INTERVIEW: Filmmaker behind ‘The Anarchists’ opens up about his own journey
Photo: The Anarchists, a new HBO series, is set at an anarcho-capitalism conference in Acapulco, Mexico. Photo courtesy of HBO / Provided by press site with permission.
The Anarchists, directed by Todd Schramke, is the celebrated docuseries on HBO and HBO Max that wraps up its six-episode limited run this Sunday night, Aug. 14. The show, produced by Blumhouse Television, looks at the anarchism movement in the world, with a specific focus on an annual conference held in Acapulco, Mexico. This gathering is a chance for a wide array of people to celebrate and promote the “absence of government” and “absolute individual self-rule,” according to HBO Max’s website. For those who have watched the first five episodes, featuring footage from Schramke’s six years of filming, they know that the events in the docuseries turn from celebratory to “strange and deadly,” as the network put it.
For Schramke, the journey to document the anarchism movement began many years ago. Formally, he began work on the docuseries in 2016, but his own personal journey and interest in anarchism and other ideologies began when he was a teenager.
“It started with my own punk rock influence when I was a teenager playing in some loud, aggressive bands that eventually desensitized me because some of the bands in the punk scene, there’s a few that within their lyrics and in their music talk about anarchism,” the director said in a recent Zoom interview. “[This was] not just in the sense of what we think of back in the ‘70s of the Sex Pistols who portrayed it as chaos and destruction and shock, but people who are taking this as a serious ideology. So as I was forming my own political identity in my late teens, I started to explore the different flavors of anarchism, and one of them that I came across and took a particular interest in was this concept of anarcho-capitalism.”
This was also the time when the digital currency known as Bitcoin came out, and Schramke said some anarchists on the scene were celebrating this cryptocurrency news as a solution to their problems with the central banking system.
“They were celebrating it and thought that they had found finally their panacea to the problem of the state, and I kind of faded away from the anarchist scene for a while but continued to follow the Bitcoin and the larger cryptocurrency story,” he said. “That was when the first wave of Bitcoin documentaries came out, and the story of cryptocurrency was just starting to touch the mainstream. And I felt kind of dissatisfied with the way the stories were reporting on it as more of a technology story, and they weren’t really looking into the ideological origins of where this came from and why there were so many people out there evangelically speaking about it. We have digital currencies. The U.S. dollar is, in a sense, a digital currency as it exists now, so I wanted to tell the story of what was really driving people to continue using [cryptocurrency] and promoting it and what drove its creation and invention.”
The filmmaker relied on some contacts from his previous days in the movement. He found them on Facebook, connected with them and discovered that they were attending this anarcho-capitalism conference in Acapulco. Some of them had even permanently relocated to Acapulco, and that’s when Schramke saw his opening to tell a human, character-driven story about the anarchism movement.
“But it turned into a whole much bigger thing that I never could have imagined,” he said. “I think it helps universally for any journalist or documentary filmmaker to really, really do their research on the subject that they’re reporting on in advance before engaging in the interviews, especially if it’s something that is very prominent in popular culture. So, yes, it absolutely helped that I understood where they were coming from and that I could sympathize with them and that I wasn’t simply coming from a totally unexposed outsider perspective. It very much helped not only the trust factor, but it also helped the quality of the interviews. The fact that I was able to converse on their level made it a much more productive relationship.”
Within The Anarchists, there are moments of self-reflection, when viewers can intuit Schramke processing his own journey and considering the visuals he is recording in the series. For example, he was drawn to characters who espoused diverse reasons why they subscribed to the movement. One person in the film had a divergent perspective because she was drawn to anarchism not for intellectual, academic, economic or political reasons. For her, Schramke discovered, this movement was akin to spirituality.
“It was an emotional thing,” he said. “It was a state of mind, not a state of society, so just hearing her talk drew me in as well. … So having this array of characters and subjects really helped me see that there could be a bigger story.”
Then, as HBO states on its website: “[W]hen rule-avoidant freedom activists come together in one of the most dangerous cities in the world, utopian ideology collides with the unpredictability of human nature. Relationships are fractured, rivalries are forged and ultimately, lives are lost.” What starts as a series based on na ideology ends as a narrative with a true-crime element.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Anarchists concludes its six-episode run Sunday, Aug. 14 on HBO and HBO Max. Click here for more information.
