Filmmakers Emily MacKenzie and Noah Collier started from the bottom—quite literally, the floor.
As documentary-film road warriors, “we stay in hotels an inappropriate amount of our lives,” Collier explains. “We’ve spent many nights in hotel lobbies, staring at these incredible designs and envisioning a psychedelic opium den of designers coming up with patterns somewhere.”
An internet rabbit hole brought them to the small Georgia city of Dalton, the so-called carpet capital of the world, where 80% of American-made carpets and 40% of the world’s carpets are produced. And six years later that has led to their debut feature, Carpet Cowboys (screening this weekend at New York’s Metrograph), which weaves among a cast of idiosyncratic personalities in and around the business.
But what begins as an offbeat look at a changing industry (which tanked after the housing-bubble-driven 2008 recession) unfurls into a poignant story about the allure and elusiveness of the American dream and the perennial adaptability and exportability of American identity.
The film finds its protagonist in Roderick James, a Scotland-born rug designer and self-styled modern cowboy, raconteur, and jack of all trades. “In Dalton it was pretty clear that the industry was in a state of flux,” Collier notes, adding that many people they filmed were preoccupied with the past. “Roderick had a forward-looking trajectory we could follow. He was looking for answers and trying to do something in response.”
That includes everything from pitching for work from Chinese carpet businesses to writing jingles for a preteen glue entrepreneur and crafting deconstructed-American-flag jeans as part of his burgeoning Americana lifestyle brand. “We thought it was very interesting that a Scottish person who’s been here forever dresses as an American cowboy and now wants to brand this idea of American masculinity,” says MacKenzie. “The most extreme version of a thing becomes a rupture point where you can peer in—how does this outsider, who’s sort of an insider, perceive Americanness or American manliness and then put it on as a suit?”
The film follows James as he eventually endeavors to peddle his Americana in, of all places, the Philippines—itself no stranger to malleable identities as a colony of Spain for three centuries, followed by nearly a half-century of American colonization and a brief occupation by Japan. The filmmakers were intrigued by “this Americana thing going over in this Scottish package,” MacKenzie says. “It’s just the layers and layers of identity. We had to go to the Philippines to see how this man was received.”
The directors also hoped to respond to stereotypes of the American South, especially a place currently represented in Congress by far-right firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene. “We did worry about displaying what would immediately be perceived as a Trump-y part of the country,” Collier admits. “But a lot of what we’re doing in this film is stepping past those views.”
“It felt important to find ways to portray our characters that weren’t just stereotypical ‘North Georgia hillbillies,’ as one of the characters says in the film,” adds MacKenzie. She’s lived in Louisiana for the past decade and sought to address in particular Southern masculinity, “a very difficult, toxic, controversial, problematic thing that we need to be exploring.” That meant “letting these guys say things that are pretty awful or unpleasant sometimes, but also letting them say things that are profound.”
That’s likely a notion that resonates with documentarian John Wilson, who joined as executive producer after seeing a cut of the film. “I really liked their vision,” says the vaunted creator of the HBO series How to With John Wilson, adding that he felt compelled by the topic and impressed by the first-time feature filmmakers’ deep exploration of the characters.
He was immediately hooked by the footage of carpet testers who tread on samples for tens of thousands of steps in total to assess durability. “It felt like a really Sisyphean kind of job,” he says. “That kind of infinite loop of carpet testers was one of the most amazing scenes that I’ve seen in a documentary in a while.”
Wilson helped shape the film in a significant and incisive way, MacKenzie notes. “He advised us to be really efficient with humor and trim all the extraneous stuff,” she says. They dubbed one version “the John Wilson hatchet edit.”
But the directors were receptive to his input, Wilson says. “I’ve had to kill my darlings so many times throughout the edit process on How to that I’m used to removing some of my favorite material to preserve the most powerful arc of the whole piece.”
Wilson doesn’t often advise filmmakers nor does he actively seek projects to produce; indeed he finds much of the documentary genre feels stale. “A lot of what passes for documentary these days has a very strict formula to it,” he continues. “The most popular stuff on Netflix has this obnoxious title sequence and these talking heads repeating the same points over and over.”
But MacKenzie and Collier stood out, he says, for “taking a chance and trying to figure out the story as they were shooting it. That’s something that doesn’t happen as frequently in nonfiction films. People are very often telling a story about something that has already happened. I get excited when filmmakers have the courage to chase the story or make portraits of people that may not ultimately have a payoff. Knowing to follow stuff is a really important quality in a documentarian.”
But aren’t we in a golden age of documentaries? “I’m not sure what people mean when they say that,” Wilson replies. “There’s a lot of air-quote documentary stuff being produced. But it’s a term that’s very easy to mean a million things. A lot of these executives are being replaced by reality-TV people now, and that’s the kind of texture a lot of nonfiction films have. I feel like genuinely weird documentary is not as common. It is a gamble to do something like this, and it takes genuinely curious people who may not have as much pressure from a studio. But yeah, I watch a lot of these Netflix documentaries too, and it gets you through the day.”
For their part, the film’s subjects have been uniformly positive about their depictions—but the directors were especially anxious about James’s reaction. “If he didn’t like the film, I felt like we were gonna need to shelve it,” Collier says. “I just didn’t feel okay with releasing anything that he was gonna feel threatened by.” But after screening the film, he recalls, James “tilted his cowboy hat down to conceal his face, and he said very dramatically, ‘You told the highs and the lows, but in between you told the story.’ And he wept. He loved it.”
And James reacted with a barrage of creativity typical of his profession. “Carpet designers create at volume,” Collier explains. “When he has a client, he puts out maybe 75 different options and color combinations, giving every possible option to the client. And so in response to this film, he’s been sending us all sorts of materials, at such an extreme volume. He’s made alternate posters, music videos. We’ve got six edits of a Carpet Cowboys theme song that we’re gonna try to play at some of the screenings.”
Another unintended effect of doing a film about carpets: “We’ve taken on an enormous amount of carpet in our personal lives,” Collier says. MacKenzie’s studio is now covered in carpets, with samples nailed to the walls. And New York audiences are in for a very special treat: The directors are hauling 300 pounds of carpets from casinos, hotels, and bowling alleys to deck out Metrograph for the film’s run.
Carpet Cowboys screens August 25 through 27 at Metrograph in New York City and September 15 and 16 at Brain Dead Studios in Los Angeles. Visit memory.is for other screenings.
