"We Found Ways to Combine Drama Therapy with Filmmaking into Something New”: Director Robert Greene on the Netflix Documentary Procession

At the root of the word “procession” is “process” — really a fitting description for any Robert Greene film. But the title of the nonfiction veteran’s latest foray into character-collaborative doc-making has other meanings. It nods specifically to the Holy Spirit’s procession and also to the dictionary definition of people moving forward, a march that includes the risk-taking filmmaker himself. Procession (which premiered at Telluride and just hit Netflix November 19) is perhaps Greene’s boldest cinematic move yet. Once again the director (and “filmmaker-in-chief” at the University of Missouri’s Murray Center for Documentary Journalism) blurs the lines between narrative and nonfiction, casting six male survivors of childhood sexual abuse by Catholic priests and clergy in a creation of their own making. It’s “a radical experiment in therapeutic collaborative filmmaking” — one specifically designed to return power to the victims. Supported by a crew that includes a trained drama therapist with a background in sexual assault prevention and education, the mainly midwestern men painfully and painstakingly mine memories, dreams — and, for one, still raw anger at a woefully inadequate legal system — to stage a series of often inspired fictional scenes. (Another uses All That Jazz, Fosse’s fake take on real life, as a touchstone.) Shortly before the streaming release of Procession, Filmmaker reached out to Greene to learn more about the film and, yes, his own process, but also whether we might see more instances of “therapeutic cinema” in the future.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.