One would think “The Choice 2024” would have been, if not easier for “Frontline” producer and director Michael Kirk, perhaps a slightly easier lift.
Every four years since 1988, the recurring special offers what may be the most evenhanded side-by-side portrait of the two major party candidates running for president of the United States. Kirk has directed six of the seven versions produced since the 2000 race, perfecting its winning production method to a formula that suits any year or political era.
This time would have been a rematch of Trump versus Biden. Between the previous special and all the investigative documentary series’ individual pieces about each man, all the main pieces were present. The tough part would have been to find a new angle, a somewhat tougher task for former president Donald Trump, the first candidate to co-star in “The Choice” three times, than President Joe Biden – another repeat, and a staid one by comparison.
Kirk had a rough cut of the original special ready to go, and “Frontline” editor-in-chief and producer Raney Aronson-Rath had tasked him with getting started on a version of “The Choice” profiling the candidates for vice president, a first for the series.
Usually, these portraits take months, even when one of the candidates has been profiled in a previous edition of “The Choice” and other Frontline episodes.
Then in July . . . well, you know. Biden was out, Vice President Kamala Harris was tapped to take his place at the top of the Democratic ticket, and Kirk realized, "Oh my God, we have about seven weeks. It would normally take four months. A new character is coming from who knows where. Two weeks to shoot, 27 interviews.”
That’s all before “the weave,” Kirk’s term for editing thematically similar narrative segments about each candidate next to each other to emphasize commonalities and contrasts between the two.
This may be the third time “The Choice” features Trump, but it’s the first long-form documentary to examine Harris’ life. Despite the brief turnaround, Kirk’s profile does a solid job of revealing her to be a study in political pragmatism – someone who learns from setbacks, evolves her strategy, and figures out how to win the next round. It achieves what opinion writers and pundits have insisted voters need from her, in that it illuminates a more nuanced understanding of who Kamala Harris is.
“I love the weave because I think there are secrets that it reveals that you didn't know were secrets,” Kirk told Salon in our recent conversation. "I'm thrilled with the narrative structure, and the way it reveals things that I didn't even know were coming. There's an alchemy that happens, and it's just delicious when you watch it.”
Kirk shared more details about that alchemy and other aspects that made “The Choice 2024” uniquely challenging and rewarding in a lengthy conversation, the highlights of which are featured here.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
This is the first time that you've profiled the same candidate three times for "The Choice." . . . Can you remind me about the process from when you begin producing “The Choice” to locking it? How long does it usually take?
We started this one in January. We’d just finished a film called “Democracy on Trial.” It aired in the third week or fourth week of January, and we had already sort of moved the research over. We knew we had a backlog of Trump, so the idea there was, how can you make the Trump stuff feel new and fresh and different or useful? And we had Biden from 2020, so we had a lot of that in the bank too.
So we kind of were like, let’s do something extravagant: let's do three hours and try to get everything we can in for both of them. And that's really what we made in July. . . I can't remember when Biden dropped out because my life became a blur at that moment, but I think it was the 21st of July. I don't remember, Melanie. I cannot remember time anymore.
Nobody can.
OK, good. It’s not just me.
But actually, I do want to ask you about what you call “the blur.” You have your method, you already knew there were going to be some specific challenges for both, in terms of finding a new way to tell Trump's story that isn't a retread.
Yeah. I'd already played that magic trick once, right there. In the “Trump vs. Biden,” the meta-theme on both sides is how they faced crisis. The film starts with the country in crisis, in the pandemic, and how did these men who are asking us to vote for them in the midst of a crisis and a divided country, how have they reacted to crises in the past?
So I want to return to that, but what I want to know about now is your reaction at the moment when you saw that Biden dropped out. Because if I were in your situation, I probably would have disassociated.
Well, maybe. Are we having this conversation? Maybe I never made it. I never finished. It's possible, I suppose.
So the week before, or two weeks before, we had shown a rough cut to Raney Aronson. It was a four-hour rough cut of “Trump Vs. Biden,” and it was good. It was big.
. . .But we'd been interviewing all of his people and his family, and we knew things were right on the edge. And his campaign was very . . . you know, if you've been doing this long enough, you could tell things were not all in right over there in Wilmington.
Raney had also made the decision in January to contract with us to also make a “Choice” about the vice presidential candidates. And I said, “Nobody cares about the vice president . . .Come on, that's crazy. It’s just a worthless job.”
And she said, “Well, I think it might be interesting, especially because they're both old, so people might want to know who the vice presidents are.” Fair enough. So we said, we would do that as soon as we finished the big three-hour “Choice.” So we had started researching Harris. . . and the hints we were getting from people inside the Biden group, who shall remain nameless, were, “If he goes, it's her. It's obviously her.”
…When it happened, oh, it was a Sunday afternoon. I'm sitting in this room, on the screen back there is CNN, and bang. And I called Raney and said, “Here we go . . . I'm going to see what's the fastest I could make a two-hour Biden film. I've got some new stuff that I haven't used. I'll throw it together, and I'll get two hours up.” We did it in nine days, and she put it on the air, on PBS. “Biden’s Decision” aired.
Meanwhile, the research team, the reporters, were out there grabbing everything they could on this person, Vice President Harris. No documentary had ever really been shot. Abby Phillips did something at CNN, but . . . there was no definitive biography. There was very little that the archivist could find.
. . . Many of Harris' friends . . . those people had never done an interview before on television. They were all excited and thrilled, and she said, “Sure, go ahead and talk to them.” Fortunately, they came prepared to talk not about everything, but about what they thought they should say.
And we shot in two weeks, and we cut it in five weeks, and we did it. I don't know how. Then we did the weave, which is the hardest part.
When I interviewed you in the past, you said that the point is to show these portraits that are complimentary and contrasting. No one's putting their thumb on the scales here, and I think that's one of the most useful things about it, this ability to weigh these candidates impartially.
And yet, when I was watching this edition, I was very much aware that from at least Trump's side of “The Choice,” that must have been uniquely difficult. Not only do you have the challenge of telling the story you've already told twice in a different way, but he is a documentary character who, as you know, time, experience and exposure have made the public see him in a specific way. I wonder if that weighed on you differently this time.
Absolutely. The thought process I went through was a hard one. Why go all the way back to when Donald Trump was throwing birthday cake and kicking over blocks, and try to bring him through military school and up to where we sort of know who Donald Trump turns out to be?
But because we didn't know anything about Harris, I thought, well, we have the things we should keep from Trump’s life story and reevaluate some things about his childhood that we hadn't really hit before, because we knew we were going to have to hit her childhood, because of the composite of who she is.
That we would emphasize Trump's dad, and we would emphasize her mom, became an obvious thing right away. Berkeley, CA., is very different than the Trump household in Jamaica, Queens. So place started to become something we were really interested in: Berkeley versus Jamaica, Queens, for example. Mom, Shyamala, versus Dad, Fred Trump — what a vast difference between the two!
Forgetting, even if you will, race and gender for just a little while, because those are sort of obvious givens . . . the implications for Harris' life are very different than I think Donald being an old white guy. And how does Donald react to race throughout his life, from lots of things?
. . .I have this thing hanging on the wall. You're not gonna be surprised by this: “A president can bring to the job no more than the lessons of their own life.” And if you know that's what you're doing, you're trying to just draw an underline and build a little five-minute, six-minute sequences about a lesson in their life along the way.
It was a little bit like — everybody always says three-dimensional chess. I think of it as Scrabble. You're moving these little tiles around and trying to come up with an interesting word. And that's the challenge.
Who is that quote attributable to?
You know, I said that quote for years to people, and I never knew who it was. And I was doing a radio interview just 20 minutes ago, and I said, I don't know who said this, and a listener wrote in. It was Mark Twain.
There you go. The ever-quotable Mark Twain. It's always either him or Benjamin Franklin.
I’m actually sorry it was Mark Twain. Well, a little bit, I mean. Everybody has a Mark Twain quote that they pull out, it becomes such a trope. I thought, what if it was somebody else? I don't know who that would be.
Let’s return to that question of the meta-theme. What is the meta-theme of this edition of “The Choice”?
I think it's about struggle, you know. Her struggle. I mean, they both have plenty of struggles. His struggle is living with this idea that you cannot lose. That's been with him forever, but it became so manifest after January 6 and the Stop the Steal movement.
What's the struggle of Kamala Harris? Part of the struggle, of course, is as a Black, South Asian female in the 1980s '90s, and 2000s, who wants to make a change, who grows up in a family, around Huey Newton's trials, all of that, with a mother and father — especially mother, who is just an amazing movie in herself. I mean, we couldn't do what we started out to do, which was a big Shyamala story, because it's just fantastic.
. . . The struggle for Kamala, what her heart and soul and her view of justice have become, is an inside war, a kind of fight from the inside. Well, that's a challenge in the '80s. As the women around her tell us, it was hard enough to be a woman trying to break into the power centers of America. How about a Black and Indian woman breaking into the power centers of America? Then on top of all of that, she makes a controversial choice against the wishes of her mother and becomes a prosecutor and works in law enforcement at a time when the primary people being scooped up on the streets of Alameda County in San Francisco were Black people. Her mother was outraged. Couldn't believe it. Her family couldn't believe it. Her friends were shocked. But there she is deciding that's her core struggle. How do I fight from the inside?
To me, that was it, with sort of both of them struggling in different ways. This was the meta-struggle that they were fighting.
Owing to the extraordinary nature of this particular election, I wonder if you have some thoughts about the meaning and utility of “The Choice” this year, versus in 2020 or even 2016.
Part of the task of the film, as opposed to Biden versus Trump, was presenting a whole new person who has genuine star power, political star power.
And I've been doing politics all my life, and when you're in the room with somebody who has it, you just kind of know. Maybe they live up to it. Maybe they don't. Maybe they do some interesting things. Maybe they make mistakes. Maybe they can't handle it. That's the kind of core of who she is, and I thought people need to know that.
Also, we're not doing policy and issues, but it's implying things about policy and issues you're really introducing in a way that even her DNC speech didn't do. The real Kamala Harris. It's a big challenge because, as I say, there's no archive, there's no long history. There's no record to go back and examine. There's political record, and there's law enforcement record, but nothing that you really put your arms around and say, “Oh, that's her.”
… Donald Trump doesn't and didn't represent any Republican values at all, apparently. He pulled the party apart and created his own party and most of his actions are ideology-free. They're about Donald and what he wants to do so that he can win.
I'm just taking that part of the story that nobody does which is, what were they like when they were little kids? And how does that emerge as you grow, as you learn and as you make mistakes, and as you find a mentor — like Roy Cohn, in Trump’s case? How do we evaluate them as presidents, knowing that that's what's going on inside their heads, and maybe, if we're lucky, inside their hearts and souls?
"The Choice 2024: Harris vs. Trump" premieres Tuesday, Sept. 24 at 10 p.m. on PBS member stations and on YouTube, and is available to stream on the "Frontline" website and on the PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly asserted that no candidate had run for president three times. Thomas Jefferson, Grover Cleveland, William Jennings Bryan, Franklin Roosevelt and Richard Nixon are previous major political party nominees who ran for office three times.
