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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now, the next installment in our series All This Week, talking to the makers of the five nominees for the Best Feature Documentary Oscar. Today, I welcome back director, Laura Poitras. She is the director of All The Beauty And The Bloodshed, a film that follows photographer Nan Goldin's activism against the Sackler family's ties to New York and other cultural institutions, while also looking back on Goldin's life and career as an artist whose work is about those who are stigmatized by family and society.

Laura, as I count, this is our fifth time speaking to each other on the show. You were here as part of this series in 2015, I'll tell everybody. Your documentary Citizenfour about Edward Snowden back then went on to win the Oscar. Congratulations on your latest nomination.

Laura Poitras: Thanks, Brian. It's great to talk to you again. I'm sorry it's not in person. I'm such a fan of your work.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you so much. It's mutual. When we've spoken before, it's been about your project centered on surveillance and the post-9/11 national security system. This film is a little bit of a departure for you, isn't it?

Laura Poitras: Yes. In some ways, it's a departure. In some ways, it's similar. I tend to make films about individuals who take risks to expose injustice, and particularly in the context of US power. Nan fits into that, but it's more of a domestic story. The things that are different, it's very much-- It's made with Nan and it's about an artist. That was really exciting for me to team up with an artist whose work I have such respect for and has been so influential to me and so many other filmmakers.

Brian Lehrer: We'll hear some audio clips from the documentary as we go, but in the film, Nan Goldin says, "The wrong things are kept private in society and that destroys people." I thought that could sum up your work and really unites her art with her activism, fighting those who profit from addiction, in this case, opioid addiction, but still have their money welcomed by big cultural institutions.

Laura Poitras: Yes, exactly. It's a really key line to the film. In Nan's work, she often talks about her personal experience and the wrong things are kept private on an individual level. My work has focused a little bit more on the political realm and the government secrecy. Both of us, I think, have this passion to just say, "Let's look at the truth here and unveil what we think our society's misplacement of where we put our secrecy.

She's very much used this organization she created called P.A.I.N Prescription Addiction Intervention Now to shame the Sacklers, to shame them, and to hold them accountable in these cultural institutions. For those who don't know, the Sackler family are a family that owned the private company, Purdue Pharma, that produced Oxycontin. As we know, Oxycontin has fueled the overdose crisis that is now impacting the United States at such terrifying and horrible ways.

Brian Lehrer: There are still cultural institutions in New York that bear the Sackler family name because they made big contributions to build those cultural institutions?

Laura Poitras: yes, there are. What the story follows, as you say, it's about Nan's work and her life, and that's very much at the heart of the story, but it also follows her activism to demand that these cultural institutions like the Met and the Guggenheim and the Louvre and the Tate internationally both stopped taking Sackler money and take the name off their buildings. That actually has been very successful.

The name has come down from the Met, the Guggenheim, and other institutions. It still is on universities and some institutions and we call upon all of them to do the right thing here because the direct connection between they're illegal. Marketing of Oxycontin and people dying is very direct.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, I would hazard a guess that of the five Oscar-nominated documentaries, this is the one that more of you have seen than the other four. If anybody has seen Laura Poitras' film and wants to say anything about it or ask her anything about it, we invite your phone calls, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Or you can tweet a question or an observation @BrianLehrer. While we see if some calls do come in, for people who don't know the art scene, I'm going to invite you to tell us a little bit about Nan Goldin. First, I'm going to play a bit from the film's trailer where she's talking about her work and how it was received back in the 1970s and 1980s.

[start of audio playback]

Nan Goldin: Photography's like a flash of euphoria and gave me a voice. Once I started sharing the work, it was really heavy resistance, especially from male artists and galleries who said, "This isn't photography. Nobody photographs their own life."

[end of audio playback]

Brian Lehrer: "Nobody photographs their own life." Now, she's revered. What made her such an outsider then?

Laura Poitras: What she did was so radical and so groundbreaking, really one of the most important artists in the last century. What she started doing is documenting her friends and people who she was intimately in relationships with. Making these works that are deeply personal, brutally honest, and just challenging all types of social norms, very much celebrating queer sexuality and trans identity. It was very autobiographical as she says in this clip. It wasn't embraced immediately. It was embraced in an underground scene which she started.

Her first body of work was created in Boston with her roommates in a work called The Other Side, which was looking at trans community in Boston at a time when it was really dangerous to be trans. Then, she moved to New York and she started showing her slideshow. The most renowned being The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which was individual slides on carousels that were then edited to music. They were live events. They were happenings that Nan would perform at different cultural spaces in New York.

She also went on the road with them, and she was constantly re-editing them, the sequencing of the slides. At the beginning, it was for her friends and family. There was very loud call and response. Then, slowly, the museums and curators, and critics started paying attention. Now, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is collected by every major museum around the world.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Her activism today, she herself had an addiction to opioids after getting prescribed Oxycontin following surgery, right?

Laura Poitras: Yes, that's right. What happened is, she was prescribed Oxy. She got addicted. After she came out of recovery, she read an article by Patrick Radden Keefe in the New Yorker, who drew the link between the Sackler family and their role in Oxycontin and this immoral use of marketing to doctors and how they under-described the addictive properties of this drug so that they could make money. The Sackler name, Nan knew it from museums because-- She recognized the Sackler name because it was on the wings of many museums.

When she made that connection that this drug that she knew very well was also-- That the money was being used and whitewashed into cultural spaces, she said, "I have to do something." She created this organization P.A.I.N. It was a very small group of activists who all have some connection either to Oxycontin had lost somebody or themselves had experienced some sort of addiction. They knew these issues well, and they were also mostly artists. They did these really spectacular very seductive protests in museums.

At the beginning, the museums ignored them. Then, after a year and a half of consistent and persistent activism, at first, the institution stopped taking money. It took four years for the name to come down. Actually, it's interesting because last night, I was with Nan. The Met Museum, they hosted a screening for us last night at the Met. It was a full circle moment to be able to be in the Met, which did take down the name and did do the right thing.

Brian Lehrer: The group P.A.I.N that you mentioned, it stands for Prescription Addiction Intervention Now. P.A.I.N, an acronym for that.

Laura Poitras: That's correct.

Brian Lehrer: Some of their protests, I guess performance art actions, you might describe them, as well as at museums that you mentioned which had been taking money from the Sackler family. Can you describe the "Blizzard at the Guggenheim?"

Laura Poitras: Sure. This was one of the most spectacular protests. What they did is they, there was a court case that released a bunch of quotes from the Sackler family. One of the most disturbing was from Richard Sackler who said something to the effect of our drug will create a blizzard of prescriptions that will destroy the competition or something, basically talking about their efforts to promote this drug.

They created their own blizzard of prescriptions where they took quotes from Richard Sackler and they printed them on thin pieces of paper. Then they had activist go around the rotunda at the Guggenheim if you know it, as a circular rotunda. Then they coordinated, started throwing them off from the ceiling and then it created this really spectacular blizzard snow of prescriptions.

Then at the bottom of the rotunda, they staged a die-in. This was widely covered in the media and about a week after that demonstration that the first institution, the National Portrait Gallery in London said that they would not accept a $1.3 million grant from the Sacklers and it was because Nan said that she would refuse to show her work there. For me, it's about activism in politics, but it's really about at its core, it's about art and the power that an artist has in society and the power of art as also a way to survive in a very brutal and cruel society that we live in.

Brian Lehrer: Here's another example of her work. Here she is in action from the film outside the Louvre in Paris.

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Speaker: Many people have started to refuse donations from the Sacklers, including the Guggenheim Museum, the Met Museum, the Tate, and the National Portrait Gallery, as well as medical institutions worldwide. We need to demand that the Louvre stand by and hear us and be the first to take down their name.

[end of audio playback]

Brian Lehrer: Did the Louvre take down their name?

Laura Poitras: Yes, they did. Soon after that protest then the name came down and then other institutions followed and I think really important thing to mention is that P.A.I.N is very much motivated by the work of Act Up and what they did again, in response to government failure of a crisis and an epidemic in this country. The persistent activism and direct action and that has an impact. I think it's important-- One of the things that I hope the film shows is that it wasn't a foregone conclusion that this would be successful, at the very beginning, I think a lot of people thought that this wouldn't have an impact and so to see the impact it has really it's meaningful.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a tweet that's coming in from a listener who says, got to see All the Beauty and the Bloodshed at the New York Film Festival last fall and it was wonderful, great portrait of Nan Goldin as an artist and also about her activism against the Sacklers. I guess we've been talking mostly about the activism, but it's also worth noting that the film is a visual feast of her works and archival film and stills, right?

Laura Poitras: Yes, absolutely. The real heart of the film is about Nan and it's told through, we did these long interviews, I would go to her house. There were just audio for over a year and a half. I would sit in her living room, we would talk and the intimacy that she speaks about her life mirrors the intimacy of her photographs. This is an extraordinary for me as a filmmaker that she has this body of work that we could go through every decade of her life and show the audience. Not just to tell her story, but to see her, to tell her story through her art and that's amazing.

Brian Lehrer: Your interview of her about her life and work, I'll say as a radio person, it could have been done for radio with no cameras, so that was an interesting choice for a filmmaker. Have you thought about releasing it as a podcast? Or what was behind that decision?

Laura Poitras: That's interesting. Behind the decision was the intimacy. I felt that doing it with just audio, we would go to someplace that wouldn't have been possible if there was a camera. I also knew that these that she had these incredible photographs that we could bring to life, this section where she meets David Armstrong and she's first given a camera and she's a teenager and she was going to a hippie-free school.

She had been kicked out of every school in every home she'd been to. She lands at a hippie-free school and gets a Polaroid camera and then starts photographing. These photographs, the very first photographs are fully formed artworks, this is really incredible to be able to collaborate with an artist like Nan. This is very much a film that is made with her, this is a collaboration, which is somewhat different than my previous film. She's also a producer on this film.

Brian Lehrer: Bijan in Stratford, you're on WNYC. Hi, Bijan.

Bijan: Hi Brian. Hi, Ms. Poitras, fan of your work. I haven't seen the documentary yet, but I'm anxious to see it. I've certainly been a fan of Nan Goldin's work for years. I have a question of where the conversation goes from here, I feel like there's a little bit this idea of let's take the names off the buildings, but it's blood money to me. What do we do with that money?

Do we stop and say, "Just take the name off?" Or do we say, "Hey, why don't you give that money back or give that money to another organization?" It just feels like some of the institutions and even on a larger note, the settlements that occurred with the Sackler family, there was no accountability. The accountability to me is more than the name, so I'd just like to hear your opinion on that.

Laura Poitras: I totally hear you and I am sure that Nan would agree that this is not enough, this is not justice. It doesn't come anywhere near justice. Really, what should happen is that the Sackler family, particularly Richard Sackler should be indicted criminally. There is a mountain of evidence that shows that he knew the relationship between Oxycontin and that it was killing people and so you're right, it's absolutely was blood money and there are documents that support that.

I think it's terrifying that the failure of the government and our politicians in this case because it's been reported for now over two decades, that Oxycontin was being legally promoted and was leading to people dying. Two decades about this, we have a government that did nothing. Yes, in 2007, there were guilty pleas for illegal marketing again in 2020, but still, not a single, Sackler family has been charged with a crime or had to personally declare bankruptcy. I totally agree that this bankruptcy deal it's obscene in the immunity that it's giving the family and the lack of justice.

Brian Lehrer: We'll have to leave it there with Laura Poitras, congratulations again on your nomination. Good luck at the Oscars.

Laura Poitras: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: I'm sure you'll have something interesting to say from the stage if you win. All The Beauty And The Bloodshed is still in theaters, folks, including IFC in Manhattan. We'll eventually be streaming on HBO Max, I'm told. Tomorrow, we conclude this series with all five makers of the Oscar-nominated documentaries, as we hear from the director of the Fire of Love. Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

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