In this excerpt from the ebook In Their Own Words: Documentary Masters Vol. 1, Steve James discusses the making of his documentary ABACUS: Small Enough to Jail. To read the full interview, purchase a copy of the ebook here.
Steve James’ new documentary, ABACUS: Small Enough to Jail is a wonderful little treasure. On one level, it’s the story of a small family-owned bank, ABACUS, in New York’s Chinatown, which served the Chinese immigrant community, and which became the state’s target for prosecution during the banking crisis. The story was underreported in mainstream media so the film becomes a bit of a thriller as we wait with anticipation to find out the trial’s outcome. The case may not be the glamorous stuff of television drama, but James makes it emotionally resonant by showing it to us through the eyes of his protagonists and clearly explaining the content of the case.
ABACUS: Small Enough To Jail is also a compelling character study of the Sung family who own ABACUS: patriarch Thomas Sung, a lawyer and Chinese immigrant himself, who started the bank to give back to the community, his wife Mrs. Sung, and his amazing adult daughters — all but one of whom are lawyers. They weren’t going to take this court case lying down.
I talked to Steve James about how he balanced the technical side of the story with the more personal, character study of the Sung family, how he developed a way to visually tell the story of the court case without being able to be in court, and why Thomas Sung is a lot like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life.
Seventh Row (7R): How did you put together the first ten minutes of ABACUS: Small Enough to Jail? You let us get to know the Sung family before the trial begins.
Steve James: You find out at the beginning that this is a bank that’s being put on trial. I wanted to give you a glimpse of the chain gang thing to be like, “Wow, this is serious! What’s going on here?” You want to intrigue the audience. You want to hook them. You want to give them the sense that there’s some real drama to come.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘You want to intrigue the audience. You want to give them the sense that there’s real drama to come.'” quote=”You want to intrigue the audience. You want to give them the sense that there’s real drama to come.”]
Then, we kind of step back for a little while. We used an early dinner to give you a sense of the family. In that dinner, they talked about the history of their bank, the goals, and why Mr. Sung started it. Then, we work our way around to the precipitating incident, which takes us back to the central story, which is a bank put on trial.
7R: In ABACUS: Small Enough to Jail, how did you approach telling the story of this bank, this family, Chinatown, and the financial crisis, all while documenting the case?
Steve James: I’m a big believer that you go into a project with what you feel is a strong idea of what you’re doing. But you have to be flexible about where the story leads. Inevitably, what really happens is far more interesting than anything you imagine going in. It’s really important to constantly revise the story that you’re telling as you’re making a film.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘It’s really important to constantly revise the story that you’re telling as you’re making a film.'” quote=”It’s really important to constantly revise the story that you’re telling as you’re making a film.”]
In this film, for example, we knew we wanted to deal, as background, with the 2008 mortgage crisis. We wanted to throw into sharp relief that these were the big banks, look what happened there. And here is this small bank, this community bank, and look what’s happening here. I didn’t want to have the film go off on this tangent where we just spend 20 minutes on the big banks because that’s not the story we’re telling. The challenge became how can we condense that down, tell you what you need to know, and have that be part of our story but not dominate our story.
In an early edit, the editor had drawn things off the internet from the early bank crisis: people being handcuffed that were individually charged, the bull on Wall Street — all the usual images like the tickers. I was like, “I’ve seen all that! I don’t want to do that.”
I came up with this idea that we create a sequence that tells you what you need to know with statistics, and the façades of the big banks, which speak to their power, and leave it at that. It felt like an elegant way to tell you what you needed to know without doing it in the usual way.
7R: ABACUS: Small Enough to Jail is also a character study. I just really loved everyone in this family. It was so wonderful getting to know them.
Steve James: That’s the heart and soul of the film, the family. It’s an important story to be told and should be told. That’s reason enough. But then, when you meet the family. For me, as a filmmaker, well, now I really want to tell this story. I fell in love with the family.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘That’s the heart and soul of the film, the family. I fell in love with the family.’ – Steve James” quote=”That’s the heart and soul of the film, the family. I fell in love with the family.”]
The whole family is fascinating, and they’re all very different from each other. We did our best to try to capture and present, in the finished film, enough of each of them, to give you a sense of who they are as individuals and collectively, as a family.
They’re interviewed multiple times. We didn’t just do one single, sit down interview with the members of the family. Sometimes, we interviewed them more formally. Sometimes, it was just “hey, we need you to tell us about this.” It’s an organic process. You have to roll with the punches. That’s part of what makes it so fun and enjoyable in documentary: you’re not working off a script. You’re working off of ideas and a story that you think you’re telling. You’re constantly revising as you go along.
[clickToTweet tweet=”You’re working off a story that you think you’re telling. You’re constantly revising as you go along.” quote=”You’re working off a story that you think you’re telling. You’re constantly revising as you go along.”]
To read the rest of the interview with Steve James on ABACUS: Small Enough to Jail, purchase a copy of the ebook In Their Own Words: Documentary Masters Vol. 1 here.
[wcm_restrict]
7R: How did you go about getting to know the family and decide what to film?
Steve James: We had to pick and choose our spots because we were Chicago-based and going to New York. A lot of it is just serendipitous. There were different turning points you want to make sure you’re there for. You also just need to get lucky in documentary filmmaking. I’ve found over the years, that if you’re there, things happen.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘In documentary filmmaking, I’ve found, over the years, that if you’re there, things happen.'” quote=”‘In documentary filmmaking, I’ve found, over the years, that if you’re there, things happen.'”]
Sometimes, films create the illusion that you’re there for everything. But nobody’s there for everything. We would have driven the family completely crazy if we were there for everything. But they were incredibly open and giving and cooperative. It was a tense time for them. You see that tension, but you also see that one of the ways they deal with it is through humour and bickering and love and worrying about dad’s sandwich.
That’s one of my favourite scenes in the movie because it’s who he is and who they are, too. He has got this kind of zen acceptance of his sandwich being dry, and that will be fine. They’re so worried about everything related to him. They want to take care of him. A scene like that is not the kind of scene you’d ever make up in fiction. You’d never think of that. But it’s one of the better scenes in this movie. It says more than just a guy eating a sandwich that’s dry while his daughters are sitting there with him. There’s a lot more going on.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘A scene like that is not the kind of scene you’d ever make up in fiction. You’d never think of that. ” quote=”A scene like that is not the kind of scene you’d ever make up in fiction. You’d never think of that. “]
7R: The court case was a big part of the story. But since you couldn’t be there to film it, how did you think about how to depict it?
Steve James: I had this idea that, since we couldn’t be in the trial, it would be great to get courtroom artists to go in and do some illustrations. We found the best courtroom artist in New York [Christine Cornell]. She does a lot of big trials. We hired her to go in for several days to draw the main players and situations. None of the mainstream media was covering it, and the Chinese media weren’t using courtroom artists. I knew when we got to editing that we would want to expand on those drawings to illustrate the trial. But we didn’t know yet what we’d be illustrating because the trial was ongoing.
There have been a lot of documentaries made where you don’t get access to the courtroom. It’s a pretty common thing. The ones that do get access are very fortunate. A lot of times, the way that’s dealt with is simply through empty courtroom shots: the defendant’s table, the jury box, the judge’s chair. We did all of that, too.
But I didn’t want to rely on that to completely carry this trial visually, especially this trial, that was about petty financial fraud. That’s challenging for a viewer. You don’t see cases about petty fraud on Law & Order. If it’s fraud, it’s big time, the big banks, or it’s murder and mayhem.
When we went back to shoot the empty courtroom, we had to hire a court officer for the day to chaperone us. When we were moving in the equipment, he says to me, “What trial is this that you’re doing this on?” I said, “ABACUS.” He goes, “Abacus, Abacus, Abacus….oh! Oh, that was a paper case,” with the most dismissive…like “Dude, why are you doing this?” That was basically his message.
One of the ironies of this whole thing was that a lot of money and time was spent prosecuting the most petty fraud imaginable and it was fraud that the bank had discovered themselves, reported, and taken steps to try to eliminate themselves.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘We were only limited by our own imaginations and budget.’ – Steve James” quote=”We were only limited by our own imaginations and budget.”]
7R: How did you think about what visualizations you needed for ABACUS: Small Enough to Jail?
Steve James: We were only limited by our own imaginations and budget. We knew we were going to do opening arguments and closing arguments. But what part of the 7000 pages of testimony were we going to feature? That’s a big job. That was driven by what seemed to be the prominent moments, the days in the trial where the most significant things happened.
We worked from there to figure out what few scenes, out of that long trial, were going to stand in for what was important in this trial. It’s kind of a, pardon the pun, trial and error process in editing.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘They say writing is rewriting. Documentary filmmaking is re-editing.’ – Steve James” quote=”They say writing is rewriting. Documentary filmmaking is re-editing.”]
They say writing is rewriting. Documentary filmmaking is re-editing. You edit, and you keep refining, and you keep discovering new things that you need. If you do your job right, it all seems to flow together for the viewer in a way that feels inevitable and obvious. But it’s rarely so obvious when you’re putting it together. You have to work your way toward creating something that feels like it just unfolds in a natural and organic way.
Once we zeroed in on what we wanted, we put Christine [Cornell], our artist, to work. We need this shot. We want to look over the shoulder of Ken Yu at the prosecutor or over the shoulder of Ken Yu at the defense lawyer for this testimony. We want to see the jury behind Ken Yu. You start to storyboard, in a sense.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘Once we zeroed in on what we wanted, we put our courtroom artist to work. You start to storyboard.'” quote=”‘Once we zeroed in on what we wanted, we put our courtroom artist to work. You start to storyboard.'”]
We’re using the courtroom illustration technique and motif. But you’re seeing angles that no courtroom illustrator would ever give you. They’re usually sitting in one spot in the courtroom. The illustrators don’t have free rein to move around the courtroom. But you see those angles in our film because we’re not bound by that convention. We’re using that style and approach, which everyone is familiar with, but we’re expanding it, too.
7R: How did the scenes of the Mr and Mrs Sung watching It’s a Wonderful Life come to be in the ABACUS: Small Enough to Jail?
Steve James: I wish I could claim credit for it. But it was the TV reporter Ti-Hua Chang. He said, “You have to understand that Thomas Sung is like George Bailey of Chinatown.” He was this pillar in the community. It was probably also motivated by the fact that he’s this tall, lean, elegant man, though older than Jimmy Stewart at the time of It’s a Wonderful Life.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘You have to understand that Thomas Sung is like George Bailey of Chinatown.'” quote=”You have to understand that Thomas Sung is like George Bailey of Chinatown.”]
At one point, the [ABACUS] bank had a run, and [Thomas Sung] had to personally reach out to the members of the community and convince them to not take their money out of the bank, to believe that all would be fine if they just settled down. That story hearkened back to It’s a Wonderful Life. That was part of what motivated Ti-Hua to refer to him in that way. But it extended beyond that story. It extended to his very place, and the bank’s very place, in the community. In It’s a Wonderful Life, it’s Potter that’s trying to bring the bank down. Here, the state is. So there were some interesting analogies there.
I knew from talking to the Sungs that Mrs Sung religiously watched the movie every year, at holiday time, and that Mr. Sung, not as religiously, watched it with her, from time to time. So that motivated “Oh, well we should film that.”
I had this notion that starting with them watching It’s a Wonderful Life, since it’s something they did, would be a wonderful way to start the film, to make that analogy from the start.
7R: How do you think about your audience for the ABACUS: Small Enough to Jail? You’re dealing with this case that was underreported, that deals with complicated stuff. In some ways, to start with It’s a Wonderful Life is a cultural thing that’s well known, an easy access point for many.
Steve James: I thought it might be an interesting way to hook the audience. We screen for colleagues when we’re making the film to get feedback. In one of the screenings for some filmmakers, a Chinese filmmaker said, “Oh, Chinese people don’t watch It’s a Wonderful Life”. And I was like, “Well, this family does.”
It caused me to go back into what we had captured and put in that part where Mrs Sung was saying, “This part always makes me cry.” It wasn’t originally in there. But I wanted it to be clear that this was not some fabricated moment, that this was something that she truly loved. It wasn’t some fabrication to pull at the heartstrings.
I loved the idea of starting with it because it is such a touchstone film. We want this film to get out to the Asian community around this country, and the Chinese American community especially. But we also want this film to appeal to a non-Asian community. We want them to be drawn into the story of this family. I think George Bailey is not a bad way to help that process. It doesn’t feel like pandering to me. It seems legit.
[/wcm_restrict]
