It’s His World; She Was Just Filming It

It’s His World; She Was Just Filming It
Eight Films/Isotope Films
Jennifer Venditti, the director of the documentary “Billy the Kid,” with the film’s subject.
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By DENNIS LIM
Published: December 9, 2007
JENNIFER VENDITTI met the subject of her documentary “Billy the Kid” in a high school cafeteria in rural Maine. Seated apart from all the other students, who were clustered into the usual cliques, was a wiry 15-year-old in shorts and an AC/DC T-shirt.
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“There was a table of bullies who pointed him out and told me he’d tried to sit with them once,” Ms. Venditti said. “They called him a freak.” She went over to talk to Billy, “and as soon as he opened his mouth, I was like, ‘Why isn’t everyone sitting at your table?’”
A casting director for films and fashion shoots who specializes in “street scouting” — the practice of plucking subjects from everyday environments — Ms. Venditti was trying to find teenage actors for a short that her friend Carter Smith was directing. She cast Billy as an extra in that film, “Bugcrush” (which went on to win the prize for best short at Sundance last year), but resolved to give her new young friend, who seemed both troubled and precocious, more screen time in a project of her own.
She obtained permission from Billy’s mother, Penny Baker, and in the summer of 2005, returned to Maine to film him, hoping to combine that segment on Billy with portraits of other compelling figures she had discovered around the country. After a five-day shoot she changed course and decided to focus on Billy alone, returning for three more days to capture his performance in a Christmas choir.
In “Billy the Kid,” which won the top documentary prize at the South by Southwest Festival in March and opened in New York on Wednesday, the title character emerges as a bright, likable, decidedly awkward oddball, as apt to quote Robert Frost as he is to mimic Gene Simmons. Ms. Venditti and her director of photography, Donald Eric Cumming (who starred in “Bugcrush” and befriended Billy during that shoot), shadow their subject through his daily activities — establishing his alienation from his peers and his penchant for martial arts and air guitar — and look on as he embarks on a tentative first romance. But this fly-on-the-wall study of teenage outsiderdom gradually takes on darker overtones. Billy and his mother speak about his history of violent tantrums and refer to his father, now no longer in the picture, as an abusive drug addict.
When Ms. Venditti met Billy, she ”immediately wanted to know what was wrong with him,” she said. “That’s how we are as a society. We’ve been conditioned to think if we don’t understand something, we need to put a name on it to help us understand.”
She talked to teachers and students and got “really vague answers,” she said, “like ‘Oh, he’s complex,’ or ‘He has emotional disabilities.’” Billy was found to have Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism, last year. But “Billy the Kid,” completed before that diagnosis, mirrors Ms. Venditti’s experience with Billy. It proceeds largely without explanation or judgment.
Ms. Venditti said that “Billy the Kid” reflected “my whole process of thinking about Billy.” She added: “It was almost like an experiment for myself. I want to see what the world looks like from Billy’s point of view. The challenge is to understand someone on their own terms, not on the basis of a diagnosis.”
Billy, to say the least, is unlike most documentary subjects. He makes wary eye contact with the camera and yet is remarkably un-self-conscious about performing in front of it. “I’d set up all these things I was going to do with Billy, but when I got there, I realized he’s been directing and starring in his own movie his whole life,” Ms. Venditti said. “My job was mainly to create a safe environment.”
In a sense, she added, Billy saw himself as a co-author of the film. Referring to Heather, the shy local girl he woos with some success, Ms. Venditti said, “He knew he needed a love story, a damsel in distress, and of course he found her.”
Speaking by telephone, Billy, now a senior in high school, referred to the documentary repeatedly as “my film.” He said that he had quickly developed a trust and a rapport with Ms. Venditti. “I actually think of her as family, kind of like a sister,” he said.
Ms. Baker, his mother, also interviewed by phone, said she found the film “a little painful to watch.”
“It does reinforce how hard it can be for that young man,” she said, but she added that on the whole she was pleased. “It’s a really nice, gentle, tactful way to show Billy.”
Not everyone agrees. In a review in Variety the critic John Anderson accused Ms. Venditti of perpetuating a “freak-show aesthetic.” Additionally, he wrote, the vérité appearance was a “masquerade,” since scenes appeared to have been set up and shot from multiple angles.
“I was floored,” Ms. Venditti said of her reaction to the review. “I was bedridden for three days.” She explained that the scenes that deployed multiple angles had been edited down from hours of footage.
Documentaries about eccentrics (like “Grey Gardens” or “Grizzly Man”) can engender a kind of ironic appreciation — or its equally queasy flip side, a romantic condescension. Ms. Venditti herself lapses into descriptions of Billy that toy with the notion of the holy fool.
“He doesn’t know how to lie or conform,” she said. “All these things that we’ve developed over time to protect ourselves, he doesn’t know how to do, and in some ways it’s inspiring.”
Still, while the film might stir debate on questions of responsibility and exploitation, one senses in Ms. Venditti a genuine affection and protectiveness toward her subject. She worked with a psychiatrist, discussing ways to “make clear to Billy the purpose of the film,” and was adamant about not shooting more than she needed.
“If I’d gone on, it would have affected his life more,” she said. “I also liked the restriction, the idea that it’s this window into his life at that moment in time.”
Sometimes admirers approach Billy at screenings. “I don’t think of them as fans,” he said. “They’re just people who understand. They’re good listeners.”
But the distance of more than two years has already diminished his degree of identification with the on-screen Billy. “When I watch the film,” he said, “I’m thinking: Is that really me up there?”