NUEVAS CONVERSACIONES SOBRE CINE DOCUMENTAL (IV):
KERRY MCLEODBy Ricard Mamblona
Kerry McLeod es Directora del Documentary Filmmakers Group (DFG), organización independiente para el desarrollo y la promoción del documental en el Reino Unido.
Productora de Mosaic Films, McLeod es colaboradora del Film London, British Film Institute, BBC y Channel 4. La entrevista fue realizada el 22 de noviembre de 2009, en inglés, que transcribimos a continuación.What are the factors that have influenced the evolution of the new wave of documentary films?
The single biggest thing of course has been video and then digital video. The cameras are smaller, lighter, more accessible, more people can get their hands on them. Before I started working in Mosaic, the company had been going for a long time and it made its reputation giving Hi8 cameras to filmmakers to go and make films in places where filmmakers had never been, and where you couldn’t take heavy equipment. And I think it’s increased the number of voices that have got access to the equipment to tell their stories. So it’s increased the number of filmmakers.
And the big thing that we see in the UK is that because the equipment is lighter, smaller and cheaper it’s also decreased the budgets. So more filmmakers are working alone or with maybe a single assistant. Unless it’s a big shoot or a big HD documentary, filmmakers are working on their own, shooting, doing sound, and now they’re producing themselves…
So do you think the trend of documentary is now towards the subjective and the individual?
Yes, that’s a massive area and I think there’s a big taste for it but there’s also a lot of films being made that probably aren’t that good because people are using film as therapy, working through their problems by making a film about it but I don’t think that always works. There’s also this “Predator” concept that you’re also editing your own film as well. I think it can be dangerous because I’ve always thought of a film as being a collaborative process and you’re getting more and more people who are making the film completely on their own, without any third voice, or second voice even, that helps give the film some feedback and direction.
I run an event in London called “10x10”. I set it up with a friend of mine who lived in LA for ten years. It’s an American format and she used to go to it a lot, and obviously the independent filmmaking theme is really strong in America, people are much more used to just getting a camera and making a film, and finding bits of money along the way to help them make it, whereas in the UK, we’re much more used to having an idea, pitching it to a broadcaster and getting the money. So the independent scene is still really new, it’s still very young. We’ve been running this event since 2007 so just over two and a half years and there’s a massive appetite, the events are always completely full. There are four slots and they can show up to ten minutes and get ten minutes of feedback, but the films that they show… It’s the same mistakes that people are making every time, and nearly always what they’re missing is the external point of view, the other voice that comes in and says: “That scene that you really love, that you think helps your film, it doesn’t really work, and it needs to come out” or “This film that you’re making about your Mum, she’s not really that interesting, on her own”, and people are lacking that. So I think that there’s a new set a problems that comes from it being so easy to make a film now.
In Mosaic films you’re trying to produce “high quality” documentaries, what exactly does this mean? What are the requisites of a “high quality” documentary?
Mosaic was built on giving opportunities to filmmakers in the country where we were making films so we did a big series of films in Russia, and whereas before it was always British filmmakers going in and making films about Russia, this was Russian filmmakers that were making films about Russia that were then broadcast on British television. And the only way of convincing a commissioner of giving us the money to make that film was by promising a certain level of quality.
So through a link with DFG as well, and having the training department, what we pride ourselves on. Anyone can make a documentary now but not everyone can make a good documentary or a high quality documentary and that’s technically in terms of knowing how to use a camera or more importantly knowing how to get good sound because so many people have got these little cameras but they don’t record good sound.
So quality is a technical question, or is the language important, that is to say, the narrative?
It’s both. The deal that Colin, who set up Mosaic films, made with the commissioners was that he would oversee the films in the edit to make sure that they were a high enough quality for television. So it’s both, it’s having the technical quality so filmmakers who know what they’re doing with their equipment, but also the storytelling ability and creating a narrative. That’s the other mistake that comes up again and again in 10x10.
So that’s what the commissioners are looking for before they commission the film?
Before the film even starts, yes. Especially now, increasingly now, funders and commissioners want to know, before you start filming, what the story’s going to be, or at least have a sense of what it might be. People are much less willing to take risks in business. But, on the other hand, you’ve got filmmakers who’ve got more freedom because it’s much cheaper and easier to make films to just head off and, without necessarily having any funding, follow a story and see where it goes, see what develops.
I saw a film this morning, a short film by someone I know and she pitched at quite a well known short film scheme in the UK called Bridging the Gap, and she got through to the final round of pitching and she didn’t get the money because the people on the panel couldn’t see the story, they didn’t think there was going to be a story there. So she gave up and then she thought: “Well, I’ve booked the time off work, I might as well go and film it anyway”, so she did. She got a camera and she went and filmed it. And actually what she captured was a very simple but very moving story, and now it’s showing at IDFA and it’s showing at Sheffield Doc/Fest as well.
I think what I’m trying to say here is that along with the fact that it’s easier now to make films, I think things have changed in terms of what people in the industry are looking for. But then also what’s possible outside of the industry. So you’ve got a kind of tension at the moment between the two, and I don’t know what way it’s going to go in the next few years, but my guess is that it’s going to go much more towards the independent filmmaker.
Can we speak about economic profitability when talking about documentary these days?
I think it depends. From a UK perspective, you’ve got very successful films like Man on Wire, and they’re successful because it’s almost like watching a fiction film, the structure, the production values, the story and the strength of the character, and it plays out like a feature. And then, on the other side of that, you’ve got films like The Age of Stupid, which are doing well in terms of getting audiences, but they’re not making money. Man on Wire made money, but it also had a big budget, in documentary terms. I think it was something like 1.5 million. Which is a lot of money.
Do you think that an award in a festival is a guarantee for a documentary to be shown on TV?
I think a lot of films that win awards at the bigger festivals, I think it helps them to get distribution but then most of them have most of their distribution in place already. For instance, the film Afghan Star by Havana Marking, that won the audience award and directing prize at Sundance, it’s an interesting film. She followed the first kind of “Pop Idol” type series in Afghanistan after the elections in 2005, and she already had UK distribution in place when she went to Sundance because they funded the film. And I think she had other European broadcasters on board as well. But having said that, as a result of doing so well at Sundance she got HBO and some other broadcaster in the United States to give her a distribution deal. So yes, it does help, but it’s got to be at one of the main festivals. It’s got to be at IDFA or Sundance or Hot Docs, really.
Talking about Festivals, there are more and more international Festivals emerging around the world. What are they contributing to documentary film?
I think everything is becoming more international now, and that’s certainly true of documentaries, most films that you make you’ll have funding from more than one country. Or more than one platform. So you’re looking at theatrical distribution, broadcasting rights, DVD, and that’s all quite new for documentary. And I think that the festivals provide the infrastructure for that. That’s where people go and they meet people. You come to IDFA and you meet producers from all over Europe and from North America, in a way that you couldn’t do business, not on a filmmaker’s budget at least. You couldn’t go flying to all these places. They’re really important as central hubs for getting that kind of business done.
Do you think the advent of digitization creates more dangers for the values of documentary films, given that some films are created digitally from start to finish, such as animated documentaries or documentary games?
I’ve never thought of it in that way before. I’ve never thought of it in terms of digital being a danger to objectivity, that’s quite interesting. What do you think are the dangers?
Well, when you call something a documentary it’s like saying to the audience that what they will see is based on reality. However in an animated documentary, what you show is clearly not real…
I don’t really see the difference. The animated documentaries that we’ve made are based on interviews that are cut together with animation expressing what these people are saying, and I don’t really see the difference between that and a film that uses shots of the landscape to illustrate what people are saying in their interview. Very few films now would just be a straightforward talking head.
Audiences aren’t impressed by that, and animation is just one way of expressing that. Film is a visual form, so it’s just another way of doing that. But in terms of the contract with the audience, I think that’s really interesting. I mean, you’ve got films like Borat, people call that a documentary. Or Persepolis, people call that an animated documentary, which I’m not sure that I would, because it’s actors and it’s a script which is animated. It’s an autobiographical film, yes, but I think there’s a difference between that and the animated documentaries that we make.
So I think that there is a danger in terms of people being able to say: “This is a documentary”, without necessarily having to back that up with anything. But on the whole it’s like, back in the days of vérité, direct cinema, they were supposedly completely true because they were unmediated between the filmmaker and the audience. Well, of course they were, they were edited so that’s just as much of a breaking of the contract because they’re promising an unmediated view when of course it’s mediated. They decided what to shoot, they decided what to put in the film. And what I love about documentary is that it’s always changing and there are lots of ways of telling a story. Lots of quite inventive ways of telling a story, that are still real, you’re still talking about real stories, real situations, real people, and I think that’s what documentary is.
In UK you use the word documentary even for the fiction films like documentary drama, whereas in Spain we say a film based on real facts. How would you call for example films of Ken Loach?
I get really confused because there is drama documentary and documentary drama, and one is Ken Loach which is kind of fiction but shot in documentary style and the other one is something like Man on wire or Touching the void that uses reconstruction in order to help to tell the story. And I think this is very different. You would say Man on wire is very different film than a Ken Loach film.
Projects like “The Great British Summer Holidays” are an evidence of crossing the borders with new technology and also you are working with NESTA… tell us a bit about these projects?
“The Great British Summer Holiday” was a business opportunity, it was an opportunity to pitch in Cannes, in a TV market, and it was part of this strand of events called “Content 360”. And it was pitching to the BBC for a development prize, and the brief was “engaging the audience via their mobiles”. So we came up with this very commercial idea, unlike anything that we had ever done before, which involved teams of celebrities travelling Britain trying to find the best places to go, and every step of the way they had to be guided by the audience on their mobiles, who tell them where to go, what to do, where to stay, give them directions, help them out… and the whole thing would be mapped in real time online and on TV.
And from the point of view of telling stories in new ways, it really excited me. But it was such a commercial venture, I was not sure. I would have preferred it if it hadn’t involved celebrities, but real people travelling through Britain it could be quite interesting, a new way of discovering the environment. But that’s neither here nor there because we won the developing prize but it’s not gone anywhere.
When you talk about the use of the technology or dissemination through mobile phones or the use of the Internet, are you thinking about business sharing with the rest of the community? It’s like documentary, not always thinking of money but in a social profitability.
If we’re being honest, I think documentary is always social profitability, they’re never going to make money or profit in that way. Nobody making documentaries does it because they want to make money. The only way I could get excited about the project of “The Great British Summer Holiday” was thinking about how it was a new way to tell a story, a new way to engage an audience.
I’m doing a project now with Mosaic which isn’t on our website yet, which is working with small archives around London to make their material available online and using an online editing system, it enables people to use archive heritage material from around London. It’s a London based project to re-cut into their own films, so it’s about exploring local history and local culture and identity, thinking about what makes a place home, is it where we live or is it where we are from, is it the people around us? And that’s what I love and that’s what the technology affords us.
I become a facilitator, in a way. We are going out to libraries, schools, art-centres, to run workshops to help people understand the technology and how to use the software and then they make the films. Thanks to the web anybody can watch them. It’s kind of two-fold: putting the power into the audience’s hands so they can do with it what they want and it’s also making material that might otherwise have never been seen, films that have just been in an archive for years. It helps them to get seen by a wider audience, one for whom that material is relevant. And I think that is the big thing that’s so important now, as things become increasingly international and we are watching films from all over the world, at the same time people are much more interested in things are very local, local concerns, and this resonates with me, I can identify with this.
Compared with fiction, projects like 10x10 are more concerned with people who like documentary and want to be part of a group or a different community…
Yes. In a way that’s how a documentary develops. People wanting to speak to the audience in different ways, ways that theatre or fiction can’t reach, about telling stories that otherwise couldn’t get told. I always think of the early documentaries and how they told stories of the working class that just weren’t seen on film otherwise. I think it’s extending that tradition, it’s about finding new ways to tell stories. And I think the best way of doing that is to help other people to tell stories. Personally that’s what I like.
Television is now offering new types of programmes, “playing” with reality and documentary feature films are being heavily influenced by that, how important is the role of television in the documentary genre?
My answer is in two parts: filmmakers I’ve spoken to who aspire to make documentaries for cinema will actively say that they model their films on fiction films rather than reality. That’s the ongoing format, the talent search and getting it down to the one person who wins. Possibly before reality TV kicked in, films like Spellbound, they follow that format.
The English surgeon is a British brain surgeon who travels to the Ukraine twice a year to perform brain surgery and, talking to the director, who is an interesting person, he knew when he set out that he wanted the narrative to be like a fiction narrative, so it unfolds, you get introduce to the characters, you get introduced to the jeopardy which is that one of the characters has to have life-threatening surgery. And the surgeon is kind of nervous and he is having memories of the first time he did this and it went wrong and this little girl was left so severely brain damaged. She didn’t die, it took her two years to die and it’s this guy’s search for redemption versus this guy’s search to get better. It’s really constructed like a feature film.
I do think reality TV has had an effect on films that are getting made in a very negative way, and it’s about ethics. I think suddenly filmmakers are more willing to manipulate the stories to try and get more drama out of it than ten years ago. And I think you see that when filmmakers push it too far and I think it’s the fault of reality TV. And I think is also because of reality TV, with the commissioning editors and industry types, that’s why they want more information from you up front: What the story is going to be? How can I know you are going to be able to deliver the story to me? So filmmakers are under more pressure to deliver that.
Before you mentioned ethics, so do we have to appeal then to the ethical values of the filmmaker in the end?
I think there is a contract between the filmmaker and the audience and also a contract between the filmmaker and the person you achieved making the film with and that’s very important because, how can you claim to be telling a real story or telling a truth if you are not honest with the person you are filming?
And is there any difference with the digitalization now than in the past?
Yes, absolutely. Previously if you wanted to make a film it was a very expensive, big process and so you would not be very likely to have gone straight into making the film, you’d have worked your way up and you’d have learnt from other people how to make a film and there was a kind of structure or a support network and you learned how to be a good filmmaker and how to be an ethical filmmaker. And now people with no training they just jump up and make a film. They don’t necessarily think about the ethics, they just think about making a good film.
We’ve seen that a lot in “10x10” as well. I watched a film where the guy was making a film about his friends and he was an out-of-work actor who thought he was quite a hit with the women but he really isn’t. And this film is kind of following him and telling you he is an actor. And it was cut together as a comedy and I found that really offensive, it’s like “I thought this guy was your friend, and why do you want us to be laughing at him? Does he know that we’re laughing at him? Does he realize that you’re setting him up as this comic character?” And the filmmaker just hadn’t considered that, all that he was thinking about was: “Wow, my friend would make a really good character in a film because he was just out there and funny”.
Grierson defined documentary as “the creative treatment of reality”, is this the essence of documentary?
I can’t think of a better way to put it, but what makes it different to any other art-forms is about telling you “A Truth”. It’s the truth as the filmmaker sees it, like Michael Moore or it’s the truth as the subject sees it. It’s never like “the truth”, whatever that is. The documentary has to tell a story at the end of the day and in order to tell that story it involves the creative ability of a filmmaker to shape that story and, in order to that happen, there is some kind of treatment, there some kind of intervention into a real-life situation. You can’t avoid that.
What is the role of Internet in documentary films?
It’s almost the democratization of filmmaking. Anyone can make a film, anyone can get their film seen. I read somewhere that it was like a chart and it was showing the level of literacy, so the number of adults and the number of adults who publish. It’s kind back to blogging and twitter and stuff like that. It’s almost like it’s coming to meet, that the numbers are the same.
So everybody now who can read or write is publishing in some way and it’s a bit like that with film. But I think what hasn’t been worked out or what is going to need to be worked out in the next few years is, if everybody is doing that, who do we watch, how do we choose who we’re going to watch, how do we choose which stories we see. Do we have to choose? Maybe it’s just that there are stories out there for everyone. But I think it does also then question the role of documentary because if it’s always been about trying to get a story seen by the audience, how do you do that if everyone can make a film, if documentary is still the best way to do it?
And the other thing is the cynic in me… I love the idea that anything is available to anyone now but the cynic in me says that there’s always going to be a voice stronger and that’s always going to be voice of the establishment, whether that’s Google buying Youtube and offering Youtube Channels to the big media companies so it means their contents are going to be seen more than the little guys. Or Amazon going into DVD sales so it means that if you want to sell your DVD you have get it on the list of Amazon or no-one’s ever going to find it. I’ve got my reservations, I love the thought of it could happen but I have my doubts.
Documentary has obviously progressed a lot in the last few years, but we still cannot compare it with the fiction market?
A big part of that is down to the filmmaker as well because filmmakers still seem to be really reluctant to make their films available on the Internet, because they think it devalues them. And it’s a shame because increasingly that is where the audiences are now, that’s where they go to watch films. And if you don’t put it on there, somebody will. It’s a really interesting time.
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