The Man Behind the 'Strongman'

Stanley "Stanless Steel" Pleskun lives what he believes. This much is evident from first-time director Zachary Levy's documentary Strongman (2009). The film follows Pleskun, a South Brunswick native, as he strives to rise above a chaotic personal life and disheartening professional obstacles to do the thing he dreams of: performing great feats of strength for a rapt crowd. Levy fielded a few questions about Pleskun while also reflecting on his own filmmaking experience.

Inside Beat: Stanley addresses you by name a few times in the film — did you try to attain a distance from Stan and his family or did you become attached, and if so, was that difficult?
Zachery Levy: Yes, I try to have pretty strict ethics about how I interact with everyone during production. Like more than a lot of documentary filmmakers, I try to keep my role as a filmmaker first as clear as possible. That doesn't mean of course I don't care — these are people I care about deeply and I wouldn't be there if I didn't — so yes, it was difficult to see them go through things that weren't always easy.

IB: What was your first impression of Stan, and how did you view him after making this film?
ZL: I think I probably saw him as a gentle giant the first time I met him. That's of course very much part of his personality, but he is also far more complex and interesting than just that. I think Stan is one of the most intelligent people I know — really intuitive about the way he gets through the world. And despite all the chaos that comes with his life, he is still able to sit back and look at himself in a way that is really honest and unique. He is strong in ways that few people are. He is truly a great artist in own right — he approaches his work with a sense of artistic integrity that would put most painters and musicians and novelists to shame. I see him really as one of the great American characters of our time. I mean that in the biggest sense — he is worthy of Melville or Whitman.

IB: What made you decide not to use a musical soundtrack?
ZL: Good question! Well, the kind of films I like come out of a '60s and '70s vérité tradition that in its strictest form tends not to use music. Making a film without music is very hard; audiences these days are so used to having music to guide them through a narrative. Often an audience isn't even aware that music is there, but it's used to really shape the way they feel about a film and help give it pace. I felt like in the same sense that Stan approaches his own art with a certain purity, I felt the film should echo that. I wanted to make something that trusted the audience to figure it out. It's the filmmaking equivalent of bending a penny — you are giving yourself less to grip onto and still trying to see if you can bend it.

IB: What did you take away from making this film? Is there anything viewers should keep in mind while watching it?
ZL: There's a line in a Pete Seeger song that I like: "In this world of joy and sorrow, we still can have singing tomorrows." I think that's the kind of thing I took away — a sense of our universality and a hope that for all the things in our lives, [and] we still can find a way to go forward.
In this kind of filmmaking, you really begin to see how much truth there is in everyone's different perspectives. There is truth in everything. And making this kind of film forces you to look for it.
I don't think people should keep too much in mind while watching it — I just hope they can open themselves up and let the film bounce around in there. Afterwards, maybe the one thing I'd say to keep in mind, that even though I really believe this as "real" a movie as maybe they have ever seen — it's still a movie. When I talk about Stan and Barbara, I am talking about them as characters. It is very close in many ways to who they are in real actual life, but it can't ever be exactly who they are. That doesn't mean it's fake — just that real life is always faster than 24 [frames per second]. It's when you get close that it's exciting.

Stongman is being screened at 7 p.m. by the New Jersey Film Festival at Scott Hall 123 on the College Avenue campus on Oct. 11 and Oct. 17. For more information, visit the Web site at www.njfilmfest.com.