It’s become burrowed in our psyche: the necessity of a diamond ring when it comes to marriage proposals. Not to mention the most prized gift a significant other could desire no matter the situation. When did this idea begin? And in an industry where synthetic, man-made diamonds are on the rise, what is the future for value of the product? All these questions (and many more) are answered in Jason Kohn’s new documentary Nothing Lasts Forever.
A perfect double-feature with Uncut Gems, the entertaining, occasionally shocking documentary explores all facets of the modern-day diamond industry. From the fabrication of socially accepted ideas of romantic love, pushing the scarcity myth, and above all the importance of crafting a good story, Nothing Lasts Forever gives impressive weight to all sides of the twisty tale without painting anyone into a definitively villainous corner.
With the film arriving in theaters this Friday courtesy of Showtime, I had the opportunity to speak to the director about his globe-trotting adventure, what the media is failing to report, his cast of subjects, his thoughts on the Safdies’ latest film, and the future of the industry.
The Film Stage: I was struck by how balanced the viewpoints are, with the different subjects you bring and how you see the whole scope of everything. What was the process for finding these people and then the balance in the edit of not painting anyone in too villainous a light?
Jason Kohn: In terms of how we got access to all of them, that’s an odyssey that took place over essentially a 13-year window. So it’s a really long story, but the other kind of the larger note is about the evenhandedness, which to me is extremely important and essential. There are characters with whom I fundamentally disagree with about everything. And what’s funny is that actually the hero of this story, the only person who actually has a plot, is Dusan Simic, one of the world’s greatest gemologists. He and I became great friends throughout the process of making this film. I would stay at his apartment. We traveled the world together multiple times. And he’s somebody with whom I disagreed with. Often we would argue endlessly about natural versus synthetics.
This isn’t to say that just because I disagree with somebody, they’re a villain. I think that it was really essential, especially when it came to Stephen Lussier and Martin Rapaport, that they are understood as characters. Their perspectives are not in minority in this world. As a matter of fact, I would argue that their perspectives are far more common than anybody else’s. And if we don’t understand exactly where everybody’s coming from, how the hell do we have an actual real conflict?
Ultimately, this is portraying the real conflict of the diamond world. It was so difficult to make this movie because nobody wanted to talk about it. People were so scared of this product, scared of mixing, scared of people finding out about mixing. If those perspectives are painted with cartoonish colors, if the audience isn’t given an opportunity to actually understand where they’re coming from, then the conflict isn’t real. Then we don’t understand why people care about what they care about. For a long time the movie was actually called Origin Stories: Part One, because in my head there was a sequel to it. But the real idea of origin stories for this particular film was so much about how for every single person in the movie, I’d like to believe that you truly understand why they have the perspective on the diamond industry that they have. For example, Martin’s first story about having $5,000 in his pocket says so much about the psychology of having objects that have value. Because that is where some people derive their self-worth. And if that is where you derive your self-worth, of course you’re going to fight for that object to continue having its value. So this is as much a psychological, dramatic, narrative argument as it is an ethical moral argument.
You mentioned it took 13 years to find the subjects and, with this globe-trotting scope, it feels more like an espionage thriller than your standard documentary. Can you talk about this cinematic vision?
All of the projects that I work on personally start with an understanding of what kind of genre they belong to. When I first met Dusan, that’s when the story really picked up and while I really focused on Dusan, I think Aja [Raden] and Martin really steal the show in many ways, but Dusan to me is the heart of the film because he provides the plot. When I met Dusan in New York at his little laboratory, he had just published this article identifying within the diamond trade that natural diamonds were being mixed with synthetics. What I saw was this person who was responsible for identifying two things that were identical. And to me, it was immediately obvious that this was a Blade Runner character. If he was a Blade Runner character, all of a sudden we were going to have to make a movie that adopted certain conventions, not only of noir but of thriller, of science fiction. And that’s where it all started.
Once I started following him around the world on his trips, I realized there was this kind of globetrotting element, popular ideas of diamonds, but also bring the weight of James Bond. All of these kinds of film conventions, aesthetics, started to become obvious while making the movie. And one of the things I love so much about nonfiction is that we get to paint a palette from reality. It’s kind of a bullshit statement I just said, because everything does––all art does no matter what. We’re slightly more beholden to facts as they occur in front of our camera and in real-time. So when those things happen, it becomes a wonderful challenge. How do you render this environment that you’re put into, whether it’s in India or Botswana or in China aesthetically in a way that fits into these kind of film conventions? And then it’s there’s this kind of artistic puzzle that you’re you’re faced with in process.
And I love this. It’s wonderful. For so long I bought into some kind of false hierarchy of genre where fiction was really the goal of cinema. And as I’ve been making more and more nonfiction, I’ve never, ever once felt creatively dissatisfied by not working with actors. I’ve never felt hindered in my ability to be artistically satisfied as a director by not working with actors or a script beforehand. It’s not like we don’t script, but the order of operations is slightly off. So all of these things, to me, are the essential components of what makes nonfiction so good when you come at it from a genre perspective.
When a movie like Uncut Gems made a big cultural impact, where were you in the process of making your film? Do you think the attention around it aid the potential audience for this film?
We were really finishing up our edit when the film came out. And one of the film’s producers was a neighbor of ours. I remember he had told me when they had just gotten back from their Africa trip because he knew that we were also making films about diamonds. I’m a big fan of the Safdies and so when I saw the movie, I was so happy. I actually feel a similar way about Uncut Gems, as I did about City of God when Manda Bala came out. I feel like those two movies felt like siblings, and in a weird way, they were taking two very, very different looks at a similar problem––one through way more through a lens of poverty, one way more through the lens of wealth and power.
I think Uncut Gems and Nothing Lasts Forever kind of attack a similar world through two different kinds of lenses also. So I love Uncut Gems––it’s funny, it’s cool. To me, what the Safdies do so well and I think about often––more than almost anything else––is momentum. How do you keep momentum up in the narrative. In nonfiction, it’s often a lot more difficult for a lot of different reasons. We have a lot more exposition and portraiture often to get through. That’s another one of the challenges, but when you look at a movie like Uncut Gems, you see this blistering pace and it’s so much fun. I think Nothing Lasts Forever also has a certain pace and a humor and a dedication to a fun narrative.
Yeah, it’s that kind of relationship where, after you watch one, you should watch the other. There are so many fascinating tidbits that come up with the interview subjects—like this notion of romantic love having only really been around for like 150 years. What were you most surprised by during your interviews, and what kind of conversations has it spawned with the audiences that have seen the film?
One of the things that surprised me most is not as much something that’s in the film, but it’s something that I was always curious about. The second that I stumbled onto this mixing scandal, the fact that lab-grown diamonds, man-made diamonds have been mixed with natural diamonds now for well over ten years now, it is well-known within the industry. People have been trying to fight this forever. This is not a journalistic film yet we were definitely breaking a story back in 2015 when we landed in the world’s largest diamond factory in China, and got the actual numbers on how many millions of carats were coming out of that one factory, going to three distributors in India at the time. There was a large effort within the diamond industry to find out where the diamonds were coming from, where they were being mixed. And so we were actually breaking news in a kind of a journalistic way before anybody else had found that out in the industry. Then the industry later found that out.
But one of the most surprising things throughout the entire making of this film––that was back in 2015––is that nobody, not one non-diamond press, has covered the story of mixing diamonds. And it’s crazy to me because there have been lots and lots of stories about lab-grown diamonds and whether they are ethically or environmentally better. There have been lots of stories about the inequities of the diamond industry and yet this one aspect of the diamond issue, which is this mixing problem, has never been covered. And I think there are two reasons, really. One is because the diamond industry is extremely insular and this information has been protected. But I’m not a journalist and it wasn’t very difficult to figure this out. The other thing that’s unique about diamond narratives, especially nonfiction and journalism, is that even those that are critical of the diamond never attack the underlying fundamental mythology of the diamond. That is what this mixing scandal does. It really attacks the heart of what a diamond is and I feel like that was always what was important about the movie, is to really dismantle the underlying myths of the diamond and the underlying stories that have been told to us and that we talk to each other and that we perpetuate.
So the fact that that mixing story has never been told––and it feels like it’s a global story, it has to do with factories in China and India, the dealers in Belgium and New York and in Moscow. It’s international, it’s big and I feel like it reverberates with everybody who sees it. And yet nobody talks about it, and that’s another big part of the story. This movie is really about those things that we kind of all know a little bit in terms of that, especially the diamond mythology. But we kind of just don’t want to think about it and we don’t. There’s so many elements in the world that we kind of know are bullshit. I always love those moments where people are just like, “Let me believe what I want to believe. Let me have Santa Claus. Stop bursting bubbles. Stop being such a killjoy all the time.” There’s so many things like that. And those are the things that I love the most.
Because of the technological advancements of the last ten or 15 years, it seems a movie like yours can be made about almost any industry. Obviously we have Who Killed the Electric Car? and other films of that ilk, but I’m curious: in your research—and just travels around the world—have you picked up on other industries and topics that could tell a similar story?
This movie started way before crypto and NFTs came about but there’s a real 1:1 relationship between the diamond and what we see and going on in the crypto world. That felt like the single most obvious because it’s so recent and has gone through so many fluctuations. That really distills everything that the diamond has been going through for around 100 years because the proper invention of the diamond as De Beers created it was a post-World War II relic. It’s continued very powerfully, so much so it’s incredible we tend to believe that millennials and Gen Z are less engaged with the diamond myth––no pun intended, actually. Yet diamond prices have gone through the roof, especially through the pandemic.
Anecdotally, you get a sense that younger people don’t care as much, but it actually doesn’t seem like that. The numbers don’t really bear that out so much. And what that means is there was this enormous marketing push for diamonds. I felt it very much as a kid in the nineties. The boomers, my parents’ generation, they were the ones that were really trained and indoctrinated in the diamond myth. We’ve seen all that marketing decrease dramatically, but the net effect hasn’t really decreased dramatically.
You still have this idea that if you’re going to get married, you need to give a diamond engagement ring, to people who were not inundated with diamonds are forever marketing. The claws have sunk so deep into our psyche, it’s almost become genetic. I don’t foresee that in terms of the NFT market, but we don’t need De Beers telling us that you need to get a diamond any more because our parents and peers and friends and siblings––everybody else is telling us that you need to get a diamond or two. It’s become culture.
Since you’ve filmed, have there been any updates that you wish you could add back into the film? Or is it just kind of waiting for more people to learn about what you’ve covered?
Because of the pandemic, this movie had actually been finished a little while ago. The only thing that’s changed dramatically since the movie came out is the price of diamonds has gone up, natural diamonds have gone up. There are a couple of things that are really interesting. There’s a moment in the movie where one of the main characters says, “If we lose the engagement ring market, you’re out of business, I’m out of business, we’re all out of business.” And this is one of the most important people inside the diamond industry, Martin Rapaport. He says that to a bunch of synthetic diamond manufacturers and retailers.
Now De Beers is selling two-carat loose white diamonds for $800 a carat. Whereas De Beers was selling a smaller colored, kind-of-custom-style synthetic diamonds, now they’re selling big, white, beautiful engagement ring diamonds for nothing comparatively. So De Beers now is selling engagement ring diamonds. That’s the big story that has happened since. Nothing really happens very fast in the diamond world because it’s an entrenched, old-school market. But that’s kind of a big deal, in the diamond world anyway.
Nothing Lasts Forever opens in theaters on Friday, November 11.