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Director Ross McElwee turned footage of his son Adrian, who died of a fentanyl overdose at 27, into the grief-struck documentary Remake, exploring film-making, loss, and consent.
Ross McElwee is the film-maker who spun home movies into art, framing himself, his friends and his son Adrian. The director used to film Adrian for a few minutes each month, tracking the kid from infancy to adulthood, trying to catch the significant turns of his life.
When tragedy struck it back-shadowed the footage. Maybe every home movie is a ghost story at heart. It feels crass to compliment McElwee on his latest documentary, Remake, because it is not the picture he would ever have chosen to make. It is instead a grief-struck tour-de-force: a magnificent film about film-making and its real-world repercussions.
Grief Transforms the Remake Project
McElwee filmed Adrian because he loved him, but now fears he might have hurt him. So he sifts through the material in search of clues, addressing his son as though he is still in the room. I look at the footage to convince myself that you were alive, he says. But also to convince myself that you are gone.
The plan, he explains, was for a completely different film. A Hollywood producer wanted to shoot a fictionalised version of his 1986 documentary Sherman's March. McElwee decided to follow the process, to make a new documentary about adapting an old documentary. That might be funny, he thought.
But events overtook him. Adrian's mental health was deteriorating. He became addicted to opioids. He died from a fentanyl overdose at the age of 27, in the bathroom of McElwee's Boston home.
Everything immediately ground to a halt, the director recalls. My son was gone. I was devastated. And compared to everything I was facing, the film seemed banal and frivolous.
He took a year to regroup and plotted a new course. A more traditional film-maker would have junked the original idea. McElwee has audaciously chosen to preserve it, so that the remake plays as a kind of absurd counterbeat to the anguish of Adrian's death. The film would have been too depressing otherwise, he says.
And in a sense I'm remaking my life by picking up the camera again. I'm reconstructing the life of my son from the scraps and pieces that had ended up being filmed. Adrian, we learn, was gung-ho for a Hollywood version of Sherman's March. Remake shows him discussing the project at length.
Swansea and Adrian's Lasting Presence
He feels that his dad should be making more mainstream movies. He says, Why not just do some big blockbuster hit? After seeing Remake, I rewatch Sherman's March. It is a joyous, insightful, free-ranging affair; a film that delights in taking the road less travelled.
McElwee is ostensibly making a civil war documentary, but he keeps being set up with various nice southern girls. In one scene, Charleen Swansea, his voluble former English teacher, demands that he turn off his camera before a big date. This isn't art, she roars. This is life!
The success of Sherman's March made Swansea a cult celebrity. A poll of American critics named her the greatest documentary character of all time. But when McElwee revisits Swansea for Remake, he finds she is now in the grip of dementia. She has no memory of the movie, or of teaching him English.
Things just disappear, she says with a frown. People disappear, that is the tragic logic of life. Except that on the screen, in the footage, Adrian still feels alive, which is both a comfort and a torment. McElwee dips back through the archive to show him as a gorgeous, earnest little kid, netting crayfish on the rocks.
I just love the deep surprise of the ocean, he says. Now here he is again as a tense, watchful teenager, raising his hand to block the camera lens. There was no evidence for me that my films were a problem for him, McElwee tells me. Overall I would say that they were more a plus than a minus.
All the same, he cannot help but wonder. Might the issue be one of divided loyalties? McElwee has a set of responsibilities as a parent and a set of responsibilities as an artist. But maybe these are always going to be at loggerheads.
McElwee nods. Yeah, they are antithetical. And when it works, the antithesis is what gives a film its creative friction. Because it never resolves itself.
It is always part of the problem. You have the camera, which means you have the power and other people do not. And that is the big responsibility. You cannot push your subject to say what you want them to say.
Consent and Filming Within Families
You have to keep that in mind when you shoot and you edit. After speaking with McElwee, the writer calls Victoria Mapplebeck. In her fabulous 2024 documentary Motherboard, Mapplebeck condensed two decades of life as a working single mother alongside her phlegmatic son, Jim. She says she relates to Remake and the ethical issues it raises.
It is about the compulsion to film and its effect on a family; the granting of consent and how that is understood by both parties. Watching it, she says, I felt both ashamed and moved. Because the thing with both Jim and Adrian is that at times they do provide consent because they recognise what it means to you. I think Jim definitely got more from the process than Adrian did.
It was a useful way to get us talking. But fundamentally I needed to do it more than Jim did. In his 2011 film Photographic Memory, McElwee painted Adrian as a troubled but basically resilient young man. The pair promoted the picture at the Venice film festival.
Adrian posted pictures of speedboats, gondolas and wild parties. It should have been a triumphant moment. But McElwee now worries that his film got Adrian wrong and that the subsequent fuss turned his head and caused problems. Did I give him a false impression of who he was?
That he was more or less invincible and could therefore keep doing drugs? He does not know; he fears the worst. For a child to see himself in a movie that his father has made and to then travel with him to festivals, often that would be wonderful for both father and son. But then all these questions arise.
McElwee also acknowledges the possibility that he was in denial about the severity of Adrian's struggles. Remake becomes a reckoning with that uncertainty, a father revisiting his own archive to ask whether his art helped or harmed the person he loved most.
Remake Documentary Adrian Mcelwee Sherman's March Victoria Mapplebeck
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