DGA Monthly

S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 6 I 3 3 Michael Apted on writing the structure of a documentary: "Sometimes feel I'm more creative doing documentaries, personally, than I am doing a [narrative] movie because, you go out and harvest the material and you got this whole ton of stuff and you've got to create a story out of it, whatever it is, whether it's a character in the films. That's been a big training ground for me because I have to start from scratch on a documentary with a structure. I mean, not the big picture. You know the big picture, but actually the details of it. And I found that has really informed me when it comes to doing [narrative] movies." The DGA's Visual History Program is an endeavor designed to explore the art and craft of the Director and the Director's team via peer-to-peer interviews with other Directors, Assistant Directors, Unit Production Managers, Associate Directors and Stage Managers. Created in 2000 by the Special Projects Committee and consisting of more than 270 videotaped interviews, the Visual History Program serves as an invaluable teaching source for those curious about the craft, a preservation of the professional wisdom of DGA members, and a unique repository for Guild history. The interviews, which last between three and eight hours, emphasize reflective and collegial discussions about all aspects of the creative process in film, television and other media. Visual History interviews are accessible to all Guild members as well as to the general public on the DGA website. The Visual History database is fully searchable by topic, and each interview is indexed, allowing for quick retrieval of segments pertaining to specific interests and topics, either within a particular interview or across the entire collection. Featured here are a few excerpts on directing documentaries. Perspectives on Directing Documentaries from the Visual History Program Archives Lee Grant on the importance of expressing harsh realities: "It can't be erased, it's on film, it's going to be there forever in that sense our ability to say, 'You exist. You are important.' What you need to say when that woman says at the end of Down and out in America, 'What kind of country is this? How can this be going on in the United States,' she is validated. And what can you ask of yourself, more than to validate people who are swept under the rug? So in that sense I think we perform a huge service. In another sense, I think when people see something that kind of brings them down when they want to be up, they turn a channel or they don't go to the movie and they don't see it. And more, and more, and more it's 1984, and I mean the book. More and more, they have found a way of putting amusement next to bad news, next to the weather." Chuck Workman on a documentary Director's duty to tell the truth: "The audience expects that what they're seeing in a nonfiction film is truthful and authentic and organic to the story. And they don't expect lies. They don't expect what's called fake news today. When you see news on TV — and I think because documentaries have their roots in news, or close to it anyway — people expect it to be true. So your responsibility is to make it true. Is to dig. So, if you do a film like yours [moderator Harrison Engle's] of Theodore Roosevelt, you better make sure that all the facts are right. What I do sometimes is I'll bring an expert in afterwards. I have to do it because suppose I made a mistake? I can't have that in the film. And so we rely on Ken Burns and Errol Morris and you and me to be right and to only show us things that we know are true." Jesús Treviño on finding a documentary innovation in the face of a limitation: "I found that there were a lot of historical events in Chicano history that we had no images for. You go back to the Zoot Suit Riots of the 1940s and there were photographs at the LA Times of young Chicano kids being beaten up by sailors and then being arrested by the police and all that — their photographs exist. But there were certain historical periods and events that were, I thought, important to our history, but for which there were no images. And so that's when I hit upon the idea of doing dramatic recreations. And so I basically started getting actors together, dressing them up, and recreating moments in Chicano history. And I began to include those in the flashback moments. And that was really my first real sense of working with actors and staging drama, staging where the camera was gonna be, how we were gonna shoot this, how we were gonna intercut this." View more excerpts and interviews in the Visual History Collection via the link on the homepage of www.dga.org.

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