The Importance of Journalism in Documentary Filmmaking
“I've been making documentaries for 30 years. For the first 15 years, no one was interested in them.
I'd like to think that it wasn't that they weren't interested in my documentary, but that they weren't interested in documentaries. [in general]I started making a lot of music documentaries because I'm a music nerd, and I figured out how to make music films at a time when it was hard, really hard, to make documentaries.
So I did the stuff I wanted to do, like Muddy Waters, Hank Williams, Brian Wilson. And I think I ended up doing a lot of biopics and historicals. I like that, but I like other stuff too. I mean, we're at a point now where people want those movies, even if there are too many of them. I like doing those movies, but I wish it was easier to make smaller, weirder movies too.
Journalism is great training for documentary. In film school, I feel like it's important to try and use your voice. What do you want to say? What is your point of view? And in journalism, it's, what do you listen to? What do you listen to? It's a totally different trend.
A lot of my work is really about really listening. When I start a project, I go in with no plan. I just try to understand everything, talk to as many people as I can, watch as much as I can, read as much as I can, and then I think, “Okay, what's emerging? What patterns do I see? How do I start to put it together?” This Steve Martin documentary is a great example of that. A24 helped me make it from the beginning, and they were like, “Just work on it until you figure out what it is.”
Is this a theatrical film? Is this a miniseries? What? And it felt like this material was going in two different directions. [Steve Martin’s] The beginning, middle, end of my stand-up career, my years with Steve. And I thought, why not just leave them as they are? They can be separate. Rather than trying to play ping pong. [between the two ideas]As is often the case with documentaries, I try to make the ideas more true to the essence of the documentary.
I think [documentary subjects] Respond to the fact that when I walk into a room, all I'm trying to do is understand what I'm looking at. And documentary is a broad term and there are many different types of films, but sometimes I've seen people interviewing people as if they were hostile witnesses on the stand. I'm more focused on how to keep the conversation going for as long as possible.
That's the way I work. That's my process. Just talking, reading, absorbing, and then starting to see what the shape is.”
Find Steve in “Steve!”
Steve! (Martin) documentary series
Provided by A24
“I feel like [Steve Martin’s] Throughout his career, he's been grilled by people about what he's promoting, and with his second film, he says this is an antidote to that.
As he opened up more and more about his journey, it began to dawn on me all that he'd been through emotionally that I hadn't really known before, and how relatable a lot of what he'd been through was to me — both the struggling artist part and the workaholic part.
The lesson in perseverance is striking because there are so many talented people who would have given up long before Steve, and I've heard other comedians say that some of the funniest people they knew were comedians who never made it because commitment is key. It's not just about whether you have the talent. It's all about what else you can do.
What I really discovered through Steve is that he was essentially doing performance art rather than comedy, and nobody understood it, and then some people got it, and then everyone got it, and the moment everyone got it, he was able to keep doing new tricks.
But what was the point? Like he said, it was a dead end, and he had to get out of there. He could have stayed there for years and made a ton of money, but that's Steve. The minute he feels he's reached the pinnacle of something, he has to move on to the next thing.”
How to Manage Archived Footage and Music in Documents
Steve! (Martin) documentary series
Provided by A24
“I have a full-time archive producer who I've been working with for a number of years. The best enemy. There's a ton of archival work, so we're doing some digging. Sometimes we're doing some digging looking for local TV news and stuff, and we find that. But part of that work is literally staying in Steve's basement for two months scanning, and we did that, too. It was basically the two of us in his basement for a summer and we scanned over 5,000 things.
He had diaries and all this stuff. I was like, Oh my God, I have to collect them all. And he had audio cassettes. He would record himself playing at shows and listen to the audience's reactions. I love that archival aspect of it.
It just kept growing. I wasn't sure if the first film should just be an archive. [at first]After about six months, I decided I had enough material to make the first film without any modern footage.
I'd never done anything like that before, but it was a fun challenge.
[For the animated sequences] There was a story [from audio recordings] I don't have visuals, but I have a lot of photos, so I wanted the animation to be a photo collage, all based on real photos. I also wanted to have a handmade feel to it, to give the animation a three-dimensional feel. It has a stop-motion feel, it feels period. It's like a Terry Gilliam type of work or something.
Another big factor was music. To me, Steve is a quintessential Californian in a lot of ways. He grew up in Orange County, he worked at Disneyland, so he's American in a lot of ways. While editing, I started listening to a lot of rare Beach Boys songs – not just songs, but stuff from box sets from the late '60s and early '70s.
I started working with that, and then I met Darian. [Sahanaja]”We had Darian, Brian Wilson's musical director for over 25 years, write the music, and we also used some Beach Boys songs.”
Morgan's advice to documentary filmmakers
Steve! (Martin) documentary series
Provided by A24
“There are many different aspects to documentary, but like I said, I think a lot of it is about not getting in the way of your subject. Let the subject tell you what you're doing. In that sense, I think I've always been a method director. My films reflect the subject and the form reflects the subject.”
Mister Rogers Movie (Would you like to be my neighbor?) is very slow and deep. But I like Orson Welles (They'll love me even after I die), it was insane, and it was reflective of Orson at the time. So I know that's how I approached it. But I think it took me a long time to think of myself as less of a journalist or a historian or an artist or whatever and say, “Okay, I'm going to make a movie. What is the movie going to be about?”
Tell a good story or find a great character, or ideally both. It's that simple. I think a lot about my characters and my story. I think a lot of the advice I get from both editors and writers is really helpful in thinking about how each scene affects the character and how that moves the story forward or moves the character forward.
And even in my music documentaries, I try to use every song as a character beat or a story beat. A lot of times, people use music like wallpaper. The song has to reveal something in some way.”
clock Steve! Currently streaming on Apple+ via A24
