One of the most unusual films to come from the SXSW film festival is Nicole Lucas Haime’s Chicken People. The documentary is a character story at heart, telling the tales of American snowbird breeders as they prepare their birds for competitions.
Larry took some time with director Nicole Lucas Haimes and cast-member Shari McCollough to find out more about the weird and unusual lives of showbirds.
First of all, I have to ask the obvious question, how did you become familiar with the topic and meet the characters in the film?
Nicole: Well my son who’s now sixteen and totally into fashion and sneakers and cars and he’s very passionate about it, so in between that and Pokémon he had about a ten minute flirtation with chickens. During that flirtation I bought him a picture book of chickens and noted that there were people who competed them and spent the better part of their years raising and competing show birds, and I thought, I have to learn about this, this cant be true.
Some of the finer details, from the the oils used to give the birds colour, it’s extraordinary
Nicole: I mean the preparations from my point of view, Shari can tell you a lot more but from an outsider point of view, when I first saw people blow-drying a chicken and clipping their nails and filing their beaks and putting them in the sink and sneaking them into hotel bathrooms to clean them, I thought oh my god, you could talk about the pamper.
Shari: Well, different breeds have different needs, so you have one set in the film, where some people had the single comb or the rose comb, some people use sweet oil or Vaseline to make that spot shiny, you want (the bird) to look really red so it stands out, really neat and clean. For me, my Silkies just (had) feathers on their heads, so they only require blow-drying, just (keep them) very clean and neat, no stains, very presentable, but there’s a lot that goes into it.
Nicole: Like a dog show there’s a standard of perfection, breeders raise the birds to that standard, it’s a little bit like our constitution, it’s open to interpretation, there are amendments, changes every year
Like how many guns can these chickens own?
Nicole: Exactly you couldn’t have said it better. So for breeders, that’s the living document …
Shari: It’s the chicken bible
Nicole: It’s the chicken bible, it really is. The whole hobby centres around that.
So how did you get involved in the film, Shari?
Shari: Well Nicole actually phoned me one day and we had a conversation and talked about what was going on, and she filled me in, we had a three hour talk about all kinds of things actually. But, I mean I’ve been around chickens all my life.
I grew up on a farm as a kid and my parents raised chickens for different reasons, for eggs and meat and my responsibility as a child was to collect the eggs. But growing up I always knew that someday I wanted to own my own chickens, and when I finally had that opportunity to do that, I loved them for more than just the eggs and I definitely wasn’t going to eat them.
So I took a very different road and started to get into the exhibition side of things, which is a whole other world, as you’ll see in the film. It’s something people don’t realize exists or is there.
Are these stand-alone events or do they take place as part of larger animal show events?
Nicole: There’s stand alone events, but the film uses the competitions almost as a red herring to get into the story of the characters lives, so its really the human story that we focused on and how chickens have really helped the subjects in our film become the best version of themselves. What I think we both really love about the film it’s kind of a character story hiding within a competition film.
Watching the clips the film reminds me so much of Gates of Heaven, which is obviously much more morbid story, but in a similar style of ‘the lives of people that love their animals’.
Nicole: I think its different in that, I felt Gates of Heaven looked at its subjects at arms length and that it sort of took a stick and poked a rock, and turned it over and looked underneath then said, there’s some dirt under that rock and those people are a little weird and I had a very different goal as a filmmaker. My goal wasn’t to look from a distance, but to embrace, to get really close and to tell the story as a loving story not a strange story, and that was my goal from the very beginning.
I didn’t know where the film would go or what would happen with the journey of the characters but I did know that my intention was to be intimate and it’s kind of like, life is really hard and we all have to learn how to find things that help us be better.
From a stylistic point of view, how did you approach the colour schemes and the appearance of the film?
Nicole: We had an amazing cinematographer Martina Radwan who was just extraordinary, with me being a first time director she really helped me see things with new eyes and get out of the bad habits I learned from television. She just had uncanny instincts and she’s a world-class cinematographer, [whom] we were able to have her because we had great producers who brought her to my attention. So the look of the film is really the feather in her cap, no pun intended.
We’ve come full circle, not enough chicken jokes in this interview! Thanks for your time, looking forward to seeing the film.
Chicken People will receive a limited release sometime later in the year. For more information on Chicken People and remaining screenings at SXSW click here.
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