Four Things Every Documentary Filmmaker Should Know
It’s Oscar Week, which means we’ll be sharing stories and lessons from this year’s nominees. Here, the artists behind the Documentary Feature and Short Subject films discuss the things they learned.
The direction of your story might change, so stay open-minded
When Yance Ford set out to make Strong Island, a personal film about the murder of his brother, he started with the question: “What happened?” This later turned into “why did it happen?” and, eventually, led to a whole different line of inquiry.
“[It] broadened the story out from one that was about my family to one that was about a familiar sequence of events that happen to particular people in the United States.”
Documentary work can lead filmmakers, and their audiences, on journeys they never anticipated. As Frank Stiefel, director of the nominated short Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405, put it:
“It’s religion. There’s no evidence that there’s a film there, but you just keep on showing up as if there might be.”
Documentary feature Icarus began as a personal pursuit, when director and amateur cyclist Bryan Fogel decided to document himself doping and attempting to pass a drug test. The film turned into something far more political — and more timely — when Fogel sought the help of Grigory Rodchenkov, head of the Russian anti-doping lab. An international doping scandal ensued.
“When I started out, I couldn’t have imagined where this was going to go—but once I was in it, I never saw a way out,” Fogel said.
Laura Checkoway, director of the short film Edith + Eddie, experienced a similarly unexpected turn of events. She started with the story of a couple of newlyweds in their nineties.
“I wanted to know what it would be like to find love at that time in your life.”
As the story progressed, Edith’s daughters disagreed about what was best for their mother, and the couple grew in danger of being torn apart.
“If you’re following people’s lives in real time, then you don’t know what twists and turns are going to come,” Checkoway added.
Find a story that wouldn’t otherwise be told
Agnès Varda and JR’s documentary feature Faces Places focuses on “simple people with no power” throughout France, Varda said. The duo travelled and documented them “so we could make you, the audience, meet these people.”
The project, specifically, allowed its subjects not only to enter the documentary, but to be part of the act of creation and imagination at its core. Varda and JR would photograph citizens and paste large-scale prints of them across towns, beaches and docks, showcasing individuals—and their stories—for their towns and the world to see in a new light.
And then there are stories that are kept under wraps. Producer Dan Cogan was initially interested in Icarus because of its sneaky, muckraking quality—exposing a practice that’s often hidden.
“We hear about doping, but we never see it,” he said.
Let the viewer learn alongside you
Stiefel, whose documentary short follows Mindy Alper, a brilliant artist suffering from mental illness, came to his subject with fresh eyes. “There’s not one minute of that film that I knew about,” he said, referring to her illnesses and her backstory. This allowed the audience to go on the samejourney of meeting and understanding Alper, too.
Fellow Oscar nominee Thomas Lennon read about the subject of his film in the newspaper. Knife Skills follows the opening of a Cleveland restaurant in which everyone working in the kitchen (with the exception of two people) was recently released from prison.
By simply “hanging out” there, he went through same stages of education as any viewer would. His preconceived notions of the chefs were shattered as he grew close to them, and his views tested once more when he saw some fall back into their old ways. What he discovered, ultimately, was that “the road to recovery is a bumpy one.”
Restrictions can turn into opportunities
Sometimes, limitations create new possibilities for creativity. Just ask the team behind the nominated feature Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, which follows the only financial institution to face criminal charges after the subprime mortgage crisis: a family-owned community bank in New York’s Chinatown.
Director Steve James and producers Mark Mitten and Julie Goldman discovered that they weren’t able to film in the courtroom or film either the prosecution or the Sungs’ defense layer. “We basically only had ‘access’ to the Sung family outside the courtroom,” James said. But the Sungs all turned out to be “compelling, principled, courageous, funny.”
“That’s the center of our movie anyway,” James added.
With Last Men in Aleppo, director Feras Fayyad aimed to change society, and to change the way people think about Syrians. His team risked their safety to tell the story of the “White Helmet” volunteers on the frontline of the Syrian Civil War.
“I grew up in an environment where, if you say no, you’re going to go to jail or you’re going to be killed,” Fayyad said.
“For us in Syria, film is art. It’s a way for freedom of expression, a way of saying no.”
Click here to learn more about this year’s Oscar nominees. For all things Oscars, visit Oscar.com.
