Documentarian Ryan White is nothing if not prolific, tackling a great variety of issues as he goes. In his latest movie, Come See Me in the Good Light, he profiles the late spoken-word poet Andrea Gibson (who was non-binary and used they/them pronouns), who died on July 14 of this year, fours years after receiving a diagnosis of ovarian cancer in 2021. Appointed the Poet Laureate of Colorado in 2023, Gibson was a star in their field. White creates an intimate portrait of Gibson and wife Megan Falley (also a poet) as they navigate the challenging territory of life and death. At the recent Middleburg Film Festival (where I reviewed the film), I moderated the movie’s post-screening Q&A, and here is a digest of that conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Christopher Llewellyn Reed: I understand, from reading the press notes, that the way this story came to you was because you had asked Tig Notaro at one point to bring you a subject that would help you make a documentary that was funny, that had humor in it. I wouldn’t necessarily think of a story about somebody who has cancer as “funny.” Could you please explain how Tig Notaro thought that this would fit that description?
Ryan White: I’ve known Tig for a very long time, really before Tig was famous. She has had her own cancer journey. She had a legendary set of standup comedy at the Largo in Los Angeles where she came out about her breast-cancer diagnosis. It’s really what made Tig famous. And I was at that set with, I don’t know, 60 other people, maybe 12 or 13 years ago. And we have been saying to Tig for over a decade: “Bring us a funny idea for a documentary. Why aren’t there comedy documentaries? Why can’t they be funnier?” And so, you’re right, we were pretty appalled when her lead words were “poetry” and “cancer” when she called a couple of years ago and said, “Just don’t hang up on me!” I had never heard of Andrea Gibson.
Spoken word is not an art form that I’m really familiar with. Now, I am very familiar, but at the time … Tig had been friends with Andrea since their twenties, so they go way back, almost 30 years. And Tig said to us: “Andrea is one of the funniest people I’ve ever known. They are the rock star of poetry. Going to their shows is like seeing a rock star and they are confronting end of life in this incredibly remarkable way. Just watch a few performances I’m going to send you and I’m going to send you a couple interviews that Andrea has done.”
And when I say “we,” my producing partner, Jessica Hargrave, is my best friend since we were little kids. So we’re very mom and pop; we’ve worked together since we were nine years old, and we think very similarly. And so Jess watched the performances first. I had written Tig off, or maybe it’s not that I had written Tig off—Tig has lots of good ideas—but it was like, “It’s a bad documentary market already; what is less marketable than a poetry-cancer documentary?” But when Jess watched the performances, she was the one who emailed me and said: “There’s something magical here. I think you’re going to be into it. Watch it.”
Right away, I was on a flight and I was blown away with whatever you call that art form that Andrea does. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody else do it. And we said to Tig, “If Andrea wants to meet us, we’ll get on a flight this week.” Which we did. And we flew to Colorado. I’d never spoken to Andrea and knew almost nothing about Meg except that Andrea had a partner. So I had no idea that this would become a love story in this type of way.
I showed up at Andrea’s house and they came out. It was always just a crew of four on this film, a tiny little crew of the same people every time. So it was the four of us outside. Andrea gave us all a hug and said, “Welcome to my home; I guess you’re going to be with me when I die.” And that was kind of the understanding of what this film was going to be.
Andrea passed away in July and our film premiered at Sundance in January. So Andrea was alive at the end of the film and they were also alive during the first six months of the film’s release. And so I actually just sat in the back here at Middleburg and watched the film, one of my first viewings since Andrea passed away, which totally changes my experience of watching the film, but it also is so touching to get to watch Andrea live on screen now. But we thought, and it was Andrea’s understanding, that the film would end with their death, and obviously that changed as we made the film.
CLR: I also knew nothing about slam poetry or spoken-word poetry prior to this film, and I did not know who Andrea Gibson was, but watching this film, they’re pretty amazing, as is this world. We obviously see it in the film, but how would you describe the difference between a spoken-word poetry event and a live-music event? They seem very similar, in terms of audience response.
RW: Yeah, and I have to say, I’ve only ever been to one spoken-word performance in my life, and it’s the one at the end of my film, because when we were making this movie, Andrea and Meg were very quarantined. The cancer diagnosis happened at the beginning of COVID. And then afterwards, even when COVID was subsiding, Andrea was so sick that they were virtually around no one. So it was a tiny little bubble and they invited the four of us into that bubble and we would test like crazy before we went there. And up until the moment we went into their home, we would test. So spoken word was something I was really learning about as I went, and mostly through the archival that we got of Andrea and Megan, who’s also an amazing spoken-word poet.
It’s competitive, a lot of it. And Andrea was in a lot of these competitions and great at them, but I think especially in the final years of their life, they moved away from that kind of competitive spirit. I mean, I learned so much from Andrea making this film, and one of my favorite takeaways, it sounds so un-American, but one of the best impacts that Andrea’s had on me is just the idea of ambition and success. Andrea had no ambition at all while we were making this film.
I’ve been in the documentary business now for twenty years, and especially the last five or six years when documentaries had their big boom and I’ve been making so much, it’s been one project after another. Andrea and I got pretty close and Andrea was saying: “Why are you working so hard? Just relax a little bit and spend time with your loved ones and maybe a little more time at home.” And so Andrea was not trying to climb that ladder anymore. It was really refreshing to be around them. That final live show was not for any metric other than to get to see—they didn’t even like to use the word fans—but to get to see, it was like 2000 people, all in a room and connect with them and leave their final words for them.
Megan’s only seen the film a few times, as well, since Andrea passed away; typically she would be here with me right now, which is wonderful. Megan gets to watch her love story on screen three months after her partner has passed. She’s a 37-year-old widow now, but Megan is writing not only her own memoir but is also finishing Andrea’s memoir. So Megan’s on a writing retreat on an island in Washington at the moment, totally disconnected, working on that. So she’ll kind of carry on that writing legacy.
RW: Jess says I have career ADHD, and Megan has ADHD and related to me right away on that. (laughs) But that’s what I love about my job. Yeah, there’s really no major through line to my films. I think this is my 14th or 15th one. The only through line that we have mostly found is they’re almost all about women, or in this case a woman and a non-binary person. I was raised by a single mom in a house with a grandma and an older sister, and Jess was my best friend. So I think I kind of glamorize women and female stories in that type of way. So we always joke that one day we’ll find a man that we might want to make a film about, but we haven’t yet. And I think that’s what’s such a pleasure about making films with your best friend, because we never know what makes us say yes to a project.
Early in our twenties, we were broke and we were working side jobs to make our films, even through most of our thirties. And then there was this little tiny boom in the documentary world beginning with The Keepers, at least for us, that allowed us to find some stability in that world. And we were actually starting to say no to films for the first time and not have to just generate ideas. Jess and I, we don’t have a formula on why we want to make films or what moves us. We usually look at each other and say, “Do we want to go on this journey for a couple years with these people?”
And by the way, we have a no-asshole policy, especially with celebrities. If we get pitched a celebrity and we find out that that person may be an asshole, we say no immediately. That’s why our very few celeb films have been about Dr. Ruth, Serena Williams—who people think is an asshole, but is a delight—and Pamela Anderson, who I loved working with. But on this film, when we did that trip to Colorado, we knew that this was going to be an uphill battle to get this film made. No Netflix was going to fund this film from the beginning. But Jess and I were in tears on the flight back, just saying we were so moved by the three or four days that we had with Andrea. We had to make this. It was almost like an addiction. We didn’t know how much longer Andrea was going to be alive. Maybe it would become nothing and that’s okay, but we just knew we needed to keep going back to Colorado.
CLR: I want to know about the title. It comes from a poem by Andrea, that goes:
- Come see me in the good light.
- Come tell me what you tell the truth.
- Come trouble me.
- Come lightning strike.
- Come read out loud what I can’t yet pronounce of my own life.
How did you land on that for the title of your movie?
RW: Yeah, it’s a beautiful poem called “The Good Light.” I’m sure you probably noticed it’s also a neon sign behind Andrea and Megan’s bed. So it was always there and we were constantly shooting in bed, which is so weird. For most subjects, that wouldn’t be the case, but here it was always the natural place to film; they were unicorn subjects in that type of way. So we were constantly filming in that tiny little bedroom, and that light was always there. It’s not like we put it there. We knew that was going to be the title of the film. It was always just shining above them. But the poem is not in the movie. Actually, I got married while we were making this movie, and Andrea picked that poem to be read at my wedding. I guess it’s a love poem written for Megan when they started dating. And so my sister read it at our wedding.
It’s really hard to talk about this film without sounding cheesy. To me, when I’m trying to introduce the film or we’re trying to put it into a log line, it either sounds really sad or really cheesy, but Andrea embraced cheesy. Andrea loved cheesy because they thought that was authentic emotion. And so to me, when you simmer this film down, what it’s about is finding lightness in the darkness. And that is the first line of the poem, Andrea beckoning to Meg, “Come see me in the good light.” Basically, “Come see me in my best light, find the best in me,” and then it’s a refrain throughout the poem, “Come see me in the good light.” So I just love this idea that they were going through something that many of us, me included, from the outside, would perceive as so dark. People were pitying them and thinking this is going to be the worst years of their life.
And they were trying to tell people, “No, no, no, I know you don’t believe us, but we are having the most joyful year of our life.” In fact, Meg’s really sweet, and I think I can speak for her when I say this, where she said, “Look, we were both writers and we were writing about it like crazy, and words were coming up short. Our friends and family and fans didn’t believe us. It took a documentary showing the joy that we were living in for people to now believe how light the final year of our lives was together.” And so that was why we chose that title in the end. To me it is the embodiment of the film, not only in the love-story way of like, “Let’s see our loved ones,” whether it’s our partners or our children or our parents in the best light possible, but also, “Let’s find the lightness in these dark moments in our lives.”
CLR: That’s absolutely beautiful.
Christopher Llewellyn Reed
Chris Reed is the editor of Film Festival Today. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.