“They were always a little bit tense,” Green says. “It’s not a relaxed, easy story. There was always a point in every interview where the person would draw a line and say, ‘I don’t want to talk about that.’...All the interviews were a negotiation.”

Green says the activists often refused to talk about the details of their militant campaigns and their participants.

Once he had secured funding and coaxed the former Weathermen into opening up to the camera, Green still faced the challenge of putting their actions in context.

“Obviously they were inspired by the horror of Vietnam,” he says. “It took me a long time of doing research and talking to people before I actually appreciated how horrific the war was.”

In the film, present-day interviews and old news broadcasts are juxtaposed with several punishing sequences depicting brutal violence in Vietnam. Green says he struggled to save these passages from leaving audiences numb.

“It’s very hard these days, because we’ve seen so much death and so much killing on TV...for that kind of imagery to have any power,” Green says.

“Sam handled it really carefully,” Subrin says. “It would have been really easy for him to be gratuitous with the images he used.”

In one particularly disturbing scene, the camera shows a Vietnamese man being shot in the head at point-blank range in a street. The moving image, familiar to many as a still photo, is rendered all the more powerful in slow motion.

“When I saw it for the first time it just assaulted me,” Green says. “It was as if someone hit me in the face... That is what war is.”

Robb Moss, the Arnheim lecturer on filmmaking and the teacher of VES 51a, where Green spoke, says he finds this sequence’s retrieval of an iconic still image to be an apt metaphor for Green’s technique in The Weather Underground.

“That’s kind of an image of what Sam’s movie does,” Moss says. “My recollection of events was the photograph, but his movie gives me the before and after.”

Aftermath

After finishing the lengthy process of culling archival footage and filming new interviews, Green faced a task in some ways even more daunting: editing the many hours he had collected into a coherent narrative.

In the middle of editing, Green says, an event of huge international significance threatened to end his own documentary project. When terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001, he says, his uncompleted film’s attempt to understand a group of people who had bombed public and private buildings to bring down the government acquired an unsettling resonance.

“Before Sept. 11, it was kind of a forgotten piece of history,” Green says. “The context changed so much.”