You know, when people talk about filmmaking and the techniques of filmmaking, we use them all the time in network television news in order to make our stories simpler, tighter and more understandable to the general public.
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If you acknowledge that filming is an occasion where people express things they might not otherwise express, that offers a much more insightful analysis of why documentaries - even of the fly-on-the-wall variety - are powerful.
I don't actually see that much difference between telling stories in journalism and telling them on film. The tools are very different, but the basic idea is the same.
Filmmaking, like any other art, is a very profound means of human communication; beyond the professional pleasure of succeeding or the pain of failing, you do want your film to be seen, to communicate itself to other people.
As filmmakers, we're constantly always looking for something to bring the audience deeper into the reality of the story we're telling.
Documentaries are a form of journalism.
In a way, film and television are in the same sort of traumatic trance that print journalism is. The technology has outpaced our comprehension of its implications.
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.
I think it's important that we all try to give something to this medium, instead of just thinking about what is the most efficient way of telling a story or making an audience stay in a cinema.
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.
I mean, journalism is very detailed... you try to get down in the weeds and sort out exactly what happened. And I don't think that a feature film is really a place where that happens.