Lake of Fire is a visionary documentary about the abortion debate 17 years in the making and running 152 minutes long. Focusing its stark lens on both the brutal murder of abortion doctors and the grisly realities of the abortion procedure, the film gets up close and intimate with doctors, patients, anti-abortion killers, and Norma McCorvey (a.k.a. Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade, who has famously become an anti-abortion advocate). As comprehensive as it is complex, Lake of Fire refuses to present the controversy, like the film’s cinematography, in black and white.

British-born filmmaker Tony Kaye, a former advertising director, spoke to Utne Reader about the film and what advertising has to do with the abortion debate.

 

While several critics called Lake of Fire the best documentary of 2007, few people saw it in theaters. Do you think it will now find an audience on DVD?

I always saw this as a piece, like most books, that you can’t really read in one go. You don’t even want to read it in one go. It’s too dense. Although this [film] is finished, it’s not finished as a project. I’ve got a lot more footage. I intend to shoot more. There will be subsequent Lakes of Fire, or whatever I call it next. . . . I can’t think any household would be complete without this DVD.

 

American households, at least . . .

Well, there is no country in the world where everybody has such a keen political interest in everything. Unfortunately, with abortion, it’s such an incendiary subject in the first place, and, secondly, it’s doubly incendiary, because nobody’s right and everybody’s right. Because of the massive abstraction, we haven’t found a way through it. But we have to, because there’s something wrong. I’m not suggesting abortion is wrong, but there’s something wrong with the process. Fetuses should not be terminated, and people who passionately believe that shouldn’t be killing other people, and women should have complete choice of what they do with their bodies.

 

What sorts of reactions have you gotten about the film, from either camp?

Lake of Fire hasn’t really entered the discussion. But if one sits with a big audience, one learns a lot. Early in the film, when you see a woman go through a late-term abortion, and then you see a tiny hand, there’s a massive gulp in the audience. And this comes not from a passionate pro-life person. This is from a master manipulator who is trying to make a point. You hear a very smart doctor who is explaining, in quite clear and correct terms, why this process is 100 percent right, yet there is an amazing irony that this process is categorically wrong. That’s shocking for people who don’t know what abortion is, and I didn’t, though I went through one with a girlfriend a long time ago. I was upset at the time; I wanted us to have that baby born, but I went through it with her. I was very curious to know what it was, both spiritually and physically. To this day, I am shocked every time I see it.