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Working with my brother and equal representation on the credits
Albert Maysles Film-maker
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I- I don't know what the percentage is but I mean not every brother/brother relationship works out in a professional fashion. But, but my brother and I had this unusually close relationship where, especially because we believed so completely in what we were doing as filmmakers, that that always came first. And also because we specialized, I would operate the camera, my brother would operate the sound, and the two of us, my brother as well as I, would, would be responsible for the film and be responsible for our relationship with the people that we were filming. So it was a completely joint effort that we both shared, where we both shared the responsibilities and the satisfaction of doing something very good. You can't beat that for a worthwhile and productive relationship. We really saw eye to eye with just about everything. He would also take on the function of supervising the editing, and we were very lucky in having some of the very best editors like Charlotte Zwerin certainly was one of them. You can't do any better than she as an editor. And we always felt too that the way people were and are still credited in documentaries is not really fair to one person or another. And we were determined to represent what each person did fully so that Charlotte got equal credit as a filmmaker, equal credit with the equal credit that my brother and I shared. So in those films there was the three of us. Editing is very important, the person behind the camera is very important, the producer, my brother, who shared every moment in the, in the making of the film- we were all represented properly in the credits. It was not a one-man operation. It was not a one-man operation and we didn't want it to be represented as such in the credits.

Albert Maysles (1926-2015) known for his important documentaries on Muhammad Ali, Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles, pioneered the documentary style known as Direct Cinema. He helped create techniques still widely used in modern documentary production, as well as many of the techniques used in reality TV.

Listeners: Sara Maysles Tamara Tracz Rebekah Maysles

Sara Maysles, daughter of Albert Maysles, is currently doing her BA in East Asian Studies at Columbia University, and working as an Archivist of the photographs and photographic material at Maysles Films Inc., Albert‚s film production company. She spent ten months out of two years working with Tibetan refugees at a center in Nepal, and continues to travel back and forth between America and Asia.

Tamara Tracz is a writer and filmmaker based in London.

Rebekah Maysles, daughter of Albert Maysles, is an artist living between New York and Philadelphia. She has her own line of clothing, Blackberryrose, and co-runs the store Sodafine in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, New York, a vintage and handmade store that sells clothing, books and other products made by artists.

Tags: Charlotte Zwerin, David Maysles

Duration: 3 minutes, 2 seconds

Date story recorded: September 2004

Date story went live: 24 January 2008