Invest in a Quality Team, Not a Specific Idea
Balancing Predictability and Spontaneity in Documentary
In 2008, at the 58th Berlin Film Festival, accomplished producer Julie Ahlberg was asked how she managed to raise the funds necessary to complete her new documentary, Standard Operating Procedure.
“I had Errol Morris,” was her response.
At the time, Errol Morris (one of only a handful of “household name” documentary filmmakers in America) was just coming off an Oscar win for his film, The Fog of War. Ahlberg (who also produced Fog of War) was saying this recent success gained the trust of investors for Standard Operating Procedure. It’s not unreasonable to infer that without such success on their previous project, perhaps some of the money for their subsequent project would never have been offered.
This makes sense especially when talking about documentary film.
Good business desires predictability. When you’re pouring hundreds, thousands, or millions of dollars into a project, you want to know where your money is going. That’s perfectly reasonable. Why throw money at something you can’t see/imagine/understand?
In contrast, producing quality nonfiction film requires a comfort with spontaneity not frequently asked of investors and businesses. Writing proposals for nonfiction projects is notoriously hard, because all a filmmaker can speak to with honesty is their intentions (i.e. we will investigate X subject matter, and in so doing, we hope to explore Y theme). If you get too beholden to desired conclusions, when production begins you risk choking out life in favor of conforming to the preconceived idea. That way lies disaster for nonfiction.
How can these competing interests coexist? Is there any way to preserve the spontaneity required for quality documentary while also giving the business interest its desired level of security/predictability?
A lot of this comes down to trust. When you, the business or investor, sit down with the production team, how do you feel? When you look at their prior work, what do you see? When you listen to the words of previous collaborators, what’s the reputation you hear?
Of course the idea matters. If the filmmaker wants to make a movie about how “GMOs are bad for our collective health” while you believe “GMOs help to combat hunger in underprivileged communities around the world,” obviously that is not a match made in heaven.
However, if you and the filmmaker both want to make a project about the Voyager 1 satellite mission of 1977 and how it was a beautiful gesture of cosmic poetry, don’t try to firm up the idea too much beyond that. Instead, investigate the filmmaker. What does their previous work suggest about how they will most likely handle this subject? How much do you speak each other’s language when discussing the project? Are you on the same wavelength?
When Morris was looking for investors for a documentary about Abu Ghraib, he could point to his handling of subjects like Robert McNamara & Vietnam (The Fog of War), the failings of the criminal justice system (The Thin Blue Line), and the psychology of Holocaust denial (Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchtner) as suggestions for how he would handle abuses in Iraq War prisons. It was easy to believe in the filmmaker, and the investors didn’t have to know exactly what Morris’ conclusions would end up being because they could guess based on his prior work.
If you believe in the creative team and feel a connection to the intended area of exploration, that is more worthy of your investment than a firm, calculated idea from less compatible filmmakers.
