(Swans - July 28, 2008)  Jan Baughman (JB):  How did you become Ralph Nader’s filmmaker?

Jürgen Vsych (JV):  I was never an overtly political filmmaker, but in 2004, I supported Ralph because he was the only candidate against the Iraq War, and who was for a living wage and universal health care for all Americans. I studied Ralph’s campaign and thought to myself, “This campaign doesn't have really any Web presence, they're not making films, there could be a good opportunity here,” so I sold all my furniture and I moved across the country. I basically showed up at Nader HQ in Washington D.C. and said [singing a la Mighty Mouse], "Here I Am to Save the Day!" Since then, I've been making humorous educational films for young people and middle-aged people who are apathetic, to teach them about consumer and political issues -- to wake them up and get them interested in what's going on.

JB:  How did Ralph become a consumer advocate?

JV:  When Ralph was a young man, a lot of his classmates were killed in car crashes. If you're under 50, you kind of forget that everybody used to know somebody who was killed in a car crash. It was like a regular thing of life, like many years ago everyone knew a woman who died in childbirth. Not that long ago, if you had a car crash, you would probably die. Ralph discovered that there were all these wonderful safety devices that had been developed. It wasn't like nobody had thought of them -- but the car manufacturers didn’t want to spend the money putting them in. When Ralph learned that more people die in auto crashes than have died in all our wars, he went to Washington to regulate the auto industry. It was really logical, and look at how many millions of lives he’s saved, not just in America but around the world, because foreign auto makers had to adhere to our safety standards if they wanted to sell their cars here. Ralph's not indentured to any corporation because he doesn't accept their money, unlike the other candidates. Ralph’s campaign is just an extension of his life's work, really. He likes saving lives: that's his great passion. It’s fun to save lives! It's nice that someone's looking out for us. Like Batman! “He’s the hero America deserves. He's a silent guardian, a watchful protector...The Dark Knight!”

JB:  Tell us about the most famous video of the entire 2004 campaign, Ralph Nader Crashes the Two Parties. It aired on ABC Nightly News.

JV:  From Day One of the campaign, I kept saying, "We've got to get Ralph in the debates." When it quickly became apparent that that was never going to happen, I said to Tarek, Ralph’s nephew and top aide, “Should we attend the debates, and drop your uncle from the ceiling like Zorro, and have him challenge Bush and Kerry to a verbal dual?!” I had this vision of Ralph crawling through the ducts above the stage and then dropping down at an opportune moment!  Tarek said,  “Why don't we just do our own debate with Bush and Kerry cutouts?” and I said, “Oh no, it's gotta be in 3-D, using GI Joe dolls!” When Tarek and I were trying to get the funding from the campaign for this, they thought we were insane, though we knew Ralph would be very good because he's a great debater.

JB:  Did you have a lot of good outtakes from that, or was he able to do it with a straight face?

JV:  Oh, we have no outtakes -- what you're seeing is what I shot. The only outtakes I have are of the Bush and Kerry dolls. I had planned it all out beforehand. I played back snippets of Bush and Kerry's "answers" -- we shot in between the second and third debates -- so I played little sound clips so that Ralph could get mad, hearing what Bush and Kerry answered or didn't answer, and Ralph answered the question very directly. I just trimmed down Bush and Kerry's answers or non-answers, and then I shot all the insert shots -- the single shots of Bush and Kerry alone. For that, there are incredibly funny outtakes. Ralph and the campaign manager made me cut out the shot of Bush wrestling with a great white shark, which I thought was really funny. I also had Bush talking about how he was a good steward of the land, and there was a UFO circling his head. During the shoot, the guy who was flying the UFO accidentally hit Bush in the head and Bush fell over. And of course I put that in the first draft of the film, but when Ralph and the campaign manager saw it, the campaign manager said [angrily] "You have to cut that, you have to cut the UFO!" and I said, "No WAY I'm cutting the UFO!!" and Ralph, being the great diplomat, said "The UFO can stay, but you have to cut the part where it hits Bush and knocks him over." Ralph is very diplomatic! And that just goes to show how Ralph is obsessed with safety for everyone, even his opponent -- he doesn't like seeing people get hurt.

JB:  It will be interesting to see if he does get on the Google debate -- do you think you might have to produce another debate video?

JV:  Unfortunately, yes. If the two major candidates think that the Google debate will have any impact, then they're gonna find some way to kick Ralph off. They could easily change the rules at the last moment to exclude him.

The reason why Obama and McCain don't want Ralph in the debates is, people who hear, actually hear Ralph speak, they vote for him! Or, at the very least, they start thinking, and asking irritating questions like, “Why can’t we get universal health care?!” and the other candidates don't want that.

JB:  You can almost imagine Nader taking on John McCain -- it wouldn't be pretty for McCain.

JV:  It wouldn't be pretty for Barack either, because Barack is so inexperienced compared to Ralph; has no record to speak of compared to Ralph; and his voting record is dreadful. I actually think Barack has more to fear from Ralph than McCain because Barack thinks he has progressive voters locked up. He just totally takes them for granted, as the Democrats have for decades now. I remember John Anderson and what happened when he was going up against Carter, who was running for his second term against Ronald Reagan and at the beginning everyone was howling at the thought that the star of "Bedtime for Bonzo" could ever beat Jimmy Carter! But the economy was bad, like it is now, and there was a lot of enthusiasm for this very smart logical guy named John Anderson. But then everyone started saying, "A vote for Anderson is a vote for Reagan so vote for Carter," and that worked out really well, didn’t it?!  Anderson was in the debates -- actually, Carter wouldn't debate him, but Reagan did, which made Reagan look affable. It seems strange, but remember at that point in time Carter was not coming off as being  -- despite all his teeth -- he was not coming off as being an amiable guy you want to have beer with, which apparently is important to the American people. It was really interesting in 2004 to travel to a lot of Red states I'd never been to before -- South Carolina, Texas, Alabama -- and meet people for whom beerability* as I call it in the book -- beerability is of utmost importance to them. It doesn't matter what his voting record is-- "I just like him" That drove me crazy in 2004: "I just like Bush, I just like him." I heard that so much, and I'm hearing that about Obama. Yeah, I want to like him too, he doesn't seem like a two-headed monster. I want to like Barack Obama, but I just look at his voting record and who Obama’s taking money from - the health insurance industry?! American will NEVER get affordable universal health insurance under his administration!

[* Beerability; beernacity; beernatious: possessing a personality ideal for lightweight mindless conversation in a bar over several beers, but inadequate for running a large business, such as a country; e.g., Ralph Nader ranks very low in beerability polls; while highly affable, one needs every brain cell to engage in a conversation with him. From What was Ralph Nader Thinking]

JB:  Our standards have become pretty low.

JV:  Yeah, we do have extremely low standards. I blame the corporate takeover of our government to a large extent. They have the American people running scared. We are a nation of scaredy-cats. We're afraid if we don't get into the right school, our whole lives are gonna be ruined -- and to some extent that's true. It is a really dysfunctional system we have. It’s not one designed to make everybody happy and healthy – it’s designed to make a select few very, very rich.

JB:  What do you think of the significance of the demise of General Motors concurrent with this election cycle?

JV:  Ironic, sad, and inevitable. We’re not kicking up our heels and going "Ha ha, told you so!” America should be able to manufacture excellent cars. It's sad, it's sadly pathetic. America's become such a joke. I was born in the United States but I’ve lived in Europe most of my life, off and on, and I used to be kind of embarrassed to say I was an American, because we're perceived as being so dumb, uncultured. But now, we're not just dumb and uncultured, we're evil. The things we've done with our imperialism -- now we're hated more than ever. The whole GM thing was inevitable. It's hard to believe that logical, thinking people would look at this horrible machine, the worst machine ever invented, the combustible automobile -- it runs off what? Oil?! It's a mad machine, and of course this was all going to happen one day. Even as a kid, I thought it was inevitable. I remember the gas crisis of the early 1970s and thinking, it's just going to get worse and worse, and where are those solar powered cars that we were promised? Where is wind power? Where the hell did the metric system go?!?

And Ralph, being quite a bit older than me, has seen this even more than I have. This is one advantage of having an older candidate -- he's been though this so many times. I know some voters have concerns about age, they maybe want to vote for McCain but they think he's too old. But then they think, well, “I don't want to vote for McCain... but RALPH? He's older than McCain!” But McCain doesn't seem to have learned anything from all his years on this planet; Ralph has -- that's the difference. Ralph, unlike McCain, learned from history. In 1939, when he was five years old, he went to the World's Fair and saw GM's Car of the Future. And he's still waiting for it!

JB:  It's amazing how he keeps his sense of optimism and determination.

JV:  He's more optimistic than I am because he's had a lot of legislative successes, although a lot of his work has been systematically undone by deregulation. Ralph and the people who work with him, “Nader’s Raiders,” we’re all fighters, we like to fight and we know we’ve saved a lot of lives. That's one of the fun things about working and traveling with Ralph -- people see him in the street, or see the Raiders, and they come up to us in the airport with tears in their eyes and they tell us, "I'm alive because of you. I had a terrible crash and I had one of the first model airbags and it saved my life." That's what really fuels us, because we hear stuff like that and I tell ya', it's like a shot of Red Bull -- we don’t need caffeine or  pep pills! Stuff like that really keeps us going. And we still get letters from consumers needing help -- Ralph likes helping people and there are a lot of people that need help. I used to love to answer Ralph’s phone at 10 am on Sunday morning -- people with their cars broken down, totally in despair, just needing some help and advice.

JB:  What proportion of people yell at him when they see him, or call him the "spoiler" name?

JV:  He has a very strong personality and aura, so it is kind of like being in the presence of someone historic, like Abraham Lincoln. He's only been hated and despised by people who blame him for Bush winning for the last eight years, but he has such a body of work, and a lot of people do know what he's actually accomplished. So they're kind of like, there's that man -- there's Ralph Nader, he's that guy... they're kind of on the fence. Sometimes Ralph will be walking along and somebody will drive by and roll down their window and yell "RALPH NADER, DON'T RUN!" But luckily it doesn't get much worse than that.

JB:  You’re known for your narrative films. Will you be making more documentaries?

JV:  No. I'm not a documentary filmmaker, even though I make films about Ralph. I'm a storyteller and a biographer, that's my main thing, I make biographies, and the people I make films about, they don't really exist! But Ralph Nader…I made an exception for him because it's kind of hard to top his story! Spider-man, Batman, Ralphman…

I really like working with actors, and Ralph is the world's worst actor. I like him as a candidate because he's genuine, he's real, but he can't act whatsoever. When he tries to tell a joke, it's lame, LAME. Ralph’s pretty funny in real life, but if he tries any kind of acting, he sucks. It's really funny how appallingly bad he is. As a candidate, he’s so qualified, he's so experienced, and has incredible energy; he can outwork all the 26-year-olds on the campaign! And he speaks Arabic, which is important in this day and age when we're having serious dealings with that part of the world, and so he has a sensitivity towards people in the Middle East, which none of the other candidates do. All the qualities I like about Ralph are things that freak out most people -- which makes me laugh. Ralph’s beerability is zero...which is fine by me, because I’m a teetotaler!

JB:  Have you found that your political support of Nader and your work on his campaign have impacted your ability to get support on your artistic endeavors?

JV:  There is a definite Nader blacklist. I have to admit, every time I apply for a job I have to think twice – “Well, shall I admit my affiliation with Nader or not?” But I always end up putting it out there, because I figure it lets people know who I am and what my spine is like. I think people and companies I’d want to work with are looking for directors who have, above all, backbone. When they see "Nader 2004 Campaign Filmmaker" hopefully, they'll say, "That's the kind of woman we want to work with -- the kind of director we want." It does make life kind of hard, but you do weed out people you don't want in your life anyway.

© Jürgen Vsych    All rights reserved

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