Every four years since 1988, the team behind the PBS series “Frontline” creates a film called “The Choice,” exploring the political biographies of the candidates running for president.
By July of this year, filmmakers Michael Kirk and Mike Wiser had assembled a rough cut of a four-hour documentary about President Biden and former President Trump, two men of the same generation who were bracing for a rematch after the contentious 2020 election.
“This thing was sprawling and big, but it was a hell of a story,” said Kirk, likening the project to the Michael Cimino epic “Heaven’s Gate.”
Then, on July 21, Biden announced he was dropping out of the race, and Vice President Kamala Harris quickly emerged as the presumptive nominee, a historic turn of events that upended the election — and forced the filmmakers to pivot in record time to create “The Choice 2024: Harris vs. Trump,” a two-hour documentary premiering Tuesday on PBS.
In a stroke of luck, by the time Biden dropped out, they had already started work on a documentary about the vice presidential contenders — an idea “Frontline” executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath proposed because of the advanced age of the likely presidential nominees.
Still, it was a mad scramble to complete the Harris portion of “The Choice 2024,” particularly given the lack of documentaries and biographies about the vice president compared with her rival, who has been courting media attention for decades. “We just threw ourselves at it,” said Kirk, who directed the film in addition to co-writing and producing with Wiser. “What would have taken us four or five months we did in about nine weeks.”
The documentary traces her childhood in the East Bay, where Harris’ single mother leaned on the Black community there to raise her daughters; her formative years at Howard University, where she joined the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority; and her political career, which began in San Francisco as a district attorney fighting to reshape the system from within. It also zeroes in on some of the controversial episodes that have shaped Harris — including her relationship with politician Willie Brown and the backlash she faced when, as San Francisco district attorney, she chose not to pursue the death penalty against the man who killed police officer Isaac Espinoza in 2004.
Harris’ entry into the race also meant recutting the Trump portion of the documentary, which posits a link between the bare-knuckled tactics he learned from his father, Fred Trump, and mentor, Roy Cohn — and the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.
“The very same Trump scenes are suddenly very different when they’re matched up in a weave against Kamala Harris,” Kirk said.
Kirk and Wiser spoke to The Times via Zoom about covering this unprecedented campaign. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
How did you reorganize this film once you knew Biden was dropping out?
Kirk: We’ve made six [“The Choice” documentaries]. Early on, we learned this phrase, “life method.” We were pulling together things that happened across their lives that inform how they make decisions. “What is their life method?” In Trump’s case, it’s: “Never lose. Do anything you can to win.” It’s the playbook handed to him by Roy Cohn. We always follow this adage, “A president can bring to the job no more than the lessons of his own life.” That is an operating principle for making “The Choice.” If you’ve got good interviews with people who really know [the subjects] — friends, family, biographers — it is surprising how fast it could all come together, even though there was nothing about Harris that was obviously just lying around on the surface.
How much of the Trump material changed because of Harris?
Wiser: A lot of it had to change. We had to bring [the] Trump [material] down by half. “The Choice” plays off the two characters. What are the stories in their lives that you can juxtapose? In their case, especially because of their age difference alone, it feels very different.
Kirk: When we did George W. Bush and Al Gore [in 2000], they were contemporaries. You could run it all side-by-side over a chronological timetable. In this case, there’s a 20-year difference in age as just the starting point. He’s rich, she’s not. He’s very white, she’s not. The weird alchemy of getting those scenes together — six minutes of Trump, six minutes of Harris — just changed how you watch Trump, who felt very familiar before we added the Harris stuff.
You have so much ground to cover with Trump that everything has to be very condensed. I wonder how you approach covering the candidates in a way that gives them a similar amount of screen time but doesn’t distort their records or create a false equivalency?
Wiser: That has been a question about this project since the first time that we did it about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton [in 2016]. The challenges of it have gotten even more difficult. One of the candidates has been prosecuted for numerous crimes, has been impeached twice, wouldn’t accept the results of an election, and has also been at the forefront of the news since he entered politics. Our focus is to not shy away from any of those things, but it’s to remain true to what “The Choice” is, which is telling a story about who he is. One of the things that was different about this “Choice” is the context of being after Jan. 6. You look back on his life and say, “Where does that come from?” We decided to emphasize more his relationship with his brother [Fred Trump Jr.] and his dad. What is it about Trump and his childhood that he can’t accept losing?
The conventional wisdom is that Harris is guarded and doesn’t put herself out there a whole lot. Did that characterization ring true to you?
Wiser: That is definitely one of the challenges. You open up her autobiography [“The Truths We Hold”] and you say, “What is the story that you’re telling about yourself?” That story is very minimal in terms of biographical detail about the things that shaped her. She’s been very cautious about showing that. She came up politically from a place where she didn’t have to do that. When you run for D.A. or attorney general, you’re not running on your life story the way that a presidential candidate is or even as someone running for Senate. When she was in positions where people were expecting that of her, it was very difficult for her to transition and to talk about those private things that shaped her.
Do you think that’s just her personality or is it more strategic?
Wiser: It’s a good question, and it is one that we asked everybody that we talked to, including people who are really close to her, and they don’t say she’s a different person than she is as a politician — less guarded, more profane, she’s relaxed in a way that, until recently, she hadn’t appeared in front of a camera. Some of that caution does go to the heightened scrutiny that she’s faced as a Black woman in politics. When she first got into politics and was running the D.A.’s office in San Francisco, she had the Espinoza controversy right off the bat. All those things have shaped to make her more cautious about telling her own story.
What do you see as the most definitive turning points in her political biography?
Kirk: I think the core struggle that she faced is “How does she decide to fight from inside?” Her parents are people who walked along protesting the Vietnam War, supporting [Black Panther] Huey [Newton], shake your fist at the man. She decides to be the man, if you will, and become a prosecutor and join law enforcement in the ‘80s, when Alameda County and San Francisco were filled with crack addicts.
In the course of researching and reporting on Harris, was there anything new that really helped bring her into focus?
Wiser: Probably the most interesting parts of her life were the early [years]. She’s never really talked about what it was like to grow up as a biracial kid, and the kind of names that she would get called. It was interesting to talk to her contemporaries and her childhood friends about how that shaped her and made her somebody who has pretty thick skin. You can see that in the way that she’s handled Trump in this election, staying focused and not getting thrown on it.
Harris is the second woman to run against Trump for the presidency. I wonder if you have been struck by any differences between Harris and Clinton in terms of their approach to gender?
Wiser: Kamala Harris is very aware of her status. She’s very aware when she looks at all of the pictures along the wall, they’re all white men, but she doesn’t make it the forefront of her politics or her appeal. With Hillary Clinton, it was very clear from that campaign that that was part of what they were trying to activate. I think that it was part of Kamala Harris’ approach to race and gender from the beginning: prove that you belong where you are, let the slights fall off your back, push forward.
You have been making “The Choice” together for a long time now. What makes 2024 unique to cover?
Kirk: It’s been true in America, certainly for most of my lifetime, that you’d approach a presidential election and both candidates were plausible. America wasn’t going to fall apart if John McCain became president. Starting with Trump versus Clinton, it’s gotten increasingly more complicated. It really matters to a lot of people in America right now who wins in a way that I have never felt before. This [film] was so hard to do, and the stakes feel just really super high in a way they never have before. I felt really responsible to get it right.
