“You get this sprawling experience in a very intimate adventure”

An interview with Matt Yoka, director of Whirlybird

Whirlybird chronicles the extraordinary story of intrepid Los Angeles helicopter reporter Bob Tur and his wife Marika Gerrard, the husband-and-wife journalist team who captured from above the mayhem of the city, from the 1992 L.A. riots to the infamous O.J. Simpson highway chase—all the while battling their own abusive relationship. But now Bob, a transgender woman named Zoey Tur, reflects on her testosterone-fueled rise with a piercing sense of regret. In his absorbing documentary feature debut, Los Angeles native Matt Yoka spent years sorting through and digitizing Tur’s archives to tell a story of a city, and a reporter’s personal reckoning.

This film is about a lot of things, but I feel like Zoey’s transition is the elephant in the room. I feel like you could have handled it in different ways, revealing it later chronologically as it happened in the story, for instance. But you decide to get it out there early. Why? 

I never wanted to delay that. I think that Zoey’s transition is a fascinating part of the film, but I didn’t want to treat it like a plot reveal. For me, there’s a couple things going on: I didn’t want to make a spectacle out of it, of what is a personal, difficult process that somebody goes through. I also didn’t want it to be an explanation for anything. I think it’s more complicated than that. We all like to pinpoint the core of somebody, but everyone is an amalgamation of a bunch of things. I also thought it was more interesting for the audience to watch the film knowing where Zoe is today, rather than taking you there at the end. I wanted to the audience to be more aware and I think that would help inform certain aspects of the film, and allow the audience to have some perspective.

Can you talk about how Zoey and Marika’s archive was so important to the film? How many hours did you sift through and how did you find the structure of the film?

It was definitely massive, somewhere around 2500 hours and 3500 tapes. But that was the exciting part of it. When I was first pitching the film, it felt like a no-brainer to say: “Look at how many tapes they shot of their life--of course, there’s a story in there.” I chipped away at digitizing it over the first few years, but the bulk happened over the last two years when we got funding. We would load boxes of tapes into a U-Haul and bring it to a post-house, and tape by tape, they digitized it. Every Friday, I looked at a batch and start viewing it. I knew that I could tell a personal story when I saw this tape where Marika is pregnant with their first child, taking to their unborn child, and I remember thinking how beautiful the image looked, how tender and awkward the interaction was, and then on top of it, they map out their entire career. So I became hyper-focused on finding those moments. Then I fused that with the highlights of their career. I knew what those pivotal moments were. And then I charted out two timelines, their career and their family. As we digitized everything, we looked for pieces that would fill out that puzzle.

There was another tape that informed what I wanted the film to be. I found this wedding tape where there’s the two of them interacting with their family just after they eloped, and then it cuts to a murder scene, where somebody is getting loaded into the back of the van. You have that juxtaposition within one single tape. And that accurately reflected their life. The other thing that kind of emerged, when it cut from the wedding to the tragic scene, was there was this amazing analogue video glitch which became a visual language that I wanted to play with.

What attracted to you to this glitch as a stylistic device for the film?

I could see how it can be seen as a stylistic choice, but it has a deeper significance for me; it has two different objectives: one is the glitch simulates the experience of watching the raw tapes. As much as I want the audience to be immersed into the story, I also wanted the presence of the archive to inform the film, and how they were always documenting, and the glitch functioned as a reminder of that. I also found that the glitch conveyed some kind of emotional expression. It could be sometimes aggressive, other times, hypnotic and beautiful, and I had a catalogue of these glitches, and I would choose those that felt right at particular moments.

So the film is obviously the story of Zoey and Marika, but what did you set out to say about Los Angeles, which is another big character in the film?

The documentary film Los Angeles Plays Itself was a big source of inspiration for me. I always thought it was so brilliant the way that it used all these Hollywood clips to tell a deeper story about Los Angeles’ identity. I set out to look for a subject that would let me add to that conversation in another way, and I found myself gravitating towards the time that I grew up in, and explore the city in what I felt was an endless news cycle. So I wanted to tell the story of a very complex city, and what I found was that I was telling the story of a very complex family, so it allowed me to have a micro/macro experience of L.A. I can’t imagine a better subject than Zoey and Marika to deliver an experience of the city. And I think the one of the results was personalizing these huge stories. Even something like O.J. or the riots, there’s so many lives that intersected with those moments.  And I think there’s some benefit to seeing one of these lives going through history. I half-jokingly reference Forrest Gump, because they experienced the history of the city and were at the center of the history of the city for multiple decades. My hope is that you get this sprawling experience of Los Angeles in a very intimate and personal adventure. To a certain extent, a lot of people experience that in Los Angeles. We lose that individual experience of these significant events.