JT Takagi and the Best Accidents

I first met JT Takagi in the late ’90s, when I joined the Third World Newsreel Production Workshop—a rigorous training ground for emerging filmmakers and one of the few spaces where working-class and BIPOC artists could learn to use the tools of cinema. Alumni of the program include filmmakers Grace Lee, Randy Redroad, Daresha Kyi, and Ada Gay Griffin. 

JT is a force: a teacher, sound recordist, filmmaker, and fierce advocate for collaborative storytelling long before it was de rigueur in the documentary field. As executive director of Third World Newsreel (and previously a longtime staff member), JT has mentored emerging BIPOC filmmakers through the TWN Production Workshop and distributes seminal documentaries, such as A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde (1995). She has also directed films about the Korean diaspora, including Homes Apart: Korea (1991, co-directed by Christine Choy) and The #7 Train: An Immigrant Journey (2000) with Hye Jung Park. Her work as a director and sound recordist has shaped generations of filmmakers—not only through her precise sound work on some of the most influential documentaries of the last 40 years, but also through her insistence that the process matters as much as the product. Partnering with communities that are the focus of the films she makes is not optional for Takagi; it is at the heart of her work. 

In this conversation, JT shares the “accident” that led her to sound and what she has learned by genuinely listening to the people and places she documents. We discuss sound not solely as a technical concern, but as a kind of intimacy, a form of ethical presence. We discuss directing, diasporic memory, and what it means to work in a field where women and people of color behind the camera must champion themselves and one another. We also discuss the radical persistence of Third World Newsreel, an organization whose mission has never been more urgent.

JT’s generosity of thought—and her deep well of practical knowledge—make this conversation one that anyone working in nonfiction film should read.

Yance Ford: JT, you have built a career as a sound artist and sound recordist on dozens of influential films and as the director of an impressive body of work about the Korean and Korean American experience. I want to talk about your sound work first, if that’s okay.

JT Takagi: Yes.

YF: What’s the origin story of Takagi as a sound recordist?

JTT: It was kind of accidental. I was volunteering at Third World Newsreel, and they had very loosely organized shoots. And among the issues would be, “Oh, who wants to do the sound?” I didn’t want to do sound, but I said, “Oh, I’ll do it. I don’t know what it is, but I’ll do it.”

YF: How did it go?

JTT: I promptly blew up a Nagra.¹ There’s one version of a Nagra where batteries come in a separate pack that you attach to it, and I reversed the polarity.  

YF: Oh, and things went boom.

JTT: Yes. So it was a painful lesson.

YF: Can you talk about your relationship to sound in cinema and how you view the role of sound in cinematic storytelling? I’m curious how one moves into sound recording by accident and winds up being one of the best sound recordists working in film.

JTT: That’s sort of the issue with sound in general; it’s an area that people don’t notice until it’s bad. You never get people to come out of a film saying, “Wow, that dialogue was really crisp.” 

It’s very similar on the set. But I think part of what’s interesting about it is that you have to listen beyond what you automatically pay attention to in a room.

In the position of the sound recordist, you’re also often getting closer to a subject than you might otherwise be. And so you’re able to talk to them and learn. So all those things appeal to me.

YF: Describe that relationship: mic’ing people up, dropping the microphone down people’s shirts. It’s a special relationship with the people that you interview because it’s intimate.

JTT: Well, it definitely means you have to try to get into a comfort zone with the person. And usually, you have the person who either has done this [being wired and interviewed] a billion times, so they’re just being friendly, or this is very new to them.

It’s also a matter of getting people comfortable. And I guess if I didn’t do that right, I would have a very objectified, I think, relationship to the person, because they would be just there. I would do a recording, but I wouldn’t necessarily have a feeling of the person themselves apart from their interview persona.

YF: How do you approach capturing and designing sound?

JTT: Well, it’s a little contradictory. I work to remove all the extraneous sounds and anything that could make a sound so that the person and location are, in some sense, unreal. I’ve gotten rid of all the realistic sounds around them. But the goal is to collect sounds after the interview that can be added back into the background.

So, especially in people’s homes, we’re shutting down everything. Whoever’s in the kitchen, the kids and all that. Unplugging refrigerators. Hopefully, I’ll remember to plug them back in. And then, after we do the interview, we try to collect those same sounds separately so that the director has an option to make it seem like a lived-in house during the interview.

I always tell my students to think of those things, because especially if they go on location, they may be in an area where they’ll never get a chance to go back and record sound there again. And there may be very particular sounds in a place that you should record. And that might mean you have to get up before everyone or stay up later than everyone, but it’s worth it.

One [film I worked on] was set in the Badlands in the winter, and there was snow, but we wanted the sound of quiet snow and environment, and it meant having to travel into deep snow areas and collect different sounds. And I remember thinking, Oh, we could freeze to death here and no one will find us.

YF: Can you talk about the difference between silence and room tone and how each functions differently in film? I’m interested in how silence is a type of sound. Room tone for example, is supposedly quiet, but there’s so much sound in room tone.

JTT: I think there are very few films where you have actual silence. But what you might have is the sound of a quiet space. Usually, when you have absolute silence, as happens often in student films, they just cut dialogue, and then there is truly nothing in between. As an audience member, you’re sort of shocked by what seems to be missing, and you’re not sure what’s missing. But you know something’s wrong.

I think [room tone] is a sense of people. Room tone does not make us feel that something’s missing but that we’re in the same place as these people. Room tone basically smooths our experience out. 

Film silence, which is not silence but usually the sound of a room or space/environment, can be a very effective way to force a viewer to think more deeply about what they are experiencing and what they are seeing. People write about films that make use of that—films that, for instance, don’t use music to “force” us to have a particular reaction to what we are seeing—but it’s rare.

YF: When you teach emerging filmmakers, whether at Third World Newsreel or City College, what do you emphasize about capturing sound?

JTT: What I encourage my students to do is approach projects where not only do we record dialogue, but I give them projects where they have to sound-design a piece, and also where they have to analyze a film that they’ve seen just in terms of sound.

And it’s usually an ear-opening experience for all of them, because they haven’t had to approach films that way before, having to think about just what the sound is doing for the film or how the filmmakers might have positioned mics in a scene, and then to have to take a project that’s MOS² and then have to think about what sounds they would add, and how that changes what the nature and impact of the film could be. They then have to actually record and edit the film for sound and mix all the elements—voice, effects, tones, and music—together, which is difficult but rewarding in the end.

This is a good experiment for everyone to try, to realize just how much sound impacts every aspect of how we feel about a scene or a film. There’s artistry involved in our work. It’s not just a technical thing.

I think the other part of it is that, because of the kinds of films I work on, it’s about the content as much as everything else. I’m always very aware of that. I work primarily on social issue documentaries, which in the end are going to potentially impact people’s thinking and hopefully lead to change. And that’s why I try to keep track of things like when someone misquotes something or mis-says something, to try to make sure we cover those lines. 

YF: It’s almost like being a script supervisor, when someone gets something wrong, misses a line, or flubs a line, there’s always a point where your voice pipes up. And you’ll say, “This person should go back and say such and such again,” or “Can we get that line again? Because there was something in the background.”  

I don’t know if you realize that you have this presence on set. When you speak up and say, “Hold on,” or “We need to get that again,” you gently remind the director that something needs to be said over. It’s always because you’ve been paying attention to what’s being said and what it sounds like. And there can be a dozen people in the room, but you hear what others can’t necessarily hear.

That seems to me kind of like a filmmaking superpower. Being directly connected to the most powerful listening device on set feels like having secret access to the heart of a story.

JTT: It was interesting when you said that I was sort of like a script supervisor. You know, that was my first job.

YF: Really? That makes so much sense!

JTT: Yeah, coming out of film school I did script supervision and then slowly transitioned to sound.

YF: So you’ve been listening to what people say since before you were recording what they say. I want to pivot to some of the themes in the films you’ve directed. Many of them center on the AAPI immigrant and diasporic experience. What draws you to these stories? 

JTT: Well, in most cases, it’s an issue of uncovering history or lives that have not been shown before or have been ignored or mistreated. I firmly believe everyone has a story to tell, and we just haven’t been privy to most of them. Making films about our communities has been historically deprioritized and [is] right now getting more deprioritized as we speak by the powers that be. But that’s why I encourage everyone to film their families, to film relatives, because if we don’t uncover these stories, no one may.

And in particular, my interest in Korea really started with Third World Newsreel, which had made films about Chinese and Japanese in the past. And at one point, we were challenged. Someone approached me and said, “How come you haven’t done a film about Korean Americans?” And this was way back before there were many films about the community coming out.  

I thought, up till that challenge, that I was a pretty conscientious Asian American, but I really knew nothing about the history of Japan in Korea—occupying the country and the trauma, generational trauma, that came out of that, and then the US incursion and continued presence there. After doing a lot of study with people, I realized this is something that we should try to work on and bring to light.

Tragically, we’re in a situation where the Korean War is still not over, and we still have a divided Korea, and we have the potential for war and nuclear disaster looming even closer than it was a few years ago.

Third World Newsreel has done three films about the Korean Peninsula and taken on a fair number [of films] from other makers from Korea for distribution. But I remember when we were working on Homes Apart: Korea and Bittersweet Survival: Southeast Asian Refugees in America, we were saying in 1991, “By the time we finish this film, the country will be reunited, and we don’t even need to make this film.”

And then, of course, here we are in 2025, in the same position: a divided country with the potential for war, the US troops still in South Korea, and threatening everybody in Asia at this point.

I’ve always worked in partnership with Korean Americans on the films I’ve made about Korea. So I partnered with Christine Choy on Homes Apart, and with Hye Jung Park on The Women Outside: Korean Women and the US Military [1995] and The #7 Train and North Korea: Beyond the DMZ [2003].

YF: Why is working with other Asian American filmmakers important to you? Why do you focus your body of work on films that are about issues that you’re active around?

JTT: Well, Third World Newsreel came into existence, from its original formation as the Newsreel, over the issue of who is telling whose story. Most of our organization’s early films were made by very well-meaning white activist filmmakers about communities of color, whether it was the Black Panthers or the Young Lords or labor movements.

While they worked with them, there was no representation in the production team from the community itself, except for voiceover narrations and people giving consultant advice and things like that.

They managed to make really good films, but it also became clear that you can’t really be a progressive filmmaking organization and not aim to either work collaboratively with community members or train the community to make their own films. Which is part of the basis for the transformation of Newsreel to Third World Newsreel back in the early ’70s. 

It’s incumbent on anyone who is thinking about working on a topic that’s not necessarily their own story that they work in true collaboration with the community that they’re depicting. I remember going to film screenings in the past where, after watching a fascinating but devastating story, the audience would ask the filmmaker, “Oh, and what happened after that?” And they were like, “Oh, I don’t know. We moved on to another project.” That really left a bad feeling for me in terms of what the responsibility of the filmmaker is to the issue, to the people.

My first documentary with Third World Newsreel also was a trigger. Bittersweet Survival [1982], which was the first documentary I did in collaboration with Christine Choy, was a film on the conflicts that arose after Southeast Asian refugees were resettled in the US after the Vietnam War, conflicts between the refugees and the resident communities.

We made the film, but we weren’t directly working on those issues, and I felt bad about that afterwards. I didn’t want to really work on a film where we’re asking so much from people to contribute to the film, but aside from the film itself, we’re not necessarily supporting their struggles [or] giving back to them. 

So from that point, I wanted to try to make films that had a clear responsibility to the community that was depicted and where I would have an active role in helping to make change outside of the film itself.

YF: How did you come to discover Third World Newsreel? What was your first involvement in the organization?

JTT: I had heard about Third World Newsreel as a teenager. I had seen some of the films, and I knew it was the kind of place with a mission I could get into. At the time, I didn’t think regular people really worked in film. So I was doing the Asian American thing—you know, science, medicine, things like that. I did media on the side, and eventually, even while I was still in school, I would volunteer at Third World Newsreel. But I didn’t think it was anything serious in terms of what I would do after school. 

And then I had an epiphany at some point, partially because everyone at the organization would work on films but no one could tell me why we used a light meter, for example. Why did we have to point the mic any particular way? I couldn’t understand why you couldn’t just stand on the side of the room and just hold up the mic and get sound. And people got annoyed, and they finally said, “Well, why don’t you just go to film school?” And I ended up doing that. I went to NYU, but I spent half the time working on stuff for Newsreel.

YF: It feels to me like the work of Third World Newsreel is more important now than it has ever been. In April, the House of Representatives approved a GOP-backed rescission bill that would withdraw approximately $1.1 billion in already appropriated funding for public broadcasters like NPR and PBS. How is Newsreel navigating this political moment as an organization that receives public arts funding?

JTT: I don’t think there was any point that Third World Newsreel was in a golden period. Because we’ve never been very popular with private foundations. We have been able to get some federal, state, and city support, though federal has just gone away, as you can guess. It was rare for us to get major foundation funding or anything like that. There have been periodic exceptions. But then with BLM, Black Lives Matter, we began to suddenly get more attention. 

We’re used to being lean and spare, and the organization itself has historically been under attack in the past. The early Newsreel group had huge FBI files, because they were presumed to be somehow dangerous types in the late 1960s and early ’70s. And then in the ’80s, under Reagan, there were written attacks. People were attacking the NEA for supporting groups like ours. 

So right now, this is like a renewed but more weaponized version of what happened in the past. I think part of our issue is our name. One person suggested, “Oh, why don’t you change your name to First World?” Doing that defeats the point of why we’re here.

But we anticipate that more bad things will happen. We have had an NEA and a Humanities New York grant terminated. Additionally, TWN is the fiscal sponsor of a project that came through the National Park Service, which we heard will be hit next.

But I think on our part, at least so far, because we’ve always been preparing for the worst, we’ve been very careful with how we spend our money. We have to believe we’ll survive this. We also feel that our importance is not only the training and work that we do, and the films we distribute—about 700 films made by about 400 mostly BIPOC filmmakers—but we hold an archive of materials that document many of our communities in the late 1960s through the mid-’70s. Not to mention the films that we’ve made since then, which range from the film about Audre Lorde, A Litany for Survival, which I’m sure is on somebody’s hit list somewhere, to all our films about Korea, for that matter.

I think, on one hand, we have material that would probably be considered provocative. On the other hand, it’s our history, culture, and community. We have to value it and take care of it as much as we can. We’ve been very lucky in the last few years. Before the election, we were able to get some funding to be able to digitally preserve a lot of our older films, and now we’re trying to raise money to be able to preserve the rest of the material so that we can be sure that they’ll exist for future generations to come.

It’s difficult. We expect difficulty. We hope we’re going to make it through. We’re pretty sure we will. We might have to be a lot smaller than we were before. I don’t know if we can get any cheaper than we were before, but we can try. And we are hoping that the communities we have served, as filmmakers and film viewers, will support us.

YF: You have broken ground as a director and as a sound recordist and with your work at Third World Newsreel. What do you think of as your legacy?

JTT: I think the legacy will be the films and the mission that we serve at the organization. And I think it’s going to be in the next generation of filmmakers who come up. And I’m glad to say that past students of ours, so many of them are filmmakers/activists. They’re actively working on issues. They see the power of media, but also the power beyond media in terms of how they can contribute to change.

YF: What advice would you give to emerging sound recordists and directors who look up to you and hope to follow in your footsteps?

JTT: Well, two different things now. The realistic one—because I just had a union boom operator talk to my class the other day who had only doom and gloom to report—we’re telling everyone, keep your day job, as no one can say right now what’s going to happen in production or in the funding of productions. For independent filmmakers, it helps to have a skill that will help you when you’re making your film or a job while you are raising money to make that film. 

I think the core thing, though, is to believe in the thing that you’re working on and to be committed to it, because that’s the only way things get done, right? You have to really believe that it has to get done, that you have to put yourself out there to do it, and it might mean it may take you longer, and you might have to use cheaper means than you hoped for. But I believe people who end up becoming filmmakers are those who really, truly believe in it.