In documentaries, there's a truth that unfolds unnaturally, and you get to chronicle it. In narratives, you have to create the situations so that the truth will come out.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Stories, as we're taught in journalism school early on, are told through people. Those stories make our documentaries powerful. You can explore someone's culture, you can explore their experience, you can explore an issue through human beings who are going through it.
Documentary people have to know that, particularly nowadays, they have to be on a mission. And part of the mission is to - is to be like good journalists: search for the truth, have an open mind, listen to as much as you can of different sides of things.
Documentaries deal with people who live real, everyday lives. But if these people trusted us and told us the truth about their lives, it could be used against them - which sometimes happened.
Documentaries are a powerful and effective way of bridging the gap between worlds, breaking through to new audiences that wouldn't otherwise be engaged - in essence, not preaching to the choir.
We're telling a story. And the demands of that are different from the demands of a documentary. The audience must believe in order to keep faith in the story.
Documentaries are a form of journalism.
Documentaries can embrace contradictions in a way that journalism can't.
One of the reasons to do documentaries is that. There's more sense of creating something, more sense of my own soul in the documentaries than in movies, because I don't write the movies I do.
Truth is quite constricting, in a way. You endlessly see at the start of a film 'This is a true story'.
You can construct whatever story you want to. Documentaries are constructions, as is all journalism.