Laura Longsworth

“Shortly after my daughter was born, Tom Luckey called me to say happy mother’s day, and he said ‘I feel like maybe we need to make a film, what do you think?’ Well, I had been thinking about it too. And I thought, you know, I have a baby and it isn’t going to work, but…okay.” This was the start of the successful cooperation between Laura Longsworth and the Luckey family, the result of which is her incredibly intense film Luckey, now playing at IDFA.

I meet Laura at the Rembrandt Square in a grand café. As we sit down on the cushy red sofas, we start talking about the films we’ve seen this festival. While staying in Amsterdam for a couple of days, she will try to see as many films as she can and meet up with friends in between. Before she started making documentaries, Laura worked as a newspaper reporter, which meant meeting daily deadlines in a pumping adrenaline rush. Despite the fact that she loved this hectic profession (since it gave great satisfaction after a job well done) she now feels intensely lucky to be able to work on long-term projects. In order to secure a steady income, she makes historical documentaries for public television. “But doing Luckey was more fun. It’s my baby.”

Laura met Tom Luckey, a sculptor of children’s climbers, through her father-in-law, who attended the same architecture school he did. At that point, he was a sixty year-old who used to keep everybody up all night partying. According to Laura, if Tom was in you life you just couldn’t avoid him. Whilst in the middle of designing a huge climber for the Boston Children’s Museum, he had an accident in his house and went from being someone who was intensely lively, to being completely immobilized. For a long time he was on the brink of death and they didn’t know whether he was going make it, but as soon as he started coming back to life he was still very much himself, in a way that said: I don’t care if I can’t move, I’m going to finish my project! Longsworth was drawn to Tom’s unstoppable optimism and wanted to do a film about him. “I think I was a little nervous over talking to him about it, because how do you approach someone who’s had such a terrible accident?” Apparently, Tom himself then took the initiative.

Although there’s a lot of tension among them, in the film the Luckeys seem very open and honest about their relationship problems. It might have helped that Longsworth had another point of intersection with the family; Spencer and she went to the same high school, although they didn’t know each other back then. But basically, the family were just very open, especially Tom. Laura spent a lot of time with them and tried to be fair. “One of the hard parts of making this film was that there was tension among the three of them. I knew that if I took sides, or even was perceived as taking sides, any one of them could have said: ’look I just don’t wanna be in this anymore’. I love them all, and definitely had an opinion on who was right and who was wrong, but I decided to step back.”

In total, Luckey took about two years to complete and in the process it changed from what Longsworth expected it to be - a documentary about Tom and his art, into a family portrait. Also, the project required a lot of ad hoc organizing on the part of the crew. With someone in a situation like Tom’s; medically on the edge, something would happen that nobody planned for, like having to get him to a doctor, and often things would have to be done at short notice.

For Laura, making this film was a great experience. She would like to have a screening in New Haven, Tom’s town, but since he is bedridden at the moment and cannot come to the screening, she wants to wait. His bad health isn’t stopping him from working though, as he has three different projects going and apparently he’s really happy, which is remarkable. Laura gushes: “I think Tom’s optimism about life is completely to be admired in a lot of ways and it’s really inspiring. Whenever you’re in a bad mood, just think of Tom Luckey.”

Jessica Hartman