Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1525212
TELL THE TRUTH: "We don't score the films, we edit to the music," says Ken Burns. P H OT O : F LO R E N T I N E F I L M S 40 C I N E M O N T A G E F E A T U R E By Roger Nygard A f ter a screening of " The Great B u s te r " ( 2 0 1 8 ), a d o c u m e n ta - ry about silent-film star Buster Keaton, director Peter Bogdanovich said, "With a narrative, you write it, then shoot it. With a documentary, you shoot it, then write it." Finding the plot in your docu- mentary is job one. Great documentarians are master storytellers with a plan. After a screening of "The Fire Within: SHOOT , THEN WRITE A NEW BOOK EXPLORES HOW EDITORS CAN HELP MAKE DOCUMENTARIES SOAR A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft" (2022), Werner Herzog recalled when a young filmmaker came up to him at the Sundance Film Festival and said, "I've shot 850 hours of footage, and I've been editing for two and a half years." Herzog said, "My heart sank. This young man did not know what he was doing, where he was going with his project. I said to him, 'Please, please, please, shoot what you real- ly want for the screen. We are filmmakers. We are not garbage collectors.'" The editor must fully understand the story in order to be able to write the final draft in the edit. Sometimes, the filmmaker is the editor. Other times a director works with several editors. The director-editor relationship is so essential that filmmak- ers often repeatedly work with the same e d i to rs. ( I t s h o u l d b e n o te d h e re t h a t documentaries are often non-union, for a variety of reasons, although the Guild has