Filmmakers learn from doing—dancers must have a floor to dance, swimmers must have water, and filmmakers must shoot and edit. Turn a camera on, and you are straightaway collecting fragments of reality—voices, behavior, landscapes, images, people in action, people talking. With digital software you can begin editing your materials into a narrative.
To tell outstanding stories from the real world, you will need a ferment of ideas about life and living, the courage to go where angels fear to tread, and most of all, personal and inventive ways of using the medium. Do this well, and you will catch people’s attention and make them wonder, laugh, become spellbound, or even weep. Your reward is to move hearts and minds—and maybe change the world a little. Filmmaking is a beautiful and involving art form, one that synthesizes practically every other art form invented, and that makes learning a lifelong adventure. Most significantly, making documentary means you are learning about yourself, and becoming a fuller human being.
There are plenty of books about techniques and equipment, so this book concentrates upon what is mostly overlooked: that is, what you must consider, feel, do, know, and strive for in order to emotionally engage audiences. Learning this takes many steps, and two major phases, which is why this volume is divided into two books. Book I, with all its short practical work, aims to turn you into a first-class observational filmmaker. Book II concentrates on the art of telling stories, and encourages you to make yourself into a stylish and masterly storyteller.
Directors who touch us do so from a fascination with the human condition, and a love of using the art of cinema to explore it. Their passion is to entertain, move, and persuade, and their films come not only from them—but through them. Each film has a progenitor: someone whose heart and mind starts a project going, and over time brings it to completion. This is the documentary director, who leads a team that often totals no more than two or three people.
Emile Zola said that a work of art is “a corner of Nature seen through a temperament.”1 Certainly a gripping documentary leaves this impression, since the people in it, with their predicaments and objectives, seem imbued with the compassion of an unseen human temperament shaping the life on the screen (Figure 1-1). With this in mind, I shall emphasize throughout this book how important certain kinds of self-knowledge and self-inquiry are to the aspiring director, and will show you how to begin. You have a pleasant and perhaps surprising discovery to make—that you already have a formed and focused inner drive ready to lead your work. I call it your artistic identity, and once you know its nature, you will want to use it. This you could do in any expressive form. It would help you write fiction, paint pictures, take photographs, choreograph dance—and, yes, make films. You are probably thinking, can’t I function without knowing this artistic identity stuff? The answer is yes, because I directed two dozen films before realizing that my work—maybe my whole life—had a common theme. If only I had known about this earlier in life!
Human beings are by nature seekers, and the quest for meaning is both fundamental and noble. To know what yours is, you have to look for it. The respected actor and New York University directing teacher Marketa Kimbrell used to say, “To put up a tall building you must first dig a very deep hole.” All compelling art arises because someone has sought understanding and taken a journey fundamental to human development and wellbeing. The authors of Art & Fear say categorically that “the only work really worth doing—the only work you can do convincingly—is the work that focuses on the things you care about. To not focus on those issues is to deny the constants in your life.”2 To this I say, Amen.
Your documentaries become “corners of nature seen through the lens of a temperament” when you pursue how your life has marked you. The highest and lowest points of your life, especially its darker moments, have branded you with special experiences, marks etched in your psyche. Whatever arouses you to strongly partisan feelings is usually connected with these bruises and scars. This is your unfinished business talking to you and urging you to pay attention.
The drive to make, express, and discover comes from one’s artistic identity, and it is something you can name and characterize, as we shall see. Often it will seem provisional, hazy, incompletely understood, and under construction. No matter, answering its call will always make you feel joyfully alive, as if in love. In love, that is, with a mission and purpose in life rather than with a person (that will come too).
Truly “the unexamined life is not worth living,”3 and today we own the most superb tool for examining lives—the documentary film form. Make your start with a simple pledge: I will not put anything on the screen unless it reveals something, however small, that I have discovered for myself about the human condition.
But, you protest, I have nothing to say! Nothing of importance has happened to me yet!
Not true. Nobody gets through their teens without tasting almost every human experience. Metaphorically speaking you have seen death, been in love, lost a kingdom, fought battles, defied death, been a refugee, and have sacrificed and betrayed. That is the nature of being alive. Left over from this is your unfinished business, and unfinished business is urgent business. When blocked it is an energy source that goes haywire. To have order and purpose in your life, you must attend to it.
This is the particular work that your artistic identity expects of you. It may be science work, arts work, medical work, building work, family reparation work, parental work, teaching work, Girl Scout work, historical reconstruction work, psychological work—work of any kind that involves striving and giving. Since you are reading this book, you are thinking of making documentaries as your work, which means that my work is to guide, encourage, and enthuse you with everything I know about it.
Properly attended to, the unfinished business emanating from your artistic identity will change over time. New matters arise to claim your attention, and that is your evolution unfolding—just as it should.
Here are a couple of enjoyable and revealing exercises to help you make a flying start.
Privately and non-judgmentally, make notes of the marks you carry. Avoid making anything “positive” or “negative” since that is the inner censor at work, always trying to make you acceptable to other people. Divulge nothing too private. You only need recognize the fundamental truths in your background under general headings. Here’s how:
a) List your key experiences: Go somewhere quiet and in complete privacy write some rapid, short notations as things come to mind. Make a private, non-judgmental list of your most moving experiences. That is, any experiences that profoundly moved you (to joy, rage, panic, fear, disgust, anguish, love, etc.). Keep going until you have ten or a dozen, but the more the better. Some will seem “positive” (accompanied by feelings of joy, relief, discovery, laughter), but most will seem “negative,” that is, they carry disturbing emotional connotations of humiliation, shame, or anger. Resist the temptation to suppress anything, because there is no such thing as negative or positive truth. To discriminate is to censor, which is just another way to prolong the endless and wasteful search for acceptability. Truth is truth—period!
From making this inner agenda visible, you start to naturally see themes. Any single, deeply felt theme can find expression through many film subjects, each one very close to you, yet none of them autobiographically revealing.
Now start writing notes to help you make a presentation to a class, group, or important individual. The more candid you can be, the better, but you need disclose nothing too private.
b) Arrange them in groupings: On a large piece of paper, group them in any way pertinent. This important technique is called clustering because it helps reveal structures, connections, and hierarchies. Name each group and define any relationships you can find between them.
Then, in public, and preferably to a class or group, and taking no more than 5 minutes,
c) Describe a single, powerfully influential experience, and the mark it left on you. Keep the description brief.
Example: “Growing up in an area at war, I had an early fear and loathing of uniforms and uniformity. When my father came home after the war, my mother became less accessible, and my father was closer to my older brother, so I came to believe I must do everything alone.”
d) In 3–5 minutes, summarize your authorial situation by completing these four sentences:
● The theme or themes that arise from my self-studies are…
● The changes for which I want to work are…
● The kinds of subject for which I feel most passionately are…
● Other important goals I have for my documentaries are…
The family is mostly where we learn the hard lessons of growing up, and the family is the great crucible for drama. Why else would the Greek gods all be related to each other? To a person, group, or class,
a) Describe in 2–3 minutes the main drama in your family. If there are several, pick the one that affected you most. (Examples: The impact of the family business going bankrupt, discovering that Uncle Wilfred is a cross-dresser, or the effect of a dictatorial parent wanting all the kids to become musicians.)
b) Say what you learned from the way the family drama played out, and what kind of subjects and themes it has qualified you to tackle as a result.
You should now feel you have experience and strong feelings to help focus your directing. Maybe making documentaries will become the work you want to do, in and for the world.
See further self-discovery projects under Project 1–3 Other Routes to Self-Assessment at this book’s website (www.directingthedocumentary.com). They draw on your dreams, favorite surrogates in film, literature, or public life, and the archetypes they suggest to you.
What type of person makes documentaries? Go to a documentary festival, and see what a varied lot they are—old, young, shy, outgoing, haunted, extroverted, straight, gay, men, women, large, small. Most are approachable, friendly, and unassuming, and most are supportive of each other and non-competitive. They will be happy you are thinking of joining the documentary community. They may warn you that it is hard to make a living and that you will have to do other work— crewing, teaching, or something else—to make ends meet.
What is the work really like? Sometimes the director does virtually everything and only intermittently works with a sound recordist and an editor. Other times he or she works with a phalanx of colleagues. Either way, the director’s work is leadership that includes:
● Choosing subject matter in which one has an emotional investment and a compelling need to learn.
● Explaining the hypothetical project and getting agreement by people to participate.
● Researching the lives of special people, situations, and topics.
● Helping participants enjoy the experience of making a record of their life.
● Leading the crew and taking decisions about what to film and how.
● Using a camera to ethically record whatever is essential and meaningful.
● Empathically bearing witness, especially for those in difficult or dangerous situations.
● Exposing dramas and injustices in life with a socially critical purpose.
● Drawing stories from real life that are cinematically and dramatically satisfying.
● Supervising (or actually doing) the editing and making the sound track.
● Trying to change the world, one film at a time.
● Working long hours and hardly noticing it.
Each new film project will draw you into a new world, subject you to experiences that press you to decide what’s significant, and challenge you to crystallize what matters on the screen as a story. Since artworks mainly emerge from conscious choices and decisions, this means that you must,
● Make yourself highly aware and critical of each unfolding aspect of your film’s world and characters.
● Retain not only what you learned on your learning-journey, but how you learned it.
● Use the screen freshly and inventively so that your audience gets an equal or better learning-journey than your own.
● Suggest stimulating ideas and values concerning the nature and meaning of contemporary life.
Directing takes a multi-layered consciousness, and juggling with so many balls that it may seem like an impossible talent. But anyone can learn how, if they want. It is not a talent but a learned skill. The mistakes and miscalculations you make are all inseparable from learning. The American Cinematographer’s standard interview asks famous cinematographers, “Have you made any memorable blunders?” and the answers make reassuring reading because everyone has. Periodically everyone screws up, feels inept and defeated. When it’s your turn, punch yourself in the chin and just keep going.
People make documentaries to seize and preserve something they cherish before it vanishes. Why does this matter so much? Probably because we know that the great mass of ordinary humanity, your ancestors and mine, left nothing by which we can know them, which is tragic. Only by our forebears’ folk music, cautionary sayings, and the marks they left on the landscape can we even guess what kind of lives they led. Unless they tangled with the law or did something remarkable, they sank without trace. I would love to learn more about the branch of my father’s people who were village chimneysweeps in Victorian times. I know two things: that the boys had to rub saltpeter into their torn knees and elbows (to toughen them so they could climb the inside of chimneys), and that the family believed itself illegitimately descended from Sir John Cheke.4
You and I cannot, must not, pass so silently from life, nor must we depend on others to tell our stories. The digital revolution has given us the screen through which to chronicle whatever we see and feel, and now our contemporaries and our descendents can know us. Right now, we can use the screen to examine how and why we are alive.
So, use this book to help you bear witness, reinterpret history, or prophesy the future. It is so much easier than it used to be. In Figure 1-2 the New York veteran documentarian David Hoffman shows the cumbersome and expensive equipment he once carried, and what he now uses for personal filmmaking—a tiny, waterproof, wide-angle $400 plastic sports camera called the GoPro. At a moment’s notice he can shoot whatever or whomever he runs into, and his films reflect the sparks generated from human encounter. Originally a musician and coming from the Maysles Brothers tradition of spontaneous filmmaking, Hoffman articulates his outlook quite passionately in “Why I use the GoPro for Documentaries” (youtube.com/watch?v=uptn76M8iDQ). We are all, he says, “reporters, narrators—from behind and in front of the camera. We’re talking to each other, to the camera, and to the future.” Meeting curious strangers in the street, he tells them, “I’m recording for the future what we’re doing, thinking, and feeling in the present—so speak to the future, for this [tapping the camera] is your future box.” In another YouTube film “Best Add-ons for the Hero 3 and Hero 2” (youtube.com/user/allinaday) he shows some of the equipment he has tried, and the minimalist rig he uses now. It does what an iPhone does, only much, much better.
Perhaps you are interested in recording a people and their culture. Shows like those given by the Royal Anthropological Institute in London or the Margaret Mead Film Festival in New York exhibit a hundred films in a few days, and the filmmakers are there to discuss their work with the audience. Ethnography is truly the testimony of witnesses, since what they place on record sometimes vanishes before their film is finished. Attend one of these festivals and see how ethnographers try to record a way of life without imposing their own values.
Documentaries, smartphones, and social media are collecting records of today’s grassroots life, from steam fairs at agricultural shows, to the obscenity of shells landing in Middle Eastern apartment buildings. As the Arab Spring upheavals showed, those holding power can no longer ignore or silence the mass of alternative voices. People can now organize and communicate via the Internet, and the consequences—for bloody showdowns, for a more equitable tapestry of cultures, and for the dream of free expression and democracy—are incalculable. Today’s documentaries are at the center of this because they investigate, analyze, warn, indict, explore, observe, announce, report, explain, educate, promote, posit, advocate, celebrate, experiment, expound, propagandize, satirize, shock, protest, remember, revise, prophesy, chronicle, conclude, conserve, liberate, lampoon, activate…
Notice that all these are verbs, or “doing” words. “Documentary is an important reality-shaping communication,” says Patricia Aufderheide, “because of its claims to truth. Documentaries are always grounded in real life, and make a claim to tell us something worth knowing about it.”5 Documentary not only reveals actuality, it prepares us—whether we know it or not—to take action and live differently.
Film, including the genre of documentary, is a social art in every stage of its evolution. You work with some behind the camera, and with others in front of it. You direct, shoot, and edit a documentary collectively, and then pass your work over to the audience, that other great collective, for its reactions. In the last century, and now in this, collaborative processes have helped make fiction film preeminently influential among the arts. More recently the documentary has made its way from obscurity to a place of new importance in public consciousness. Today, independent documentary is collecting evidence and showing truths that media corporations hardly dare handle. Often it is the lone, keen, and eloquent voice of individual conscience (Figure 1-3).
The documentarian’s reward is to live a full, evolving, and fulfilling life. People treat you and your camera as significant since it is, just as David Hoffman says, a “Future Box” that observes on behalf of those alive now and those yet to come. Your future box, when you appear with it, is a magic passport that opens doors, lowers barriers, and lets you pass where others dare not go. The filmmaking relationship, sincerely and daringly pursued, immerses you in other cultures and other lives. Not only will people want to trust you, but they will take bold new steps because of the attention you pay them. You are first to see aspects of people that not even their closest friends or family have seen. With all this influence comes responsibility.
Making nonfiction cinema gives you a chance to relive segments of your life again, and to discover all that you routinely miss. When you run and rerun the material you shot, you keep seeing further dimensions in your participants and their situations. And then, as you assemble and refine your film, new truths and correspondences keep surfacing, and the film miraculously develops and strengthens like a growing child.
Today you can make films with little money, position, or influence, as the Catalan artist Mireia Sallarès shows in her astonishing five-hour film about Mexican women’s sexual lives, Little Deaths (Mexico, 2009, Figure 1-4). You can do significant work, as she has said, using a “way of shooting [that is] direct, humble, [and] alone with no crew or extra hardware.” All you need is a camera and computer, the will to discover, and buckets of persistence. Your largest obstacles won’t be ones of technique or technology, but of timidity and political correctness. Can you step beyond habits of self-protection and truly explore what it means to be alive? Can you delay gratification for months or years in order to compose the film your subject deserves? All this becomes possible when you come to cherish the language and tools of the cinema. Then, unlike so many trapped in work they hate, you will never have to wonder if you are using wisely your one-and-only life.
Filmmaking is a market commodity that thrives or dies according to audience figures. Complaining about this is futile and unproductive because there are plenty of other obstacles to discourage the fainthearted. Luckily, making a small-canvas documentary no longer requires much of a budget, so now—if you can keep body and soul together—you can simply make the film you believe in, and then see where you stand.
Making the audience notice and value transient moments in obscure lives is normal enough in fiction films, but rarer in documentary. Uncertainty about deserving an audience’s attention makes documentarians play safe, so they often resort to exotic or sensational subjects. War, murderers, family violence, urban problems, eccentrics, deviants, demonstrations, revolts, as well as victims, victims, and more victims—all these promise something heightened. Yet the consequence for the viewer is a sense of weariness and deja vu.
How refreshing instead to find Ross McElwee’s self-mocking search for a wife in Sherman’s March (USA, 1986, Figure 1-5), or Robb Moss’s pained contemplation of his childlessness in The Tourist (USA, 1991, Figure 1-6). While he and his wife kept failing to conceive, he was working as a cameraman and regularly shooting in Third World countries where people have too many children. These are original voices intent on breaking the veil of silence that masks unfulfillment. For the small stuff of life—the minutia of small-town life or the anguish in a barely solvent marriage—we more often turn to fiction. But this is not inevitable, as you see in The Farmer’s Wife (USA, 1998, Figure 1-7) directed by David Sutherland, who makes films from long and patient involvement with his subjects.6 Of similar intensity is Doug Block’s film about his parents’ half-century of loneliness in marriage, 51 Birch Street (USA, 2005, Figure 1-8), and Deborah Hoffman’s Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter (USA, 1994, Figure 1-9), a bittersweet chronicle of caring for a mother who is sinking into Alzheimer’s disease.
FIGURE 1-5
Sherman’s March, a road movie of encounters between a man and each of the women he might marry. (Photo courtesy of the Kobal Collection/McElwee Productions/Guggenheim Fellowship.)
FIGURE 1-6
Robb Moss’s job as a cameraman in The Tourist keeps taking him where people have too many children.
Documentarians wanting to buck the trends, as these fine films do, will always face special difficulties, not least with raising money for a film about subjects often considered minor and confined to the personal. Yet their warmth, intensity of regard, and courageous honesty leave much that calls itself documentary looking shallow and perfunctory.
FIGURE 1-8
Despite appearances, a half-century of mismatch and loneliness in marriage in 51 Birch Street.
Fewer documentaries than fiction films or novels manage to travel beyond the parochial, linguistic, or cultural enclosure of their origins. Often they consciously cater to local interests and local pride, and much funding goes into national navel-gazing. The insular nature of so many documentaries comes ultimately from documentary-makers themselves. Through parochialism they often fail to look for themes of more universal significance in their surroundings. This is why art that transcends boundaries so often comes from immigrants, whose displacement sensitizes them to larger truths. It was immigrants fleeing poverty and totalitarianism, not the locals, that founded Hollywood. And it was immigrants who defined the American Dream—itself the dream of humanity more than of America alone.
FIGURE 1-9
Deborah Hoffman and her mother in Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter. (Photo by Frances Reid, courtesy of Deborah Hoffman.)
As ever more people make ever more documentaries, finding unique content gets more difficult, with the consequence that creativity in form and style is now at a premium. That is, how a film sees may be far more significant to the audience than what it sees. Thus you will need to practice generating excellent and original ideas about film form.
So, find out where you stand by blitzing friends and colleagues with project ideas, and encourage them to do the same with you. Argue and promote your ideas so you can fully discover the possibilities, depths, and difficulties ahead. This habit alone will massively speed up your evolution, make you interesting to be around, and it won’t cost you a dime.
A seldom-recognized reason to make documentaries is to prepare yourself to direct fiction films. In the relatively small British fiction industry, it is enlightening to see who first worked in documentary: Lindsay Anderson, Michael Apted, John Boorman, Kevin Brownlow, Ken Loach, Karel Reisz, Sally Potter, Tony Richardson, and John Schlesinger. Is this a stellar list by chance? Now add those coming from painting, theatre, and music, or who espouse improvisational methods, and more distinguished names appear, such as Maureen Blackwood, Mike Figgis, Peter Greenaway, Mike Leigh, Sharon Maguire, and Anthony Minghella. Not all these are household names, but they do suggest that having documentary experience may be important.
In this book’s sister volume, Directing: Film Techniques and Aesthetics, fifth edition (Focal Press, 2013), Mick Hurbis-Cherrier and I advocate the value of making documentaries for aspiring fiction directors. The advantages are,
● Rapid, voluminous training in finding and telling screen stories.
● Confidence in your ability to use the screen spontaneously and adaptively.
● A proving ground for your intuitive judgments.
● An eye for a focused and truthful human presence.
● A workout in a genre that requires great narrative compression and poses the same narrative problems as fiction.
● Opportunities to show real characters in action as they struggle with real obstacles.
● Immersion in the way a person’s identity is not something fixed, but constructed through interactions.
● A laboratory for character-driven drama.
● Catalyzing truth from participants in preparation to do the same with actors.
● A benchmark for knowing when people are being rather than acting.
● Shooting in real time, thinking on your feet, and plucking drama from life.
● The risk/confrontation/chemistry of the moment, so central to both documentary and improvisational fiction.
How and where you learn to make documentaries depends on your resources, learning style, and how many consuming responsibilities you have acquired. A short summer workshop, such as those at the Maine Media Workshops, can get you hooked or deepen some of your craft skills. Those who need an undergraduate degree may choose a four-year college program for its teachers, structured path, equipment, and filmmaking community. There are however academies that teach only practical filmmaking, such as the London Film School, New York Film Academy, and Tribeca Flashpoint in Chicago. Most film students initially study fiction, and perhaps discover documentary along the way. They may only get a survey course and one or two in basic production. This gets you started but cannot develop your skills and understanding as the excellent two-year MA program does at Stanford University. In the USA, Canada, Europe, and Australia you can find many Masters-level programs listed on the Internet. Be careful: most are expensive, and may be heavy in scholarship and light in professional level skills. Any educational courses you find on the Internet should be crosschecked to see what they promise, who is teaching, and what those who have taken the program say about it. In North American film schools, as elsewhere, there are no recognized standards for teachers or programs, and my intermittent attempts to raise the issue informally with educators have met with a polite silence.
An inexpensive two-year postgraduate program funded by the European Union, taught in English, is called DocNomads (www.docnomads.eu). Each intake migrates through three successive European cities—Lisbon, Budapest, and Brussels—with the idea that,
students are immersed in different cultures and social environments which make them more sensitive to different documentary practices, ways of communication enhancing their capabilities to work outside their own cultural contexts… The students of this itinerant school explore, via the best Portuguese, Hungarian, Belgian, European and international masterpieces, the history and the new forms of documentary, as well as its outstanding representatives, most of whom are involved in the Master Course. It is a practice-based training: particular attention is given to fieldwork and practical courses that deepen the students’ theoretical knowledge and encourage them to define their own style.
The workload is high, and competition for places keen, but you may be eligible to become a paying or a scholarship student, depending on your circumstances.
if you have a day job, mortgage, and children to support, you won’t have time or money to attend film school. Online courses, sometimes free, are becoming available, especially in using the technology (see www.lynda.com or www.coursera.org). Albert Maysles has been actively involved with passing on his experience and skills, and the Maysles Documentary Center has grown to offer a range of educational and other opportunities (http://maysles.org). If you are self-motivated, it is quite feasible to assemble the teaching you need. Use this book, a camera, a computer, and solicit feedback from intelligent friends who won’t hide the truth from you. You can learn documentary simply by lots of doing. If you simply worked through the projects gathered on the website, and used the book to guide your journey, you could become an experienced documentarian in a couple of years of sustained work.
No matter how chance may affect your advance, map out your future intentions. If you want to excel, you cannot plunk yourself down in an educational setting and wait for them to form you. Still less should you expect to naturally attract recognition, since that’s another excuse to do nothing much but wait and see. Making entertainment is a highly demanding and entrepreneurial occupation, so you must wring the utmost from your education and earn the respect of those you need. This means that you,
● Use the teaching and facilities to do more than the program demands.
● Work only with people who are committed and constructively critical.
● Read everything about those whose work inspires you, so you become like them.
● Immerse yourself by seeing every film you can, and going to every conference and festival you can afford.
● Read nonfiction, newspapers, and even novels to learn about the subjects that fire your imagination.
● Make working on ideas into an addiction. Only by writing can you discover what’s in your mind, examine it, and go farther.
● Pitch (describe in some detail) your ideas for films to anyone who’ll listen. They are your film’s first audience—even though you haven’t yet made it.
● Cram in all the production experience you can handle in addition to your directing.
● Specialize in camerawork, sound recording, or editing so you can expect to earn a living working for others.
● Actively seek your teachers’ and contemporaries’ help, ideas, and criticism.
● Pay attention to the emerging evidence concerning your strengths and weaknesses, since your best chances of future employment rest on what you do surpassingly well.
● Grow a thicker skin if you are hurt by criticism.
● Compile clips of your best work in each craft. From this you will make “show reels” of your camerawork, sound, editing. These will be vital to your employability.
Working in the film industry is uncertain, and success takes determination, social networking, and persistence. You cannot “learn film first” and expect to make a living later. Do please read Part 8, Work, in particular Chapter 36: Developing a Career. It shows that, to develop a career, you must start building the requisite work habits and social skills from the beginning.
Do not be discouraged by a complete lack of advertised jobs in documentary. It is a branch of the entertainment industry, and the world always has room for the best among its actors, comedians, singers, musicians, journalists, poets, novelists, playwrights, painters, animators … and documentarians. Talent is not something you “have”; it is something you have to develop using all of yourself.
Learn to walk the walk, and talk the talk, by reading professional journals and websites. They will draw you into your chosen world by showing where the various jobs and interests lead. The Independent (formerly The Independent Film and Video Monthly—see www.aivf.org), International Documentary (www.documentary.org/magazine), American Cinematographer (www.theasc.com/ac_magazine), and DV Magazine (www.mydvmag.com) are a mine of professional, critical, and technical information. These sources will help you think, act, and handle yourself like an insider and stay abreast of news, ideas and trends, and new approaches in independent film-making, cinematography, postproduction, distribution, and festivals.
Well-established film schools have an internship office that connects their best students (mostly advanced level, but sometimes sophomores and juniors too) with local media employers. At mine (Columbia College Chicago) students get paid and unpaid work as a grip, assistant editor, production assistant, camera assistant, and a great many other positions. Via these internships an employer can, at low risk, try students out in positions where they can’t do much harm. An internship may turn into your first paid work, and even if it doesn’t, it allows you to try out a career at, say, a postproduction house before you commit to it. Internships also provide the all-important professional references when you need them.
Reputable film schools have an internship office to ensure that students do useful work of educational value to themselves rather than finding themselves doing menial tasks unpaid.
Most chapters end with a section inviting you to do some practical work from among the projects listed on the book’s website www.directingthedocumentary.com. I really believe you learn most from simply doing, not waiting until you feel ready. So if you have any kind of camera and know how to run it, why not do SP-8 Dramatizing a Location? It asks you to study the daily rhythms and activities in a place such as a terminus, cafe, or car repair shop, then write a shotlist from your notes, so you can shoot selectively as an observer of life. If you can already edit, so much the better. If you can’t yet edit, then simply shoot material, watch it critically, and decide how you will edit them later.
1. Émile Zola, Mes Haines (1866), French novelist writing in the literary school of naturalism.
2. David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking (Image Continuum Press, 1993), p. 116.
3. Attributed to Socrates (c. 469 BC-399 BC).
4. Classics scholar and tutor to Queen Elizabeth I, imprisoned for his religious beliefs.
5. Patricia Aufderheide, Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2007).
6. See www.davidsutherland.com/bio.html for Sutherland’s description of his methods.
