CR 057: Director-Producer Joe Hill on War, Filmmaking, and Art as an Act of Resistance
The Emmy Award-winning documentarian discusses his latest film, “Match in a Haystack.”
During his six years at VICE News, five-time Emmy Award-winner Joe Hill produced dozens of documentaries—often putting himself at risk to tell heart-wrenching stories of war, famine, and displacement—for HBO, Showtime, and other partners. But along the way, he began to wonder if there might be more uplifting ways to engage audiences.
“I have these core values as a journalist,” Hill says. “And with VICE News, I felt strongly that we were creating this historical record of very profound and influential moments of history and trying to center the feeling of being alive as part of the historical record. But I was overwhelmed by the sense that we were only creating this historical record of the act of destruction and death and suffering. I’d filmed such horrific things. I’d filmed famine, I’d filmed refugee crises and bombardments. And I started to will myself to believe that there was history that wasn’t just death and destruction. That there’s also something else as part of history, like life and meaning, the things that we hold on to that make us feel purpose or importance in our lives instead of just suffering.”
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he pitched an idea to VICE to tell stories about the act of creation, rather than destruction. He partnered with a Ukrainian American producer, Stefanie Noll, and the two embarked on a journey to find artists in Ukraine who would have an interesting story to tell.
The result is Match in a Haystack, a feature-length documentary that follows the women of Ukraine’s leading contemporary dance group as they struggle to find purpose in their work. Executive produced by world-renowned ballet dancer Misty Copeland, Match in a Haystack is a story of art as a form of resistance, resilience, and reflection. “This film is very different than many other war films,” Hill says. “It’s focused on humanity; it’s focused on persistence and perseverance. And that is a very hopeful way of navigating a very difficult situation. That’s why we created it, because it gave us that chance to feel that.”
I recently spoke with Hill about the film, his career, and what he’s learned about life from working in dangerously high-risk situations.
SANDRA EBEJER: You’ve had a fascinating career. How did you get into this line of work?
JOE HILL: I was actually interested in theater when I was younger. I was homeschooled, so before I even learned how to read, I was doing these little plays. So storytelling has always been really fundamental to the way I see the world. But I was pursuing theater and directing, and I felt attracted to film and the way story could take place in different formats. As a college student, I started to recognize things that were happening around me. I was engaging with the world in a different way, and I wanted to be a part of that. I didn’t want to necessarily create an artistic form of escapism. I wanted to be directly in conversation with what I felt the world was that I lived in, so it pushed me toward documentary. I started directing documentaries, and that was the first time I ever traveled abroad. The rest of my career has been focused on international storytelling and trying to create this window into the world.
You worked at VICE News for six years. Were you still at VICE when Match in a Haystack came about?
Yeah. It’s a complicated story with VICE. I was still a producer with VICE News when we started making this film. I pitched this idea to make the historical record of the act of creation. We found the dancers. It’s a hard sell to make a dance film in Ukraine for VICE. That’s not really what they do. There was pretty significant lobbying that took place, and they finally agreed. They sent us to Ukraine, and it was probably within a month of us getting back from Ukraine, the first trip, that the company went bankrupt and many people were laid off. I was not laid off; VICE kept me around. They were like, “You have this interesting film, so try to find the money to make it.” It’s very clear at that point that VICE didn’t have resources to support the film and it was difficult to get someone outside of VICE to want to make this film. So there was this epiphany that the film wasn’t going to happen if it was still under the umbrella of VICE. So I went to them and said, “If it’s going to happen, I’m going to have to take it. I need to own this.”
It was a complicated discussion, but at some point, we finally agreed that I would create an independent studio, Dangerous Company. I left VICE, took the ownership of the film, and this was the birth of our company. And now we have this framework to make new projects that are coming out soon.
When you’re producing a documentary, you’re not working from a script. You can’t know how things will unfold. How do you know whether a story is worth pursuing?
These are really good questions. I’m going to speak personally [about] things I look for in story. I think the fundamental pieces of a good story are true no matter what format. People sometimes fall into a trap with documentary to say, “These are great interview subjects. They’re representative of a well-rounded argument,” and it sounds like we’re making an essay. I want to make a film that confronts a world that makes absolutely no sense and somehow tries to piece together a semblance of meaning. And for that, you need characters that you love. You need people who deeply desire something, obstacles, and a way of understanding if they succeed.
There’s a couple movies I’ve made where there’s a pretty clear objective. Like, this is a film about trying to make a play. There’s a container in which the story can take place. But obviously, the movie’s not about a play. It’s really about, what does it even mean if they succeed? It’s to understand who they are and what they’re up against to be able to succeed, and if they were to succeed, what would that even mean? I think that’s what it really comes down to in the way that you tell your story—can you find the profound meaning of something that’s simple? Does your story have people who deeply desire something? What’s at stake for them, what’s in their way, and what does it mean if they’re succeeding? Those pieces make me excited. And the hard thing in documentary is we followed them for over a year of them floundering and the discouragement of deciding if it’s even worth doing. All the discouragement and the doubt made it seem like they’d never end up finishing.
There’s another conversation that was important for us to have, which is that not every dancer in Ukraine was able to keep dancing. And so the film itself, while hopeful and meaningful for a group of people to watch as an audience, is also dedicated to the people who couldn’t. I think it’s important to talk about them, too, because I don’t think they’re less artists or less important or they found less meaning in their lives because they’ve made a different choice.
Your work relies on you having access to individuals who are going through a challenging time in their life. How do you get them to trust you, especially when you don’t speak the language or come from the same background?
I wouldn’t necessarily say the people we filmed trusted us when we first arrived in Ukraine. They maybe felt like we were some kind of TV channel that were going to make a two-minute dance package. And I think they were surprised that we kept on showing up and kept on filming. It took some time to warm up. As the trip was going on, we were spending more time and were starting to get to know each other.
And then we spent almost a year fighting to get back to Ukraine. [The dancers] were trying to finish their show, and we were fighting with VICE and fighting with financiers. And in that time, we were staying in touch. [The dancers] had this strong will to finish their project, and we did, too. It felt like we were in this parallel track where all of us were just trying to do something that felt important, and the world was against us. When we got back on the second trip, it was like we were long lost friends. It was so wonderful to be together.
It was interesting, because this film is slightly less journalistic, so we didn’t have to maintain the same kind of wall that you do if you’re doing hard news. I don’t feel ashamed in saying that we’re friends. These are people that I really value. When we weren’t filming, we had our meals together and drove around together. We didn’t have enough seats in our car, so we were squished into the back seat together. My fiancé is a dancer here in Brooklyn and her friends are these crazy artist people, and it [feels like] the same group. I didn’t even feel like I had left my home to be spending time with them. Once the bridge was there, it was clear we were very similar.
You’ve filmed in some incredibly dangerous situations. Was there anything that happened with this film in particular that was nerve wracking?
Yes, there were some things that happened on this trip that were tense. The truth is, I feel weird talking about this, because compared to some of the other projects I’ve worked on and compared to other people’s experiences in Ukraine, what we experienced was relatively safe. And I think I’m a little desensitized, because there’s this very profound moment the first time you experience a war where you are past the point of no return. You’re trapped in the place. You’re not able to have enough information to know whether you will live or die in the situation. You hear the bombs falling. You hear them getting closer. You’re in the cellar. Things are shaking. And there’s no amount of physical fitness, no amount of decisions, whether you smoke cigarettes or not—none of it will keep you alive. It’s just arbitrary if you live or die, and it’s an arbitrary decision by some person you’ve never met or know nothing about. And something just shifts fundamentally in your brain that makes you rethink your priorities.
For me, [the first time] it happened I was 23. I was in Nagorno-Karabakh, basically with the Armenian side of a war that was taking place. We thought we’d be besieged in this town, and it really forced me to question my values. And then I went to Ukraine, and I was meeting people [and it was] happening to them right then. I knew nothing about Ukraine, but in a weird way, I was like an expert on this fundamental mind shift that happens when you experience war. Because now it’s my third or fourth time.
I remember one night in Ukraine, my colleague, the director of photography, was sleeping in the other room, and there was a loud strike that was pretty near to us. It shook the whole apartment. It woke him up. I stayed asleep and he came running in [with] his flak jacket on. He ran into the room, like, “Joe, do we need to go in the shelter?” I woke up and listened. There’s no more strikes. Then we heard the anti-air gun. And I was like, “It’s probably fine.” What are you gonna do? How much sleep would we really want to give up for this? I think that’s an interesting perspective, that maybe more than the fear that we had in a moment of hiding in a cellar, what I really picked up from the proximity to death in Ukraine is that there’s a cultural shift toward YOLO energy. All of us are in bed at 11 because of curfew. All of us get woken by the same sound of a strike. We all wake up and see the destruction, the aftermath, this other building [destroyed] that wasn’t your building that night, which means you get to go to work that day and you get to have your lunch and do whatever. It skews people to think, “This moment now is what I have.”
Is it hard to let go of some of that when you come home?
Yes, it’s challenging. Coming home from a war zone and then being in a place like Brooklyn or Los Angeles is definitely a stark culture shock. I think I carry with me the same sensibility that I care for my time, like the way I spend time with the people that I love. We talked a little bit in the beginning about how to choose the right project. Sometimes it’s not about the story. It’s, am I spending time with people I love to make this? Am I spending time wrestling with an idea that feels important to me? All we have is our time. The biggest thing I carry with me is making sure that that feels precious. There’s no shell that will land in our house in L.A., but our time is still so important.
Who are your influences?
My mentor, Jackie Jesko, is a very talented producer. She runs Latchkey, which is a production company, and she’s making such cool films. Big picture, the films that Matthew Heineman has made I was really inspired by. I think they’re beautiful. I’m really inspired by a film called Life in a Day, which is a National Geographic film where they took hours and hours of footage from around the world, but everything is from one specific day, and they created this portrait of the world in a day. It was so profound, and made the world feel small and intimate, but then so colossal. I think that was amazing. I’m really inspired by the TV show The Pitt and [creator] John Wells. I went to the John Wells Directing Program. The people who created this show are somewhat connected to where I went to college and I actually met them in Los Angeles. I went to the set. They let me do a tour, and I heard about how it works.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to be able to articulate more clearly what I really care about as a filmmaker. I think so much about the profoundly incomprehensible world, the world that is far greater and beyond the scope of our understanding. It’s hopeless and feels so scary and so intense. And I think that storytellers reflect the world, but they’re creating something that shows there’s something that’s meaningful. It’s not just a reflection of the world; the story is the tool to navigate the world. And The Pitt was so amazing that you were immersed in this very hopeless, sad, bleak, windowless hospital—basically the last place anyone would want to be—and you’re with characters who care profoundly and are navigating the checklist of all the worst shit you could ever worry about. And I think sometimes, in a time as hopeless as this, in a time that feels so daunting, it means a lot for storytellers to try to find the tools to cope and the tools to navigate, as opposed to distract or numb or escape. We don’t have the choice but to go through the life we’re having, so stories should be able to help us in this way.
Is there anything you haven’t yet done in your career that you’d like to attempt?
Yeah, we’re making a big expansion in what it is we do as a company. We’ve been heavily in documentary, in international storytelling, and conflict reporting. These big pillars of what we believe in, about story, about how it helps us navigate the world, the way that we find meaning—it’s all true. But sometimes that doesn’t actually mandate documentary. Sometimes fiction or historical fiction allows for even more profound and more deliberate conversation. And so this coming year, I’ll be directing my first narrative feature. It’s a film about the men who created the U.S.-Mexico border after a horrible war between the two countries. And it’s about deciding to be a part of the act of dividing two groups of people, and simultaneously realizing that to navigate this horrific desert, the only way they can survive separating the two countries is by working together.
What do you hope people take away from Match in a Haystack?
I hope people take something similar to what I took from it. I felt pretty hopeless before making this film. I felt really discouraged. Things have been so bleak, and I felt like there was no point in making a film about it. I would go to a war zone and film people suffering, and it’s like, what is the point of doing this? How could I possibly get up and keep doing this when I make no impact and no difference? And for me, finding this group of women who decided to cling to purpose and cling to meaning and cling to aspects of their lives [was inspirational]. You have to decide it’s what you want. You have to decide who you are and what makes your time worth it. And they’ve deeply impacted me to get to watch them go through this.
As you mentioned, the world is such a mess right now. And those who work in creative fields are not getting paid, constantly having to hustle, and it’s exhausting. I feel like we all have to cling to why it is we do what we do. So, what is your why? Why do you continue to pursue this work, even in light of all of the challenges you face?
Humans need food and water, but they also need story. We need nourishment for the human part of us. I have a body that I have to tend to, but there’s something else in me that makes me me, and if I don’t spend any time trying to feed that piece, then I don’t feel like there’s much of a reason to keep my body alive, either. So in some ways, I think stories and the feelings that we get to share together through them are the nourishment of our humanity.
To learn more about Joe Hill, find him on Instagram.
To see Match in a Haystack in theaters, click here.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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