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Documentary Overview
By Darrell Hope
Stacy Peralta and Jessica Yu
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When most people think of the film industry, the first things that usually pop into their minds are feature films and television. However, a large amount of what we know of the world via film has been translated to us through the art and craft of documentary filmmakers. Even though their overall goal is to present a story in a nonfictional manner, their styles can range from the heart-rendingly dramatic to the comically absurd. However, their passion for ferreting out truths often give us insights, not only into others, but sometimes into ourselves.
DGA Magazine recently spoke with DGA members Michael Apted, Errol Morris, Jessica Yu, St. Clair Bourne, Stacy Peralta and Mark Lewis, and asked them to comment on the art, craft and state of the modern documentary.
Although Michael Apted joined the DGA as a director of narrative films like the recent James Bond feature The World Is Not Enough, he also directed the seminal 1964
documentary Seven Up, about a group of 7 year olds from diverse backgrounds, and continued their stories in the
follow-up films Seven Plus Seven, 21 Up, 28 Up, 35 Up and 42 Up. Recipient of the 1999 International Documentary Association's Career Achievement Award, Apted's other documentaries include Inspirations where seven artists discuss their respective art forms and Me & Isaac Newton in which scientists are given a similar treatment.
Apted is very outspoken in his support for both the DGA and the status of documentary filmmakers. "Documentarians need to know that the Guild is there for them because it's a very difficult world," said Apted. "There isn't the kind of structure in documentary filmmaking that there is in feature filmmaking. There are a lot of very low budgets and a lot of exploitation goes on. It's important that the DGA is there and that directors know that they have the Guild and other experienced documentary filmmakers as a lifeline."
Documentarian Errol Morris would agree with that assessment. For Morris, having the Guild behind him makes the rough road of independent documentary filmmaking less perilous. "The DGA is great," said Morris. "It has been my champion on a number of occasions. It helps me to collect from producers. It's a very valuable and important union. The Guild is a great blessing and it's important to know that they're there for me."
A DGA member since 1990, Errol Morris is the director of the 1988 International Documentary Association (IDA) Award-winning The Thin Blue Line, which proved Texas inmate Randall Adams was wrongly convicted of murder and helped free him from death row. Morris's filmography also includes the 1999 DGA Award-nominated Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.
"I'm asked unendingly whether my films are documentaries," said Morris. "The answer is 'yes' and 'no.' There are elements of fiction and nonfiction in all filmmaking. I use real people. They're not reading a prepared script. They're attempting to talk about themselves. That's real. But I do other things that are closer to fictional films, like I storyboard, for instance."
St. Clair Bourne
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St. Clair Bourne says the thinning of that line between the storytelling elements used to construct fictional films and those employed by the modern documentary is one of the biggest changes in the documentary world. "Before you could just almost do a report, but that's not enough now," said Bourne. "You have to engage the audience and have a character. You don't have to have the three-act structure, but you have to tell a story with dramatic storytelling elements in real life situations."
For Bourne, the director of the 1997 Urbanworld Film Festival's Best Documentary Jury Prize-winner, John Henrik Clarke: A Great and Mighty Walk, the other great revolution in the documentary world is the proliferation of digital filmmaking techniques. "I just produced a feature-length documentary for HBO called Gordon Parks: Half Past Autumn and part of it we shot in Brazil with digital video because it was easier and it holds up."
Stacy Peralta was even able to use the internet in an unusual way to jump-start his feature-length documentary about the birth of modern skateboarding, Dogtown and the Z-Boys, which will debut at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. "A year and a half ago, an article came out in Spin magazine that told the story of Dogtown and the skateboarders and it was bought up by Hollywood. But it was a story I wanted to tell," said Peralta. "So I said, 'Let Hollywood fictionalize the story, we'll do the nonfiction tale.' I was able to get a lot of footage by soliciting for photos and films from a website."
From that material Peralta was able to create a trailer that enabled him to get more people involved in the film, including fellow DGA director member Sean Penn who narrates Dogtown. "On the basis of that three-minute trailer alone, we were able to get Jimmy Page, Ted Nugent and David Bowie to license their music to us for lesser fees than they're used to getting. What struck people was the style I used to give the photos a sense of animation. I did multiple takes on each photograph and sped them up for a sense of motion."
Director Mark Lewis (left) and director of photography Pieter de Vries in New York filming RAT. (Photo: Courtesy of Mark Lewis)
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Mark Lewis is the director of the 1988 BAFTA Film Award Best Short Film nominee Cane Toads which documented the ecologic havoc wrought by the introduction of the giant poisonous amphibian to Australia, and the 1998 film RAT, in which New Yorkers share their encounters with their rodent neighbors. A DGA member since 1993, Lewis recently completed A Natural History of the Chicken, which will be screening at this year's Sundance Film Festival. Lewis also employed some digital techniques to complete the film and asserts that the economic boon digital technology has brought to his work cannot be overvalued.
"I work in Hollywood and I look out my window and see big studio productions working on location and their craft service budget is half of what my film cost," said Lewis. However, these new techniques of shooting on film and converting to digital video and vice versa are causing a bit of confusion on one front. "I was at a documentary festival in Amsterdam recently and they divided everything into a film competition and a video competition. I shot A Natural History of the Chicken on film and then finished it on digital videotape. Others shot on tape and converted to film. So the festival has decided to end the categorization, which is a good idea."
Jessica Yu finds that the advent of digital technologies in the documentary world is bringing a broader spectrum of filmmakers to the festival circuit. "Last year I was on the documentary jury at Sundance and it was great to see all the films," said Yu. "With changes in the technology giving more people access, right now it's a really exciting genre."
Yu also believes that documentaries have offered more opportunities to people who may feel disenfranchised by other forms of filmmaking. "There are a lot of women and people of color in documentaries. Because you're often short on labor, you can get hands-on right away. My first job, I was recording sound on a shoot and trying to figure out how to work the Nagra, whereas on my first commercial, my first job was arranging frozen noodles on forks. The level of engagement and the level of closeness to the actual process is much higher in documentaries."
For all of the directors, their love of the documentary format fueled their entry into the film world. "I came of age in the '60s and the documentary was the accepted format for new thought and new information," said Bourne. "It had a noble mission. My father was a journalist for the black press, and although I thought I was doing something new, I'm basically following in his footsteps."
And while Yu has directed commercials and episodic television like The West Wing, her first love is documentary filmmaking. She made the Sundance Grand Jury nominee The Living Museum and the Academy Award-winning film about a Berkeley, California, journalist and poet who lives in an iron lung, Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien. "I'm directing things I'm really interested in, whether it's documentary or narrative," said Yu. "Since the documentaries that I do are very personal labors of love, I do need to find other avenues to continue working my craft and make a living outside the independent documentary arena."
Bourne believes that more than the techniques and technologies have changed in the documentary world. "It's harder to make really good documentaries and mostly you end up being fodder for the machine in the way of the
reality-based TV shows," said Bourne.
However, Bourne noted, documentarians don't generally face the distribution difficulties many directors of independent narratives encounter. "People will only put money in a documentary if they already know where it's going to be shown. Even if it's a political or independent vision documentary, you know it's going to end up on PBS's The American Experience or P.O.V. Basically the documentary is being structured to death. There are more opportunities to make them, but you've got to fill the niche more."
"My bugbear about documentaries in America is that they have to fit into homogenized programming," said Lewis. "If your documentary doesn't fit into the format of Wild Discovery or Biography, it doesn't get picked up. Distinction and originality are valued and prized overseas, but not here, especially on the cable channels."
"Although a lot of documentary filmmakers have a hard time funding their films, if they still get them made and the film is wonderful, people want to purchase it, but nobody wants to put the money up front," said Yu. "That's a hard thing with documentaries because of the process, unless you're doing a historical documentary, you don't know where the story is going to go and you don't know what you're going to get. As a filmmaker you have the confidence and want to pursue the story but funders are warier. They need a bit more of a guarantee about what's going to happen. That's just the nature of the game. But people will still get those films made. You'll still have the really dogged, determined filmmakers that feel that making a film is the most important thing in their lives so you'll always have those films out there."
Michael Apted. (Photo: Andrew Cooper
© Twentieth Century Fox)
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Moreover, the problems that many independent directors face - the pressure to bring films in at a certain rating and battles with the ratings board over content - does not seem to extend to the documentary world. "A lot of documentaries go out unrated," said Yu, "and it doesn't seem to harm their box office. If a documentary film gets a nice theatrical release, I always tell friends to go see it because you know it's going to be great. And they're going to see it whether it rated 'G' or 'X.' I don't think it really has the same bearing because you're really not going after the same type of theatre-goer. There are many other barriers to documentary distribution that are greater. It's very hard to market them in general. Like Dark Days that was just in theatres is a terrific film and everything about it is great. But it's not something you're going to see in a multiplex."
Although Bourne has been making films since 1971, it wasn't until the making of his 1999 IDA Award-winning film, Paul Robeson: Here I Stand, that he joined the DGA. "I didn't think that it was going to make any difference," said Bourne, "but I have to say that since I have joined, it has. The obvious thing is the benefits like the health program, but the other thing is in a field like documentaries, you're even more vulnerable than in features. Features are highly structured. But for a long time documentaries were producer-based. It's only recently as documentaries have been struggling to renew themselves as a viable artistic and financial form, that the directors vision has become important."
A DGA member for a year and a half, Yu is glad she made the decision to join. "I think that some of my reservations in the beginning turned out to be the very reasons why I joined. I wondered why should I be in the Guild? I thought it really wasn't about filmmakers like me. I worried that it would limit the work I could get involved in. Then I realized that part of the reason that the Guild didn't seem to represent the groups I was a part of was because people like me weren't joining. If I wanted to be represented, it made sense to join. It's not just about the perks you get like the benefits, the protections and the health plan, but the fact that in a larger sense it's good to be counted. It about the long-term benefits, not the short term."
And having access to the Guild and advice from fellow members has already paid off for Peralta. "As a DGA member I didn't know whether I could do a theatrical documentary, but Penelope Spheeris encouraged me to call the DGA. She said that if I was honest with the Guild, they would support me. I wasn't expecting that."
"I'm a feature-film member of the Guild, but I prefer to work in the documentary area," said Lewis. "I would like to see the Guild build up the documentary area. There are good people in Chuck Workman, Penelope Spheeris, Michael Apted and others to give us representation."
Apted would like to see many more filmmakers from the documentary world become members of the DGA. "I think every major documentary filmmaker should be a member of the DGA, like feature-film directors, independent directors and TV directors are, and have the same protections that the Guild can offer."
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