David Winton: The Perfect Neighbor
By Joan Gibson

“I love the idea of organizations like the Film Society that are committed to cultural literacy,” says filmmaker David Winton. “Groups like the Film Society are key because they perform the function of critical filtering,” he added, “identifying films you wouldn’t ordinarily see.”

So it was not surprising that when he moved his office and editing suites to the San Francisco Film Centre, he stopped in. “Like a good neighbor,” says membership manager Nicola Rinne, David just came over one day, “introduced himself and said he wanted to get involved.” He signed up for a dual membership at the Benefactor level.

David’s production company, Winton/duPont Films, specializes in television documentaries and industrials that focus on business, the marketplace and work. The industrials constitute the bulk of their productions and many of their clients are Fortune 100 companies such as Dow Jones, Sony and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. These kinds of projects are focused on sales, marketing and recruiting products. David enjoys the work that the industrials provide; however it is the work they do on TV documentaries that he is most excited about.

His latest film, The Crash, which was shown October 28 on the History Channel, documents the stock market crash of 1929. The Crash was edited right here at the Film Centre.

Another recent project, Code Rush, recently shown on PBS, is a fascinating look at a team of code writers at Netscape who raced with time in 1998 to reconstruct the company’s Internet browser and turned the industry upside-down by making its source code freely available. Next, he’s hoping to do a film on the 1980s financial boom, examining the impact and fallout generated from that time.

“Films about the marketplace and business are a great milieu for storytelling,” says David. “Work has a huge psychological impact on our lives. For many people it’s not just a way to make a living, it has become their main form of human fulfillment.” This creates all kinds of paradoxes and human dramas in the workplace as jobs and industries change at a rapid rate. Stories about the workplace also lend themselves to the cinema verité style of filmmaking. One of the cool aspects of Code Rush, he says, was the refreshing spontaneity of being able to watch the people in the film respond to events as they were happening.

David became friends with Frank duPont in high school in the 1970s during what he calls “the heyday of American filmmaking,” and they shared an enthusiastic interest in film. They met up again after college and began their business in New York in 1988. Neither of them studied filmmaking in school; indeed David was a history major at Harvard. He doesn’t feel that film school is necessary in order to tell a good story as a filmmaker. “Cinema is the ultimate form of manipulation. It’s all about the perspective and viewpoint of the filmmaker’s taste and intelligence.”

He cites Stanley Kubrick as a great director who has had an impact on his work. Lars von Trier is enthusiastically mentioned as well. In addition to Kubrick and von Trier, other directors who have influenced him include David Lean, Howard Hawks, John Ford and Ingmar Bergman. “In college you had to love Bergman.”

I asked him what he looks for as a moviegoer, and what are some of his favorites. As expected, he casts the eye of a director on the question. Favorite films include 2001 A Space Odyssey, Lawrence of Arabia, Dreamlife of Angels, Smoke Signals, von Trier’s Dogma films like Idioterne and Meet the Parents. He considers The Celebration to be a defining film, one that “flipped a switch for people,” providing an immediacy that is lacking in the Hollywood experience.

David enjoys going to the movies with his family because it’s fun to hear what everyone has to say about their experience. “I look for a fresh voice, an overarching intelligence, I like to see the architecture of the mind at work, to see that the conventions of the story
(beginning, middle, end) are obeyed.” He enjoys dissecting the casting, the writing, the performances, the cinematography and the sociopolitical aspects of the script. In short, he is looking for the best way to tell a story, which is essentially what all good filmmaking is about.