Telling a story
Unable to interview the 2020 presidential candidates face-to-face, pandemic presented a challenge for Frontline’s ‘The Choice’
It’s a few weeks out from the premiere of Frontline’s “The Choice 2020: Trump vs. Biden.”
A longtime chronicler of politics, Michael Kirk is buried in the editing process.
Sure, he’s used to it, but this one’s different.
The veteran filmmaker is used to doing face-to-face interviews to tell a complete story on the presidential candidates for the series Frontline.
Since 1988, the series has presented “The Choice,” which weaves together investigative biographies on both candidates.
This year, the majority of the interviews were done by Zoom.
“How do you get high-quality interviews?,” Kirk asks of the Zoom platform. “I’m used to interviewing people for hours at
a time. Doing that over Zoom is a challenge in its own.”
Kirk also has a big task ahead of him.
In the midst of a historic pandemic, economic hardship, and a reckoning with racism, on Nov. 3, Americans will decide who will lead the nation for the next four years — President Donald Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden.
The two-hour documentary tells the story of a deeply divided nation through the lives of the two men who want to lead it.
It will premiere at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 22, on New Mexico PBS and online.
“This is the fifth one that I’ve done and it feels like it’s the most important and essential,” Kirk says. “It’s on the edge of something necessary. It’s become critical viewing.”
Kirk worked his team for months on “The Choice,” which is a primer to the election.
Kirk offers a deeply reported narrative arc of both candidates’ lives, told through interviews of those who know Trump and Biden best.
“The only way you would get an acknowledgement out of Donald that he may have not done it right,” Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani tells Frontline. “He would say, ‘I think my dad would have done that differently.’”
Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens, recounts the impact of the death of Biden’s wife and daughter in a car accident, shortly after his election to the Senate in 1972.
“In six short weeks, we went from being on top of the world. … he was the bright young hope. He went from that to being a young widower, a father of two children, and a single dad. And a man with a broken heart,” Biden Owens says.
Kirk says before he began the project, he needed to get his head around telling a story that is fresh and useful.
“These are two people who have been in the public eye for a half century,” Kirk says. “They are masters of sanitizing and sandpapering their image. Our job has been trying to think about what we know about them and learn what we can about their lives.”
Kirk says since both men have been in the spotlight nearly all their lives, it was difficult to tell a new story.
“It’s just remarkable, you go back to 1972 and you see young Joe Biden campaigning,” Kirk says. “Donald Trump has really forced his way into the news. We had to look for elements that were useful for the viewer because both men are in that spotlight. It’s been a real test of everything I know how to do.”