Director’s Statement
By Rachel Boynton
December 2005
 

I got the idea for this film when I first heard about a group of Americans (not the ones in the movie) who had run an ad campaign to oust Chilean dictator Pinochet. For two years I’d been looking for the right idea for my first film. I wanted to find a topic that would let me explore America’s relationship to the rest of the world, and here it was – political idealism meets the profit motive. What could be more emblematic of us?

So I met with every U.S. political consultant I could find and tried to get access to a campaign overseas. Stan Greenberg was the first person I met from the Greenberg Carville Shrum group. His idealism appealed to me. When you’re in a political campaign you have to believe, and he was a true believer. The men working for Goni (Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada), the pollsters in particular, were convinced they were making the countries they worked in stronger democracies by expressing people’s views to the leaders, and by helping leaders communicate with the people. And when they spoke about Goni, it was easy to see him as a great visionary, fashioning himself after FDR.

It took me a while to realize the majority of Bolivians didn’t see him that way. To Americans, Goni is clearly liberal. Goni privatized Bolivia’s economy in the 90’s in a way that was unique and very innovative at the time, through a program called “Capitalization”. Goni sold half the shares of the national companies and retained the remaining half for the State. He used the profits from the State’s shares to create Social Security and free maternal/infant health care for the people. All this seemed well and good. But a major point of contention came over the issue of jobs. Goni swore he created 500,000 jobs through Capitalization. The people said Capitalization cost them jobs and they accused Goni of “selling off the country.” (And of course all the statistics remained vague, with each side interpreting them to reflect its own agenda.) So because he favored a market economy (something we take for granted), Goni was often described as a right-wing conservative (perhaps our ideals weren’t so universal after all).

Ultimately this became, for me, one of the central conflicts of the movie. I always saw the Americans as emblematic of us, and I realized that our “brand” of democracy, like theirs, is very wrapped up in the idea (and the hope) that market economics will bring benefits to the majority. The consultants chose to work for Goni because they agreed with his vision of how Bolivia could thrive – through a certain “brand” of democracy, as Jeremy Rosner says, that’s “market-based and modern but with broad benefits.” Essentially, they were fighting for progressive capitalism. But the Bolivian people have yet to see proof that a market-based economy will bring them any benefits. The American equation of “democracy + market economics” hasn’t proven its worth for the majority. And this conflict isn’t unique to Bolivia. It’s playing itself out around the world as we speak, from South America to, potentially, the Middle East. Our brand of democracy has promised prosperity and has yet to deliver.

I was also interested in the question, not just of why the consultants do what they do, but of how they go about doing it. The machinations of Goni’s campaign gave me a unique way of looking at how our system works back home. I realized our concept of democracy and our concept of capitalism are so closely intertwined that our technique of political salesmanship – how we sell a candidate – mirrors how we sell any product. In an election, the goal becomes to get voters to “purchase” a candidate, rather than to create dialogue. And without real, substantive, two-way discourse, politicians are left out of touch and the people are left with an insufficient understanding of complicated issues (be they the reasons for selling gas through Chile or the true reasons for going to war in Iraq).

So I never thought of “Our Brand” as a film about Bolivia, and I never thought of it as a partisan movie. At the end of the day, I wanted to make something that would leave people – all kinds of people – thinking and talking and asking themselves questions. How do the simple “messages” we hear all the time – whether they’re in political campaigns or Nike ads – affect us? What do we require of a leader in the modern world? What is our “brand” of democracy after all? When we talk about “spreading democracy” overseas, what do we mean? What are we spreading? And if we want democracy (or progressive capitalism) to work, what really needs to be done?

Above all, it was important to me not to portray stereotypes or to rely on easy impressions of the consultants and the candidate. In general, I think it’s too easy to blame individuals for what are really systemic problems. (It’s much easier to point fingers at a scapegoat than to really examine the system the scapegoat represents.) So I didn’t condemn the characters. I picked these consultants because I respected them; they were tackling a job that could alter the world in a fundamental way and I thought they were incredibly good at what they did. Essentially, the consultants are powerful in the same way we are powerful as a country; as a nation we are capable of influencing and altering the world. This doesn’t make us – as Americans – evil, but it does make us responsible for our actions and for our country’s political and economic attitudes around the globe.

But this is my opinion, and I hope viewers will have their own thoughts walking out of the theater. I hope the movie will act as “anti-spin” and reveal something fundamentally true about how the people in the film behave and why they behave that way – and let viewers judge for themselves.

The challenge for me was to do this within the context of an exciting, fiction-like thriller. I wanted the film to pose questions, but I wanted those questions to arise naturally, from the events themselves. I wanted it to feel like an adventure story well told – to be, above all, an exciting movie.

The edit took a little over a year and a half, partially because events kept evolving and partially because it took a long time to figure out how to communicate all the necessary information without narration or too many cards. But I think the election year of 2006 is a good moment for Our Brand Is Crisis to come out – an adventure about the all-American art of branding, and about how it effects us and the state of democracy at home and around the world.
 

• Return to the Our Brand Is Crisis film info page.