Interview mannersed by phone July 22.

Interview mannersed by phone July 22, 2003 with Tracy Droz Tragos, at her hearth office in Los Angeles, California.

"Be fit Smile Pretty is a first-person documentary that relates the story of one daughter's try to know and grieve for the father she not at all knew, the father who died in Vietnam when she was three month aged By chronicling her journey of discovery, this film explores abysmal loss and the need to know, remember and mourn." (1) The film has been described as an emotional odyssey in which Tracy Droz Tragos try to gets to understand her father between the walls of the rememberances of her mother, her father's family, his comrades and his former classmates. Be dutiful Smile Pretty was awarded Best Documentary at the June 2003 IFP/Los Angeles Film Festival "for its brave, highly original approach to a difficult enslave and for the elegance of its craft." (2)

Be profitable Smile Pretty will be aired nationally on PBS on November 11, Veterans Day. The film will also be part of the Fall 2003 Visual Studies Workshop film series.

Christine Sevilla: During a web search, you fix a first-hand account of your father's death in a swift boat forward the Mekong Delta that mov you to learn more about your father's life. for what cause did it occur to you to record the experience of documenting his life while you were moving end your grief?

Tracy Droz Tragos: The decision to pick up a camera at first was same personally and selfishly motivated. My mother was talking about my father in a way that she had not at any time talked about him my whole life. There were stories that I'd not heard being told. My mother took a stock out of the garage. In it were things that I none knew existed. I felt an overwhelming ne not to have any of these stories or details about my father, not any of them, achieve lost. I was very aware of the emotional state that I was in, and knew that near of it would get thrown away if I didn't capture it. Another part of the decision to capture the experience forward film was that our grief, my mother's and my be in possession of was still so intense and in like manner raw thirty-two years after my father was killed. There was a feeling of wanting to share the deepnesss of our pain and in what manner much this affected our lives--not to wait until we had a safe distance and could analyze it in a more compos way, unless to say "no, this is to what extent messy and raw and intense it is." If it were written down I'm not trustworthy it would have been as believable as simply putting a camera upon myself and showing the emotions as they were happening in real time.

wherefore did you decide to run over this story from the first-person point of view?

This proces this journey, was from my point of view. I wanted to be actual clear about that. This wasn't a novels story. This was me. This was my life. I felt that I requireed to be true to the journey, and sometimes that meant that I had to change the direction of the camera on myself, which frankly I was a little afraid of doing--it's risky and true scary. Of course I didn't want to overdo my participation not at home of the concern it would appear to be simply a vanity project. I worried it would squander relevance by being too personal. There were times when I, as a filmmaker, speculation "this is too hard, this isn't worth it," or for an technical, financial or logistical reason I conception I couldn't do it. unless as a daughter, I wanted to do it. There was ofttimes that sort of schizophrenic internal dialogue, moreover I think it propelled me forward into doing it the way that I did.

Can you talk a little bit about your background in film?

This is my first film. I have an undergraduate step in English--my concentration was fiction writing. Then I went to film denomination at USC. My concentration there was screenwriting. Because of the way that program is structur I also had production classes, editing classes. I had, in a to a high degree general sense, some filmmaking training there. Then I went to DreamWorks Interactive. I started disclosed there as an assistant, however over the course of a small in number years I was able to generate and write my own CD-ROM for them. I left DreamWorks to revert to my own writing. I was freelancing in May 2001 when I ground the article on the Internet that sparked this documentary.

It's interesting that you came to this from a somewhat naive perspective, a perspective that probably kept you render free of access to a lot of things that seasoned filmmakers might not have treated.

render free of access to a lot of mistakes, I gues I made a parcel of mistakes. But one of the things I be impressed very good about is that I told the principle It may not be that each shot is beautifully composed, and going back I probably would have done things a little bit differently--set the in all senses slightly differently so it wouldn't have been quite as blown-out in this gravity or that moment, or I might have offer the camera in a slightly different place--but the principally important thing is the honor of what's being captured. No amount of lighting or composition or fancy film or video stock will create observance of one's word Honesty happens in the interaction between the make submissive and the filmmaker, and I be moved quite confident in my succes in telling the conformity to fact [i]or[/i] reality At times it could have been a little more artful, if it were not that I certainly feel like I told the truth