Portland filmmaker Irene Taylor on her HBO documentary ‘Trees and Other Entanglements’

Portland filmmaker Irene Taylor’s new film isn’t about any one person or tree or culture. She tells a series of braided distinct stories, like English Ivy around one of the towering trees in her own backyard. Taylor interweaves her own personal story with the overlapping and intersecting narratives of George Weyerhaeuser, photographer Beth Moon, Oregon bonsai professional Ryan Neil and others, illustrating a variety of relationships between humans and trees. We talk with Taylor about the stories in “Trees and Other Entanglements” and how they come together in the film, now streaming on Max.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The Portland filmmaker Irene Taylor’s new film which is now streaming on Max is about art and commerce, intimacy and racism, mortality and hope. Taylor explores all of these potentially disparate subjects through the prism of trees. The film is called “Trees and Other Entanglements.” Taylor interweaves her own personal story with the overlapping and intersecting narratives of a whole bunch of other people. The late Northwest timber magnate George Weyerhaeuser, the photographer Beth Moon, the Oregon bonsai professional Ryan Neil and others. Irene Taylor joins us once again. Welcome back to Think Out Loud.

Irene Taylor: Thank you so much

Miller: I’ve read that the seeds for this new film were planted when you read “The Overstory.” That’s the Richard Powers’ book that we talked about with him a couple of years ago, made up of a bunch of connected stories about people who all have their own relationships with trees. What effect did the book have on you?

Taylor: Well, I in fact, did not read it. I listened to it while walking every day through Forest Park.

Miller: That sounds like a great way to do it.

Taylor: Yeah. Well, I live here in Portland and I know those trails well and so I would just walk for hours. Much like two films ago when I was making a film about Beethoven, I would walk in the forest for hours listening to Beethoven.

Miller: OK. So that’s how you took it in. What effect did it have on you?

Taylor: I think what Richard Powers did so profoundly was, he took these human beings and he showed us how trees connected them and also kind of drove them apart in their endeavors. But what I really appreciated about his work of fiction, where he could have made anything possible, is that all of his characters did not neatly tie together. Even though they were connected, they didn’t connect perfectly. There was some messiness to it and that really made it feel to me like a documentary book of nonfiction because in nonfiction you can’t always tie everything up in a neat bow like that.

Miller: Was it a kind of one-to-one thing where you listened to this book in a place you knew well and loved and said, I want to do my own version of it? Was it that simple?

Taylor: I think it was really more the challenge of knowing I wanted to make a film about trees but trying to use trees as a flashpoint or as you put it a prism. I think that is somewhat what his book does, but when I think of comparing a book to a nonfiction film that I wanted very much to be a cinematic endeavor–I was thinking about all the other layers of visuals and audio and music–I think my film was a little more haunting maybe than his book attempted to be. So I just said to myself, I know these connections must exist in the world out there with real people.

Miller: Early on in the movie, you’re in Southwest Portland in a forest, the area around your backyard and city land trying to tear down some massive ivy vines. I hesitate to even call them vines at some point. There are tree branches strangling some trees. What was driving you?

Taylor: As wacky as it sounds, every time I looked out at the trees in my backyard, I saw my father, who’s been the subject of several of my films, dying. He was dying at the time. He’s no longer with us and he had Alzheimer’s. Well, Alzheimer’s is simply described as plaques and tangles sort of infesting the brain and gumming up the brain pathways. So I would look out at these trees and I would see trees, some of them in my backyard were completely covered in ivy, like you couldn’t even see the bark anymore. And I just kept thinking of my dad’s brain suffocating in the same way. It’s a bit odd. Everyone in this film is a bit odd, including me and I decided to put my own story in because even though it started as a globally-minded film, eventually I brought it almost entirely to the United States and Canada. So I really just wanted to use my own story also as a way of bringing my entanglements into trees and with the other characters as well.

Miller: Did spending a couple of hours and taking down a couple vines in a forest that is sort of choked with them at places, provide any moments of solace to you?

Taylor: Oh, my gosh. Yes, I did it for more than a couple of hours. I mean, I’d say over the course of a year, I probably spent a total of 60 hours outside. I’m an outdoors person, but I would routinely go out by myself. Sometimes I would take my, at the time, eight-year old son, who was always just a good companion and he liked to saw at the Ivy, but sometimes the Ivy would have a girth of five to six inches. It would look like a tree itself.

Miller: Had you made a feature length film like this before that is less of a linear narrative with a soul focus? It actually reminded me a little bit of Errol Morris’ “Fast, Cheap & Out of Control” that I saw back in the nineties. I think it was four people who all were sort of variations on obsessive themes. There are differences between that movie and yours, but have you made a movie like this before?

Taylor: I had not made one quite this disjointed. And it’s funny that you bring up “Fast, Cheap & Out of Control” because I made the film with Peter Richardson, who’s also a filmmaker based here in Portland, very acclaimed film director, nonfiction film director, who helped me produce the film. And he was like, let’s watch that film again. So we watched that film at one point while we were editing and..

Miller: Was it helpful?

Taylor: It was helpful. It was very different. It was sort of kooiker than mine. I think mine’s a little more haunting because I actually do find the subject matter of trees to be quite haunting.

Miller: What do you mean when you say haunting?

Taylor: I think trees are so mighty looking, especially where we live here. I mean, when in the northwest, we just take trees with a six foot wide girth for granted, we don’t think too much about it, but they are so vulnerable and our ability to harm them directly and obliquely, just through our common practices every day, is so profound. So I find the whole thing…like I say in the beginning of the film, that we move as humans through time and space, but trees have to stand still and they cannot escape anything we do to them.

Miller: Can you introduce us to George Weyerhaeuser? He’s one of a number of fascinating people in the movie, also somebody who’s no longer with us.

Taylor: Yeah, the Weyerhaeuser name, of course, is a very big one here in North America. A multigenerational timber family that had for a long time, [been] a family-owned company. And under George Weyerhaeuser’s leadership, it became a corporation, a public company, and he led the company for more than 30 years as both president and CEO. He really had a fascinating life before he ever came to lead the company and that was he grew up, of course with father, grandfather, great grandfather who were also timber barons, but he at nine years old was kidnapped during the Lindbergh baby era in the 1930s and he was kidnapped. And he says in the film, it was probably because of trees.

Miller: Meaning, because he came from a very public, wildly wealthy family?

Taylor: Yeah, by today’s standard, his ransom was about $4.5 million. It was $200,000 at the time, but it was a big deal. And it was a big deal that he was returned unharmed. And one thing that is not in the film that many people don’t know is that George Weyerhaeuser eventually, after he was released and went to college, went into the Navy and had his life. He hired one of his kidnappers after he was released from prison.

Miller: And we get the sense in watching the movie that it made a dramatic impact on his life that lasted, maybe not surprisingly. He was in a hole in a forest by himself for something like a week, but when you talked to him many, many, many decades later, I mean, it was still a part of who he was.

Taylor: Absolutely. In fact, when I sat down with him - which I was very honored to do, I will say - right out of the gate, he started talking about his kidnapping. I mean, before I even asked him a question.

Miller: I want to play a short scene from the movie. George Weyerhaeuser is outside on his large (not surprising) property with his family. And at this point, his son asks him a question.

[Clip plays from “Trees and Other Entanglements”]

George Weyerhaeuser’s Son: What’s your favorite tree on the property?

George Weyerhaeuser: My favorite tree?

Son: Yeah.

Weyerhaeuser: Oh, I don’t know, Dave. There’s some damn big one.

[Clip ends]

Miller: This is a man whose professional life was devoted to chopping down and replanting - it’s worth saying - a mind boggling number of trees. Do you think that not having an emotional connection to trees was necessary for him to do what he did?

Taylor: Well, I would think so, for what that is worth. But I also admit I was quite obsessed as the mother of several boys who were all nine years old at one time. I was obsessed with what his relationship to large trees must have been like after being in that ditch in a forest, being fed plates of food several times a day for more than a week. I cannot fathom what that must have looked like to be a child of maybe four and a half feet tall, looking up at these 200-250 ft tall giants. It also made me wonder why later in his life, he developed such a penchant for tiny trees. The film goes on to talk about how the Weyerhaeuser Corporate Collection of bonsai, which grew out of a relationship the company was having with Japan back in the sixties, became the greatest collector of bonsai. And I thought, what is that connection for him? Because he says that he doesn’t really see trees as art, but I think he appreciated them and I couldn’t help but to wonder if they were also never threatening to him…

Miller: Because they had been miniaturized. Permanently kept small.

Taylor: But let me be clear, this is my imagination. Speaking here, I can’t say that for certain. And I think this is where I was able to use a lot of my imaginative muscle in this film. Whereas some of my previous films may have been a little bit less oblique and more direct and more journalistic. This one, I allowed myself a little bit more artistic license.

Miller: As we talked about before, as you were making this movie, as you were starting out, your father was dealing with dementia, something we talked about the last time you were on and approaching the end of his life. Do you think that had an impact on your interest in this old man, on George Weyerhaeuser?

Taylor: Well, I think it’s fair to say that when I met him, I certainly did not know that he would die three months later. But when I met him, I felt a familiarity that was both charming and saddening to me because his family did tell me he was getting along at his age and he may not be available for more than a half hour because his mind would just wander. So, yes, I think I saw him absolutely as a human being. I saw him as a father. I saw him as a colleague and I certainly never met one person who knew him personally that had bad things to say about him. So I knew that he was a man of great character, but I also knew that he helmed this company through certainly an innovative part of its history, which was tree planting and advancing a new kind of high-yield forestry. But I also knew that he presided over the most efficient era of clear cutting ever.

Miller: Another person you spend a lot of time with is the Oregon bonsai professional Ryan Neil who has been on Oregon Art beat the series, but I was on this show maybe seven years ago or so if folks want to try to dig that up. I want to play a clip of him talking about some of the work he’s done. This is after he has moved aside some branches to show some of the otherwise hidden branches and trunk. And you’ve said it seems like he knows what these trees look like naked.

[Clip plays from “Trees and Other Entanglements”]

Ryan Neil: Haha. Yeah. Yeah, I know they look naked. Well, because I’ve been so intimate with them. Yeah, I’ve been super intimate with them. [Piano music in background] I mean, with Baker, it’s had roots grafted to it. It’s had roots ripped off of it. It had all of its root system bent and highly manipulated. My technique was super raw. This tree [sigh] has really been through a lot. Yeah.

[Clip ends]

Miller: It seems based just on the scenes in the movie, that you spent a lot of time with Ryan. How did the time you spent with him change the way you think about human relationships with trees?

Taylor: Well, I think Ryan really taught me as he really exemplifies in the film that trees teach him something about resilience. I heard him say last night when we premiered the film at the Tomorrow Theater with the [Portland] Art Museum that I followed him during the worst year of his life. And yet, he could look at a 4500 year old Bristlecone pine with my camera watching him and say this part of the tree is dead. This part of the tree had a fire but it lived. This part kept growing. That is a life well lived and we see the scars, but we see the tree is still here and it endures. And I think really, that ultimately is probably my biggest takeaway from the film is just the ability for trees to just endure.

Miller: You have an absolutely gorgeous series of shots of the photographer Beth Moon making platinum prints, a phrase I guess I’d heard before, but I don’t think I’d ever see anybody make them. Can you describe - this as unfair because it’s such a visual thing - but can you just describe essentially what we see?

Taylor: So Beth basically makes large contact prints for people who know the old darkroom technique style. But she paints the paper with a chemical compound so that the image will adhere to it. And then she pours chemicals over that in a large tray. So if she’s making a 16 by 20 print, she’s basically exposing it to light and then putting it in this tray and pouring the chemicals over it. And my director of photography, Nick Midwig and I, built a rig over her printing process so that we could film it just from the top down. And so there’s this delightful reveal of several of her images in the dark room while she’s printing them.

But the beautiful part of it is something you really cannot see. Which is that the process here is the most archival that you can possibly achieve in darkroom photography. And as she puts it, the prints of the trees will outlive us all. And probably the trees.

Miller: She says these pieces of paper impregnated with tiny bits of metal that they’ll last thousands of years, potentially.

Taylor: Absolutely. And I think there is something haunting a bit in a sense, because as she puts it, they will live on. And I just thought, really, she’s making them immortal and I think we arguably are headed towards a place in our future where ancient trees really show the signs of 5000 years of life. Think about that - 5000 years, what’s happened over that time. We may never see that again because our climate may have changed so much that we can’t support our climate, can’t support life, to a tree that long. So I think she has created an immortality for these icons.

Miller: Near the end of the movie, there’s a shot of you dragging these huge branches of English ivy and then hanging them up near your house. These are trees or vines that, as you said, you’d see and you could not help but think about your father’s Alzheimer’s. Why hold on to them?

Taylor: First of all, I found them beautiful once I took them off the tree because they held the shape of the tree. So you could imagine, it’s kind of like when your brain fills in the blank, you hear the beginning of a song and then you hear the chorus in your head even if it never plays. I think you see the recess of this tree’s life that it was suffocating. And if you take the ivy off carefully enough, it’s a semi circle or even almost an entire circle or you can peel it off. And so I hung those after my father died because it made me feel like he was there. And I saw this case around the air. But then I could with my imagination and my love and my memories, kind of fill in the gaps.

Miller: Irene Taylor, thanks very much for coming in.

Taylor: Thank you.

Miller: Irene Taylor is a Portland filmmaker. Her latest film which just premiered last night for streaming on Max is called Trees and other entanglements. Some of her earlier films include “Leave No Trace,” “Moonlight Sonata” and Here and Now.”

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