The Art of Nonfiction Movie Making
Jeffrey Friedman
Language: English
Pages: 239
ISBN: 027599225X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The past few years have featured such blockbusters as Super-Size Me, Fahrenheit 9/11, Sicko, March of the Penguins, and An Inconvenient Truth. And as news articles proclaim a new era in the history of documentary films, more and more new directors are making their first film a nonfiction one. But in addition to posing all of the usual challenges inherent to more standard filmmaking, documentaries also present unique problems that need to be understood from the outset. Where does the idea come from? How do you raise the money? How much money do you need? What visual style is best suited to the story? What are the legal issues involved? And how can a film reach that all-important milestone and find a willing distributor? Epstein, Friedman, and Wood tackle all of these important questions with examples and anecdotes from their own careers. The result is an informative and entertaining guide for those just starting out, and an enlightening read for anyone interested in a behind-the-scenes look at this newly reinvigorated field of film.
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interview subjects are not. This is a basic rule of documentary filmmaking—you never want to allow the suspicion that people in your film are saying what they’re saying because you’ve paid them.4 We defined Klaus’s role as director of research, and because we were impressed by the relationships he had developed with the older men in his research, we discussed the possibility of making him a character in the film—the seeker whose quest we would follow. We also agreed to give him an associate producer
Punishment, we spent months meeting with attorneys—mostly prosecutors but also defense attorneys who had cases we were interested in—to assess who would give us the best access and who had the most interesting cases. These were the primary criteria we used: How good a case does the prosecutor have? (Ideally it was good, but not so good that there would be no plausible defense.) How comfortable were the crime victims, attorneys, and defendants likely to be with a film crew following them around?
with the executive director, who responded positively to our project. We agreed to offer the organization several benefit premiere screenings and a share in any profits. In exchange, Hollywood Supports agreed to let us use its backing of the project to help get the film made. Then we went back to the studios. Our strategy this time was similar to the one we used to approach movie stars. We started with a studio we had a relationship with from a previous film, on which we had been given a reduced
producer is in charge of making sure the entire production runs smoothly. Typical responsibilities include making deals for crew and equipment, arranging production logistics, formulating the budget and then tracking actual costs, seeing that crew and equipment are where they are needed, keeping the crew fed and happy, licensing footage and music, and keeping the whole production on schedule. The producer can also help locate and schedule the subjects you want to film (your “characters”). Ideally,
dealing with death, and moving on with their lives.” This implies a story. The big difference is that a story has structure and characters. Humans are storytelling animals, and stories have a basic structure. Does your idea have the potential to tell a good story? Can you imagine your idea as a film with a beginning, a middle, and an end? A good documentary—like any good film or any good book, for that matter—takes us on a journey with unexpected twists and turns, finally landing us somewhere
