A young musician is dedicated to the vibraphone while battling mental illness.
When filming about mental health, to understand informed consent is crucial. Here is how two filmmakers went about it.
It’s the end of May in New York. Nathan Siegelaub and I are crouching on the ground of a small, windowless room, in the basement of Pierce "Sparni" Sparnroft’s (they/them) childhood home. I set up an artificial light to illuminate Sparni’s face, play with Sparni’s blue LED light strip, and make some final adjustments to the camera frame. Nathan checks the audio levels. I press record and the camera is rolling. The stakes are high. We are going to ask Sparni direct questions about their life.
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Sparni—a film—delves deeply into our character’s struggle with mental health issues—many of them uncovered during this very interview. As opposed to an “in situ” scene where everything happens rather spontaneously, for a “sit-down” interview one can prepare questions in advance, often making a whole list with sections and subsections.
But on this day, nothing could've prepared us for Sparni's answers: They were frank, deep, and vulnerable. Stories of hallucinations, suicidal ideation, childhood trauma, one after another, in an interview I felt so submerged in, it was like being in a conversation vortex.
This was wonderful material for a film, rich in detail and profound in essence, but it came with a catch: Could we put these confessions in our documentary, and if so, how? It was like being handed someone’s most precious diary, with the permission to do whatever we wanted with it. And something about it felt off …
Sparni had signed a release form already. Legally speaking, we had done our job: We could use whatever material we collected, however we wished. But, ethically speaking, the more we knew, and the more the camera captured, the more responsible we felt.
Here is the problem as it appeared to us. By nature, Sparni is candid and talkative. Sparni entrusted us with some of their most intimate recollections. We became witnesses to a dark and painful story. The last thing we wanted was to use them in a way that would end up being harmful to Sparni. (What if Sparni’s mental health worsened as a result of our film coming out? Could there be anything more dreadful?)
Fortunately we had guidance. Our professors at Columbia Journalism School connected us with Meg Kissinger. a mental health journalist based in Milwaukee and the author of a memoir about her family's tragic history of mental illness. She knew what it meant to share somebody’s story.
Kissinger knew how not to exploit, and how to inform her subjects. Kissinger encouraged us to engage Sparni in a discussion, to explain our aims with this project and ask Sparni if they would be comfortable sharing with others what they had shared with us. If Sparni was not on board, we would have to ditch the story. It is hard to explain how dispirited we felt. We were months into the process of filming. But we had to suspend our concerns, and do what we felt was right; to be better safe and transparent than sorry.
A couple of weeks later we arranged what felt to us was a slightly patronizing but more-than-necessary interview. In it we embarrassingly but imperatively stated—as clearly as we could—what it really means to divulge intimate details while a camera is recording the conversation, and to do so to documentarians who have a signed consent form.
On the one hand, Sparni seemed to us fully aware of what saying something to a camera entails. Sparni is a rapper with a penchant for writing lyrics about mental health, so there are plenty of gruesome and dark reflections available on SoundCloud. But does that mean Nathan and I were absolved of responsibility? No. Much of the frankness in rap is muddled behind a veil of artistry. No one takes lyrics as “literally” as a well-lit, well-filmed interview.
Our goal wasn’t Sparni feeling OK with saying something to the camera. Our goal was Sparni knowing what it means to say something to a camera, to entrust it to the filmmakers. The difference between consent and informed consent.
Here’s what we knew (and had to ensure Sparni did, too): We knew that an interview—no matter how interesting—has to be cut apart and edited. Certain phrases sound louder than others. Everything is to an extent distorted. (It’s one thing if the story of what you ate for breakfast is distorted—it’s another if it’s the story of the lowest point in your life.) That is true even if we as filmmakers try our absolute best to represent the truth. No matter how aware and conscious Sparni is, we are the ones with the power over Sparni, because ultimately we decide what’s in the final cut.
We know that a film’s future involves distribution: festival screenings, streaming on websites, being reposted for people to view, criticize, scrutinize over and over again. Strangers and, perhaps even worse, friends and family would be able to hear and re-hear every sentence. Once the genie is out the bottle, it’s never coming back inside.
Sitting in the Gardens at St. Luke in the Fields, an intimate and charming oasis in New York's West Village, we put all our cards on the table. We told Sparni the entirety of our concerns, and we took time for Sparni to ask us questions.
Forty minutes of discomfort (and interesting conversation) later, we were deeply relieved. Sparni, in their typical articulate manner, made it clear to us that they understood what we recorded could all be used, and that if they were not comfortable with that, they wouldn’t have said it. Even if not totally comfortable about parts of it, Sparni said, they were motivated by a goal greater than themselves—to tell a story that can help and resonate with so many, and that is so uniquely important today.
Most of our concerns were alleviated that day. Having discussed the matter of consent so openly with Sparni, we no longer felt the overwhelming heaviness of that basement interview. We were in the clear.
