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42 DGA QUARTERLY tion entails a subtle change in the filmmaker's relationship to the facts: a distinction between what he terms "literal truth and deeper truth." "In scripted narrative, it feels more acceptable to take liberties with details of fact as long as you're true to the basic outlines of the story," he says. "In documentary, when you're dealing with real people who are presenting themselves on camera, I feel a responsibility to those peo- ple to present them in a way that they would be comfortable with. But when I'm recreating somebody's story or a historical incident, I don't feel as much responsibility to present every detail exactly as it hap- pened. I can never know exactly how something happened anyway." For Friedman and Epstein, as well as Cowperthwaite, the biopic genre seemed an obvious outlet for their skills as documentarians. Kapadia, whose narrative films have all been fictional, struggles to imagine directing one: "I don't want any actor pretending to be Amy Winehouse—that's her, that's really her life, that's her singing, that's her being, that's her physically changing. Someone playing that: I feel PHOTOS: (TOP) JOJO WHILDEN/HULU; (BOTTOM) EVERETT port of entry was if you didn't go to film school, which I didn't." That port came unexpectedly to Cowperthwaite, as the script for Megan Leavey—a biopic of the eponymous Iraq War hero—was sent to her out of the blue. "They were ready to go; they just could not find a director," she recalls. "So I went in and pitched it and was hired in the room and was on a plane within about four weeks. So much of docu- mentary is scrambling for resources, and some- times you think to yourself, 'Wow, if I could just focus on the creative, how amazing that would be?' And there it suddenly was." For veteran docmaker Alex Gibney—a three- time DGA Award nominee and an Oscar winner for Taxi to the Dark Side, his 2007 investigation into U.S. military torture policy—the flip wasn't nearly so sudden. The filmmaker cut his teeth as a fiction film editor before moving into documentary and, recently, scripted television with the 9/11-focused Hulu miniseries The Looming Tower. It's Gibney's skills as an editor across both dis- ciplines that help him parse the difference between them. "In editing fiction or scripted films, you're spending more time ad- justing elements of rhythm, pace and performance, so you're refin- ing and shaping what's been shot," he explains. "But in docs, you're inventing. There's a freedom of mind that also requires an incred- ible discipline, to define structure out of chaos. That is, I think, much harder. But there are always ways where you can kind of break apart the form." N E D I R E C T O R D O I N G just that across both documentary and narra- tive is U.K.-based Bart Layton, whose 2012 BAFTA winner The Imposter, a stranger-than-fiction account of missing-persons identity theft, play- fully tossed the documentary rulebook aside with its artful genre trappings and ambiguity-laden reenactments. It nodded toward an affinity for nar- rative cinema that fully bloomed in American Animals, unveiled at Sundance this year, in which Layton dramatizes the headline-mak- ing 2004 Transylvania University Book Heist with a daring docu- mentary twist: The real-life criminals comment on the sidelines of Layton's scripted interpretation of events. Layton is blithely casual about his fluidity of form. "If I haven't al- ready been thrown out of the documentary club for The Imposter, I would be for American Animals," he laughs. "So there's no question of [the latter] being a documentary. It's not. But it plays with the idea of how stories get fictionalized, misremembered, sensationalized. And the scripted form helped with that. I felt that the inclusion of the real people would deepen your connection to the story. Suddenly, you have skin in the game." For Friedman, switching from documentary to dramatized nonfic- O