Interview with Matt Nadel, Director of ‘Cashing Out’
Cashing Out opens with a still image of a beach landscape. Crystalline turquoise waters breaking into white ripples of foam over a golden shore. Rocky cliffs and distant hills lie flat against a sky made for cloud-watching. A suntanned beachgoer is walking down the center of the frame leaving behind a long line of footsteps. The photograph is a story in itself. As the frame zooms out, a collage of photos, postcards, and letters reveal themselves; scenes from the lives of our subjects.
In a tight 40-minute runtime, Matt Nadel allows humanity to unfold in a grim moment of queer history. Told through the eyes of three subjects—Sean, Scott, and Dee Dee—Cashing Out examines the viatical settlement industry that boomed during the AIDS epidemic. Thousands of individuals sold their life insurance policies to buy homes, cover medical expenses, and live out their dreams in the final years of their lives.
Matt Nadel differentiates between the words “scripted” and “narrative” when he describes a film. “I don’t use the word ‘narrative’ as the opposite of documentary,” he tells me. “I think you can tell when a documentary is or isn’t a narrative film. I try to make my documentaries feel as much like narratives and as little as expositions or explanations as possible.”
The 26-year-old filmmaker and I chatted outside a packed Brooklyn coffee shop until the gusts of debris-filled wind forced us a few blocks over to his apartment, indoors, warmly decorated and less windy. A piano gently crooned from a roommate’s bedroom.
Cashing Out charts its way through history through its subjects: Scott, a pioneer in viatical settlements during crisis; Sean, who sold his insurance to found POZ Magazine centered around HIV/AIDS; and Dee Dee, a trans activist and founder of LaGender without life insurance. If the personal is political, the personal can also be “historical,” I tell him. “I love that,” he says. “I think abstraction is necessary to conceptualize the world and understand history, but it also is fundamentally dehumanizing. We need abstraction, but I think the best movies about systems are movies that engage in this ongoing conversation between the people who shape systems and the systems that shape those people.”
Nadel, himself, was shaped by the AIDS crisis and the viatical settlement industry, many years after its beginning. His father, Phil, was a viatical investor during the AIDS crisis. “I had no idea that this had been part of his past. Being gay, it was weird to hear that my dad had had this whole interaction with the gay community before my birth that I had no idea about.” As Matt appears in the film to explain, Cashing Out is about delving into the history and stories of the industry while coming to also understand the history that formed his own upbringing. He tells me he was nervous at first, reckoning with his own privilege before an audience—“privilege as a white person, as a person who came from a family with money. I also have historical privilege having been born at a point in history when HIV was at last a treatable condition. But this was my idea about how to make an AIDS story feel present and be honest with the audience about how I got there.”
This was also Nadel’s first time being on camera in his own film. Aside from an off-screen question in his first film, 120 Years, his presence as the creator of his documentaries has always been that of an invisible hand. “It gave me so much respect and awe for the trust that my participants give me when they submit to being on camera—that I'll be faithful to their ideas, that I will make them look good, that I'll communicate the emotional essence of their story.”
If anything speaks to the trust Nadel’s participants put in him, it’s the presence of the personal archive in this documentary. Photographs, postcards, and journal cards from our subjects are placed against clippings of news coverage, billboards, and posters to create a rich scrapbook of life through history. I ask him what it’s like to deal with personal archival material. “It’s beautiful,” he says. The visuals throw us straight into a contemporaneous past as Scott, Sean, and Dee Dee tell their stories aloud. “I think being intimately familiar with someone's personal archive also helps you understand what they're getting at in an interview. It also helps distinguish what they're saying that is informed by the years that have passed since this happened, and what is more of a contemporaneous thought that hasn't changed since then.”
He sees the retelling of past stories as inflected by the speaker’s current hindsight and maturity. But the archive preserves those past moments in amber. He highlights a moment from Sean’s day planner in 1985 before his AIDS diagnosis where he simply notes down “shingles.” “When those words were written, he didn’t know what the shingles were going to be,” he says. “I always think to myself, in the edit, this person has no idea what's going to happen to them which makes their bravery for living the way they were living and speaking and leaving a record of their life even more remarkable to me.”
Cashing Out is constantly in dialogue with these past and present moments, refusing to rebuke either as part of one’s whole humanity. It’s something he even sees in the act of filmmaking. “I started conceiving [Cashing Out] in 2021 and shooting it in 2022. When I watch the film, there are things about it that I don't like, because I made the film when I was a much younger filmmaker. But this is a film about my process of discovery and to try to flatten that process by refracting every moment through the person I have now become would be inauthentic.”
Cashing Out is full of these quiet deconstructions of binaries such as that of history and humanity. It’s laden in the reconstruction of viatical investments, an industry that can be seen as grim, predatory, and capitalistic or liberatory, hopeful, and self-sufficient. “I'm interested in collapsing the binary of victim and perpetrator, of good guy and bad guy,” he says. “When we make documentaries about people who did remarkable things in history, when we make them seem perfect, I don't want people to think ‘Well, I'm not perfect. I could never do something like that.’ If you show a person was doing the best they could with what they had, that's something you as a viewer can do too.” It’s within the cracks between black and white that Nadel and his viewers find the humanity, pain and beauty of life.
I end my conversation with Nadel with a hard question. “Why do you make films,” I asked him. He chuckles and thinks. After a few moments, he gives me his answer. “It feels like a pretty good way to pass a life.”
Cashing Out can be streamed for free at cashingoutmovie.com.