Welcome to, produced by, in this episode, Dan Braun, co-president of Submarine, Marta Koffman, producer of Seeing All Red, Errol Morris, director of Wormwood, and the Fog of War, Cita Torren, co-founder of Turmite Films, and moderator Diane Becker, co-founder of Fishbowl Films, discussed the growing popularity of the documentary genre, and its exponential growth over the last two decades. They also delve into how the producer's choice of subject matter affects the choice of format and the impact of new approaches to documentaries. This conference highlight was recorded in front of a live audience in 2018. If you would like to learn more, please visit www.producersgill.org.
Please enjoy this panel's insights into the changing market of documentaries. Hi everyone, good morning. Good morning. Morning.
Morning. For coming. I'm a little nervous. Don't be nervous.
But I'm excited because I'm taking my shoes off. Okay. I think this is going to be a lively panel. There's a lot to talk about.
We're in an exciting time in the industry for documentary filmmaking, and I just want to thank everybody here for coming today to have this conversation. Let's just start right into it. What makes a docket doc? Are docs purely journalism?
Are they more than that? Let's just go down the table here and see what everybody thinks. Marta, can we start with you? I think one of the things that makes a docket doc is that it is a story about something that is or was real.
I don't know that it is necessarily always journalism. It is storytelling. I think it's completely related to telling a story that needs to be told because either we've forgotten or we don't know. Good one.
It's hard to top. I would say, yeah, I think it's a film that documents events in a narrative way, which is a rephrasing of what Marta just said. But it also is, I think it's a doc is, if it's called a documentary, it probably might be could be a documentary. I don't know why someone will call something a doc when it wasn't.
But there are hybrids now that are just so interesting that I think that's what it's going to make for hopefully a lively discussion. I don't think I can talk to you either either. But to add to it, I suppose, we are kind of changing what makes a doc a doc these days. It's changed a lot from when I was a child watching documentaries at Muro and Jaku-Sto and whatnot.
Now it seems like there's a greater amount of documentaries that focus on a subculture or something that we just don't know that we didn't know as you were saying, a story that needs to be told. But whether it's how much it's based in reality and how truthful it is to a sequence of events, I guess it's up to the filmmaker now. Yeah, I think what's interesting about the space is the phrase documentary. There's the phrase nonfiction.
There's the phrase narrative. At what point when you're making a film is storytelling is storytelling, which I think, Marta, you know, articulated so well. And we're sort of blurring these lines in really exciting and creative ways, which is, I think, part of the discussion today. I think to expand on that, let's talk about point of view, right?
I think that that's one of the most important aspects of when we're creating these films is like you have to establish a point of view. And I think that's what's different from journalism is that I think when you're making these films you really plant your stake in the ground. And so, Jada, let's start with you with Kedi. Let's talk about the film and how it started and the approach that you decided to take with that film.
Well, first let me check if the audience is familiar with the film before I start getting into it because it's about cats. How many cat lovers are in the audience? And our film, it focused on seven cat characters, cats that are street cats, a concept that is a bit difficult to explain in the US, but in Istanbul they roam the streets there, part of the infrastructure of the city and they're just there. And I didn't know a life without cats.
And I grew up when I was growing up there and I don't know many Turks who do. And the interesting enough when choosing the POV of the film, which is mostly from the POV of the cats, but not as if we're seeing through their eyes, but rather over the shoulder of the cats pretty much. So we had to create catcams that were low enough to the ground that we could actually be over their shoulder. And the inspiration for it was I had been working in narrative films and I wanted to, the same way that we, in a way, in narrative films you're desperately trying to reach that authenticity of real life.
You're trying to preserve in the documentary that you're making, but one informs the other in a beautiful way. And in much the same way that I would have filmed a human character over the shoulder, I wanted to film the cats the same way. So it ended up actually portraying this idea that they are, we are seeing the world through their eyes without it being a forced sort of fake, you know, eye, cat, eye view of the world, which would have been difficult. Dan, do you want to talk about Wild Wild Country or some other one of your other films?
We can talk about that. But I had a specific one that was more of what I was thinking of. It was a film I produced a couple years ago called Peggy Guggenheim Art Addict. And it was about Peggy Guggenheim, the art collector and heir or black sheep of the Guggenheim family.
And the film started out with a point of view of an omnipotent narrator. And we built it on that. And then honestly we found it really wasn't working. It was working okay, but it was like something was missing.
And through fortuitous luck and some detective work we actually found a tape of Peggy Guggenheim, an interview from the book that was written about her in the early 90s. And so we changed the point of view from the omnipotent narrator to her to the subject. And I found that any time that I'm able to do that in a film, that's what I'm most attracted to is when you actually feel like you're hearing and experiencing what happened to the person kind of as it's happening, which I guess is, you know, is a set up. But I think in terms of general, in terms of point of view, I agree that probably is one of the most important things.
And I think if you're consistent and it works great, if you're not going to be consistent, be intentional about it, make sure that you have the audience and you're not, they don't feel like it's a mistake. But we'll talk about Wild Wild Country later. Excellent. Marta?
I think we had a slightly, an experience that's aligned with what you're saying, but slightly different. We set out to do a film about Gloria Allred, and I have to say I knew what most people know about her. That she's a women's civil rights attorney, that she's a feminist, that she does a lot for women LGBTQ community. But I also saw her as many people did as a media whore.
I didn't know. And as we learned about her, as we interviewed her and we learned more and more about her, it started to change our perspective on her and we began to realize what we were doing here was not one of the two sides of Gloria Allred, but who's the Gloria that you don't know. In addition to that, when we started the film, none of the Cosby's accusers had come out yet. So as we were doing the film, the whole Bill Cosby thing happened.
She had scores of clients who were accusers. Then Donald Trump accusers came out, then he won, then the Me Too movement happened, and Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer. So our film kept changing because of what was happening in the world and what she was doing in the world. And we just had to grab on, we just had to hang on and go with it.
I mean literally we locked it in two weeks later, something happened we get to go back in and redo things because the times were changing so fast. When you do a story that is, or when I did a story that was historical, that doesn't happen. I mean the history remains the same and it's how you choose to tell and to share the story. That didn't happen with this one.
We just had to keep changing as the time went on. Yeah, I think that's a really good point in that when you're dealing with a living subject and it's a dynamic situation, it is different. You are out of control more because events can happen and then you have to integrate them into your story. I don't want to be out of control.
No, interestingly with Kitty, it's interesting that you say this because we were having debates about whether or not to portray Istanbul in the political turmoil that the city was going through at the time that we were filming the cats. And some days we were, you know, wondering are we really spending our efforts and money on filming the cats when there's a Syrian refugee crisis going on and how much do we include the protests about the environment and all this stuff. And it was a very conscious decision that we had to make that we had to say, okay, well this film, what is this film going to be about in the end? Is this going to, do we want to suspend the period of time or a moment in time in Istanbul where, which may not exist anymore and it actually doesn't exist anymore right now as I speak and preserve it in this documentary, to document it in that way, you know.
And it forced us to have to admit anything that was political that was going on. Even though we talked to people about politics, we didn't directly talk about what was going on because people were climbing up and not wanting to talk anyway and talking about cats actually opened them up to talk about things that were somewhat political in a subtle way. But I can't imagine, I mean, we would have had an equally difficult time if we had been trying to keep on top of, if our subject matter was directly related to the politics of that moment, it's a never ending process. Yeah, talk about herding cats.
And it is always a never ending process. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the most challenging things as a producer working in the space is that how you have to constantly pivot depending on, you know, the kind of story that you're telling and the way that you want to tell it. You know, I mean, I worked on Greg Barker's New Film the Final Year, which we followed the Obama administration's foreign policy team throughout the last year, the administration.
And it was fascinating as we got closer and closer to the 2016 election, you know, nobody was really thinking about like the consequences of what would happen if Trump was elected. And it happened and our film wasn't about that. It was really about, you know, these people trying in these extraordinary jobs going around the world trying to make a difference. And we sat in the edit room after the election and we just were like, it still wasn't about that.
But it was there and it had to, you know, and it was being addressed even despite our choice to not address it. And that's one of the more powerful things about that film is that you're in this real moment in time kind of watching. And as the news cycle continued to go on and we continued to evolve the film, the way the film was sort of seen through an audience's eyes continues to change. And actually it still does today.
It's like this really organic thing. But I think that's one of the biggest challenges that we all face when we're creating these films. When we started out on this wild, has everyone here seen Wild Wild Country? Good.
So it was a documentary about a cult in Oregon in the early 80s and we're trying to build a utopian city in the desert basically. But when we started out, we didn't know whether we were going to have access to anyone. And if we had, if we talked to one person, would it get around that we were, you know, we had to, the filmmakers, McLean and Chapman Way were very sensitive in making sure that talking to one person didn't make it that we would never be able to talk to another person. So that was kind of like always a house of cards because we just didn't know.
And the main character was this very enigmatic woman, Sheila. And we weren't sure when and how we were going to get through to her and how cooperative she'd be and would she tell everyone how to climb up everyone. But it was very well handled and was handled organically. So I think, you know, sometimes the problems that are presented are not just like narrative and in the edit, it's like you have to think ahead and understand like the politics if you've got a lot of living subjects.
And I think, you know, that just speaks to the dynamic and never ending nature of documentary. You know, something that I felt as I was doing our documentary, as I was working on our documentaries, is that in some ways it's no different than doing a scripted show in that. You constantly have to be on your feet and learn from what you do. So if you shoot a segment and you thought it was going to be one thing and it was something else, you have to go with that.
You can't fight against what you get. The same thing is with a scripted thing. If a joke doesn't work, you can't fight against that. You've got to keep moving and rewriting or rethink it.
If a story isn't working in a scripted series, you have to sort of throw it up in the air and see how it falls and rework it. And I think with documentary, it's similar in that if the story doesn't work, of your main character, of occult, of cats, if the story doesn't work, you have to be willing to throw all the pieces up in the air and re- you have to, you know, if you're a knitter and you get to a place and you go, oh my god, I don't want to tear this out, you have to tear out the sleeve. You have to tear out the sleeve to be able to tell the story that wants to be told. Sometimes you think you know the story, what it is, but very often the film will tell you what the story is.
Everything is being hybridized right now. TV looks like film and comedy looks like drama and drama looks like comedy and documentaries look like major motion pictures or films or narrative storytelling. Everything is finding a new, finding its new voice. I think it makes perfect sense that at this point producers and filmmakers want to find a new way of doing things.
So partly to stand out from the crowd. There are a lot of docs being made these days, so many good ones, how do you stand out from that crowd? I think that's part of it, but the other part of it, and I can't feel more strongly about this. The story has to tell you what it can sustain.
Just because other people do reenactments doesn't mean your story is going to call for them. Just because other people are hybridizing doesn't mean that the idea that you're working on needs to do that. So I really think you have to start with, what's my story? What's my character?
Who's the person I'm following? What's the event I'm following? And it will tell you what it needs. I believe that.
I believe you have to really listen to your subject. I'm also a believer though that documentaries have to be based in, I don't think you can falsify documentaries. I think that's the biggest difference between documentaries and fictional. And I think, I don't personally appreciate it when I see a documentary that is unless the whole point of the documentary is for the main character to be the documentarian who is sort of shifting the reality of what they're doing.
I don't appreciate, or at least I wouldn't call it a documentary if I'm being led to believe something that is not. Like if the lines aren't actually starving and just for the sake of conflict we're seeing the giraffes, ahead of them and the tension is there, the lines get the giraffes, etc. So for me, for example, with Kitty, it's very interesting throughout the whole process. I had many people who were like, just put in a few more meows.
We have stock footage meows. We have Italian cats, Spanish cats. And I was like, no, we have to keep them meows that we filmed. I know it's, I can't talk about this with a straight face, but it's true.
And if anyone said anything, if any of the humans said anything, that was, that could have been misrepresented in the edit room, I was very much against that, just for the sake of creating some kind of sensationalist scene. And as a result, I think, you know, our film is not a straightforward nature documentary. It's not a straightforward, you know, city biopic or it's definitely not an issue documentary or even a journalistic documentary, but it's trying to address the human condition, the human dilemmas of death, life, happiness, all through cats. Yeah, it's funny.
They wanted to wear meows and see all red, too. Did they? She's wearing meows. It's one of those notes you got.
I think that's a really good point in that, you know, there is a concept called, I don't know, poetic license or artistic license. And, you know, a documentary is a film and you could say, well, where's the line? And I agree. It's like, you know, I think one too many meows over the line, for sure.
But in other films, you know, I've been in the position where it's like, just as you said, it goes back to the story. It's like, if you don't want to tell something or add something that isn't true, if it's a documentary that just simply is invented, but you can, obviously, the filmmaker, the director, the producer team, the whole can agree that you can put emphasis on something, but maybe didn't have so much emphasis. And, you know, that makes your story better. And so, you're serving the story.
And usually, it's because the story is begging you for it and you have to listen. And that's really what happens. I remember I read an article in a film review magazine from 1972 that there was a huge controversy over Albert and David Maisel's Gimme Shelter, that it was a, it was false. It was a setup because, I don't know if you remember the film, but they had Nick Jagger and Keith Richards come in and watch and react to the murder of Meredith, whatever his name was.
And now, I mean, that was an opinion back then, but now no one questions that Gimme Shelter is considered one of the great verite films of all time. And, you know, because that was kind of an invention of the narrative, I just bring up that point, because, you know, I think, you know, in the end, if it serves the story and it works, and there isn't a big controversy that you lied about something or invented something, then I think there should be some poetic license or artistic license and documentary filmmaking. I mean, it's constantly being challenged. You know, Sundance has a whole initiative called the Art of Nonfiction, which is supporting artists in this very endeavor in terms of like how they tell stories.
There was a film that premiered, I think last year, they're called All These Sleepless Nights. It's a Polish film. It's a wonderful film. It's beautifully shot.
It follows two young men in the Warsaw party scene and, you know, sort of follows their night and sort of their lives. And it was marketed as a fiction film in Poland, but here in the US, it was sort of considered a doc. And I remember seeing it at Sundance and kind of being blown away because, I mean, aspects of it were certainly truthful and then aspects of it were truthful in the sense that they were there, but there was definitely a poetic license in terms of how they were filming it. And, you know, I had very strong feelings initially about it was really challenging my thought of what is reality and is this reality.
And, you know, after watching it a few times, I've grown to love it, but films like that are definitely challenging, the sort of, you know, what the form means. Robert Greene, who did a film called Kate Place Christine two years ago, and this year had Busby 17 sort of works in that same way. You know, Busby 17 is basically about this. Busby, Arizona had this huge uprising 100 years ago where they deported all of these minors.
And last year was a 100 year anniversary and they went and the filmmakers basically filmed it. They did a recreation of the event and filmed it with the townspeople. And so the whole film is this sort of like reflection on what happened and yet really forcing the town to kind of confront their own, you know, racist sort of opinions about it. And, you know, you can make really strong arguments on what is truth, what is reality, what is the form.
And I think that's what's really exciting about this space right now. Well, because it also ties into how it's marketed. You know, you were saying it was marketed one place as a narrative film. And then if it was actually marketed as a documentary film, I mean, whatever people.
But I mean, you know, Dan, with, you know, with submarine, it's like, when, you know, how have you seen the industry change in, you know, the last number of years as these films come into the marketplace and like you're going out there and representing them and finding homes for them. And, you know, has it just sort of expanded, you know? Yeah, yeah, no, it has expanded. I mean, I think in the last five years, the kind of or maybe longer the general acceptance of documentaries as like entertainment, you know, there's something that you would get out of the red box on Saturday night or, you know, wouldn't feel was medicinal, has fully matured.
And so because that's fully matured, I think it's also starting to, you know, to these hybrids are happening. And I think that's because there's more people working in the form, there's more people taking risks. Interesting stories are coming out. Like a lot of, you know, you could say I'm very interested in music documentary.
So, you know, there are a million bands or artists that you could do a thing on, but not all of them are going to be a great subject for documentaries, don't know. But I would say that the market has certainly changed in a lot of ways. And that's probably a big conversation. I also think, you know, and you refer to this, but certainly the good news is documentary filmmakers finally have an audience where it was such a struggle for so many years.
It has an audience, it has many places to go and to be seen and film festivals, and it provides so many people with the opportunity to do good work. Yeah, that's exciting because of then I think it feels less of a risk for filmmakers who are starting out, investors who may be coming in, whether they be private equity or, you know, grandma's, any jar or whatever. I think, you know, there's, there is many more outlets. I mean, that is a bigger conversation of what's actually happening with the higher end and the lower end of the market.
I do have one word of caution. We were talking earlier about the different kinds of subjects you can do and the different kinds of characters. My word of caution is young filmmakers sometimes believe that they are the best story. Their father is the best story, their mother is the best story, and I would caution, I mean, it's, it's great practice, but it's not necessarily what makes a great documentary, just because it's incredibly interesting to you and your sister.
Thank you for that. But we also don't want to squelch. The one person has the most amazing story about their anti-Indian that ever, and they're like, oh, I'm not. Have you noticed how hard these are to drink out of?
Yeah, very differently. Everything goes down to like, right? It's, you don't know where to put your nose. Good advice.
Good advice. Let's talk about, I mean, you brought up recreations and we talked a little bit sort of about animation and things like that. I think, you know, Daniel, we're just sort of touching on this, that as these forms expand, as we continually bring new tools to our creative workspace and creating these films, you know, as a result, some of these budgets are inflated now and sort of growing. And I think that that also has an impact on how we sort of choose to tell the kind of stories that we're telling.
So, you know, I don't know where I'm going with this. I think we've got to pick up from that on, most likely nobody's here seen it, but there's a film that was in Tribeca called White Tied. And that is definitely going to be a kind of a case study because it is, you know, 50-50, 60-40 kind of narrative and documentary. And it looks like a feature film.
It smells like a feature film, but it's really a documentary. And it's just shot and presented, and the story is told in such a way. And the filmmakers did something really interesting, they did these very cinematic recreations, but they used the main subject as an actor. So, most people do their recreations, and it's in the past, and it's older, but they, so it's very seamless.
And I think this is going to be an interesting thing to see what happens to it in the market. It did sell, and I can't announce who it was sold to, but it'll be easy to see. And I think there are going to be more things like that, also, as young filmmakers kind of want to, and this is also, I think, part of the cautionary tale, which is that if you start to get too attached to your recreations and you're like, I want to play in the big boy's sand and be, you know, a narrative director, and I've seen it happen with documentary filmmakers, they kind of feel, this is my chance to do casting and makeup and wardrobe, and then they get very, and they kind of lose sight of like why they were doing it, which is to serve the story. And I've seen it happen more than once.
And I think, again, as Marla said, it all goes back to the story. If you get so distracted by either the animation or whatever it is that you're using in this non-traditional way, and it takes you out of the story, then you miss the bull's eye. Yeah, I mean, I'm working on something right now where we very specifically initially were trying to do sort of like recreation slash possible musical numbers, and at the end of the day, the voice of the person that we're telling the story about became the most important aspect. So the archive is probably going to be the thing that sort of drives the narrative, but it is true.
It is a cautionary tale in the sense that you really have to always keep story and point of view as you're true north when you're creating these things and not just do something non-traditional to be non-traditional, you know. I mean, I could just tell a little anecdote. I won't say what the film was but they came in and I was an executive producer like, we're going to do these recreations and they're going to be amazing. And we kind of all thought about it and I was like, why don't you just do like a black card with type?
And we did that and that worked amazingly well. So you don't have to reinvent the wheel. It's exciting to think about that. But sometimes the simplest solution is the elegant solution is the solution.
Yeah. Let's talk about producing and creating work and developing work. You know, Marla, when people come to you with projects or you're developing projects, is there, you know, I mean, you work in both spaces. You work in film, you work in television, documentary, like, have you ever had an instance where someone came to you with something that you thought suited a different sort of approach?
It's a really interesting question. It more goes the other way around. You have a documentary that you're working on and you go, you know what? You could make an amazing film out of this.
There's so much story here. There's so much I'm not getting to feel emotionally because I just skipped those moments so that I can get to those other moments. And it more happens that way that a documentary I think can make you think that could be an excellent film. I have yet to be approached with a documentary idea and to think that would make a great series because I don't know why.
I guess because documentaries... I mean, look at their scripted series. Yeah. Yeah.
Yes, I'm sorry. Absolutely scripted series. I've never had that experience. You know, I think I believe that the line between scripted and non-scripted has to stay clear for the purposes of not that you can't do something in between, but if you do something in between, I don't think you can necessarily call it a doc of part of a descriptive.
That doesn't mean there can't be reenactments. Reenactments are very often in many films I've seen. You're just seeing them. You're not necessarily getting dialogue.
And then lastly, I have to say I agree with you wholeheartedly that sometimes we go for the complicated answer when it's actually quite simple and very often somebody will come to you with a doc and you go, yeah, it's a doc. That's what it is. And then there's Wormwood. And then there's Wormwood.
Which is, you know, I mean, I guess that gets just back to the idea of what we call these sort of storytelling projects in many ways, right? Because, you know, Arrow comes from this, you know, very specific documentary background. And I have to say, unfortunately, I think some of the discussion and some of the argument has to do with awards and that kind of pisses me off. You know, well, you can't call that a doc because it has words in it that someone wrote or you can't call that scripted because you're also doing some verite.
It seems it's complicated, but I think that's where it upsets people is I don't want to compete against wild, wild, wild country, you know, or something like that. So I think it's the labels that are complicated. Right. Great.
Well, I think we're just about at the time now where we're going to open it up to some questions. So I wanted to do as an independent filmmaker, I'm working on a documentary and I love that you said that this story basically kind of tells you who it is or what it is because I haven't following it that past. So I love that. You just made me feel so much better.
Can you talk to us a little bit about really quickly on just on the next approach, like going into festivals or should we try another route? Maybe that may be a little different. Like I come from the music industry too, where we used to kind of do like the street teams and promotion and things like that. So I was wondering like within this day and age of social media, are there some other forms of things that maybe those of us on the other side on the indie side trying to get into your shoes, your shoes can be thinking about?
Well, I guess I'll go to the Film Festival question because that although maybe is that, well in this particular era right now, the Film Festival pedigree of documentaries has become more important than ever. Buyers are looking for some sort of, I don't know if it's validation or branding or just a that sort of first gatekeeper. And now the festivals really are influential and they are because the people who are doing the acquisitions for the major festivals are just so sophisticated and they've just kind of seen it all. And so when something gets in a major festival, it's kind of exciting to everyone.
So doing marketing, maybe social media and other kinds of marketing, kind of leading up to a little more of a presence maybe before it's shown in the festival is one way or if the film is matured to be what it is then just submitting it to a lot of film festivals is really to sort of old fashioned, submit it to all the festivals that you can. I also think there are so many outlets now that I think there is no shame in going to those outlets and saying I have an amazing documentary, here's a piece of it when I get on board. It's a lot easier to get your budget when you do it that way than when you're trying to raise it 100,000 at a time. Well, with film festivals, one thing I'd like to add to that is to keep in mind that you might not get your big reception at the festivals that you thought you could get them at or the big ones that everyone is also submitting to, which unless you're already a known director or have a known exec producer who's pushing your film, no one's going to ever look at it.
In our case with Kitty, for example, we spent a year going to festivals and we were really depressed at some point because nobody was even interested. They didn't know how to qualify, sales agents didn't know what to make of it. And finally, it was actually Seattle Film Festival, which is a festival that I hadn't really known much about or hadn't really thought much about. But we submitted, as we submitted to everywhere else, and it was a Seattle Film Festival that it actually got its big reception.
And we had five sold out screenings. And out of that, an exhibitor actually noticed and called distributors and said, you guys need to get this film. And that's when we started getting interest from US distributors. And we went with the Soliscoa Labs, who were amazing and did a big release in the US for the film.
We made nearly 3 million at the US box office, which was like, unheard of for a Turkish language, some title can't move. Hi, great panel. Thank you guys for coming today. I'm a commercial producer who's interested in getting into the documentary world.
And so I wanted to ask, hopefully not too controversial question. But what is your approach when a subject either wants to be paid or there's a discussion of, for this interview to happen, we need to facilitate it with either cash or some kind of morally, and what are your feelings on that? I have never done that. I have encountered it many times.
And you would think that the subject would just be happy enough to just have their life captured on documentary. But some, I've encountered it, I will say more on the musician, on the music box side. Because there is sort of a, especially with maybe older school musicians, there's kind of a like, no, I need 10,000 in a bag or I ain't gonna do it kind of thing. And I have encountered that.
And you kind of just talk to them and say, I don't have 10,000, I don't have a bag. But we could potentially do an honorarium. And you want to get that out of the mindset of getting paid for this. But it's kind of like something that's respectful.
And so a lot of it is just like, a negotiation really. But I think when it gets to the point where you know that it's never gonna be reasonable, then you just have to make your decision. And in the end, if it's part of your budget and it's a big part of your budget, the en buyer or investor is likely gonna question it. So it's tough.
That's why you do documentaries about cats. Non-cuminous subjects. I will just add one thing to that though, is it's depending on who it is. Like let's say the person that you want to make a film about has a massive archive, right?
And they want to get paid something. There's a way to compensate them, but you're not compensating them for being in the movie, you're licensing the rights to their footage. And I have worked in that capacity. Yeah, exactly.
That's kind of the next iteration of it is like there is a situation I'm dealing with now where there's a subject who does one compensation, but that subject has exactly what you're saying is access to an archive that would really make the documentary amazing. So that's another way of kind of slicing the onion. But if you're talking about a regular person and not like a professional, not like a celebrity or professional. I mean they do get paid for appearances and stuff too, but if you're talking about a regular person, then the whole idea of getting your permission signed upfront is key because people can hold it over your head and they can choose not to finish the follow-up shoot that you need to do with them because they say that you need to pay them now.
And if anyone, upon the first discussion of you need to sign this release form, in which you also say I'm not getting paid, at that point they say, well what about some money? Because I had done a lot with cats, not with cats, but the humans and the cats. The people can be hustlers and they're like, oh that cat I can tell you more about that cat. Give me some money.
It happens. It happens. Those were the people that I would just say thank you so much. Bye-bye.
And it was very interesting that those who wanted money, that I would have wanted it in the film, some of them came back around and were like, okay, whatever, I don't want the money, I want to be involved. But you could tell that you can fall into a big trap if you don't secure your clear release forms and for the locations and for the people upfront. Yes, so basically I'm an independent filmmaker as well, working on a documentary about funding. My father was living in a village in Africa currently and when approaching, I've only had a chance to approach one funding source and I was asked to do it outline and I'm used to that.
Same outline? An outline, yes ma'am. So as an air tool that would have been straight for, sure no problem, here's an outline. But I had never even thought of that and so I did it to my best ability working in reality TV, how those producers would kind of have an idea as to what they were looking for, though they didn't know where it was going to go.
So my straightforward question is, if it sounds like that's not a common thing, so how should I have approached it or do you guys have an experience in how have you approached putting something on paper to kind of illustrate what you're trying to attempt to get? No. The story you're talking about seems to be one, and I could be very wrong about this, but it sounds like it has a beginning, middle, and end that you have a story to tell. So that can lend itself to, I don't think it can be a very detailed outline because you don't know all the pieces, but you can tell the story with a beginning, middle, and end.
It may change 17 times after you do that, but you know the story in this case. So as daunting as the ideas of trying to do an outline, I think it is doable in that case. I've never had to do one with the stuff I've done, but I don't think any of them could have called for one because the story didn't exist yet. I wanted to address my question for Martha.
You talk about your documentary about Gloria O'Brien and how everything changed throughout the story because the political climate change. So I was wondering, how did you project it? How did you tell the story? Did you show the news?
I'm sorry I didn't see the documentary, but I'm very interesting to see how you kind of like portrayed it in the story through Gloria's point of view or through other people's point of view. It was always through Gloria's point of view. It was through the lens of getting to know her better, getting to understand who this woman really is. And watching her do things like, and we never expected this moment.
The filmmakers filmed a scene of Gloria and other people in her firm watching election night. And they go in and they're in a great mood and everybody's really happy. And you sort of watch this thing happen where they just get quieter and quieter and quieter. We didn't know that was going to happen.
We just happened to be there shooting and were the documentary gods dropped some dust on us and let us get moments like that. There was an impromptu rally in DC the day of the march after the inauguration. It was impromptu rally. I think one of our strongest things in the film is what happens at that rally.
Never expected it. Wasn't supposed to be one and it was shot on an iPhone. So just be ready. Just be ready because it's going to take you all kinds of places.
Hi. Would you or would you ever see a trend that studios would offer documentary filmmakers an overall deal like they would a typical director? And if so, if someone would offer you that what would your approach to that be? Yes.
Yeah. It's hard to turn down money and resources and distribution. But there are a few people in the industry that kind of have those kind of deals. They're not that well publicized.
But those deals are absolutely out there. And people are trying to find the next great filmmakers and develop early relationships. And you know, if you have something that's exciting that actually could happen. It's not that doesn't it's not a complete anomaly.
But I think obviously the terms of it, you know, should be negotiated by lawyer. And I would say similarly, yeah, if it's a right chemical fit, you know, you got you got a chemistry, you know, like if you're if it's not just based completely on opportunism, like you have to feel good about the people you're working with. And I don't know if there's if there's a more detailed question than they are not, but generally I mean, I think what I would add to that is that even if there isn't like an overall deal, you know, if you make a successful film or, you know, series with somebody like Netflix or an Amazon or an HBO or Showtime, the likelihood is they're going to be like, what do you have next? You know, what else are you working on?
What else are you developing? And I think that that becomes sort of the natural, you know, overhead deal of modern day times. Right. So it isn't like exactly it's not like, you know, a codified deal, but you have a relationship with Netflix, you get two really good shows with them or one, and they're excited about your next thing.
And deals are double edged sword or HBO, you know, Netflix, but there's other a lot of other stuff. The producers out there. The problem can be you have a deal at HBO and HBO decides not to do it, and then you don't have anywhere to go with it because they own it. So there is a downside to having an overall deal or you have an idea for a film that you can now, we don't want to do that kind of thing.
Can you come up with something else? So it's their, it's a double edged sword. Unfortunately, we can talk for ours. Thank you all.
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