The Art of Documentary Filmmaking – Episode 5
Welcome to Talking Movies. In episode 4 of The Art of Documentary Filmmaking, we continue the conversation with international documentarian Stuart Tanner, who directed The Seeds of Sovereignty, and Matthew Kalil, who is a regular guest on Talking Movies.
MK: Although, I’m going to jump in and just say, you know, like Nanook of the North, the first documentary where it’s like this polar expedition, and they go up to the north, and it came out like a lot of that was sort of fabricated. And yet, it really kind of resonated with an audience. And I wonder sometimes about one of the documentaries I’ve made, it was the tone of the documentary, it wasn’t a serious investigation piece, like the pieces you’re talking about. I made one where it was these Afrikaans performance poets after apartheid, and they were doing these weird performances on stage. And I got someone to act like a priest, okay, and they were asking him, like, you know, what did you think of these people? And they’re like, oh, they were terrible. Because they were priests who did say that at the time. But there was something about the tone of that documentary, which I guess is an experimental documentary or a fun thing, even actually, interestingly enough, in Netflix’s Drive to Survive, which is bold as a documentary.
ST: There’s different terrains, and in certain terrains, it’s like, expectations are different. So but in terms of the Formula One that you mentioned, the team were very upset, actually, because I remember it was something to do with Hamilton. He had suggested a takeover, a letting the other driver past, but they cut that out. So it seemed like there was a disagreement, and he didn’t want to let him through. But that wasn’t the truth of the situation. I think that’s clearly wrong, and they got in the heat over it and had to apologise. If you’re watching some really Survivor kind of reality TV, then I think 90% of people realise that there’s scripting, there’s messing about with the storylines, so that, you know, it’s not as it happened, necessarily, and 100% accurate thing.
MK: Yeah, I think with deep fakes now, it’s going to get even more important, because essentially what we’re after, you know, as Spling said, is the notion of the truth. And I think as soon as you do start messing around with that, but I’m really interested in how documentaries, as the way we understand them, you know, if you go to Netflix, it’s late at night, you want to watch a movie, you click on Netflix, you click on documentaries, what’s going to pop up is like some crime thing with or some political thing with huge production values, where it looks almost like a feature film, and it’s shot incredibly well, but it sometimes doesn’t have the integrity, I think, that we’re looking for. And so I think with the algorithm that Netflix is trying to tell you what to watch, and even YouTube’s telling you what to watch, it’s interesting for me to see where these issues-based documentaries, documentaries that change the world, like where do they, where’s their platform? Where are they seen, even?
ST: Yeah, I would say that that’s a challenge that has evolved for everybody. People have moved more and more and more into watching things or only being exposed to things that tend to confirm their worldview or support their worldview. We all know it’s a well-known phenomenon. How do you reach a larger audience and pull people in who wouldn’t necessarily watch that kind of thing? Yeah, it’s a crucial challenge. I think that you both have the opportunity to create things that are pretty compelling visually and with the music and with the beauty of the technology that we have now and the drones and so on. You talk about the floating thing and the immersive nature. Well, that’s partly because of the technology that one has to use. And so I think it’s up to the documentary filmmakers to try and use that technology and to create forms to really engage with as wide an audience as possible and to pull people maybe out of silos that they’re in. Yes.
It does seem as though poetic licence is the thing we’re talking about here. If you need to really be making the audience very aware of the fact that you are dealing with the truth in a fast and loose way, if you are going in that direction and you are playing up the emotional side of things or the drama. But then on the other hand, if you are taking the integritise approach, giving a very factual, honest and insightful account rather than trying to bend to genre or anything, then that needs to also be established. I wanted to find out from both of you, actually, in terms of the temptation to go gonzo as a journalist and to sort of implant yourself in the story. Has there ever been an opportunity for you to do that? And how did that work out?
ST: Well, yes, there has been opportunities to do that. We have featured myself and a colleague who made documentaries in Brazil and Amazon and elsewhere in China and so on, did feature in the documentary to a certain degree. Although not as the form of a reporter, just that you could see us in the circumstances, in the places, doing what we were doing as we were carrying out the investigation and making the documentary. But the full-on gonzo, it’s always been a very strong temptation in a way and it still is to actually be in the situation and be like giving a commentary on it. It just so happens that we may do a global version of the documentary and my thinking for that one is we would definitely need someone to do that and play that role to carry that documentary and to make it work.
