Talking about Documentary: BAFTA Sessions 2019

Making documentaries comes with different concerns to producing dramas. There can be archival footage to source and interviews to schedule, as well as ethical considerations around the documentary’s subject.

To help navigate this process the teams behind four recently BAFTA-nominated documentaries are sharing their experiences and tips. Becky Read, Grace Hughes-Hallet, Tim Wardle and Dimitri Doganis (Three Identical Strangers), Andee Ryder, Ian Bonhote and Peter Ettedgui (McQueen), Betsy West and Julie Cohen (RBG) and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi (Free Solo) talk getting started with research and interviews, and how to produce documentaries with care…

How do you embark on research for a feature-length documentary? The team behind Three Identical Strangers had to go back to basics to timeline their documentary about three identical brothers who discovered each other in 1980. Wardle explained how the film’s subject “exists in its pre-internet era so you couldn’t really search online for information. I had to do a lot of old-fashioned journalism like knocking on doors… it was a real challenge just to get the basics of it down, let alone film it.”

Similarly, the team behind McQueen, about fashion designer Alexander McQueen, needed to dedicate lots of time to sourcing archival footage: “In terms of archive, it was like being a private investigator. We started on YouTube, like everyone does, but to track down the pieces of archive that had never been seen before, that took a lot of time.”

It’s important to have interview subjects willing to contribute before starting a documentary project to give your film a solid foundation. However, Ryder considered that when making McQueen, “if we’d have waited to get access at the beginning, it probably never would have got going because I don’t think anyone would have got on board. There was a sheer determination to make the film. It’s definitely one of the big don’ts of documentaries, make sure you get your access first before you set off, at least some access… [we] had none which put some stress on the team as we went along.”

As West and Cohen started work on RBG, their documentary about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, they also struggled with lack of access to interview subjects: “Similar to what happened with McQueen, and also Three Identical Strangers, we didn’t have the full promise of access when we began filming. [But] we did have a slightly open door from Justice Ginsburg, who we had written to in 2015… her initiation reaction was not yet.”

West explains: “The modern interpretation of [Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s] story has been trivialised as internet memes,” which made those close to her reticent about speaking to cameras. However, as they started conducting interviews, she felt the door open: “I think the word started to spread that these women have done their homework and are asking serious questions and really want to make a film about how you use the US constitution to promote equality, and that word filtering back to her helped us get, bit by bit, more access, and part of the key was not pushing for everything at once.”

To West and Cohen, it was important to use their documentary as a platform to celebrate women working in film. Especially given Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself fought ardently against gender discrimination. As Cohen recalls: “It was very important. We were making a film, about a woman who has played a tremendous role in obtaining equal treatment for women in our country and there’s been so much talk about lack of opportunity for women. So, we thought we should set out and first see if we could find a cinematographer who is a woman and it wasn’t hard. We worked with Claudia Raschke and she was incredible… It turns out if you’re intentional about this, it could work so we went from there.”

The only documentary in the panel to tell a story in real-time, rather than reflect on the past, is Free Solo. It profiles rock climber Alex Honnold as he attempts to perform a free solo climb in Yosemite National Park, and is a film that its director Chai Vasarhelyi describes as “always about honouring this dream and about perseverance and coverage.” Wrestling with how to make the film authentic, Chai Vasarhelyi and her co-director Jimmy Chin decided to weave their own filmmaking into the documentary. “We include the filmmaking in the film. It gets to this existential ethical question that [is at] the heart of the movie: by filming him, could we cause him to fall?”

She reflects: “The only way to handle the ethical question was to make some very strict guidelines. The needs of the film could never trump the needs of Alex, production couldn’t take over the situation and the best way to articulate that was we had a rule, we could never ask Alex whether he was going to free solo on camera… it meant that we always, always had to be ready.” While this was difficult for the production team, it was necessary to maintain the integrity of the documentary. “Including the filmmaking in those questions seemed to be the only ethical and authentic way to put it out there and say we are thinking about this deeply.”

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