Austin Film Festival: Interview With SAVING FOUR SECONDS director Rachel Klein

At this year’s Austin Film Festival, Saving Four Seconds made its world premiere, telling the decades-long story behind the Golden Gate Bridge’s suicide deterrent barrier. Directed over the course of six years, the documentary follows the activists, families, bridge employees, engineers, and public officials who spent decades pushing for a solution to one of the world’s most well-known sites associated with suicide.

We spoke with the film’s director, Rachel Klein, about earning the trust of the Golden Gate Bridge District, gaining access to never-before-released CCTV footage, climbing the bridge itself, and the emotional reality of living with a story about suicide prevention for six years.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

This is Kristy Strouse with Film Inquiry. First of all, congratulations on being at the Austin Film Festival. That’s exciting. The film is fantastic and incredibly powerful! I’d love to start with how you got involved with something like this. 

Rachel Klein: Thank you. It’s very, very exciting.

The Golden Gate Bridge was actually looking for somebody to tell the story. We came up with our pitch and submitted it. From the beginning, we wanted to tell the story warts and all. We wanted to talk about how the bridge didn’t say yes to a barrier for 86 years and how, historically, there was a culture that viewed suicide prevention pretty negatively. The attitude was often, “Well, they’ll just do it somewhere else.” We submitted that approach, and they liked it. They said, “Let’s tell the story for real. Let’s not sugarcoat it. Let’s not make it something it isn’t. Let’s show how the decision to build the barrier evolved and how it ultimately happened.”

What kind of timeline are we talking about for making this film? There’s so much in it that I imagine it took quite a while.

Rachel Klein: Six years. We first got the green light in March 2020, which, of course, was right as COVID hit. We were ready to go and then suddenly it was, “Nope.” So we had to figure out how to shoot during COVID and how to make the project work under those conditions. Beyond the interviews, we wanted to treat the bridge as its own character. We wanted to spend a lot of time making sure we captured things nobody had seen before. We didn’t want to show the bridge the way it’s usually shown in wide shots or roadway shots. We wanted to crawl all over that structure. The Golden Gate Bridge actually gave us fall-protection and harness training and took us out on the bridge.

Oh, wow.

Rachel Klein: A lot of what people assume are drone shots in the movie aren’t drone shots at all. It’s actually me and the director of photography in harnesses, filming those crevices, filming underneath the bridge, filming around the pylons and inside the towers. We wanted audiences to see a part of the bridge that they hadn’t already seen.

The shots are incredible. I’m glad you got the training first because that sounds intense.

Rachel Klein: It definitely was. One thing they teach you is that if you fall and the harness catches you, you have about six minutes to deploy these little stirrups on the side of the harness and stand up. Otherwise, the harness can cut off circulation to your legs.

We were all like, “I’m sorry, what?” It’s one thing to learn safety rules like always maintaining three points of contact. It’s another thing to learn something like that. They took us on practice runs and even suspended us in the ironworkers’ shop so we could experience what it actually feels like. Those workers are incredible. They just do what they have to do. They’d say, “Come on.” And we’d say, “Now? Why not tomorrow?” And they’d say, “Now.” So we’d go, “Okay. Let’s do it.”

It sounds like there were a lot of shoot days involved.

Rachel Klein: There were. We kept discovering things that we wanted to add to the story as it evolved. There were additional shoot days because something new would emerge. We were constantly trying to get Nancy Pelosi for an interview. She ended up being a last-minute addition. She’s spectacular, but she’s also incredibly busy. Eventually we caught up with her at a bridge event and basically said, “Just go. Just try to get her.” There were little things like that happening throughout the entire six years.

Did the structure of the film change a lot during that time?

Rachel Klein: Massively. You start out thinking, “Oh, look at this beautiful dock shot,” and then the story immediately tells you, “Nope. We’re not doing that.”

Other times you find something completely unexpected. The Jim Jones section is a good example. We discovered that Jim Jones had once been involved in conversations around suicide prevention efforts at the bridge. Then suddenly you’re sitting there thinking, “Wait a minute. Are we talking about the same Jim Jones?” Those kinds of discoveries kept happening, and then the question became, “How do we integrate this?” because it spoke to how large and persistent the issue really was.

Yeah! I was not expecting that. Was there a lot that ended up getting left behind?

Rachel Klein: Oh, absolutely. Early on, we experimented with animation because some of the interviews dealt with people at their absolute lowest points. We thought there might be a way to illustrate those moments visually. We developed artwork. We animated sequences. We explored different styles. None of it survived. At the end of the day, the stories themselves were so compelling that you simply wanted to look the people telling them directly in the eye. That’s documentary filmmaking. Sometimes you think a section is going to be incredible and it ends up on the cutting-room floor. Other times somebody gives an interview that completely changes the film. A lot of the bridge employees gave fantastic interviews. Many of them were surprisingly funny. Those moments didn’t always fit into the finished film, but they have a wonderful sense of humor about what they do. I think that humor probably helps them deal with the reality of the work.

The footage in the film is remarkable. What was the process of gaining access to it?

Rachel Klein: The Golden Gate Bridge had never released CCTV footage in its 86-year history. Right from the start, I told our bridge producer that if we could get the footage, I wanted to open the film with a successful save. I wanted audiences to be thrown directly into that moment. But it was very important that it be a save. We did not want to show somebody taking their life in any way, shape, or form.

The sequence that opens the film is incredibly powerful.

Rachel Klein: It’s hard to watch, but it shows the reality. It’s ugly. It’s collaborative. It’s chaotic. Yet there’s also a kind of order to it. It also demonstrates how determined someone can be and how many people it takes to physically intervene and convince them otherwise. We knew that no amount of talking heads saying, “This is difficult,” would affect people the way actually seeing it would. We had to earn the bridge’s trust. We promised them that we would edit the sequence, show it to them, then lock it. No bait-and-switch. No changing our approach later. That opening sequence was essentially locked within the first year of production. A large part of that year was research and relationship-building, but the bridge trusted us enough to let us start the film that way.

What was it like spending six years immersed in a topic this heavy? You’re talking with people who have experienced tremendous loss.

Rachel Klein: It’s tough. The hardest part for me was probably the edit because you’re sitting there by yourself. I worked with editor Jeffrey Elmont, who’s a genius, but we’d send timelines back and forth and I’d spend most of my time alone in my office, watching these stories over and over. I’m a mom. For six years I watched parents talk about losing their children. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to lose one of my sons. The experience really taught me that I needed something completely opposite in my life to balance it out. I’m a huge anime fan, so I’d go watch Jujutsu Kaisen or something totally disconnected from this world. I found myself hovering over my own kids more. It was affecting how I interacted with them. It’s a hard subject to sit with for that long. But everybody on the film was conscious about checking in on one another. We’d ask, “You good?” Sometimes we’d push a deadline. Sometimes I’d call someone and say, “I can’t. I need a break.” We were lucky enough to have the time to do that.

In your own words, why is this story so important?

Rachel Klein: There’s the obvious answer, of course. But for me, it’s also a David-versus-Goliath story. I want people to understand that this tiny group of people changed everything. They changed how this problem was approached, and they got it done.

They never said, “There aren’t enough of us.” They never said, “We don’t have enough influence.” They never said, “We need some celebrity to champion this.” They quietly went out and convinced people. And they did it with kindness. They didn’t show up screaming at board meetings. They came in and said, “This is Kyle. This is my loved one. Thank you for your time.”

Eventually the board came to know them and care about them. You also had people like Tom who looked at the situation and asked, “How could we keep saying no?” At some point the conversation shifted from simply moving cars from Point A to Point B to recognizing that this was a major human issue. This is one of the world’s most famous landmarks. It’s one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World. We had to ask ourselves: What are we doing? I hope people leave the film paying a little more attention to the people around them and simply asking, “How are you doing today?” But I also hope they walk away understanding that if they want to create change, they shouldn’t wait for somebody else to do it. Just do it.

This is the world premiere, correct?

Rachel Klein: It is. We had a cast-and-crew screening beforehand, but this is the world premiere. What was really exciting about that screening was having all the people from the film and all the people who worked on the film in the room together. I was practically biting my hand watching the families watch the movie.

That’s a huge responsibility.

Rachel Klein: It is. We wanted to make sure this was their story, not my story. There are so many moving pieces in this film. There’s the engineering side, the architecture side, the bridge employees, the families. We wanted to make sure every aspect received the attention and respect it deserved. But the families were the people we were most nervous about. Thankfully, they were proud of the finished film, and that made us incredibly happy.

To wrap up, what’s next for you? Maybe an anime?

Rachel Klein: If I could make an anime, I’d be so happy! [Laughs] But the next project is much lighter. It’s a horror film called The Stage, which we shot during the strike when everybody was pretty angry at the entertainment industry.

The premise is that four people become trapped on a soundstage and one of them is the killer. The twist is that nobody knew who the killer was. Not the actors. Not the crew. Nobody. Each of the principal actors received a different outline, so they didn’t even know what the other characters were doing.

As a director, it was spectacular. I’m throwing water bottles around because I need somebody to turn a certain way, and then I’d accidentally drop one and have to say, “Never mind, that one was actually an accident.” At one point our makeup artist got trapped upstairs in a room and thought she was suddenly part of the movie. The cast and crew had an absolute blast making it. It was the complete opposite of Saving Four Seconds, and honestly, it was exactly what I needed after six years immersed in this story.

Saving Four Seconds premiered at the Austin Film Festival, chronicling the decades-long effort to install a suicide deterrent barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge and the advocates who refused to give up until it became a reality.

We want to thank Rachel Klein for taking the time to speak with us today.