Johnson was filming another movie in Kabul, Afghanistan when she ultimately created her short film, The Above. While living in Kabul, she noticed a blimp in the sky and asked what it was, only to be given the short answer: “That’s classified.” She was subsequently ordered not to film it. “I thought, wait a minute, are you seriously telling me I can’t film the sky?”
Her interest in the blimp came from her background of growing up in a religious household. “It’s not just political, it stretches to my own personal experience as a child who was raised religiously and who believed a bible verse that said, ‘God knows your thoughts before you think them.’ I believed that and it’s a part of how my brain structure was formed.” When she began filming and interviewing locals, Johnson found that the assumptions and opinions of the blimp varied greatly, but at the same time, many mirrored her own fascination. “It was amazing to find a man who said to me, ‘God created the person who made the blimp and God sees everything.’ It was as if this man was speaking to my childhood self.”
Johnson began with smaller, basic questions while filming The Above: What is this blimp? Who controls it? And what does the community think of it? But as is often the case with any artistic medium, those smaller questions are gateways to larger questions about the human experience and the larger world in which we all live. “What are the big systems at work? Militaries, religions, nationalism, social control, expectations for what one gender can do or be or how many genders there are, all of those things.” Johson’s process was all about gathering evidence, finding clues, taking risks and discovering how uncovering answers from her interview subjects revealed who they were as people. She also points out the importance of asking questions when you have the opportunity; you may not know how much time you have in a particular space and when you might be asked to leave.
By following her instincts on her own terms and in her own time outside of her other shoot, Johnson ended up making an entire film out of a simple curiosity.
In determining where your interests might take your creative practice, Johnson recommends creating a long list of what interests you, what you want to say, why you’re doing this work and how your work affects others, and pay particular attention to how those needs may contradict one another. Contradictions are bound to happen, and that’s OK; they don’t all need to be resolved.
“You’re asking so many things of yourself: make something remarkable, make money, change the world, have fun, and on and on,” Johnson says. “I support the self-criticism and criticism of systems of power, and being gentle with each other and ourselves is how we’re able to go through these processes.”