PODCAST · tv
Documentary First
by Documentary First | Christian Taylor
The craft and business of documentary filmmaking, from people who actually do it.Documentary First is a weekly podcast for working and aspiring documentary filmmakers who want honest, in-depth conversations about how documentaries get funded, made, and seen. Listen Notes ranks the show in the top 5 percent of all podcasts worldwide.Hosted by Christian Taylor, award-winning director of The Girl Who Wore Freedom (25+ international awards, distributed through Virgil Films, Swank, and Canal+), the show draws on 295+ conversations with documentary filmmakers, editors, producers, distributors, and composers across HBO, Netflix, PBS, and the independent doc world. Past guests include Ken Burns, PBS American Masters creator Susan Lacy, Emmy and Peabody Award-winning editor Charles Olivier (HBO's The Jinx, The Redeem Team), and Emmy-nominated director Nick Bruckman (Netflix's Minted).Every week, Documentary First delivers two formats in one feed. The main show is a long-form interview about
Episodes
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The Velveteen Rabbit and Old Home Movies: What Is Real?
What does The Velveteen Rabbit, a 1922 children's book about a stuffed toy, have to do with old home movies and AI? In Margery Williams' classic story, an old toy called the Skin Horse tells a stuffed rabbit that being real isn't about how you are made. It is something that happens to you when…
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Archival Footage: Why Use Home Movies?
What happens to a family's home movies when no one knows what to do with them? Phil Maher was a software engineer looking for a sense of purpose when he started watching his grandfather's family reels and saw his father and his brothers, a big Irish Catholic family in Chicago. He kept going. Some...
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How Do You Get a Documentary Made? Ask the Woman Who Co-Runs RKO
Do you have a documentary, or do you have a Wikipedia entry? Somebody decides whether your documentary gets made. Sophia Dilley is one of those people. She runs Concord Originals, the division behind Stax: Soulsville U.S.A. on HBO, and she is Co-President of RKO, which Concord bought in June 2025...
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Beyond Banners: How to Make a Documentary With No Film School
Who finishes your film if you can't? Andre N. Jackson had never made a film. He had twenty years in technology and security, an idea that arrived while he was sitting in a barber's chair, and no way into the industry. He finished the film anyway, and he came on the show with three lessons for…
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Why Can't Your Documentary Find an Audience? l Deep Dive on Ep. 284
When did your audience stop being people and become a number? Most independent films and podcasts do not fail because the work is bad. They fail because no one ever felt like they belonged to them. This Deep Dive is about how to build an audience for your documentary before it is ever released…
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Ep. 284 I How to Fund a Documentary Without the Industry
How do you fund a documentary when the whole industry says no? How do you fund a documentary without film funds, grants, or a commissioning broadcaster, and still reach a huge audience? Dutch filmmaker Jonathan de Jong did exactly that with Human Forever, the most-watched human interest…
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Who Believed in You First?
Who believed in you before you could believe in yourself? In this Deep Dive, documentary filmmaker Christian Taylor makes a quiet case that we rarely overcome self-doubt on our own. Almost no one finishes anything hard alone. Someone has to see it in you first. This is a reflection on the power…
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Cold War in Philly: Joe Amodei Directs His First Documentary
What happens when a film distributor with more than 40 years in the business finally makes his own documentary? Joe Amodei grew up in Philadelphia watching the Flyers with his parents, sisters and brothers. From the family living room, he watched the team he still calls his heroes beat the Soviet...
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Ep. 282 I Finding the Heartbeat of Your Story | A Lesson From Normandy
How do you make people care about your documentary? Facts alone rarely make an audience care. The emotional core of a documentary lives somewhere else. In this episode of Documentary First, filmmaker Christian Taylor tells the story of how she found the heartbeat her film about the Battle of...
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Ep. 281 I 13 Letters That Saved a Dying WWII Documentary - on Heroes of Carentan Pt 1
Can thirteen letters from an 88-year-old stranger bring a dead film back to life? For two years, Heroes of Carentan, Christian Taylor's documentary about the 101st Airborne Division and the June 1944 liberation of Carentan, sat on a shelf, half made. In this episode she tells the honest story of...
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The Disappointment You Didn't Choose I Deep Dive on Ep. 280
What if the disappointment you didn't choose was the only door to the life you were meant to live? Three generations of one family chased professional baseball, and all three lost it to a career-ending injury. Each one found his calling in the aftermath. That pattern runs through Voices: The…
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Danny Gans: The Man of Many Voices Who Lost His Own
How do you tell the truth about your own father when the whole world knew him as the Man of Many Voices? Danny Gans could become almost anyone on stage. He was the first headliner in Las Vegas to sell a $100 ticket, and for years his shows sold out night after night. Offstage, he was living with...
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When Is Silence Wisdom and When Is It Complicity? I Deep Dive on Ep. 279
When does refusing to repeat a lie become complicity in it? The hardest question in documentary filmmaking is not how to find the truth. It is how to handle a lie. When a false story is already loose in the world, you have two choices that look almost identical on the page: refuse to repeat it…
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Ep. 279 I She Was Here: Heather O'Rourke's Family Debunks the Poltergeist Curse
Was the Poltergeist curse real, or did the world get Heather O'Rourke's story wrong for 38 Years? On February 1, 1988, Heather O'Rourke died at twelve years old. For nearly four decades the world has filled that silence with rumors. She Was Here, the new documentary produced by Brian Pocrass and...
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The Two Kinds of “Alone” Every Filmmaker Knows I Deep Dive on Ep. 278
What is the difference between solitude and loneliness, and why does every creative person need to understand it? There are two kinds of being alone in creative work, and they are not the same thing. One makes the work great. The other wears you down to nothing. The difference between solitude…
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Ep. 278 I Adapt or Die: A Working Filmmaker with AI in 2026
Adapt or die. What does that actually look like for a working filmmaker? Chicago documentary filmmaker Armin Korsos has a working filmmaker's answer to the question every documentarian is wrestling with right now. If you're not using AI, you will be losing work to people who do. In this...
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Anthropic's $1.5B Mistake. Yours Could Cost More. I Deep Dive on Ep. 277
What does a $1.5 billion AI lawsuit have in common with your unwritten will? In September 2025, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle the largest copyright lawsuit in U.S. history. The reason was simple. They built first and cleared rights later. Documentary filmmakers have been making…
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Why Does One Documentary Clip Cost $70,000?
What does the person who cleans up documentary licensing messes wish you had done before you shot a single frame? Teddy Cannon has spent 10 years in what he calls the link in the production line, standing between the filmmakers, the legal team and every vendor whose footage, photos or music ends…
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The First Generation to Live Shorter Lives Than Their Parents | Deep Dive on Ep. 276
What if the documentaries no streaming platform will buy are the ones that could save your kid's life? Today's children may be the first generation in American history to live shorter lives than their parents. That's the central argument of The 100-Year Effect, a documentary I watched at the…
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Ep. 276 I Robin Canfield on Teaching iPhone Documentary in 20 Countries
Why do documentary subjects freeze for a professional camera - but open up to an iPhone? Robin Canfield shares why he films with iPhones, how he teaches documentary in twenty countries, and the communication skill he says every documentary filmmaker overlooks. Robin joins us from Saigon, Vietnam,...
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They Wanted My Voice to Train AI - What Thoreau Knew About Living Deliberately in a Revolution: Deep Dive on Ep. 275
Someone tried to harvest Christian's voice for AI training. The pitch was polished, the project sounded real. But when she responded with ten professional questions, the conversation ended. Permanently. In this Deep Dive on Episode 275, Christian connects that experience to her conversation with...
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Ep. 275 I Erik & Chris Ewers on PBS Funding, AI & Directing Goldblum, Clooney & Streep
Even with Ken Burns and Don Henley attached, funding a PBS documentary is brutal. So what hope do the rest of us have? Erik and Christopher Ewers get real about PBS funding, AI’s impact on filmmaking, and how they landed George Clooney, Jeff Goldblum, Ted Danson, Tate Donovan and Meryl Streep for...
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Erik & Chris Ewers: Quiet Desperation—Competence vs Self-Knowledge: Deep Dive on Episode 274
He edited nearly every Ken Burns film since The Civil War. He still didn't know who he was. Henry David Thoreau wrote that most people lead lives of “quiet desperation.” But what did he actually mean - and what does it look like inside a successful career? That’s the question Christian Taylor...
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Ep. 274 I I Didn't Know Myself - Erik & Chris Ewers on Ken Burns, PBS & Thoreau
He's edited nearly every Ken Burns film ever made. But he couldn't edit himself. What does it take to build a filmmaking career inside Ken Burns's world — and what happens when the hardest part isn't the craft, but learning who you are? Erik and Christopher Ewers are brothers who co-direct for…
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What Francesca Bridgerton and a D-Day Veteran Both Discovered About Grief I Deep Dive on Ep. 273
In Bridgerton Season 4, Francesca Bridgerton stands in the middle of her husband’s funeral and says something no one expects: “I want to feel joy.” Eighty years earlier and four thousand miles away, a D-Day veteran stood on Utah Beach watching children play in the water where his friends had...
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Ep. 273 | D-Day Leadership Academy: Jake Schroeder on WWII Veterans, Normandy & Redefining Success
He sang the national anthem for the Colorado Avalanche a thousand times, coached 4,000 inner-city kids, lost it all, and rebuilt on the beaches of Normandy — where a WWII veteran watched children playing on Utah Beach and said through tears: "That's why we came." Jake Schroeder—former frontman of...
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What If You're Not Actually Failing? Deep Dive on Ep. 272 with Director Quinnolyn Benson-Yates
What if failure isn’t the enemy—but the training ground? That’s the question Christian Taylor explores in this episode of Documentary First: The Deep Dive, sparked by her conversation with filmmaker Quinnolyn Benson-Yates about the documentary Epic Bill. Bill Bradley lost his video rental empire…
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Episode 272 | Quinnolyn Benson-Yates on Epic Bill: Failure, Reinvention & the Filmmaker’s Endurance
Award-winning filmmaker Quinnolyn Benson-Yates made her first feature documentary before film school—and its seven-year journey from short film concept to PBS distribution holds lessons every indie filmmaker needs to hear. Epic Bill follows an endurance athlete who lost everything when his video...
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Finding The Good Guys | Deep Dive on Ep.271 With Joe Amodei
How do you know if you’ve found a Joe Amodei—or a predatory film distributor? That’s the question Christian Taylor explores in this episode of Documentary First: The Deep Dive, after her conversation with Joe Amodei—filmmaker, 40-year industry veteran, and owner of Virgil Films Entertainment...
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Joe Amodei on Documentary Distribution: Will Anyone Watch?
What does it take for anyone to find your documentary once it's finally out? Joe Amodei has released films since the days of VHS, and he says the hard part of documentary distribution now comes down to two things: alerting people that your film is out there, and giving them a reason to rent it.…
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Why Viewers Forget 90% of Your Film | Deep Dive on Ep. 270 with Charles Oliver
“People are going to watch your movie for such an infinitesimally small percentage of their life. What they’re going to do is remember it.” That insight from Emmy-winning editor Charles Olivier—who’s cut The Jinx, The Redeem Team, and George Clooney’s Surviving Ohio State—stopped Christian Taylor...
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The Imposter Gap | Deep Dive on Ep. 269 with Jeffrey Roth
Imagine standing in an ancient Egyptian tomb, camera in hand, as a sarcophagus is opened for the first time in thousands of years. For filmmaker Jeffrey Roth, that moment sparked a realization: "No, this is real." This is the first-ever episode of Documentary First: The Deep Dive—a new companion...
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Episode 270 | Charles Olivier on Editing "Surviving Ohio State" for HBO
Emmy-winning editor Charles Olivier reveals how he restructured HBO's Surviving Ohio State and what it's like getting notes from George Clooney. Charles has cut some of the biggest docs of the last decade—The Jinx, Magic and Bird, The Redeem Team. Surviving Ohio State, produced by Clooney and...
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Episode 269 | Egyptian “Indiana Jones”, Zahi Hawass of “The Man With The Hat”, Interview with Jeffery Roth
Jeffrey Roth has spent his career letting extraordinary people tell their own stories—Apollo astronauts, President George H.W. Bush, and now Dr. Zahi Hawass. In this episode, Christian Taylor inquires about the logistics of independent documentary filmmaking in Egypt: working with fixers,...
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Episode 268 | Peter Kelly’s Archaeological Adventure in the Turks and Caicos
In this episode of Documentary First, host Christian Taylor sits down with filmmaker Peter Kelly to explore his remarkable journey from his Mississippi roots to documenting the rich cultural and maritime history of Salt Cay in the Turks and Caicos. Peter reflects on how growing up in a small...
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Episode 267 | Alan Govenar’s New Film, “Quiet Voices in a Noisy World”
In this episode of Documentary First, host Christian Taylor interviews acclaimed documentary filmmaker, writer, photographer, and cultural documentarian Alan Govenar—a storyteller with a 44-year career devoted to preserving overlooked American lives and histories. The conversation centers on...
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Episode 266 | Emmy-Award Winning Producer, Susan Lacy, “Billy Joel: And So It Goes” Interview
Susan Lacy—the iconic creator of PBS’s American Masters and one of the most influential voices in biographical documentary filmmaking joins us. From her early roots in journalism to building a landmark series that reshaped cultural storytelling on public television, Lacy shares the real...
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The Price of Milk: Nick Bruckman on the Got Milk Campaign
Why would an oat milk company pay for a documentary that makes dairy farmers the heroes? The Price of Milk follows the money behind the 1990s Got Milk campaign, and its heroes are small family dairy farmers like Joe and Brenda Cochran. Directed by Nick Bruckman and Yoni Brook, the four-part...
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Episode 264 | Billy Joel: Telling the Story Behind the Musician (with Jessica Levin)
In this episode of Documentary First, Christian sits down with filmmaker Jessica Levin, co-director and producer of the Critics Choice Documentary Awards in the Best Music Documentary-nominated HBO documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes. Jessica shares what it was like to tell the story of Billy...
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Episode 263 | Crowdfunding for Filmmakers — Lessons from the UnScarred Campaign
In this episode of Documentary First, return guest filmmaker Elise Jaffe, first-time director of documentary project: UnScarred, and special guest, Stacie Rae Weir, a tattoo artist and breast-cancer previvor featured in the film join us! UnScarred explores how survivors of trauma and…
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Michael Parks and the Making of Long Lonesome Highway
Why would a punk rock filmmaker spend 10 years and his own money telling the story of an actor most people have never heard of? Michael Parks starred in Then Came Bronson, sang its theme song "Long Lonesome Highway" onto the Billboard charts in 1970, and walked away from the kind of career most...
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Episode 261 | Doc First Members Have Entered the Chat
In this episode of Documentary First, host Christian Taylor opens up with heartfelt personal updates and reflections on the journey of documentary filmmaking. Fresh off a moving trip to Normandy, Christian is joined by team members Peyton Rabb and Todd Anderson to share stories, challenges, and...
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Saving Private Ryan: How to Really Listen to a WWII Veteran
What happens to a World War II veteran when someone finally listens? Ceo Bauer was wounded inside German lines near Metz on the night of November 8, 1944. In Part 2 he picks up the story from his company's outpost. He lay on the floor of a house at the front, cursing, until an officer helped him...
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Saving Private Ryan: A 101-Year-Old WWII Veteran's Story
What does a 101-year-old World War II rifleman think when he watches Saving Private Ryan? Ceo Bauer has seen Saving Private Ryan more than once. He thinks the battle scenes are good but "pretty enhanced." In the attacks he joined under artillery fire, he says, soldiers didn't have the freedom to...
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Saving Private Ryan: Corey Johnson on Spielberg, and John Williams' Greatest Scores
What can an actor do with half a day on the Saving Private Ryan beach? Corey Johnson's part in Saving Private Ryan took half a day to film. He played the radioman in the foxhole whom Tom Hanks grabs to report that "Dog One is not open." While the camera panned away to Hanks and Tom Sizemore, two...
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Billy Joel: And So It Goes, From the Inside, Part 2
How does a theater kid who never finished high school end up beside Billy Joel for 50 years? Steve Cohen grew up in Canoga Park, California, cut school to sneak onto Hollywood studio lots, and learned to run sound and lights at the Starwood club on Santa Monica Boulevard. At 20 he started a...
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Billy Joel: And So It Goes, From the Inside, Part 1
How do you make an honest film about Billy Joel when Billy Joel doesn't want to talk about himself anymore? Steve Cohen walked into a rehearsal in 1974 as a 20-year-old lighting guy who didn't much care for "Piano Man." After his first show with the band, Billy Joel poured him a Black Russian by…
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Episode 255 | Creating Unique Soundscapes -- Scoring for Documentary Films w/ Panu Aaltio
In this episode of Documentary First, host Christian Taylor sits down with Finnish film composer Panu Aaltio to dive into the fascinating world of film scoring. From his early days as a cello player to becoming a successful composer for films and documentaries, Panu shares his unique journey and...
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Saving Private Ryan: Actor Corey Johnson on Filming the D-Day Landing
What was it like to film the D-Day landing in Saving Private Ryan, as a young actor with a small part? Corey Johnson was booked for two weeks on Saving Private Ryan. He spent most of the first week on location in Ireland waiting to be called, eating Irish steak every night with the other actors…
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Episode 253 | Revitalizing Communities: The Heirloom Project with Josh Nowell & Jim Rasberry
In this episode of Documentary First, host Christian Taylor and co-host Hunter Taylor are joined by Josh Nowell and Jim Rasberry, the dynamic duo behind The Heirloom Hotel & Cooking School in Laurel, Mississippi. They discuss the transformative power of storytelling, being on HGTV's Hometown, and...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
The craft and business of documentary filmmaking, from people who actually do it.Documentary First is a weekly podcast for working and aspiring documentary filmmakers who want honest, in-depth conversations about how documentaries get funded, made, and seen. Listen Notes ranks the show in the top 5 percent of all podcasts worldwide.Hosted by Christian Taylor, award-winning director of The Girl Who Wore Freedom (25+ international awards, distributed through Virgil Films, Swank, and Canal+), the show draws on 295+ conversations with documentary filmmakers, editors, producers, distributors, and composers across HBO, Netflix, PBS, and the independent doc world. Past guests include Ken Burns, PBS American Masters creator Susan Lacy, Emmy and Peabody Award-winning editor Charles Olivier (HBO's The Jinx, The Redeem Team), and Emmy-nominated director Nick Bruckman (Netflix's Minted).Every week, Documentary First delivers two formats in one feed. The main show is a long-form interview about
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Documentary First | Christian Taylor
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How many episodes does Documentary First have?
Documentary First currently has 300 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Documentary First about?
The craft and business of documentary filmmaking, from people who actually do it.Documentary First is a weekly podcast for working and aspiring documentary filmmakers who want honest, in-depth conversations about how documentaries get funded, made, and seen. Listen Notes ranks the show in the top 5...
How often does Documentary First release new episodes?
Documentary First publishes regularly with 300 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
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Who hosts Documentary First?
Documentary First is created and hosted by Documentary First | Christian Taylor.
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