Barbara Kopple on the documentary "Running From Crazy"

(CBS News) Documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple is a two-time Academy Award-winner, for "Harlan County U.S.A." (1976) and "American Dream" (1990). Her other films include "Fallen Champ" (about boxer Mike Tyson), "Bearing Witness" (about woman journalists in war zones), "Wild Man Blues" (about clarinet player Woody Allen), "Shut Up & Sing" (about the Dixie Chicks), and "Gun Fight" (about firearms in the wake of the Virginia Tech mass shooting).

Her latest film, "Running From Crazy," explores the mystique of the family of Mariel Hemingway, grand-daughter of writer Ernest Hemingway, and of the actress' struggle with the personal demons that have left seven members of her family dead by suicide.

The film, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, will play at theaters in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago in early November, before being broadcast on Oprah Winfrey's OWN cable channel in 2014.

In this web-exclusive interview, correspondent Mo Rocca asks Kopple about culling material together for "Running With Crazy" (including never-before-seen footage shot by Mariel's sister, Margaux, a couple of years before she committed suicide); about the "Hemingway gene"; and about her personal connection to the message of the film.

Mariel Hemingway is "Running From Crazy"

MO ROCCA: The loneliness in this family is so wrenching. Did you feel kind of overwhelmed at times?

BARBARA KOPPLE: Well, mostly the loneliness that I felt came from Mariel, because Muffet [Mariel's eldest sister] was already in a home and Mariel was trying to dig as possibly deep as she could so she could make a life for her children. Not knowing who Ernest Hemingway was, except that he's a good writer and he hunted and fished and he did all of these things . . . nobody ever knew much about him. It was never talked about. From generation to generation, Jack never talked about it to Martha.

ROCCA: Why do you think that is?

KOPPLE: I think because of his demon. And it was a stigma with his suicide. I mean, I think in that period of time, the late '50s, early '60s, people never talked about it. And I think it's still the same today. People are starting to talk about it a little more. But it's just like what AIDS used to be.

Or rape or, you know, some kind of addiction to alcohol. It was a stigma before, but we got through that stigma. So mental illness and suicide is still a stigma. I mean, you see so much about Ernest Hemingway and his life. But you don't realize that he doesn't have that balance; he doesn't have that kind of family situation where people spend time with him and know him and revere him.

ROCCA: Did it also have something to do with the fact that this man was a literary giant and maybe people felt awed by the legacy?

KOPPLE: I think that maybe that people felt awed by the legacy. It was true that this was his son, this was still his son. And it's still his son who felt very alone, and felt as if he didn't have a father. So he never passed down the feelings that he had about his father to his daughter. And consequently, Mariel never passed down her family history to her daughter. So it was a multi-generational thing of silence.

ROCCA: Why did you want to make this movie?

KOPPLE: Well, with many movies, I mean, I just never wake up one day and say, "A-ha, I'm gonna do Mariel Hemingway, or Mike Tyson or Woody Allen," whatever. I was approached to do it from OWN, from a woman named Lisa, who was a really good friend of Mariel's. And she said, "How would you like to do a film on Mariel Hemingway, the Hemingway family?"

And I said, "Are you kidding? I would love it." And at the same time she said, "Mariel, how would you like to do a film about your family?" And Mariel said, "No, no way. My family's totally crazy. Nobody would want to watch it."

I guess Mariel knew who I was and we got together, we had breakfast together and it was wonderful. It was like two old girlfriends talking a mile a minute about life and about things that we cared about.

You hear about Margaux and Mariel and Muffet and Ernest in newspaper clippings, or you just get tiny fragments. Here was an opportunity to really see who they were and see what their souls were about, and just dig deep. And the wonderful thing is that Mariel wanted to see that also. She said, "No holds barred, we'll just go for it."

ROCCA: Did you have to encourage her to be so open? Because she really puts it all out there. Or was she already going to do that?

KOPPLE: I didn't have to encourage her to do that. She wanted to do it. She wanted to do that not only to get it out, because she had been harboring it all these years, but also for her family, for her daughter. It was time they knew their history, and also for other people. So that if she told their story, perhaps they wouldn't be so shy about telling their story.

The thing with mental illness is that you can't keep it inside. You have to let it out.

ROCCA: I know you're not a doctor, but is there a label that we can assign in general to the family's mental illness?

KOPPLE: Depression, alcohol, pills, addiction, obsession, a lot of things. I mean, Mariel so escaped it. And she escaped it by doing things that were very good for her. She scaled mountains and plunges into cold water and works out constantly and eats well. And she could've taken the same route as Margaux, but she didn't. And she chose another one.

ROCCA: In the movie, she says that her father didn't pay the same kind of attention to her as he did to her two sisters. I was almost wondering, "Boy, I wonder if that distance was a blessing in disguise." If her sort of relative distance from the family kind of saved her.

KOPPLE: I think that as a child, you never think like that. You think that every family is like yours. So okay, "So they don't give us love, or they don't give us attention." But yet she had a great, deep love for her father. I mean, she went fly fishing with her father, he taught her how to ski. So there were those interactions. But there's also a lot of time that it was at arm's length.

ROCCA: What do you think sets this family apart from others, other than the fact that Ernest Hemingway was one of the great writers of the 20th century?

KOPPLE: I think they're all deeply creative. Mariel definitely has the Hemingway gene.

ROCCA: And what is that Hemingway gene?

KOPPLE: That Hemingway gene is not being afraid to try. Not be afraid to climb a wall that's straight up. Not being afraid to hide in dangerous places. Not being afraid to fish. Not being afraid to risk things that she's never done before. She just doesn't do it with alcohol and drugs; she does it with her body and her mind and really putting a great focus on it.

ROCCA: She says in the movie, not only that, she's somebody that's been afraid for most of her life. But she also says that her grandfather was somebody who did all that derring-do because he was deep down inside very afraid.

KOPPLE: Well, I think maybe they're all afraid, but the wonderful trait about the Hemingways is just they're willing to face their fears. And they're willing to do it. And they're not afraid to do it. And facing their fears gives them a lot more confidence to move on and to do other things.

ROCCA: In making this movie, did you ever think, "Oh, what would it have been like if I were in this family?"

KOPPLE: If I had been in this family, I don't know if I would've fared as well as Mariel had fared. I mean, she's just gone out of her way to help other people who are afflicted by mental illness, suicide. She lived her ideals.

She could've gone in the same direction as her sisters and her family. But I think she consciously didn't want to do it. She wanted to be the good girl. She wanted to be the person that took care of people. Her mother had cancer, and she took care of her mother. She fed her, she took care of her.

ROCCA: You must have some impression of her before you met her, based on her movies and her public persona.

KOPPLE: Well, the interesting thing is that, whenever I'm asked to do a film, I let everything out of my mind that is about somebody.

ROCCA: You clean the hard drive?

KOPPLE: I do. Like, when I did the film on Mike Tyson, he was in jail for the rape of Desiree Washington. "Do you wanna do a film on Mike Tyson?" I just-- "Yes, I do." And I just let everything clear out, 'cause I wanna start from the beginning. I wanna let people bloom and just be who they are and what they are and just set the stage where they're so totally comfortable that we can see who they are as people.

ROCCA: So you didn't have a preconception.

KOPPLE: Never.

ROCCA: I don't know who said it, the idea that, the the harder you try to run from your family, the more likely you'll go right back to it? But maybe this is a lesson that you can't escape? Is her life a lesson that you CAN escape the demons in your family?

KOPPLE: Well, I don't know if she's escaping the demons of her family. I think she's just trying to understand them and talk about them. And for her, she has her own demons. I mean, she has suicidal thoughts and she's been depressed and she used to do very wild things. I mean, she enrolled in Overeaters, for example, and she was eating huge bowls of salad. And the Overeaters had to tell her, "You can't stay here." You know, they had people that were eating ice cream, cake. And she said, "I can't stop eating salad. I just eat bowls and bowls of salad."

ROCCA: And they were telling her, "That's not a big problem."

KOPPLE: Right. But for her it was.

ROCCA: You chronicled people who have struggles, people without the material wealth of the Hemingways. How would you describe the Hemingway struggle?

KOPPLE: I think the Hemingway struggle is inner struggle. It's the struggle to get up every morning, to feel good, to be productive, and to allow yourself to go into spaces that you've never been before. A journey that you've never before. Mariel going to see her sister Muffet was a huge thing for her, 'cause she hadn't seen her in years.

ROCCA: And she admits she doesn't like going to visit. I mean, she wants to be the person who visits her sister, but she's very honest.

KOPPLE: Yeah. It's very painful for her and very difficult for her. When she was young, Muffet would be "away at school," she was told. But actually, she wasn't; she was in mental facilities that had bars on the windows. And Mariel would always look up and say, "This is really weird. Why do they have bars on the school?" So she never really knew what her sister was going through until she was in her teens and her 20s.

ROCCA: There are several moments in the movie that I found almost jarring, when Mariel says that Margaux was stupid. I mean, boy, it sets you back. And you on the other side of the camera were you just kind of, like, "Wow."

KOPPLE: Being on the other side of the camera when she said that was so interesting because she, Mariel, has led me into different places that maybe I wouldn't have gone with her. And I think the most touching and moving part of that was when she said, "I thought she was stupid, 'cause really what I thought was that I was stupid. And I never finished high school." So I guess she was trying to push her sister away.

ROCCA: Do you think that there is-- a suicidally-depressive gene in this family?

KOPPLE: Yes. (laughs) I think there is. I mean, every single one of them has gone through it.

ROCCA: If you go back and read Hemingway again now, will you read it differently?

KOPPLE: Oh, I'll read Hemingway so differently. And also looking at his relationships, for example, with other people, like Gary Cooper, who would've ever thought that Hemingway and Gary Cooper were best friends? And yet they didn't really talk about their lows. They just went through it by hunting and fishing and writing things for each other and acting, but never talking about the personal and the demons inside. But yes, Mariel was able to do that.

ROCCA: When you go back and read him again, [would you] read it with more sympathy or understanding or . . . ?

KOPPLE: I'll read it because I feel like I'm part of it. I feel like I've seen underneath and I won't be reading it just for the story. I'll also be reading it to glean and to see who he was as a person. And what his thoughts were about, how he dealt with women, how he dealt with bull fighters. And I'll just look at it.

ROCCA: I wonder, gosh, if his parents had loved him more, maybe he would've said, "Eh, I don't need a bull fight, I'm just gonna stay home and have dinner with the family." (laughs)

KOPPLE: I doubt it.

ROCCA: Okay.

KOPPLE: I mean, I think it was also him proving his manliness and being bigger than life. And a lot of times, you know, when you have so much pain and so much suffering, you have to try to find other outlets so that people don't know about it.

ROCCA: The trove of footage that Margaux shot, 43 hours? Had it ever been seen before? Who had it? Can you describe that?

KOPPLE: We went to Ketchum, Idaho, and our sound person, by the name of Alan Barker, said, "You know, I was here in 1983 and '84 and I was filming them. Margaux was doing a film." And I said, "Really? Can you give me the names of all the people who might have footage?" And he did. One or two led us to this place called the WPA in Minnesota that was holding all the material. And when we got in touch with them, they said, "Nobody has ever asked us for this. [We don't] know what we have." And I said, "We'll take it all to look at."

And so every day, a different FedEx package would come. And in it would be more and more of this footage. And for us it was like Christmas. I never told Mariel about it because I didn't want her and my relationship [with her] to be affected by it. She would talk about the kitchen where her mother sat and she put her legs up on the sink, and she didn't know that that was really true or it was memory. But she didn't totally remember it.

ROCCA: Oh, you didn't want Mariel know that you would have corroborating evidence or something that might refute it?

KOPPLE: Well, or -- no, it was just that I wasn't looking at it like that, or to know that her kitchen was yellow and robin's egg blue or something like that. And also to see so insightfully who her parents were at that time.

I had also gotten an audio track of Margaux taped maybe a year before she died -- somebody interviewing her for a book. So I had all these different elements to make this a much more complex story.

[Margaux] was out there. She talked about everything. I mean, in the film, she talked about being so lonely and nobody coming to see her. She had to have a hooker come and dance on the table and then stop and then put her arms around her just so she could feel love and to get her pain out there.

ROCCA: Well, she's sobbing, basically.

KOPPLE: Yeah. While she was sobbing. So she just told some of the most incredibly raw stories about her life unfolding. I mean, it just blew me away listening. And her voice sounded as if it was an old soul talking.

But what I wanted to say, too, about Mariel being filmed, at the very beginning when she came in, she looked at the film and got emotional 'cause she thought it was all going to be a film about her. And then suddenly she saw all of the material that I had about Margaux, and her whole face lit up. And she was moved, she was just mesmerized by all this material she didn't know existed. It would be the first time her daughters would ever see their grandparents. It just changed her whole world to look at it.

ROCCA: What were you seeing when you saw her look at it? Were you seeing joy? Were you seeing her mind just expand?

KOPPLE: I saw somebody who couldn't get enough of it. It wasn't joy, but it was, "I'm so happy that this is here. That just allowing me to look at my sister in a different way. This is allowing me to see my parents. This is bringing me back to all my childhood memories and seeing that they're correct, seeing that they're real, and I remembered them as they were."

ROCCA: As far as the press [was] concerned, so much of the conflict between Mariel and Margaux had to do with the movie "Lipstick," with one sister hoping that she'd become a star, and the other sister stealing her thunder, basically, and then becoming a star.

KOPPLE: Well, but it was more than that.

ROCCA: Of course, of course.

KOPPLE: It was more than just "Lipstick." But "Lipstick" didn't help it. And of course "Manhattan" helped it -- Mariel's fame and Margaux's crash. But it was also the love of their parents. Each time somebody was born, the next child got what love there was. And so, you know, Mariel being the last one, the parents were just tired and fed up. And she would tell me stories where she would go outside of her house and go under snow banks and just sit there for two or three hours to see if anybody would ever miss her. And they didn't.

ROCCA: What do you think of Margaux's work and the movie that she was making?

KOPPLE: I thought that Margaux was incredible. I thought the camera loved her. I thought that she was doing this film so she could really get inside her family. And she idolized Ernest Hemingway. He was her role model. But she also wanted to do it to get really close to her father and her mother, particularly her father. And get to know them. And she was beautiful.

I mean, being able to watch her come alive almost as a voice from the grave was amazing. 'Cause you just saw her as this full-fledged woman who was earthy, and funny, and great.

ROCCA: Yeah, when she said, "When am I going to find out what's going to give me joy? Why be alive if I have to be in such pain?" that is really sharing.

KOPPLE: And then she goes to her grandfather's house and she said, after his suicide in Ketchum, "I understand why he killed himself. Because if you can't write and you can't do the thing you loved doing, the pain is too strong, why be alive?"

ROCCA: Watching this [footage], how did your impression of Margaux change?

KOPPLE: Well, I didn't have a big impression of Margaux until I started watching. I felt that she was someone I would like to spend time with. She was someone I would like to talk to. She is someone I'd just like to wrap my arms around and hug. So I felt like I really got to know her as a human being. And that's remarkable through all that footage.

ROCCA: I had to wonder what Margaux would think of this movie.

KOPPLE: I would hope that Margaux would love it. Margaux would say, "My material really is out there and it's standing the test of time. And people, even though I'm not here anymore to say it, are gonna be able to see it and to feel it and to know me in the height of my career and at the bottom of my career."

I think also, too, talking about the Hemingway name and how that gets you through. I mean, she used the Hemingway name any way she could, and Dree and Langley have taken the Hemingway name rather than their father's name, Crisman.

ROCCA: Why do you think that is?

KOPPLE: It's a magical name. People respond to it. People think about Ernest and figure that these are relatives of Ernest, there must be something very special about them. It allows you to just to cut through culturally, politically, and socially.

ROCCA: Inevitably, there will be people who say, "Okay, every family has problems. They're beautiful, they have money," you know?

KOPPLE: I think that, sure, people will say that. But I think more people will say, "This is one hell of a courageous woman. This is a woman who bared her soul. This is a woman who is still inventing herself. And if she can do it, we can do it."

ROCCA: I read in some interview somewhere that for a long time, she wouldn't accept that her sister had killed herself. And that at one point, it suddenly dawned on her.

KOPPLE: I think when the phone call came, she probably would've wanted to have heard that it was Muffet. Because Muffet was always the one that was in mental facilities or group homes. So she was sort of shocked that it was Margaux, and that there was no suicide note. But I also want to say, too, this film is not a film about depression and sadness. It's also a film about perseverance and transformation and love and joy and really wanting to find yourself.

ROCCA: Is there anything else you want to add about what you want people to get from the movie?

KOPPLE: I think that what I want people to get from the movie is, here's a family that has gone through a lot. And here's a family that's really putting a lot on the line right now. And if this could end some of the stigma of what mental health and suicide is all about and get people talking about it, and get people to express more love to each other, I think we would've succeeded tremendously.

ROCCA: Do you have a personal connection to this movie?

KOPPLE: Yes, I did very much so. My son's half-brother at the age of 16 committed suicide. We were here, all together, when we got the call. And we all went racing over to the house. And Evan, who was his brother, had had, you know, problems his whole life, since the time he was five years old.

And I stayed with my son Nick in the room where Evan had committed suicide. And I hit the computer and up, you know, the computer came the letter of six reasons to live and six reasons to die. And the six reasons to live, so compelling: "I'm gonna be able to write songs. I'm gonna make movies. I'm going to accomplish my dreams. I'm gonna have people, you know, who love me and really care about me."

And then the six reasons to die were, "I'm a loser. I'll never amount to anything. I don't wanna give my family any more pain. ..." And my son looked at those and he said, "I wish I had known that Evan was thinking these things, because we all think these things. We all go through these things. And I could've told him, "These are things I go through." And my son is now a doctor, a resident doing psychiatry in children and adolescents. So yes, there is a personal connection.

ROCCA: Right. This is not a movie about a family that has nothing to do with any other family.

KOPPLE: Right. We all go through it in one way or another. We all know somebody who has a problem. And we all need to be there.

For more info:

• "Running From Crazy" (OWN)
• "Running From Crazy" on Facebook
• Cabin Creek Films (Barbara Kopple's website)