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DGA QUARTERLY 43 the unpredictable. But when you get into shooting a narrative movie, with all of the machinery that goes with that, that level of spontaneity or unpredictability was not what I wanted. I wanted the plan of how each scene was going to look and feel to be locked down, so I could then relax enough to open the door back up to all the stuff that you want on a documentary—basically, all the things actors do that you could never have written." Cowperthwaite elaborates on Layton's planned- vs.-improv dynamic: "With scripted filmmaking, you know what's supposed to happen every day," she says, "but with documentary, every single shoot day is a question mark. You might get arrested, your inter- viewees might not show up, there are so many things that can go wrong. There's a freshness and a magic to that: You make decisions on the fly and just embrace the imperfection of life. So what I found myself doing in scripted was encouraging those impromptu mo- ments, encouraging my cast and crew to be spry on their feet, in case something unscripted happened." Ultimately, the four filmmakers are all in the busi- ness of making movies, whether scripted or not. "It was always my hope and dream to make movies for the big screen—and that's the same in fiction or docu- mentary," says Kapadia. "So I could take all the things that I'd learned from fiction features—in terms of sound, music, camera and story- telling—and make reality just as visceral. It's why I choose not to do talking-head interviews: They take you out of the movie and make you very much aware of the filmmaker. Even with the sound design, I remember fighting to mix Senna in a really big stage, because it's a movie. It felt like this was the most exciting action film you could imagine, with this incredible hero: kind of the greatest movie star I'd come across." As more filmmakers move more fluently between forms, the me- dium evolves and expands: documentary and narrative are no longer the separate worlds they once were. In an age of "fake news" para- noia, are directors concerned about blurring the line too much? "The obvious peril is that people stop being able to differentiate between documentary and recreated reality, and I do think that's a problem," cautions Friedman. "We're currently facing a political cri- sis in defining what's true and what truth even means anymore. Even in a traditional documentary, you're making all kinds of choices, and it's more mediated than audiences might realize—but if it's done well and honestly, there's always a reliable storyteller behind the images. That level of trust is more difficult to maintain now." Finally, for Gibney, there's only one clear rule for the storyteller, whether working in documentary, drama or somewhere in the mid- dle. "I think you can fool the audience for a time," he says, "but don't ever lie to them." ® PHOTO: WILSON WEBB like I can't see past the construct. Certain sequences in Senna (about the Italian Formula One racer), like when he wins his first Grand Prix in Brazil, you can't restage that foot- age: This guy's doing 220 miles per hour and his life is genuinely at risk. Rather than trying to shoot some- thing to look like that kind of shaky- cam, this is the real thing. Something about that just plays." Gibney, however, is happy to let reality and reconstruction bleed into each other a little more, whether working in documentary or narrative. "The term cinema vérité means not truth, but cinematic truth," he says. "Mixing fiction filmmaking methods into docs is healthy and valuable, and often much misunderstood by critics, who ask, 'Why does he or she need to tart up something when just listing the facts would be better?' In the last 20 years, nonfiction has explod- ed formally: The days of the NBC White Paper are gone, and thank God. But you also see scripted films increasingly borrowing doc tech- niques, in terms of camera style, the willingness to grab material and embrace more chaotic reality." Though Layton is one of those filmmakers who liberally mixes disciplines, when it came to American Animals, he found value in the strictures of screenwriting—at least initially. "In a doc, you embrace "Mixing fiction filmmaking methods into docs is healthy and valuable, and often much misunderstood by critics." —ALEX GIBNEY (above) Director Bart Layton, left, and his DP, Ole Bratt Birkeland, on the set of the feature hybrid American Animals; (opposite, top) Alex Gibney, right, directs the action on the fact-based series The Looming Tower; (opposite, bottom), co-directors Jeffrey Friedman, left, and Rob Epstein confer on the set of the narrative feature Howl.