Morgan Neville, the director of “Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in Two Pieces,” loved movies and writing as a child, but when he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, he wasn’t sure what to do with his interests. He thought “writing seemed serious” and “movies were too frivolous” to get into show business, but when he began his first documentary, “Shotgun Freeway: Drives Through Lost LA,” he knew he had found his lifelong passion.
“I remember sending my parents a message two weeks after starting my first documentary saying, ‘This is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life,'” Neville said. “I immediately realized that documentaries were all these different things I liked: the storytelling, the writing, the research, the interviews, all of it.”
As part of diversity At the virtual FYC TV Fest, Neville joined Andrew Jarecki, director, executive producer and writer of “The Jinx – Part Two,” Mary Robertson and Emma Schwartz, directors and executive producers of “Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV,” and Justin Wilkes, president of Imagine Entertainment and producer of “Jim Henson Idea Man,” on a panel discussion on documentary films. Emily Longeretta, senior television features editor, moderated the conversation.
In the age of streaming, documentaries come in all shapes and sizes. Whether it’s a five-part miniseries like “Quiet on Set” or a two-part feature like “Steve!”, documentary filmmakers have more control than ever over how their films are organized. For “Idea Man,” Wilkes and his team wanted to make a single film. This allowed them to emulate Jim Henson’s innovative filmmaking techniques and follow the natural three acts of his life.
“Ron (Howard) thought early on, ‘We should make it so that the documentary feels like Jim is telling his story, the way Jim wants to tell his own story.’ When you see it, we use a lot of those techniques with stop-motion animation and syncopated editing,” Wilkes said. “I think that’s also why we felt like his story had a very natural beginning, middle and unfortunately incongruous end that somehow fit naturally into a three-act structure.”
When making a documentary, what a director cuts out of the film is just as important as what he puts in. While filming part two of “The Jinx,” a documentary series about the unsolved murders of Robert Durst, Jarecki had to go through “nine years of footage.” To make sure he was telling the story effectively, Jarecki turned to the trusted opinions of friends and family.
“A big part of it was making a list of all the people we trusted and then a few random people, like my kids’ friends or people we just know are smart viewers, and getting them into a screening room early,” Jarecki said. “You record something that you think is important. I remember a friend of ours who was an editor said, ‘No, yeah, I did. It was great. It was like a leftover,’ and we were just like, ‘Oh my God, that’s out.'”
One topic not often discussed in documentary filmmaking is the relationship between the filmmaker and his work. When Neville made Steve!, he saw as much of his own story in the film as he did Steve Martin’s.
“We don’t often talk about autobiographies in our films, but I see so much of what I think about and deal with in my own life reflected in the choices I make, the films I make and the way I make them,” Neville said. “In some ways, I feel like with Steve, a lot of what he’s processed are things I’ve processed in my own life too. In that respect, it really feels like a two-way street.”
Watch the full conversation above.
