Artist profile: David Mayer

I’ll spare you the rant about our school being a breeding ground for pre-professional zombies, but the fact remains that only a small minority of Duke students will graduate to pursue art as their primary vocation. David Mayer is one of them.

A native Durhamite, David’s involvement with Riverside High School’s newspaper spurred an interest in storytelling that steadily developed throughout his four years. David had heard about the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) before coming to Duke and made it a point to take Gary Hawkins’s introductory production course the second semester of his freshman year. He’s wanted to make films ever since.

“I figure it’s about as good of a thing to do as anything else,” he said during our interview—but don’t mistake his nonchalance for a passive approach to filmmaking. David is serious about his craft, and he’s already produced a varied range of pieces to show for it.

David’s most recent and soon-to-be-released project is a 30-minute documentary short titled “Questions for my Grandfather.” The autobiographical documentary shows him tracing the life of his now-deceased grandfather, a Jew during the Holocaust. After David’s family finished transcribing his grandfather’s diary into English, David used it as a guide for filming his documentary. He knew he wanted to make a film that summer and thought this would be a productive way to do so while learning about his grandfather. With funding from the CDS, Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics and a successful Kickstarter campaign, David flew to Frankfurt, Germany to begin production. He shot and edited the majority of the footage singlehandedly.

“I followed the diary as best I could for six weeks, he said. “All I had was a camera, a microphone, a backpack and a tripod.”

Considering the documentary’s cohesive narrative that spans his grandfather’s experience as a political refugee, I was surprised to hear David didn’t write a script prior to shooting.

“I didn’t know what the story would look like, and I knew that simply retelling it wouldn’t be interesting,” he said.

So he started by finding the people and places he’d read about in his grandfather’s diary. Some traces led to relevant contacts, but many were dead ends. Even the prison his grandfather was held in had been repurposed as youth education event space in Frankfurt. Still, David managed to record enough interviews—25 hours, or 50,000 words’ worth—to get his project started. From there, he began scripting what the final product might look like before realizing he would need more footage and interviews. David received the Dean’s Summer Research Fellowship to fly back to Frankfurt for six weeks. In addition to filming and interviewing more, David hired a translator, former Duke student Julia Schönheit, to streamline the transcribing process.