---

Q) Your film The Hutterites does not come off as stereotypical or dated even though it was produced over 40 years ago. How do you explain this?

Well, I think you’re comparing it to films before it, and I think one of the things that happened, technically, was that sound recording was much easier. A few of the films in the Candid Eye Series were moving towards that, but when we got to the Hutterites, we had Nagra recorders. And we had a picture system, 16 mm, which was very portable and reliable, and we also had camera people that had experience with it and in some ways, directors too, because I made six films before The Hutterites.

The possibility of doing it was real. At the Mixburn colony, up by Edmonton, there was an Amish scholar by the name of John Hostetler who had been studying the Hutterites for a number of years and was going to write a book about it. And the Amish, of course, are very close to the ideas of the Hutterites, and so he said why don’t you get the National Film Board to make a film, because they were having problems with their image.

That coincided with some of my interests because the producers at the Film Board, particularly Guy Glover, got the call and discussed the proposition of filming the Hutterites. I had tried for quite a number of years to make a film on the Hutterites. I grew up in southern Alberta and my family knew the Hutterites, my father particularly, who was a rancher and a farmer around Cardston, where there were several Hutterite colonies … when the Hutterites came up from Dakota, the first settlement was in the Cardston area.

I knew Hutterites as a child, not well, but they were not strange to us at all. And I was interested… I had been to the colony my father was particularly friendly with and had tried to get them working with me and the National Film Board, but I had gotten nowhere. The minister there was very negative… and after two or three tries, I had just given up on it. So when this opportunity came, the person who was the translator, I guess, between myself and the minister, was John Hostetler. He was brilliant, a fine scholar. Very, very happily received by the Hutterite community and he made it possible.

…I had an incredible team, and there were only three of us to do the film. One was John Spotton. We had worked together on two films and knew each other well. Spotton was a very good cameraman and very wise in social situations, and our equipment was no mystery to us at all…. The film isn’t much different in style from a lot of other Film Board movies prior to that, but… we wanted to show the colony at its simplest and most appealing… It was not a question of doing propaganda for the Hutterites because there was a lot of criticism in my mind and in Spotton’s mind and in our sound man’s mind.

We had spent two or three weeks in the colony. We lived there, we slept in the kindergarten which was not yet in use because the colony was small, and we ate with the colony every day and got up at 5:00 in the morning when working hours started.

---