After 10 Years Filming the Oldest People on Earth, Documentarian Sam Green Learned to Embrace Life’s “Great Mysteries”

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"Ten years is a long time," director Sam Green tells The Film Maven when talking about his latest documentary The Oldest Person in the World. "I look back and I just say, 'Wow, that seems like another world, another lifetime ago.'" He's not wrong. Since he embarked on his project to document the recipients of those labeled the oldest people on Earth the world has gone through political upheaval and a global pandemic. That element of time passing ends up having a more significant meaning when watching the documentary.

As the doc lays out, Green initially wanted to focus on just one of the oldest people ever living. That soon mushroomed into him talking to more of these people, all of them possessing the moniker (however brief) of being the oldest person in the world. Simultaneously, Green also turns the camera inward, showing how he changes over that ten year period while battling illness and welcoming the arrival of his first child. What starts a portrait of being old, eventually dovetails with Green looking at youth and his own mortality.

"This one, especially is the most personal movie I've made," he said. "I've made a lot of movies, and it's the most personal, and that's really difficult because you're vulnerable and you can look like an asshole easily. We've all seen personal movies that are really boring or self-absorbed. Or you say to yourself, why didn't the person's friends tell them this is terrible, you know?" That fear and vulnerability required him to take a deft hand with the editing, to be able to balance the personal with the bigger story at play. "When I see it now, I think, Wow, we did it!"

Making any project is a labor of love, but for Green this is a vastly different project compared to two of his previous features: 2002's The Weather Underground and 2018's A Thousand Thoughts, about the Kronos Quartet. The former choice is an interesting lesson in contrasts with Green's current film. After spending his career documenting an organization trying to change the world, now he's documenting people whose time is coming to a close. The Weather Underground being a story of youth, rebellion, and idealism compared to Oldest Person in the World being focused on the way elderly people make sense of life.

"I had this funny thought where I was like, Wow, that's a young person's movie," said Green about Weather Underground. "It's all about youth and idealism, the passion, clarity of youth. The funny thing is, I've said that [Oldest Person in the World] is a grown-up movie, but I've been surprised that sometimes kids or teenagers will be there, and they're not totally bored. They find something in it, too, which surprises me. I would not have guessed. I definitely see this movie and Weather Underground as funny bookends."

Of course, the passage of time makes disability more pronounced. Many of the people Green talks to are wheelchair users, or struggle with blindness and/or deafness. Green himself is surprised when I bring up that The Oldest Person in the World could very well be considered a story of disability. "I would not have used that expression," he said, but he certainly sees why I'd say it. "Nobody's living independently when you're 116. Everybody has caregivers and different levels of mobility...You're articulating it as a disability narrative. It is 100%. I don't necessarily say it, but it is true."

The idea of it as a disability narrative furthers something Green had been wanting to do while working on the documentary: the desire to show the bodies of the people he was interviewing. The camera lingers on their faces and hands. "Probably nobody has seen a 116-year-old before," he said. So by lingering on their bodies, the viewer understands how time affects a body, the distinction between what forty years can do versus one hundred. For a culture like Hollywood obsessed with youth, beauty, and capable bodies, Green insists on making the viewer confront bodies that may not be capable or young, but still possess value, wisdom, and longevity.

However, any discussion of disability narratives brings up the ethical line between education and exploitation, and it was something Green certainly thought of. One significant moment in the movie shows Miss Susie, aka Susannah Mushatt Jones, the first person Green documented before her passing at 116. Attending her public birthday party, Green's camera captures Miss Susie sleeping through the entire endeavor as people perform, take pictures with her (sleeping), and try to hold conversations with her. Green wanted to make sure everyone he documented from there was physically and mentally aware of what they were participating in.

"There were some people we filmed who were just mentally gone," Green said. "It seemed that calculus of how much of this is somehow not right to show people? How much consent can we have? I didn't include them because it was too much in the other direction." When documenting, Green had a simple question he wanted o answer: "When the film is done, could you have them see it and look them in the eye and feel good about it?"

Green also had to feel good about putting his family into the narrative, specifically his young son. This secondary element of The Oldest Person in the World is one that begs the question of what happens when the vulnerable person is you? "I actually am a pretty shy person," Green admits. It was the edit that helped Green overcome that. "So being vulnerable is not easy for me. I worked with a great editor named Aaron Wickenden. He did the Mr. Rogers documentary. He's made a lot of great movies and he was really a force for pushing me to be more open. If you're a documentary person and you're making films out of people's lives, it's fair turnaround. I'm not gonna say, I'm not going there because I've made many other people go places in my filming."

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It was Wickenden who pushed Green to talk about his brother, who died by suicide, candidly in the movie. "Nothing was really off limits," said Green. He didn't want to be gratuitous, sure, but also didn't want to elevate his concerns as being harsher than others. "These are things that have happened billions of times," he said. "So it was really important to me to not hold myself up in any way as special or exemplary."

So what has Green learned about life from documenting those a hairs breadth away from death? It's a moment actually captured on-camera. "When I said to Sister Andre, in the voiceover, I can ask her all the big questions. What's the meaning of life? Are you scared of death? What do you do with regret? Why do certain things happen to one person? Why does one person live to be 115 and another takes his own life at 40? What I have learned is what Sister Andre says to me, 'It's a mystery.' These are the great mysteries of life, and there are no answers. And at some point, you accept that. What it does is it allows you to see that all that remains is the present, and it's a great blessing. Not in a religious sense necessarily, but it's a miracle to be alive right now, and it's important to try to enjoy it if you can, and that's wonderful."

The Oldest Person in the World is in theaters now.

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