Noah Hutton
Documentary Filmmaker
Born in 1987, in Los Angeles to actors Timothy Hutton and Debra Winger, Noah spent his childhood on and around film sets and developed a passion for filmmaking of his own at an early age. After attending the Fieldston School in the Bronx, NY, Hutton entered Wesleyan University as a freshman in 2005. In the summer of 2007, he traveled to Uganda with the Jacob Burns Film Center’s World Crew program and co-directed a documentary film entitled "Shooting for Peace" that tracked three pressing issues in that country: child soldiers, water treatment, and HIV/AIDS orphans. Before directing "Crude Independence", Noah directed the narrative 16 mm short "Knives" produced by the Wesleyan Film Cooperative.
At age 21, "Crude Independence" marked Noah Hutton’s directorial debut. Hutton first learned of the oil boom in North Dakota from a New York Times article published in January of 2008. He boarded a flight two days later for North Dakota and spent a week shooting location footage and talking to locals. After putting together a proposal and raising funds all spring, he set off along with his producer and stepbrother, Sam Howard, and co-producer, Sara Kendall, to spend the summer filming "Crude Independence". The film was an official selection at the 2009 South by Southwest Film Festival and won the Jury Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 2009 Oxford Film Festival. Says a 2009 SXSW Review, "In a day and age when every documentary that releases has some sort of slant, it is refreshing to see one borne only out of its subjects. I know that with any editing process there is an argument being made. But 'Crude Independence' manages to straddle that line better than any film in recent memory."
Hutton's next directorial project will be a documentary feature, produced by Love Hope Strength, a global cancer foundation. Seun Adebiyi, a 26-year-old Nigerian-born Yale Law School graduate, is training for the Winter Olympics in Skeleton—and has recently been diagnosed with leukemia. He splits his time between training sessions in Salt Lake City and chemotherapy sessions in New York City, and is running bone marrow donor drives in the US and in Nigeria to try to find a genetic match who will save his life and allow him to compete. The story is set against the stories of two other leukemia patients, told in flashback: one who successfully found a match and one who did not. Hutton will be following Seun to Salt Lake City and Nigeria as he looks for a match and trains for the Olympics.
For the next ten years Hutton will be filming footage for a documentary feature about The Blue Brain Project. Henry Markram, scientist and project director, is building an entire brain, neuron by neuron, in a massive virtual simulation on IBM supercomputers. It is the most ambitious project in the fields of neuroscience and artificial intelligence ever undertaken—and in ten years Hutton will have documented the process of building a complete human brain. Visit The Beautiful Brain website for his podcasts, essays, and reviews on the art and science of the human mind.
About CRUDE INDEPENDENCE
"Crude Independence" is a documentary film about the heartland in the process of transplanting itself, and the new heart is pumping oil. In 2006, the United States Geological Survey estimated there to be more than 200 billion barrels of crude oil resting in a previously unreachable formation beneath western North Dakota. With the advent of new drilling technologies, oil companies from far and wide descended on small towns across the state with men and machinery in tow. Director Noah Hutton takes us to the town of Stanley (population 1300), sitting atop the largest oil discovery in the history of the North American continent, and captures the change wrought by the unprecedented boom in the years since the discovery. Through revealing interviews and breathtaking imagery of the northern plains, "Crude Independence" is a rumination on the future of small town America: a tale of change at the hands of the global energy market and America's unyielding thirst for oil. This directorial debut from twenty-one year-old Noah Hutton is at once a riveting journey through the timeline of a modern day gold rush as it is a rumination on the present state and the uncertain future of small town America.We first meet the citizens of Stanley—the townsfolk, store owners, county officials, and lifelong farmers. They have lived here for decades, thinking not of what lies beneath the land but of what can be reaped from its surface. Some have bought more land to plant more crops, selling off that same lands’ mineral rights in the process—the rights to the oil beneath, a treasure most have neither imagined nor planned for.
New horizontal drilling technology allows the oil men to find what they’re looking for; and soon enough it happens. Strange metallic creatures begin to pop up here and there, teetering up and down as they drain this black gold from its millennia-old stockpile in the shale crust known as the Bakken Formation. We meet John Warberg, a lifelong farmer who owns the same section of land his grandparents first homesteaded over a century ago. And in a boisterous group interview behind the local bar, we meet the oil workers that have been forced to stay at the Stanley Motel, then in run-down trailers as the motel fills up as a result of the housing shortage in this rural area. The county sheriff tells us about the three signs of this oil boom: “First your motel fills up, then your bars, and lastly, your jails.”
"Crude Independence" puts this modern day oil boom in endearing and captivating human terms while still managing to explore the larger issues of energy dependence, political alignment, and soaring gas prices. Framed by the July 4th parade down Stanley’s Main Street, Crude Independence is an American saga of a small town facing the descent of a global market and all the accompanied change. Hutton’s film frames a parallel of two parades—that of oil and that of independence—and in doing so has created a modern American tale of how a resource so far below can so dramatically affect life on the surface.
