For the Love of Buckyball

It all started with an obsession with Bigfoot.

Sam Green, Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker, describes himself as a very curious person and says that a love of Bigfoot and similar mythical creatures in the western United States led him to documentary films.

"I drew pictures, I spoke with people who had seen Bigfoot," he says. "I wanted to learn as much about it as I could. I was basically doing the same thing then that I am doing now."

By the time Green went to college at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, he had moved on from Bigfoot to less fanciful topics and began studying journalism, eventually leading him to the University of California in Berkeley, where his passion for creating would shift from print, and hand-drawn pictures, to a more popular medium.

"I was going to be a journalist," he says with a laugh. "But then, on a whim, I took a class on film. I really fell in love with the process: working, creating. And then I met Marlon Riggs, and something really struck me."

Riggs, acclaimed African-American filmmaker, educator and poet, taught film studies at the university and introduced Green to the beauty of documentary films, which he had previously thought little about.

"I didn't really know a lot about documentary film-making," he says. "But he opened my eyes to the whole of the documentary world. His work had a poetic and artful quality that is rare in documentaries. They weren't some boring film on public television -- they had journalistic impulse and a lyrical, poetic sensibility. The two together are magic. I've always shot for that."

Green's first film, "Rainbow Man," focusing on TV personality Rollen Stewart, came out in 1997, premiering at the Sundance Film Festival. It was a product of fun and creativity, he says, but it set the stage for his documentary style.

"I made it for fun," he says. "It was a normal documentary about a weird subject. It was a collage and very Marlon-esque in that it was like a visual poem. It had feeling to it."

Six years later, Green debuted another film at Sundance: "Weather Underground," focusing on a group of radicals in the late 1960s and early '70s who attempted to overthrow the government. "Weather Underground" was nominated for an Academy Award in 2004.

"Growing up in '80s Michigan, you did hear things about the Weathermen," he says. "There were weird remnants of the '60s around. I got into that movie because I met someone who had been in the Weathermen. I was curious, and the more I learned, the more I realized how complex and nuanced the subject was."

This week, Green debuted his new film, "The Measure of All Things," at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, kicking off three evenings of events hosted by the filmmaker. His live documentary was accompanied by musicians Brendan Canty (Fugazi), T. Griffin and Little Rock native Catherine McRae and centered around those individuals in the Guinness Book of World Records -- not those who chose to be in the book, he says, but those who embody the human experience and its outer limits.

After an art talk last night, Green is wrapping up his stay in Northwest Arkansas with an illustrated lecture on the inspiration for the museum's geodesic sculpture "Buckyball" by Leo Villareal. "The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller" centers around the highly revered theorist and designer. Based on Fuller's Dymaxion Chronofile, a huge collection of documents, bills, notes, sketches and clippings attempting to document his life, the documentary combines Green's narration with footage and photographs representing Fuller's sometimes peculiar ideas, he says.

"I think it's a great new sculpture," says Green. "Buckminster Fuller was an amazingly interesting, odd guy. His ideas were brilliant and, now more than ever, relevant. I hope people who come will be charmed by him and consider his ideas. There's something refreshing about coming to the theater, sitting down, turning off your cell phone and lending yourself to the experience. It's live. It's a unique event that will never be the same way again."