"My Name Is Pedro" — Q&A with Director Lillian LaSalle
Teacher, teacher, can you teach me? Can you tell me all I need to know?
Loyal readers, thank you. Please share this week’s post with your friends and family.
If this is your first time, I hope you enjoy Highly Transmissible, a free weekly newsletter about the best films and TV streaming right now and the state of the world we live in.
There is a special sweetness to Pedro Santana—the New York public school administrator at the center of Director Lillian LaSalle’s documentary—when he talks to the kids in his schools about his own childhood. In My Name is Pedro, Santana unabashedly identifies himself as having been “special ed,” but not letting this stop him essentially, it seems, because of the unflagging support of one teacher who helped him learn how to spell the word “island.” He tells this story, and many others about growing up in the Bronx, going to the welfare office with his mother, his time in the Peace Corps, or talking his way into Columbia Teachers College, as a way of connecting with the predominantly low-income, minority kids in the schools he runs.
LaSalle captures Pedro’s magic and energy and mounts a vigorous defense of public schools and teachers at a time when they are uniquely endangered as a result of the pandemic, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and slumping government spending. Pedro Santana has more screen time than anyone in the film—indeed he should, given that it’s called My Name is Pedro—and this is what gives the documentary its power. Rather than being a plodding policy exposition or an exposé on mismanagement or corruption (although these topics do factor in), LaSalle allows the movie to be a character study and more. By the end, which features a tear-jerking reversal, the audience feels that they too know Pedro, if only as the teacher everyone wishes they had during the tough times growing up.
After seven years in production, My Name Is Pedro is finally reaching an audience and was released virtually in New York City on Sept. 17. It will have its virtual premier in Los Angeles on Oct. 2, and nationally in the following weeks (details on how to watch are below). I caught up with Lasalle earlier this week to talk about her process and how she came to know Pedro Santana. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Be warned: spoilers ahead.
BR: How did you first come across Pedro?
LL: I read an article about him on the cover of the Metropolitan section of The New York Times. It was about how he had changed a failing middle school in the South Bronx, and it also explored how he had actually changed the setting—the ambiance of the building and his office—by creative more of a home environment. He created this space with his principal’s office where there was not a desk. He decided he wanted to create a space where kids felt like they could come anytime. He followed that idea throughout all of his schools that were under his administration. He believed environments really affected kids and particularly kids in low-income neighborhoods and low-income situations—families on welfare, families who couldn’t even afford to have a book in the house. It was about making school a more welcoming environment and making students feel they were being honored in a way.
The biggest thing that got me about the article and caused me to tear it out—for no reason other than I thought it was interesting—was the picture of him with his long flowing hair, looking like he’s in a dance club, dancing with his students. That does not look like any principal I’ve ever had. I was born and raised in Brooklyn, went to public school, went to LaGuardia in high school. I had an entire public school experience. I’ve never seen anyone like that. And you could see what kind of relationship he had with the kids.
What led you to approach him for the film?
One day I got this instinct I should call him. The man who answered the phone was security for the school—it was the summer—and I said, “is it possible to speak to Principal Santana?” And he said, “oh, absolutely, I’ll put you right through.” I talked to Pedro, and I said, “look, I’m an independent producer,” and he said, “great, how’s tomorrow?” He didn’t ask me anything, just said, “how’s tomorrow?” That’s what he instilled in his staff and students, and everything he did had a trickle-down effect as a leader.
So I went to meet him, and I was dressed really well—high heels and all, trying to look the part—and it was a hot summer day. I was ascending streets and covered in sweat and wearing the wrong shoes, and I walked into his office…the moment you enter the building you just feel different. I went right back, and Pedro was in his office. In the first five minutes of talking to him—his optimism and his spirit just—he greeted me with a hug! Within five or 10 minutes, I knew this guy was a documentary. He was so charismatic and so optimistic.
So that was the start?
I’d never really directed anything. I called him and said, “I don’t know what your plans are for your story. I’m sure you have been talking to a lot of people. But I really envision this as a documentary about you.” Not focusing on the politics around why public schools fail or succeed—that already exists and it’s called Waiting for Superman. I was interested in following Pedro and his methods and thinking. I called him and said, “I’ve never made a documentary before. I’ve never done this before.” And he said, “You know what, Lillian? I believe in you.” This started a five year journey of filming him. We did five years of shooting Pedro and two years in post production.
Politics enter the story in a big way, though, when he encounters the school board in East Ramapo, and they quickly try to get rid of him. (NB: East Ramapo is a school district in a suburban Rockland County, NY, which has large black, Latino and Orthodox Jewish populations, and where the Orthodox community exercises substantial control over the school board).
Politics became involved, but in the beginning, I really railed against involving politics in the story. But if I was going to follow Pedro, I had to follow him through his journey, through the red tape, through the politics of the school. It became a statement about certain public schools, and how things are handled or not handled, and how someone like him can slip through the cracks. He was praised, where parents were begging the school board not to let him go! They were a corrupt system where they were bleeding money from schools and using it for Yeshivas and buying buildings and selling buildings and making profits. It still is.
Did it surprise you when he left New York City for the suburbs in 2010?
He first told me about it over the phone. They actually heavily recruited him to come up. Ira Oustatcher (the superintendent at the time) was this wonderful, wonderful person and administrator. He had the same sort of view of him and pure intentions about bringing him up to this school. And then you see one of the activists in the community convince him that the school needs him. He felt very confident in the new principal at MS371 (in the Bronx). He really was a person of instinct and felt like it was time for him to move on and take on a challenge. It was described to him as “these kids need you.” To him, everything is about the children and “how can I make it better?” He didn’t know the severity of the challenges with the school board. It was never presented to him that way. He was always very open about his past and his father being a former drug dealer and gambler and in prison and his mother on welfare and in the streets. But they became a very close-knit family. And so he says, “now I can affect thousands of students.”
He was a smart guy, though. There was no inkling of trouble brewing?
Of course the school board needed to meet with him. Apparently they proposed that they meet in the back room of a deli. Like, is this the mob? It was at night, in the evening, in this kosher deli, and they told him what was going on at the school. But he felt like he was also being interviewed, like, are you someone who is going to be on our team? He said, “look, I’m just going to focus on the kids, and I’m not going to let this thing deter me. When it comes to kids, you can’t deter me from my track.” He very optimistically believed he could make a difference.
None of the school board members—or the superintendent who replaced Oustatcher—sat for an interview.
I did try to interview him, and I couldn’t get an interview. I did try to interview some people from the board, and no one would grant me an interview, or no one would answer my phone call.
The film takes a turn after he’s been dismissed by the school board, he’s out of work, and then we learn that he has cancer. What was that like? Did it change how you approached him and the film?
He called me in my office, and he said, “Lillian, I have late stage cancer.” I was shocked. I said, “okay, well, I hear you, and of course we’re going to stop filming.” And he said, “oh no, we’re not going to stop filming. This is part of my life and my journey, and I want you to keep the cameras rolling.” I saw him deteriorating through the lens. There’s a scene where we were going to include the footage—we had the camera on him—when he’s talking about having the procedure where he couldn’t wake up from the anesthesia, and the tube was down his throat. He looks skeletal, and he’s on an oxygen machine. When I included that in the film, this seemed like a film about cancer. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to show people Pedro in that physical state.
How did you deal with it as a filmmaker?
We decided to use animation. I love my animator. He’s UK-based, and all of our work was done virtually. We would talk on Zoom, and he would provide samples, and he really captured that moment. We were able to see the words on the pieces of paper which his brother Eric had saved saying “I’m scared. What’s going on? How’s the family?” I knew I wanted to include animation from the beginning. I’ve always enjoyed seeing it in other films. I also knew that there were going to be parts of the story that I missed because I wasn’t there before. And he was a storyteller. I wanted to tell those stories in animation that I couldn’t catch on camera. I could have made a thousand animations about these stories.
They have a lovely, abstract, almost chalky style to them.
I wanted to represent how Pedro saw things: “I would dream about having my own room, and I would dream about going to Africa. I would always dream.” I wanted the animations to represent some of that as well with the background colors and to make the pictures abstract. I especially wanted animation that said, “I don’t know what happens to your spirit after you die.”
Do you have any final thoughts on the film?
Right now, during a time when education is so inaccessible—or accessible in such a different way and we’re doing so much remote learning—I consider our teachers. The film is so timely because our teachers are front line workers. I want people to lift up their teachers and honor their teachers. With hybrid learning—where kids go in for a couple of days and are home a couple of days a week—what these teachers are trying to do for these kids is something they’ve never been trained to do. Pedro would say, “you’re taking this really negative situation and changing it into a positive situation.”
My Name is Pedro is currently available to stream via the Maysles Cinema in New York. It will be opening nationally in the coming weeks. More info at: https://mynameispedro.com/
LaSalle is the recipient of the 2016 Peabody "Futures of Media” Award for Producing the web-series, Halal In The Family, starring Aasif Mandvi, which garnered wide-spread media attention for taking on Islamophobia through the use of comedy and parody. She is best known for her work as a talent manager representing actors, writers and directors as President of Sweet 180.
She is the Producer of several feature films including, Loggerheads, which premiered in competition at The Sundance Film Festival and Sweet Land, which won the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature for writer/director, Ali Selim. She is currently Executive Producing the feature length animated feature, The Night Diary, based on the award-winning book by Veera Hiranandani alongside Aasif Mandvi’s Fat Mama Productions, animator/writer Gitanjali Rao (Bombay Rose, Tribeca Film Festival) and writer/director, Sabrina Dahwan, (Monsoon Wedding) with Hyde Park Entertainment.