The list of component parts for Nikki Parker and Kelly Rouse’s The Year of Paper is at its surface simple. One controversial issue, two film school alumnae and friends, three couples. Oh, and three years. “If you told us three years at the beginning, I don’t know if we would have done it,” Parker says laughing. “I’m sure we would have, but we didn’t realize what we were getting into.”

In reflecting upon same-sex marriage, The Year of Paper follows three couples Alma & BluJay Hawk, Joel & Steve Connor and Adam & Sharon Purkiss as they each struggle in identities both with and without the protections granted by marriage licenses. The documentary serves dual functions not only as a chronicle of personal journeys therefore but also as an educational touchstone on the political discrimination shown gay and lesbian couples.

Though conceptually big in scope, the production was quite small. “It’s so amazing what you can do if you just ask people,” Parker says. “We made this film with our own money. Kelly had a camera. I had editing equipment and sound equipment. We made a film with just two people and got all these amazing interviews just from asking people. Just telling them our idea and asking.”

“Independent film is alive and well,” Rouse adds.

Recently screened at Atlanta’s Out on Film, The Year of Paper asked a lot of its co-directors, who here both speak about the genesis of the idea, finding the couples and the importance of a God card.

SM: How did the original concept change through the course of—literally—the years, that you spent with these couples?

Parker: When San Francisco happened—it was San Francisco that caught my attention and all the uproar after it—I said, “I don’t see what the big deal is if two people want to commit themselves to each other. Why is this such a big thing?” As a straight person you never think about it. I never thought of gay marriage or any of that until it was put right in front of me, and I saw the glaring discrimination. Then I was like, “How can people not see that it’s discrimination?” A lot of people, especially straight people, you just don’t think about it because it’s not your world. It’s not your day-to-day life, but then once you see it, you can’t help but. That’s what part of the film is too. You can’t help but see it’s discrimination when you see the way it affects people’s lives.

So, originally San Francisco happened, and I saw everything that was going on. I talked to another film school friend of ours, and I said, “I don’t see the difference, and I bet you that if you followed three different couples, you wouldn’t see that big of a difference.” He was like, “I think you have a good idea for a documentary, and you should talk to Kelly and see if Kelly wants to do it.” Then I talked to Kelly, and Kelly’s like, “Let’s make it!”

Rouse: In discussing the idea, I immediately responded to Nikki’s idea of following these three different couples, but I also wanted to explore not only the personal but the political side of things and try to educate people. I was lesbian in a long-term relationship so I was very aware of what my rights were and what they weren’t, and I thought that it would be a good idea to try to open people’s eyes to things they didn’t know.

We felt like even though we like Michael Moore and his movies, we wanted to take a more balanced approach so that we could perhaps reach out to the people who weren’t sure how they felt about this issue. We didn’t want to be completely one-sided in our approach.

Parker: Right and that’s why we gave equal time, or tried to, for both sides of the argument…It’s an emotional issue. It’s not an intellectual issue at all because if people thought about it, they would realize all the holes in the arguments I think. It’s an emotional, visceral argument that people have.

SM: As documentarians you were both fair and balanced, but I’m assuming that as you go along you have to form opinions and pick a side. How do you step back and say, “I just have to film what this person is saying and keep asking them questions regardless of what I’m feeling,”?

Parker: People are people, and this is just one issue that people have opinions on. They are still people, and if you approach them on a human level and make humane contact with them, it makes it easier. There are a lot of people that I like in different aspects that don’t believe in gay marriage, but there are still other qualities about them that you try and connect with.

Some of the people that we interviewed that were against same sex marriage were more moderate, and they were definitely a lot easier to relate to. The folks that were on the extreme, like Lou Sheldon and Peter Sprig, I was interested in what they had to say, and so asking them questions was more out of curiosity. Because I’m not a lesbian, it didn’t affect me personally. It wasn’t like it was a personal attack on me so it was a lot easier for me to talk with them. If you actually listen to some of the questions that I ask them, I was very respectful, but I did ask them a lot because I’d see the holes in what they’d say. I’d ask them about that, and they’d say more.

I was pleasant and respectful because it was great that they talked to us. They have their opinions, and I wanted to learn more about why they had the opinions they had. So, one question would just lead to another.

Rouse: It helps that we were collaborating as co-directors. When we were in the edit room and shaping something together, if one of us felt like the approach was a little too didactic or too extreme, we could say, “You know, I think we need to tone that down.”

I have to admit too that in the questioning, even though I did a lot of the outreach trying to set up interviews with the Family Research Council and the Traditional Values Coalition, when it came down to doing those interviews, I usually was operating the camera and letting Nikki do the questioning. It is harder to separate when you feel like you’re personally being attacked. It’s a little easier to work from that position behind the camera and not right out there asking the questions.

Parker: It helped too that Kelly was really instrumental in writing the interview questions. This whole project was a complete collaboration, and it’s like we were married.

Rouse: (Laughing) People thought we were a couple.

Parker: We bounced everything off each other. Kelly would write the questions, and we would send the questions ahead of time. We wanted them to feel comfortable and know that we are not trying to—

Rouse: Ambush them.

Parker: So, they knew what we were going to ask, and from there I’d ask more questions. The people we interviewed were totally cool, and nothing ever got personal. It was all very professional.

SM: Now, how did you guys go about finding your couples: BJ & Alma, Joel & Steve, Adam & Sharon?

Rouse: We found BJ and Alma first. We’d sent out e-mails and queries to friends telling them about the project. We started going to rallies and events because there was a lot going on politically, and we were at a rally in Silver Lake I guess it was. BJ and Alma had just recently been up and married in San Francisco, and they spoke at this particular rally. We approached them afterwards, and they really responded to the idea of the film and approaching it as a celebration of love. Ultimately that’s what we were trying to do. We sat down with them at their home shortly thereafter, and they agreed to participate formally.

Parker: It was also cool that BJ and Alma were trying to start a family.

Rouse: Yeah, there was a lot going on in their lives, and they were completely open to having us in every aspect of their lives, which was great. Did we find Joel and Steve?

Parker: We were going to go with a different couple and that just fell through. Then we went to a Here event during Pride. They were being honored because they’d gotten married in Oregon. So a lot of this shaped itself…They were planning a wedding, and they talked about that. It was like, “Wow, this is perfect.” And, they were so funny and sweet. They were really open to the idea too. We had to have a few conversations; they weren’t as open to it as BJ and Alma at first, but after talking to them, we won them over.

Rouse: Adam and Sharon were friends, again, with a mutual friend from film school. Adam actually has a gay brother who didn’t make it into the final cut of the film just because it didn’t come up contextually in the story and in the timeline of that year.

Parker: And, we’d seen some other couples who we’d thought about. There was the interracial couple. That was an initial idea.

Rouse: But they were doing a whole separate project about their marriage, and we felt like it might not be as frank.

Parker: But, Adam and Sharon were so cool.

Rouse: Then we found out they were pregnant, which made for an even more compelling story.

Parker: We thought the parallels between them and BJ and Alma would be really strong, and they were super committed because of Adam’s brother. A lot of straight couples were like, “Well, why am I going to let you follow me around?” So, they were committed in the same kind of way [the others were] because they saw the issue as being really important as well.

Rouse: We did briefly think about trying to include a straight couple who were against same sex marriage, but we had trouble finding one in our circle who would be open to the whole concept—

Parker: Of being in the film, and the bottom line was it was a celebration of marriage. We wanted to find people that should be married to each other, that you look at those people and go, “Wow, those people belong together. That’s what marriage should be.”

We could have gone the way of picking couples that had problems of this or that, but we wanted it to be a testament to what marriage should be as far as love and commitment and these people being together. Our main goal was to find three strong couples that you would want your marriage to be like their marriage, which I think helped the film as far as the emotion of it.

SM: Earlier you were talking about the issue as being almost emotional, and for me of the six interviewees, the emotional trigger was always Alma. She’s the first of them that you feel emotionally on base with as a viewer. How do you, as a documentarian, sit in a room and ask question of people, getting through that with them crying? That’s got to be difficult I imagine.

Rouse: It is hard, and I think it helps again that we have each other. You sense when there are moments when you have to be respectful and give someone their space. Nikki and I would look at each other in that moment and try to be really sensitive to their emotional needs. It was devastating for them to lose their licenses, and Joel, who I think is a very stoic and witty type of person—and maybe it’s just because we spent so much time with them—but in that moment when we were filming, and he got the call that they’d lost their license that day, you can hear his voice crack. I always get moved by that because I know he’s suppressing how much that hurt him. Obviously, you want to be there to capture those moments.

It also helps with Alma and BJ that they are very open people and allowed us to be there when they were going through the insemination process. To share all of that with us was pretty amazing.

Parker: A lot of times too we would just be quiet and not say anything.

Rouse: Allow them to say however much they want to say.

Parker: And, they would always share something more heartfelt. We’d just sit there quiet for a moment, and they would continue to talk. It seemed like if we asked them a question, it would take them out of that time. So, it allowed them a moment to think of what they were going to say, and they would always say something really beautiful. That’s usually the stuff that made it into the film. When Alma’s talking about her mom, the line that’s always got me is, “Everybody wants their mom there on their wedding day.” She’d been talking about her mom just a little before that, and we were just a little quiet and that came out from that.

A lot of that we’d filmed once we had a relationship. We couldn’t have gone in from the beginning and gotten that kind of stuff. That’s after we’d been spending months with them and they knew us. For them to open up emotionally like that—they wouldn’t have done that right at the beginning I don’t think.

SM: Now after three years how did you go about in the editing room trying to figure out what you were going to use and what was going to hit the floor?

Parker: Should we tell her about the God card?

Rouse: (Laughing) Oh, yeah.

Parker: Growing up in the South, playing paper, rock, scissors, I told Kelly about how we would always play that there was God too, and God beat everything. But, you could only use it once in a game or you know, everybody would pull a God instead of rock. So, I told her, “What we need to do is each have our own God card so that if there is something that we have to have in the film and there are no if-ands-or-buts, and the other person doesn’t want it, you can use your God card, but you can only use it once the entire film.” So, we started off with that before we even got started.

We spent two years editing because we both work full-time. Kelly’s a writer, and I’m an editor, and so we would work nights and weekends. A lot of it was like having a child. We would make these sequences, and it was like having a baby: trying to figure out what to put in--we had 350 hours of footage, what to put in, what not to put in, what we got, what worked together, all that, and we never used our God cards. Kelly came close, but she didn’t use it.

We would talk about things, and we would be on the same level, or look at each other and know. Or, if one of us was adament and if we had good enough reasons, we could usually convince the other person. That’s why it was good to have somebody else. It was so daunting and [so good] to be able to have someone else and go, “What do you think?” We were usually, I’ll say, 90 percent of the time were on the same page and didn’t even have to say it. We’d know, and we never fought. We got a little grumpy a few times, but pretty much it was, and I think it totally came out in the film, good. We put in the strongest things we could, and there were things I wanted that she didn’t want, but we saw that we didn’t need them at the end. So, we’re both pretty happy with the outcome.

Rouse: I would second everything you said. Going back to what you said earlier, it was a lot like a marriage, but I don’t feel that we had to compromise or sacrifice that much either. I really do think we were in pretty close alignment on our vision and our intention.

Parker: And, luckily we have a partnership where we are each strong in certain things, and so Kelly set up all the writing and the research, and I was more on the graphical side. I’d be like, “Oh, what about this idea? And, then we’d talk it out.” We’d look at everything together…It was all collaborative. Everything in that film is from the both of us.

How much time do you think we spent, Kelly?

Rouse: Oh, gosh…At one point we were working three nights a week and Saturday and Sunday all day.

Parker: Towards the end it wasn’t that much, but everybody should know that it takes a long time to edit a documentary.

SM: I don’t know if this is just my impression of the ending notes of the film, but Steve and Joel are still together living in the same house; Alma and BJ are together in the same house; but, Adam and Sharon are actually separated at the end. That to me was heartbreaking. Because there are these three couples together in the film, you can’t help but feel--that’s not to say it’s an intentional comparison—that it’s comparative, and so for that reason it was even more heartbreaking. There’s one model of a straight couple in the film, and here are these two people separated because of work whereas here are two other couples who’ve gone through the ringer in terms of what the government’s going to permit them to do or give, and they are still living in the same houses together.

Parker: It’s actually interesting that you say that because when we screened in Honolulu, and that came up on the screen, there was an audible gasp. The whole audience gasped when Adam and Sharon weren’t living together. It’s just because of work right now, and they are working on trying to get to the same place. But, there was that gasp, and we didn’t think of it, that it was going to be that emotional, that people were going to be that shocked by it and make those comparisons. We just told it like it happened…So it’s really interesting that you said that too because we got that same reaction when we screened it, and that wasn’t the intent.

SM: In terms of the future of this project, where would you like to see the dialogue go?

Rouse: We’ve heard said that statistically that a third of the country is for same sex marriage, a third adamantly opposed and a third is not sure how they feel. So, the statistics break these different ways, but we really want to figure out how to reach those people who are on the fence. We have the best chance of maybe influencing those votes…

For more information visit www.theyearofpaper.com..

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