 The Force is the second in a trilogy of films looking at the relationship between institutions and community in American city. Oakland is where I live and it's a city that really has a remarkable connection to national issues. So things that are happening locally in Oakland, whether it's access to healthcare or gentrification or criminal justice issues, are also things that we're talking about on the national level. So we thought it would be really interesting to, like the wire did, kind of unpack the city and nonfiction feature documentary. What was it like filming in Oakland for these past two years? We set out to make a film about this police department more than two years ago before Ferguson happened and really this sort of conversation in the energy reached a fever pitch about the relationship between the police and the community. It took us about a year to get access to the department and then just as we were beginning to film the Ferguson verdict came down and so there was weeks of protests and it really kind of shifted the angle on which we were looking at the issue. So with over 250 hours of footage and the Oakland Police Department scandal popping up almost when you were done filming and done editing, what was the process like reintegrating that back into your film and changing the narrative? The sex scandal? Well, you know the difference with the third act compared to the first two acts of the film was mainly the amount of observational and verite footage that we had at our disposal to tell the story. Things were happening so rapidly and we didn't have access necessarily access to everywhere that we had to reconstruct some of the story. A lot of press conferences and before the scandal hit we had really struggled to get to a cut that we felt contained all the complexity of the issue that we wanted on the screen and we were actually feeling pretty good about the cut so that when the scandal hit we didn't have a lot of time to sort of figure out how to integrate that material but you know I've got a team of great collaborators and Linda Davis my producer and Lawrence LaRue, my editor, we all worked together to screen a number of cuts in a very short period of time trying different things and the first few things weren't working until we got to the cut that you know we took to Sundance. Being a Cal J. School alumni, how have you seen that the city itself progress as well as the journalistic take on the city? The Oakland's had you know history of problems and economic challenges and healthcare access challenges, education and you know it's now a city that is sort of bursting with innovation and growth and gentrification and along with all that growth comes all kinds of problems and so and you saw to some degree a reflection that with the go ship fire which it would shed a light on on sort of this intersection of artists who can't afford to live in the city and they're sort of shacking up in in these like these these almost abandoned warehouses you know so it's just a remarkable set of challenges that the mayor, Lobie Schaff, has to cope with and you know the the policing issues sort of set smack dab in the middle of that and that's kind of what attracted us to it. So how do you see the city of Oakland progressing in the next couple of years also with having a police fire and mayor chiefs that are all women? The tragic thing about the film is that there was a remarkable amount of progress that did happen under under that chief and what what happened was he was faced with a you know a choice and he was so close to the reform you know coming out from under the federal reform that when the scandal broke he could have you know attacked it more aggressively. If he had done that maybe he would have been fired anyway so but the reality is that all that progress that was made all the you know the body warm camera program the procedural justice program that they're doing the other transparency all that is sort of still in place and so underpinning of the whole institution the sort of potential for moral failure and how you know an individual's moral choice can affect the whole department that is something that's going to need to be addressed because cops they just go into the darkness and I think the chances increase for poor choices to be made on an individual level that can affect the institution but with this new leadership in place and you know a new chief who's a woman I think everybody you know expects and anticipates you know forward progress from from here forward. This film definitely hit close to a lot of Cal students and I just want to thank you for creating such a well-rounded film with all these different perspectives on what's going on in our hometowns. Can we get a Go Bears on three? Oh sure. Okay. One, two, three. Go Bears!