Christopher M. Cook, Producer/Director/Writer Q: Did you begin as a filmmaker right off the bat, or do you have other kinds of production experience? A: No, actually I was a print reporter and editor for twenty-four years. I had worked at the Staten Island Advance, Newsday, the San Diego Union, the Kansas City Times, and the Detroit Free Press. I also had freelanced a lot for magazines and various other publications, and I certainly always saw myself as a print person. But after close to a quarter century, I started to get tired of print journalism. It no longer held the challenges I had enjoyed when I first got into it, and I had been looking around for something new to do for about a year by 1995. One day it struck me that if I could transfer what I knew to another medium, I might find a new career. That's when I landed on the idea of documentary work. At the time, the History Channel hadn't quite launched yet, but A&E and others were dusting off old documentaries and airing them. In a matter of a year or so, it became very clear that this new world of cable television and documentaries was going to be a monster that would need to be fed. There are only so many I Love Lucy and David Wolper Presents reruns out there. Then in 1995, there was a strike at my newspaper, the Detroit Free Press. I walked out with everybody else and basically never went back. During the strike I started working for a guy who had contracted to do a series for the History Channel, and I suddenly found that I had a bit of a knack for this video stuff. Not only that, but I liked it. I was taken by its power. The power was what awed me most. And what I also discovered is that I could do nearly as much in a one-hour piece as I could do in a 7,500-word article, but with even more impact. Q: Is there a particular theme running through your work? A: Not really. I consider myself above all a storyteller. Perhaps I'm an amalgam of my past and present: the journalist with a camera, looking for the words as well as the image. And as such I look for the best story I can tell. That may come in the words of someone I interview, and not necessarily in my scripted words. Ultimately, I think that although we are in a visual medium, the moving pictures aren't much without the passion of words-and neither are the words complete without the power of the image. Simple as that sounds, it's so often lost on a lot of documentary makers. I still like the power of the word regardless of who is speaking it. And that's why you will find that either I don't use my narration or keep it to a bare minimum. I feel that narration is too often used as a cheap and lazy way around documentary work. I prefer to find someone who is passionate and knows a subject and use him or her as my audio. I think it makes for much more engrossing television. If my work has some sort of mark to it, I would guess that it would be the content of my pieces. When I first got into television, I found people coming to me and asking how I was able to put something together so fast and in my particular way. I was mystified by the question until I began to realize that television is full of people with skill in sixty- and ninety-second news pieces. After that, they're lost. Long-form content was pretty easy for me, coming from a print background. Q: Can you discuss, in general, how the idea for a documentary is born? And then specifically the genesis of the current project? A: I tend to have an idea grab me at some point. I can't say it happens at a specific time or because of a cataclysmic event. But when it does, I leave it pretty much alone for a while and come back to it later. Often I'll be reading something months later and a corner of what someone says starts bringing the original idea back again. After that, it's a process of exploring existing literature and starting to shape the boundaries of what works as a story balanced against what visual materials I'm likely to find. Don't forget, a lot of my work is in historical documentaries, and that often means archival film or stills. But it can also mean fresh shooting of areas where events happened mixed with old materials and eyewitness accounts. The land-use project grew out of a sense that many of us have had no matter where we live: that there is something increasingly difficult and unlivable in how and where we live. I'm basically an urban person who feels at home in dense big cities. And yet I've lived for ten years in a state that's mostly suburbs. I disliked it. That's why I moved to Ann Arbor. I felt at home in its density and the pedestrian nature of the city, the university campus right downtown and all the restaurants and coffee shops piled in right where I now have my office. There seemed to be something missing, something lost in all those massive endless suburbs around the town, and that began an exploration about what and why. Q: Discuss where you've lived, and Michigan in particular. What about the state interests you? surprises you? is unique? A: By all measures, I'm the most unlikely person to be living in Michigan. I was born in London, raised in Paris, spent my childhood in and out of both with a stint in Bonn and Berlin. I came to the U.S. when I was nineteen and ended up in New York City, where I decided to learn my trade. First, I tried theater, but didn't have the stamina to be an actor. I ended up in journalism and decided to move to the west coast, and over a period of a few years make my way back east while working at various papers along the way. So I started at the Staten Island Advance and then Newsday, then I moved to the San Diego Union, then the Kansas City Times and then the Detroit Free Press. When I got to Michigan I thought that it was the single ugliest and most depressing place I had ever worked. I still do. I laugh when people say this is a beautiful state. Other than a few areas around Lake Michigan, it isn't. It's a plain, awful, ugly industrial state. And the areas that aren't industrial are flat and boring. I never vacation here. I tried it but got depressed. I get out of it as often as I can. But I also find it fascinating, and it is my home.

Take a closer look at production stills and behind-the-scenes shots from the film.