The Nerve Film Lounge: Q&A: Amir Bar-Lev


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For weeks, she was the nation's favorite human-interest story: Marla Olmstead, the four-year-old artist whose paintings were hailed as masterworks of abstract expressionism. Filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev was intrigued by the questions Marla's success raised about art: what separates a brilliant modern painting from the typical work of a toddler? He began filming the Olmsteads — Marla, her parents, and her two-year-old brother Zane — in the hopes of exploring this question. Then a bombshell dropped: a 60 Minutes segment on Marla theorized that her paintings were an elaborate hoax perpetrated by her parents. Bar-Lev's documentary suddenly turned into a mystery: did Marla paint her celebrated paintings? Were her parents lying? Could he somehow record the key piece of evidence that would either vindicate the Olmsteads or condemn them? My Kid Could Paint That does not reach a verdict, but it presents the whole story in all its maddening, fascinating complexity. When we spoke to Bar-Lev, he was eager to argue both sides. — Gwynne Watkins

I felt by the end of the movie that Marla's father Mark was doctoring Marla's paintings, and that Marla's mother Laura was living in willful denial, but the whole thing was innocent and well-intentioned, and just got out of hand. Are you leading the audience to that conclusion, or is that wildly different from other theories you've heard?

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There are wildly different conclusions. Ultimately, the reality of how Marla paints is somewhere between "Marla's the next Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart" and "Marla's parents are arch criminals." Wherever that middle point on the spectrum is, it doesn't make a great Inside Edition story; it doesn't make a great Today Show story. There is some very fundamental human inclination to see the world in these black-and-white terms, where people are either heroes or evildoers, and to hope that these beatific rays of creativity itself somehow shine down on a little girl who's never studied and whose parents know nothing about art.

The moment in that final scene where you talk to the parents head-on about the possibility that Marla might not have entirely painted the paintings and Laura breaks down in tears and says, "This must be documentary gold" — that was a chilling moment. I felt like the audience of the film was really being indicted.
The audience and the filmmaker, I think. We live in a time when public humiliation is probably the most popular form of entertainment today. I wanted to show that when you're involved in something like that, it doesn't feel like gold. It feels like shit. When something like that happens, you have complicated feelings about it. Your heart goes out to the people you're filming, but at the same time, nobody was interested in financing my film until that happened.

For me, the story is partly a cautionary tale about letting the media into your life [laughs]. In any form of journalism, you're relinquishing control of your story. You could write a feature after this interview and say "I found Bar-Lev singularly annoying." You can use my words to make whatever point you want. That's the nature of the beast. When people say, "Oh, Michael Moore's films are just his opinion," I go, "Yeah, so what?" Every piece of journalism is going to be somebody's opinion. You're entitled to express things as you see them, as long as you're fair.

They didn't know what they were getting into when they turned their daughter into an international celebrity. Nine times out of ten, people are going to share the adulation in the initial stories. Eventually, someone's going to come along and have a different opinion.

And the way people turned on them! People on the internet say things that they would never say in person, but the vitriol in some emails was horrifying — especially given that there wasn't any clear evidence either way. Do you think there's something particular about this story that brought that out that kind of reaction in people?
The space for kids just to be kids seems to be disappearing. I think people react strongly to that. If Marla's parents had come off as these typical show parents from the get-go, I think people would've easily dismissed it as yet another case of almost laughably exploiting your kids. Because the parents believably expressed ambivalence, and professed to having very little agency in this — according to them, they didn't push Marla, they got dragged into the public eye — it made people ask themselves, "Gosh, what would I do in the same situation? What if my kid were super-talented? Where's the line?" If a kid is good at baseball, you let him play in Little League baseball games, and if he's good at theater, you let him star in the school play. The Olmsteads appear to be grappling with this. So when people were confronted with the possibility of this being a hoax, I think it stirred something deep within. Maybe it feels like a betrayal.

How did were Marla and her two-year-old brother, Zane, affected by the media attention?
In the initial news stories about Marla, there were these tropes. It's remarkable how similar all these stories are to one another. One trope was "the kids are oblivious." Inside Edition said, "The painting's $10,000. How much money is that? Marla's brother Zane said that buys a lot of gumballs!" You can see from Zane how oblivious the kids are. He basically says, "I know you're here because you're impressed by my four-year-old sister's painting, but I started painting in utero." It's a pretty unoblivious statement.

At one point Marla says something about how she didn't paint some of the paintings in the gallery show. Did she get that from people around her saying that?
I don't think so, if I had to hazard a guess. I don't know why she said that. It's funny: people are always saying to me, "Why didn't you just take her aside and ask her?" Well, because there are a couple of pretty compelling moments in the film where she kind of answers that question. Also, the film is about a handful of tough ethical quandaries. One of those is the choice between being humane and getting to the bottom of this story. At a certain point, I would've been administering polygraphs to people, or sneaking around and asking little girls if their dads were lying. I don't want to do that.

You open the documentary with shots of you talking to Marla. It seems you're taking great pains throughout to remind the audience that you're not just a passive observer. You're actively shaping the story. Which is true of any documentarian. Why was that so important to communicate?
It's not necessary to draw attention to the process in every documentary. It made sense in this film for two reasons. One is that this family's reputation was on the line. There was no proof that Marla was the sole author of her work, nor was there proof that her dad was doing it. Whatever eighty-four minutes I put together about this family, was going to be for many people the reality of this family, and that was going to have real-world consequences for them.

The second reason I wanted to draw attention to the process is that, in my own limited understanding of abstract expressionism, that's what people like Pollock and his contemporaries were trying to do: draw attention to the process of representing things. Before the abstract expressionists did that, people looked at paintings in the same way we look at documentaries or reality TV today, as windows into another place or time. One of the reasons Jackson Pollock would put his cigarettes out in the canvas and leave them there was to draw attention to the fact that, "Hey, this is isn't a window into reality. This is a painting. And I'm a painter." That's something I didn't understand when I was first scratching my head about the idea of a four-year-old prodigy and abstract expressionism, and something I did come to understand in the course of making this film.


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