In a popular form I think Michael Moore has inherited the mantle from Abbie with his ability to use media and comedy to present more sophisticated political ideals to get them into the national debate. But that said, I don’t think anyone has risen to the place where Abbie Hoffman stood. Abbie was one of the most recognizable and identifiable Americans in 1968 and 1969. Certainly, there’s nobody on that level. I mean, there’s Cindy Sheehan but I don’t think she’s necessarily inspiring the youth to get out and protest.

SFBG: There’s also an element of humor to the film that is perhaps its most glaring departure from traditional documentaries.

BM: Yeah, the movie is very Yippie-centric. What ultimately the Yippies did was sort of synthesize the cultural revolution - i.e., the Hippies - with the political revolution that was happening in the '60s. They wanted to bring a sense of fun, a sense of theater, a sense of theatricality to the movement. Their whole idea was basically: if politics aren’t any fun, who’s going to want to participate?

So their idea for Chicago was to have a festival of life, a concert with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, three days of tripping on LSD and partying and orgies and politics. I wanted the film to mirror the Yippie attitude, to be irreverent and funny and filled with rock 'n' roll and sex and drugs - well, there’s not that much sex, but you know. And then, while the viewer is there having a good time, I wanted to infuse the politics into the film.

SFBG: I also noticed that you tried to touch on the issue of race a little bit, specifically how Bobby Seale was treated and the attitudes of different Chicago neighborhoods. Do you think that this generation’s anti-war is more racially inclusive?

BM: Well, it’s interesting because when you see the faces of most of the Chicago protestors - most of them were white. They were white middle-class kids. I think the Panthers, in general, didn’t really want much involvement in Chicago. It really wasn’t their thing because they had their own battles that they were waging. In fact, Bobby Seale should have never been indicted. He flew into Chicago to make a speech and left - he wasn’t like an organizer of the events by any stretch of the imagination.

The way that Seale is depicted in the court room, particularly in his desire to defend himself and ultimately bound and gagged - to me, that was probably more about freedom of speech than it was about racism. I know that sounds strange because one can’t fully separate one from the other. But within the context that I present the Seale story, it’s being juxtaposed with David Dellinger being told that he can’t march.

There were a lot of issues at the table in Chicago. There was the gay rights movement, women’s rights, and a whole bunch of other things that people were out protesting for - but to me, I wanted to a common line of action. So what I hooked on was this idea about the war, and opposition to the war, and a government who’s trying to silence that opposition.

SFBG: What's been the response to the film so far? Especially from young people?

BM: The response from young and old has been pretty amazing. One of the best comments I got the other night was from a girl who said, "You know, I think I can finally understand my parents now."

I think that if you don't know the history of Chicago and you come into this film without any sort of history to it, you can really experience it and get a sense of what it must have been like to be in the center of those events. The film is very experiential at that level.

You know, historical documentaries are like lectures in a way. You see a bunch of eggheads talking about some incredible moment that they're describing to you with their less-than-incredible faces. One of the things that I was really interested in with this film was going back to a time where history was liberated from dates and leaders. If you think about it, from the beginning of communication, history was done in the oral tradition. There were stories that were handed down from generation to generation, and each generation takes that story and makes it their own, and in the process, those stories became mythologies and folklore.

Well, Chicago 10 is about the mythology of 1968. It's a re-telling of that myth. It's not a historical film. there's very little context of that year. By sort of eschewing the traditional context one would expect from one of these types of films, the audience is allowed to sort of experience the film in a more cinematic and visceral manner. I didn't need another montage in a '60s film where you see Bobby Kennedy getting assassinated and King getting assassinated, the Tet offensive, and trivializing these really important moments in history. I think for older audiences, they're able to bring all that knowledge with them to the film and can have a different type of experience than the kids can. But I didn't want to alienate the kids by making it into a Cliff Note of history.

The movie was the opening night film at the Sundance film festival last year, and when I was doing the Q&A, someone asked, "Well, I want to know what Tom Hayden thinks of the movie." And I was like, "Well, Mr. Hayden?" And I was a little concerned about what Tom would say because the film is very Yippie-centric and Tom did have issues with the Yippies.

And Tom came onstage and said, "I want to know how someone who wasn't born at the time could have gotten it so right." Of course there were things that he would have put in the film that I didn't, and for Tom, he said, "I couldn't do a movie about '68 without mentioning Bobby Kennedy, and he said, "But what you've done in this film is capture the energy of that moment. A lot of histories about the '60s have tried to over intellectualize something that was really organic, something that was really more about energy. I don't think you can capture that in book or other media.

SFBG: Can you describe the process of getting the rare documentary footage included in Chicago 10?

BM: The other thing that totally departs from traditional documentary film is that there’s no narrator - there’s no talking heads. So we would use the trial and the transcript to weave our narrative and contextualize the archival footage.

There was probably more film footage shot that week in Chicago than I can think of in any other time in contemporary American history. We unearthed about 1,200 hours of film; 14,000-plus photographs; 500-plus hours of audio. And a 23,000-page court transcript. When you make a film like this, those images become your words - they become your letters and they become the basis for your script. So it’s absolutely essential that you get your hands on everything you can because the worse thing that can happen is that you make the film, then run into somebody who says, “Oh, too bad you didn’t find me because I had all this great footage under my bed.”

It was an exhaustive search that took us to three different continents and about three years to collect. Ultimately, with this movie, I think even those who have seen just about every documentary made about the ’60s, there’s about 60 percent of the footage in this film that’s never been seen by anyone. The majority of it will be totally fresh to even the most schooled '60s historian.