Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman Revisit the Making of Their 1989 Landmark AIDS Doc “Common Threads”
It’s been 30 years since the release of the Oscar-winning documentary “Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt,” but directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman remember when they decided to make the film like it was yesterday.
The two were at the 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights when they saw the massive quilt displayed on the National Mall.
“We were just stunned and awed by the scale of the quilt and the intimacy of it,” Epstein tells Variety. “I’d never seen anything like that. We were with our friend [fellow filmmaker] Peter Adair and he said, ‘Somebody has to make a film about this. Jeffrey and I ran with that and ran back to San Francisco and met with the Names Project folks and started delving into all the material.”
They began reading more than 2,000 letters that were written by panel makers to find stories to highlight in the...
The two were at the 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights when they saw the massive quilt displayed on the National Mall.
“We were just stunned and awed by the scale of the quilt and the intimacy of it,” Epstein tells Variety. “I’d never seen anything like that. We were with our friend [fellow filmmaker] Peter Adair and he said, ‘Somebody has to make a film about this. Jeffrey and I ran with that and ran back to San Francisco and met with the Names Project folks and started delving into all the material.”
They began reading more than 2,000 letters that were written by panel makers to find stories to highlight in the...
- 7/18/2019
- by Marc Malkin
- Variety Film + TV
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