Academy-nominated Kahn invades Griffith Theater

Two-time Academy Award-nominee Nathaniel Kahn will visit Duke tonight to screen his most recent documentary Two Hands: The Leon Fleisher Story (nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary, Short Subject). Joining the acclaimed filmmaker will be Fleisher himself, a world-renown pianist who lost the use of his right hand for many years before reversing the effects of his neurological condition with a combination of massage therapy and botox injections. In a recent phone interview with recess' Braden Hendricks, Nathaniel Kahn shared his reasons on why he is a filmmaker and what he finds so inspiring about Fleisher's story.

Why are you documentary filmmaker?

I began writing and directing plays. I've always been interested in drama and in making movies. I've always found dramas especially fascinating because real people are just so amazing and interesting. I got into making My Architect, my first feature-length documentary, because there were always some questions that were lingering in my mind about what my father [famed architect Louis Kahn] was really like. It just seemed right to do a documentary, so I took that journey with a camera. It taught me a lot about drama, and what good drama is all about. As a filmmaker, in a way, real people are very humbling. Their way of expressing themselves is so unique, so individual, that many actors spend their entire lives trying to be as real and interesting as a real person is. I found making the documentary not only was a marvelous cinematic experience for me, it was also a transformative experience for writing and making fiction drama.

How did you come upon Leon Fleisher's story?

I had heard Leon Fleisher play recordings as a little boy and I really liked them a lot. Later on I heard about what had happened to him and I always wanted to meet him. I had worked at Baltimore Paramount and I asked if they knew Leon Fleisher. They said of course, he's a local hero, and in the end he agreed to meet me and to do the film. I'm lucky as a filmmaker to have been able to do this film about him. I think we found some truths, realities, that I think he may not have shared before-some emotional realities. Another reason I wanted to make this film is because I read this magazine about poisons, and there were stories about Medieval poisons and one about snake bites and spider bites, and one of them was about Leon Fleisher. Botox is very poisonous, but it had been used on him and, instead of making him sick, it made him well. The idea that through the use of this poison, paradoxically, he was able to play again. It just seemed like such a fascinating story.

What would you like students to walk away from this film with?

This is a fantastic story. It is a story about transcendent talent, great joy, great sorrow, great loss, great lows and rejuvenation, like the phoenix. Leon has lived a wonderfully dramatic and exemplary life. It's the kind of story that people find enormously inspiring. This is a story for people from all walks of life because we all have problems, and we all suffer. It encouraged me to move on doing things, even through these kind of problems, and continue doing good things in the world.