Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1525212
Roger Nygard. 41 F A L L Q 3 I S S U E F E A T U R E taken steps in recent years to reverse that.) E r ro l M o r r i s ("A m e r i ca n D h a r m a ," 2018) has worked with editor Steven Hatha- way for the last 10 years. Davis Guggenheim ("An Inconvenient Truth," 2006) feels that editors are his equal partners: "I'm sort of a co-writer, where the editor and I are writing the movie together." Frederick Wiseman ("High School," 1968) prefers to be the sole editor of his films "because I want the mov- ie to be a reflection of my voice only." Marina Zenovich ("Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind," 2018) believes the editing room should be respected as a sacred space "because you never want to make anyone feel bad. You want to boost each other up because it's such a vulnerable creative space. You need to be able to say, 'I know this sounds crazy, but what if we try this?' You give each other space to come up with ideas and work off each other. The relationship between director and editor is best when they have a certain chemistry. It's how you get along with someone, how they make you feel, how they inspire you." Before beginning with the editor, some producers and directors transcribe every interview. Then they copy and paste sound bites into what becomes the script. Some utilize an editor who will not be making creative decisions and who is just "a pair of hands." The editor starts once a paper edit is completed. In the opposite case, an editor watches everything, makes all the deci- sions, and forms the story. There's a middle ground where both watch everything and pull pieces to match an outline. Freida Lee Mock ("RUTH: Justice Ginsburg in Her Own Words," 2021) has said, "I never hand over footage to an editor without mediating what it means or what the core ideas and characters are. I look at every frame, all the dailies, with the editor before we make pulls. It's a total collaboration with creative input from the editor whose specialty in the art and craft of editing I rely upon." When I edited the docu-series "The Comedy Store" (2020), when we wanted to do a segment about a particular comedian or topic, we asked the assistant editor to word-search all the transcripts for every time someone mentioned that person or idea and then they made a string-out, col- lecting all those clips into one timeline. And then I took that collection, moved things around, whittled it down, and molded it until it flowed as a segment or chapter. T h e f i r s t s t y l i s t i c c h o i c e f o r t h e documentarian is: How will the story be presented? Will one person be guiding the audience? A main protagonist? A narrator? Will it be the filmmaker? Nobody? Maybe a series of graphics? Perhaps the interview- ees will tell the story, their sound bites handing off the narrative baton to each other. To facilitate that, it helps to ask every interviewee the same core questions so you can intercut answers about the same idea or event, as told by multiple individuals. In "Wild Wild Country" (2018), several witnesses tell the story of Indian cult leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (a.k.a. Osho). In "Trekkies" (1999), the guide is Denise Crosby, who was part of the "Star Trek" world. Even though I also conducted inter- views, the viewer feels Crosby is the guiding presence throughout once that paradigm is set from the beginning. In "Super Size Me" (2004), Morgan Spurlock is the filmmaker, host, and subject, on a journey to test the limits of his body's reaction to junk food. We r n e r H e rzo g i s o f te n t h e vo i ce a n d sometimes the face guiding his audience, as in "Encounters at the End of the World" (2007). Luc Jacquet's documentary "March o f t h e P e n g u i n s " ( 2 0 0 5 ) wa s i n i t i a l l y dubbed with first-person dialogue for the French release, as if the penguins were telling their story. For the English version, it was changed to a third-person narrator in the form of the recognizable voice of Mor- gan Freeman. Many documentaries have no narrator. Jessica Kingdon's "Ascension" (2021) has no interviews, commentary, or explanation. The scenes stand on their own, presented as a visual essay on capitalism in China. The films of Ken Burns never have a host. Some of his more contemporary films don't even have narrators, such as "The Central Park Five" (2013), because the story is closer to the present moment, and many po- tential storytellers are still alive. However, most of Burns's films are narrated. He said it's because "I've always believed in telling stories where there is no war between the word and the picture; they should get along. I don't subscribe to the idea that somehow it's not pure to have a narrator." When he is 98 percent through the editing process, Burns brings in a professional narrator (usually Peter Coyote or Keith David), and when they lock a cut, it requires some ad- justing because the pacing of the new voice changes relationships to shots and timing. "We never let narrators see the script ahead of time. We don't ask them to speak to pic- ture. We want them to speak to meaning." Frederick Wiseman's goal is to create a dramatic structure from 100 to 150 hours of footage. "I try to f igure out how the sequences might be thematically related in the editing. I'm attracted by the idea of imposing a form on my experience." Wise- man said there are some shoot days where he doesn't get anything good, " but six months later in the editing room, because of other choices you made in editing, a scene suddenly has value where originally it had none." The challenge is to distill an 'We are filmmakers. We are not garbage collectors.'