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DGA QUARTERLY 41 PHOTOS: (TOP) MERRICK MORTON/NETFLIX; (BOTTOM) A24 experimentally into scripted territory with Howl, a James Franco- starring ode to beat poet Allen Ginsberg that merged biopic form with documentary technique. Another, more straightforwardly dra- matized biopic, Lovelace, followed in 2013. "We always approach our films as narratives, so that didn't feel dif- ferent," says Friedman. "All of our documentaries are constructed as narratives that will work for an audience in the way that a fiction film will." Friedman and Epstein initially tackled Howl as a documentary project, before agreeing that the material was urging them toward a new approach. "We were finding ourselves stymied: We weren't coming up with anything alive. 'Howl' was a poem written by a young man, for a young culture, and all the people who we could approach to talk about it were very old. So we decided to recreate something that would have the energy of a youthful adventure." British director Asif Kapadia, meanwhile, started out in fiction film—winning two BAFTA awards for his 2001 debut feature, the India-set adventure The Warrior—before crossing to the other side with such biographical docs as Amy, an elegy for the late soul prod- igy Amy Winehouse, which earned a DGA nomination and won an Oscar. The film was distinguished by its reliance on found footage, with no newly staged talking-heads sequences. For Kapadia—who has since shot another fiction feature, and di- rected two episodes of David Fincher's Mindhunter for Netflix—the move to nonfiction was born of creative restlessness. "I find writing quite slow, really hard," he says, "and then there's so much waiting Asif Kapadia, crouching right, zeros in on the action for the scripted series Mindhunter; (left), a scene from his Oscar-winning doc Amy, about the late singer Amy Winehouse. involved in the process of getting a drama made. So it's been fun to have a very inverse way of working with docs, where I just go off with a tiny crew and can just start editing something. With the fiction I'm interested in, you have a crew of 500 people, this massive machine. I enjoy the circus of it all, but sometimes it's fun to just make some- thing in your back room." The filmmaker Gabriela Cowperthwaite, too, appreciates the rela- tive DIY nature of the nonfiction form. "The thing about documen- tary is you don't ask permission to make a documentary—you just make it," says Cowperthwaite, who scored a popular hit and a slew of awards with her second documentary feature Blackfish, an impas- sioned exposé of killer-whale captivity. "You gather resources as you go, little by little, and you're filming something real. Your subjects exist and your content exists in the world, and so you capture it. But after I made Blackfish—which I had kind of fashioned as a feature thriller—I was approached by reps who said, 'Have you considered the feature world?' And of course, I had! I just didn't know what the