Interviews with filmmakers

Documentary Storytelling. That s what this book is about. It s about the story, how to convey that story eloquendy, effectively, and ethically. This book is absolutely brilliant... packed full of interviews with award-winning documentary filmmakers offering up information, advice, and wisdom you ll find interesting and useful."... 

Exposed is a beautiful movie (40 minutes long) about an American MCS patient. The protagonist, a professional dancer, often filmed herself throughout her life. She kept doing so when she developed MCS, and thereby documented on tape very intense emotions, thoughts out loud, and so on. Some moments were very moving and touched me deeply. The filmmaker intersperses the patient s own recordings with old commercials about chemicals, interviews, and other material. 

U.S. filmmaker Liane Brandon s 1972 film, Betty Tells Her Story, consists of two 10-minute interviews, played in sequence. Brandon had met the film s subject when both were consulting for the Massachusetts Department of Education, and was drawn to a story Betty told about buying a dress and then losing it before she had a chance to wear it. "I borrowed Ricky Leacock s camera, and John Terry, who worked with Ricky at M.I.T., volunteered to do sound," Brandon says. At Betty s house, the crew loaded the first of three 10-minute black-and-white film magazines, and Brandon asked Betty simply to tell her story. "The first version that you see in the film is the first take that we did. I never told her how long a magazine was, but somehow she ended the story just before we ran out of film." It was basically the story as Betty had first told it to Brandon a witty anecdote about a dress she d found that was just perfect—and how she never got to wear it. 

The reunion plays on screen for a while before the filmmakers use another interview statement to again motivate a return to the past. "I always wanted the feeling that someone would love me no matter what," Bub says. "And I never had that with Ann [her adoptive mother]." This time, the filmmakers exploration of the past drives to a painful revelation Escalating tension between Bub and her adoptive mother led to a severing of their relationship when Bub was still in college. By presenting this information here, the filmmakers have raised the stakes on the reunion currently under way in Vietnam Bub has felt rejected by two mothers, so this reunion with the first has added significance. We carry this new information with us as we return to Vietnam, and the visit continues. 

Everyone approaches interviewing differently. Some people work to put the subjects at ease, starting with more "comfortable" questions before easing into material that s more touchy. As mentioned, filmmakers whose style is more confrontational may show up with the... 

If two columns are used, one is for visuals, the other for audio. With a single-column format, visuals, if mentioned, are put in parentheses or italics. In either case, narration and interview bites should stand out from each other for example, the narration might be in bold, or the interview bites indented. On films with significant interview material, whether or not there will also be narration, it can be helpful to create a separate block (whether you re working with one column or two) for each interview bite that s pulled, so they can be quickly moved around. Some filmmakers also use the outlining function to keep sequences intact, again, so they can be quickly rearranged. 

Discussed here are two of their feature documentaries. Troublesome Creek A Midwestern, about the Jordan family s struggle to save their Iowa farm, won the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival in 1996 and was nominated for an Academy Award. So Much So Fast, which premiered at Sundance in 2006, is about the events set in motion when Stephen Heywood was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig s disease). I spoke with the filmmakers separately for this interview, conducted in 2003 and updated since. 

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