Original subtitles

- Thank you.

- Okay.

- On est prêt?

- D'accord. - Merci.

- I loved to go to the movies, but it never occurred to me

that I could ever make movies.

In fact, I went to undergraduate school

in engineering, which I hated from day one.

- I mean, it just sort of happened.

- Before making films, I worked

as a professional chef for about 10 years.

- Even when I was 14,

I knew I would make films.

I started to develop stories and screenplays

and was always chased out of offices of producers.

- As a 16-year-old, it seemed to me

that it would be a waste of time to be a writer;

the majority of the population

wouldn't be able to read what I wrote.

And I loved going to films even then.

I thought films was really my medium.

- So I became an editor at first,

because it was that darkness I liked.

- Starting out life as a psychologist,

in science you learn to be open-minded.

Very important to making a documentary.

- My first job on a documentary shoot

was, you know: Here's the Nagra,

you're recording sound. And I was, like, oh my God!

- Working with that amazing dance

with people in the frame...

- You'd go to lunch and talk about it.

There was just this great kind of immersion

in the adventure of it,

which I found incredibly appealing.

- It was... astounding,

and I just fell in love.

- And then I went to film school,

then I dropped out of film school,

but that's another story.

- Documentary filmmaking

and what we call film d'auteur -

cinema d'auteur, author's film -

is...

is the absolutely...

the freest way of cinema.

You have such an enormous spectrum

of possibilities of expression.

- But I'm sorry, I speak English,

but not very well. Huh?

- In the middle of the night,

with a tiny camera in my right hand,

with a tiny candle in my left hand,

lighting the person's face,

and that was, you know, becomes cinema.

It goes on screens around the world.

You cannot have less, you know?

- Documentary filmmaking

is about being inspired by the moment.

It's about the joy of letting something affect you,

and respond.

Whether it's with your camera,

or yourself as a person if you're the interviewer.

It's about relating in a space, like dancing.

- Real life is so much more interesting

and so much more bizarre than anything you can make up.

And, you know, the imagination is always limited,

but somehow reality is infinitely bizarre

and weird and compelling.

It's the thing that fiction films,

no matter how good they are, just can't offer.

- It's a very... sort of super-real thing

that you're doing. It's highly charged.

It forces people to examine themselves.

It's very intense.

- I think of it, as a filmmaker,

as a way to understand conflicts

and... and human contradictions

and power.

You have people who are confronted with decisions

and what are they gonna do.

- The part that I like about documentary

is that it can be anything.

The part I don't like about it,

is that you are constantly being told

that documentary has to be one thing

rather than a whole multiple of possible things.

Gus Rose walked in.

- He had a confession he wanted me to sign.

He, uh... said that Iwould sign it.

He didn't give a damn what I said.

- We all know that you can create things

that are about the world.

They're not meant as purely fiction.

They're meant as stories about real events,

real people.

We piece together reality, each one of us,

from bits and pieces of stuff.

Reality isn't handed to us whole.

- It has the power to plant questions in people's minds.

It has the power to make you empathize with things

which you never really knew

you could empathize with.

- Rather than telling people what to think,

or, you know, they're learning a lesson,

we're taking them through an emotional experience

which opens a little window into something.

- It's an emotional medium.

It's not a medium of intellect

and intellectual discourse.

It's about engagement...

and emotion.

- The form itself

is no longer a kind of linear...

information-based form.

It's something which can take

from other art forms,

from the great river of cinema.

I see them all like a painter would see them,

as kind of colours on a palette,

as you're making a painting.

And the painting is, in our world now,

a documentary film.

- There's so many ideas for documentaries out there.

You know, you'll go to a party or be talking to a friend:

"Oh, you know, it'd make a great film."

There's just ideas just floating out there in the ether,

but the ones that stick are, again,

these ones where you have a lot of curiosity.

I think, for me, that's the biggest thing:

is there enough personal curiosity

about that subject,

about what happens in that story,

to propel the very long, enervating process

that is making a film?

- The eureka moment for me, when I'm thinking about a film,

is when I really feel

there's something I want to say and it...

I don't know, I feel arrogant.

It sounds, to me, arrogant to say that.

Like, why would, you know, I have anything to say

that people haven't already thought of?

But, in fact,

that is the little egotism of the artist.

- I feel very intrigued...

by the enigma of human beings, you know.

How somebody really nice, very sympathetic,

can just sit there and say:

"Yeah, my job is flying bombs into the Congo," you know?

The origin of the idea was that moment 10 years ago

when I met some of these Russian pilots.

And I knew I had something

in my hands that was very explosive.

It was very clear.

And I knew I had found the right location

and the right environment

to make a point on the state of our time,

economically and socially.

One strange product, which is that fish,

tells us the whole story of our times, in a way,

you know?

- I mean, I always tell people,

"If you can walk away, walk away."

It's only when you can't walk away from a subject

that you should make it,

because it's too hard to make documentaries,

it requires enormous commitment, time.

You will never be rewarded financially enough.

So the need to make it is actually, I think,

the first essential point.

- I stumble across things

that immediately fascinate me deeply,

and then I know there is no choice.

All the projects I have done were uninvited guests.

Like having... inviting two guests for dinner

and you open the door a little bit

and all of a sudden you have the entire apartment,

the house full of uninvited guests.

- I'm giving this talk in Chicago

and this man mentions Henry Darger

and that he knows Darger's last landlady,

and then the next thing I know, I'm standing in Darger's room.

The room that really was the place

where he spent the last 40 years.

And I wasn't thinking I wanted to make a film.

I just wanted to see more of the work,

but when I stood in that room, I had one of those moments

where my heart was just beating really fast

and I was just thinking

the presence of this person was so strong.

And this room was so beautiful.

Like, everything in there was sort of old and dusty,

but everything was something he had collected there,

and there was just this sense of the person in the place

that I felt that you could make a film out of this.

And I wanted to know more.

And that was the beginning of the ball rolling,

the curiosity building and the sense that I needed

to try to follow this and see where it went.

- There's a lot of serendipity in this world.

I mean, certain projects, you kind of... you stalk,

and you try to make them.

Others come and land in your lap.

- I was driving my car

and I hear the news,

the shooting in Oka.

And when I arrived there,

there was a barricade of police officers

and you couldn't go into the village.

I just was amazed,

and I guess I felt it's my duty,

it has to be documented by one of us.

I wanted to transmit what I felt and saw there,

and what the story was

and what it was like...

... so that whoever's looking at it

can understand what that story is,

'cause it was so complicated.

It'll last two or three days,

or another weekend.

But it lasted 78 days.

- Sometimes you just end up in these incredible situations

which you probably, in the light of day,

would choose maybe not to get into,

but by that time,

you're so intrigued that you continue on.

- I trotted off quite innocently to Cornwall,

innocently inasmuch as I was looking round

in the area of hunting,

but not to actually do a hunt.

I wanted to get into something quite remote,

but I wasn't quite sure what.

This old man who worked for the hunt

went out and about in his van picking up animals,

and the first place we went to, he just shot it.

- This is a Jersey cross, so there's no future in him...

- A, that shocked me, but B,

then to discover the animal was completely healthy,

and this was just about market values,

that got me going.

Then you're on it. Then you know

there is something happening that you need to follow,

and it starts to dictate your journey.

- So we only get rid of that sort, you know...

- What's the dramatic premise? Who is it about?

- What's the underlying story?

- There's something that's really important

that's on the line.

- You have to have some kind of framework,

what you're planning to do.

- You have to keep adjusting to what is going on.

- And I was totally unprepared. I had no shooting permit,

I had no crew, I had nothing...

- Okay, get the camera out, quick! You know, shoot...

- A lot of it is just luck.

- For me, it's more about the ideas

and the structure at an early stage,

because I always feel if I have a shape, or a story,

or a movement through a film,

then other things will follow.

- About a year ago,

I found out that I might have

100 or even 200 half-brothers and sisters.

I don't know who they are.

Nor do I know the man

from whose body we were all made.

- I was looking for a dramatic setup,

a dramatic question which would drive the quest.

The basic dramatic question is: Will this guy find his bio-dad?

The underlying question is:

What is the meaning of family?

And I knew I had a couple of leads

on who the sperm donor might be.

So I knew I had that. Eight possible sperm donors,

all negative.

So I knew that those leads would take me somewhere.

So I figured I had enough of a quest,

with some ups and downs,

and that's what I structured beforehand.

And I was nervous, 'cause, I mean,

what if nothing happened?

Can you get the name of the donor or identify--

- No, no, you can't. - You can't?

- No. No, we do have it, but we're not allowed to,

because it's confidential and the donors only donate

under that basis, that it'll remain confidential.

- All right, well, thank you very much

for the information. - Okay, then.

- In the Realms of the Unreal was the most pre-scripted film

that I'd worked on up to that point.

The paintings were one component of a world

that Henry Darger was creating.

He had written, you know, the 15,000-page novel,

he was writing, you know,

these battle songs to be played in his head.

And he was really creating as three-dimensional a world

as he could to, you know,

sort of populate this sort of ultimate story.

The structure was the thing that I worked hardest on.

How to tell the parallel stories.

The stories of Henry Darger's real life,

what happened factually, in that time.

What was happening in the world around him?

And then what was the story that he was telling

in his fiction,

in the book In the Realms of the Unreal?

So to find a way to weave those things together

was a real challenge.

- I always think making a film

is a bit like kind of building blocks.

You start off with one thing and then you...

that gives you a certain amount of information,

you move on to the next thing and then...

So a film becomes more and more...

you get more and more information

as you make a film,

and you have more and more questions.

And your questions become more and more focused.

- Before you start a film, you don't just go

and, like, cast a net everywhere.

I mean, you have to say: This is what I'm interested in.

My Country, My Country looks at an Iraqi family

and what happens to them during the occupation,

but it's really, I think, a film about America

and what America is doing in Iraq right now.

You're sort of on this journey,

but you don't know necessarily where it's going.

There is a sort of delicate balance

of having a plan,

and then also surrendering to what you encounter.

And the next challenge is identifying the people

who you'll follow,

who will take you through this conflict.

- In a way, you're casting, you know,

when you go out and you meet people,

you're assessing the level of interest

you think that they will have for the audience.

How engaging are they? How articulate are they?

What are their particular interests and quirks?

You know, what is it about them

that makes them fascinating to you?

- When I think of Kathleen...

... what I remember,

unfortunately,

is her dying in my arms.

That's always the overwhelming...

image.

- And yet, within, hell, 30 minutes

of that sonofabitch coming in here,

it was... it was a crime scene

and I was guilty and that was it!

- Now I'm not ready and I have no make-up on!

But things are getting better!

Did you find my sign, "in bathtub"?

- There we are outside of the house with Edie,

and this decaying old mansion

with her mother inside.

Hi. - Hang on.

- Take your time.

It's important that you choose someone

that you can connect with,

and hopefully things will happen

that were not predicted specifically

before you got into it,

but things would take a turn for...

toward a story.

- Very depressing, you know, when winter sets in here.

Because I don't like the country

and I don't want to be here.

Any little rat's nest in New York,

any little mouse hole, any little rat hole,

even on 10th Avenue, I would like better.

- I primarily make character films.

I hide my issues in character and stories.

But I've gotta find the characters,

I've got to cast it, to know who to hang it on.

- Doomsday, they tell me. They tell me doomsday...

We're all gonna die! Hello.

- The reason they wanted to be filmed

is that their station was literally

being allowed to be run into the ground.

When people feel they're being flushed down the loo, basically,

I think if someone comes in and says,

"Can I - I want to shine light upon you," then people respond.

There's a reason.

- We close at midnight, love, take your time.

- But I didn't know the characters.

I certainly didn't know Derek in the ticket shop,

and he wouldn't let me in the ticket shop,

'cause I didn't have the correct paperwork.

God, he was pedantic. Which is why it was so magical

when I got in there

that he was as he was. - ... and be prepared to accept

that you're not going to go any further.

I think that's the difference

between being happy and miserable.

Because I'm not going to achieve anything in life.

So, as you say, I must be depressed, mustn't I?

Hmm.

- What would you have actually liked to have achieved?

- I don't really know.

Dreams you can have, but that's not the same

as wanting to achieve something, is it?

- People want to talk to cameras mostly,

not because they want to be famous,

it's because there's such a seductivity

of just a neutral listener.

And usually we've been trained to be listeners

when we have a camera.

And that is a rare thing in our world:

somebody to just listen to you.

- People will say things in front of a camera

that they wouldn't even say to their loved ones.

That's what I find is so strange.

The camera has this effect on you,

where somehow,

because of the artificiality of the situation,

you're more honest and more truthful

rather than less honest and truthful,

and I don't know quite why that is.

Simon!!!

- He would've been up at first light, I thought,

because I was desperately, desperately thirsty

and he would've wanted to get down and get water.

And he would've wanted to find me.

- Now I did stop and pause

and I shouted across into the crevasse.

I yelled and yelled and yelled, "Joe, Joe..."

- As I was interviewing Joe and Simon,

they would, first of all,

come out with this very pat, very simplistic version

of things, and for a couple of hours,

we just go that out of the way,

and then they kind of ran out of things to say.

And then this extraordinary thing happens

where, actually,

the camera starts to act as a kind of catalyst

and starts to sort of almost drag things out of people.

- And I suppose, again, with the benefit of hindsight,

you know, after I got off the rope,

I should have gone and looked into the crevasse

to see where he was, you know, but...

- You could literally see them...

reliving elements of it.

You know, once I started to see that on the monitor,

Well, that's the film.

- I think the interesting thing is to know:

What is the relationship

between the person behind the camera

and the person in front of the camera?

Because that's something

an audience have the right to know.

It's, like: Do these people like each other?

Do they have an intimate relationship?

Is it a relationship of trust?

What does the filmmaker actually really think?

- Phew!

- There's this sort of weird intensity

in the relationship that develops.

Which developed with Aileen Wuornos in particular.

- We have evil in us, all of us do.

And my evil would just happen to...

come out because of the circumstances

of what I was doing.

Hitchhiking, hooking, on the road...

I was a homeless person all my life.

- The, uh, Aileen film was...

... probably the most difficult thing I've ever done

and I imagine Nick feels the same way.

Uh...

You know, we had a relationship with her.

She actually requested that we come

and be witnesses to the execution,

which, uh...

we declined.

- I choose people that I can relate to.

And I... I trust, also, from my side.

And I...

before switching on a camera, I usually...

... tell them, as good as I can,

who I am and what I am doing,

what I'm made of, you know.

Elizabeth was a key character,

was a very close friend of ours.

Insider, in a way.

She knew what we were looking for,

she knew our thoughts,

she knew, you know, what we're...

what we're about to do,

what kind of film.

- And suddenly she's not there anymore.

She's dead.

And, of course, it had to be a part of the film.

Because it was so hard on ourselves and...

and, of course,

it's a very, very painful part of the film.

Because the pain we had as filmmakers

is now on screen.

And that is what we call art of cinema,

is to transform a life experience into cinema

and then make it into your life experience,

as a spectator.

- People think they're going to be interviewed

sitting behind a desk

with a flag and a flower behind them.

And, you know, they become very presentational.

Uh, and I think what Nick does is fantastic,

because he... he gets people in their essence.

That's why he likes to be rolling

when we knock on a door and somebody opens it.

- I heard he was at least 6'7.

- Our brains are saturated with information

within the first second of seeing somebody.

- A knock like that, it gotta be somebody scared.

You was knockin' like you were scared, man.

- Scared. - Yeah.

- No, I'm not scared. - All right.

- You see this sort of giant. It's very funny.

I think it's quite revealing of both me and him.

We take in information so quickly.

And the audience is getting all this information too.

- Black people don't do that.

You want it clear, I want you to see!

Folks'll be running out the door with your television!

- I think there's been a tradition in the past

of going in and interviewing people

and changing their sitting room all around

and relighting it, and all you're doing

is destroying the very things that you should be filming.

- My dad used to tell me when I was a young kid,

I'd look at a job that had to be done

and he'd say to me,

"You know, nothing's impossible."

And that always stuck in my craw.

I couldn't believe it - "nothing's impossible."

- There was no such office. We created the office.

He had the insurance trophies up in the attic in a box,

we brought 'em down, we put 'em up on the wall.

We created this environment for him.

- ... and I'd specifically designed my office

so that I could display the maximum trophies

on walls and stuff.

- And in that environment, he came alive.

It was a return to these...

heroic-insurance-salesman moments of the past.

He came alive for the camera.

We created something

which was part of his fantasy world.

- I don't like this whole idea of interview,

you know, in a documentary,

because it's like somebody's telling you

something that's happened, or...

and you sort of set something, you know.

Whereas, what I... what I love,

is when things happen naturally in real life.

It's this whole thing

of seeing something unfold in front of you.

Fouzia, the little nine-year-old,

who was eight when she was circumcised,

she came up to me and said, "Come to my house."

Oh, she's going to read me a poem

and then she expects an interview.

I said, "We don't really do interviews, Fouzia."

And she said, "You've got to come.

I've depended on... I want... I've got a reason

for you to come, I want you to come."

So we went and, "Stand there, Kim. Right."

And then she told me the poem right into the camera.

- I want to tell you a poem

entitled "The Day I Will Never Forget."

"It was on a Sunday night when my mum called me

"and she said, 'My daughter, come,' in a low voice.

"I went quietly.

"Suddenly, my mom said,

"'My daughter, tomorrow is your D-Day.'

"I was shocked to hear that,

"but I was not expected to say anything.

"In the morning I was dragged and pinned on the ground

"when three women set and crucified me on the floor.

"I cried till I had no voice.

"The only thing I said was, 'Mom, where are you?'

"And the only answer I got was, 'Quiet. Quiet, girl.'

"The pain I had experienced

"was one I will never forget for the rest of my life

"and I would not wish the same to happen to my friend.

That night..."

- I suppose those are the things that you sort of depend

on happening, but I couldn't have planned it.

- The question of how you frame an interview,

how you photograph an interview,

how you cut an interview,

is all really up for grabs and very, very interesting.

What is at the heart of this?

This is the only job you've ever had.

- It's a more complex phenomenon than you might think.

- I'm learning about things

I'm really fascinated with.

- I was thinking about the Interrotron

before I even became a filmmaker.

I certainly was aware

of this whole issue of eye contact.

- How could I get the person I was interviewing

to look at me and look right into the lens

at the same time?

And...

the answer is mirrors.

Prompters cross-connected,

two cameras.

My image is floating on the lens,

but the camera is looking straight through that image

at the person.

It makes The Fog of War

a different kind of film.

You're really scrutinizing McNamara,

and McNamara is talking directly to you and the audience.

- He and I'd say I...

were behaving as war criminals.

- I don't even think it was clear to me,

at the time that I was making it,

how powerful that actually could be.

LeMay recognized that what he was doing...

would be thought immoral

if his side had lost.

Well what makes it immoral if you lose

and not immoral if you win?

- With a documentary,

there's an agreement with the audience

that you are referencing, or giving an account of,

evidence-based reality.

That you are actually saying,

"This is the way the world is as I see it."

And that has very little to do with whether you use actors

or recreations, or anything really,

except that there's an agreement

that this is an account of reality.

People have a sense when that is violated.

- This is Dieter Dengler.

He came to America 40 years ago...

- I just discovered that Werner Herzog,

when he did Little Dieter Needs to Fly,

he had this scene where Dieter comes home

to his house in California

and he opens and closes the door several times.

Because he was a prisoner in Laos, he can't feel shut in,

so he opens and closes the door quickly

to make sure it's unlocked.

And it's a very powerful moment,

and I always remember it in the film.

Total bullshit.

Herzog made that up and made him do it.

And it is a wonderful dramatization

of the guy's theme, but I think that's a lie.

- Look at Michael Moore. He makes pamphlets, basically.

He makes polemical films,

where he carefully constructs a reality to serve his needs.

And he's blatant about it and he makes...

he's careful in checking his facts,

but when you see his films, which are hugely popular

and have done a great deal for us documentarians...

but he commits, some people would say,

crimes towards the art form of documentary.

- It is all manipulation.

I mean, let's not be too sort of saintly about this.

I think filmmaking and documentary-making

is a very subjective process,

and anybody who tries to present themselves

as telling the truth in some way

is perpetrating a fraud, because it's just impossible.

- This idea that there is no such thing

as absolute truth, that truth is subjective -

"there's truth for you, there's truth for me,"

"everybody has their own truth" -

um...

... for me, that's nonsense talk.

There's a real world.

We inhabit that real world.

Things happen.

Someone sits...

in the driver's seat of that car and pulls the trigger.

That's not up for grabs.

There's not this guy's truth and that guy's truth.

There's the truth of what actually happened that night.

- When you see a film

and you have good reason to think that it's the truth,

then your knowledge of the real world

has been increased.

And it's so important for us to really know what's going on.

- You do have to be respectful of the facts.

Yeah, you should let the facts get in the way of a good story.

You absolutely should.

And out of that will emerge a true story.

- I tell the story in a way

where I'm searching for... not for just the facts,

I am into something which gives you deeper insight

into an essence,

into a concentration of something

that is way beyond facts and that is truth,

"an ecstasy of truth," as I sometimes call it.

Otherwise, facts are not that interesting.

If you want to have facts,

go and buy yourself

the phone directory of Manhattan.

You've got eight-million entries

and they're all correct, they're all facts,

but they do not constitute anything.

- All of it is artificial.

They're all different shades of the same colour.

What I'm trying to do in my films

is equally dishonest, if you like.

I'm trying to say, "This really is real.

"This is me, hand-holding, they're talking to me,

there are no other gizmos, this is life as it happens."

But obviously that's also rubbish,

because I've chosen that person.

The person's changing their behaviour because I'm there.

In the edit, they'll be put in a context

that makes them slightly different.

- I mean, we're all aware

that there is no such thing as an objective voice.

So you must acknowledge perspective,

but at the same time,

I really think that unless you are constantly checking

and calibrating that perspective as you're working,

you can stray off into dangerous places,

ethically, morally.

- The sequence in One Day In September

where we see Joseph Romano's body,

him in a photograph dead, covered in blood,

presents classic filmmaker's moral dilemma.

- I can imagine him...

... calling my name.

- Joseph Romano's wife and his daughter

saw the way that we put this together and they were appalled.

They said, initially,

"We don't want that sequence to be in the film."

As a storyteller, you want to impact your audience

and show them how terrible this event was.

I said if you want people to feel

like somebody's really to blame,

you need to show them what they're to blame for.

So, in the end,

they agreed that the footage should stay in.

Ultimately, you've got to look into yourself and say,

"Do I feel like I'm doing something exploitative,

or don't I?"

And it has to be a personal decision

and there is no hard and fast rule.

- I always tell the individual person,

because it always happens.

We get very intimate

and the person is in confidence

and will say things sometimes

that they never said before to anyone else,

because of the relationship

you develop with your subject.

And I always say to them, at first,

"Should it be that you say something

"that you feel very sorry that you said it,

"you tell me...

and I don't have to use that."

Now the difference is, many people say,

"You're crazy to do this,

"because what if the person tells you something

"and you're the only one that knows it

and it's very important to the film?"

For me, it's never important enough

for me to damage someone's life.

- We think it's a kind of noble enterprise.

We're revealing and capturing people's stories

and transforming them and sharing them with people,

but in fact we rely very much on people's stories,

so we are sucking, in a certain way,

the stories right out of people.

- You know, it's a difficult job sometimes.

There's a conflict.

Sometimes you want something in the film

and they don't want to be in the film.

There's a bit of a feeling of "grab it and run," you know,

there's a temptation to want to do that.

- I really have a problem

with this sort of documentary tradition

of, sort of, the First World going to the Third World

and bringing those pictures back.

I mean, I think it doesn't... I think it's problematic,

because it really doesn't address the fact:

Who's actually looking at these films?

- This type of punishment, they can't bear it,

because they are children.

- We have looked through every one of these files.

These juveniles are dangerous.

- You know, it'd be very easy for me

to have made a film

about my imperilled experience in Iraq.

And so if I had a bunch of Americans

watching a film about me in Iraq,

it would basically be a story about how dangerous Iraqis are.

And, ultimately,

the film is how much Iraqis are suffering in this war,

how much like us they are,

and how little we know about them.

- What people often say is, you know,

people from a country should film people in that country,

and that's... there's a big truth in that,

particularly for countries that have always been filmed

by people from outside 'cause of economics.

But within that country,

there's so many different layers.

Often people with the equipment

are gonna be people from the upper part of society.

And I remember with the court case at the end

in The Day I Will Never Forget,

there was a local TV crew,

these two Kenyan guys there...

- We said to them, "Are you going to come back

in two weeks, you know, when we get the verdict?"

They said, "Oh no, it's not a big story,

and it wasn't very interesting, we're not gonna come back."

And that's what I say to people when they say, you know,

"How dare you, Kim, go to Kenya and make a film?"

- That court case would never have been filmed,

because it wasn't thought of as important.

It was never gonna be filmed by local TV crews,

because they were interested

in filming the dignitaries, the rich people,

what they thought of as TV events.

And these little girls from the mountains

taking their parents to court wasn't seen as a news story.

- For me, one of the most important aspects

of this ethical enterprise called documentary

is to really protect the subjects that we're filming.

They're living in parts of the world

that are less privileged than ours,

and, literally, their lives are on the line.

- In the first week of filming, I was arrested twice,

I was chased by mobs once or twice.

And I knew that this was being done on orders

from, you know, ministers in the government

at that point and so on. So, if anything,

it got my back up and I said, you know,

"I'm actually more determined to finish the film."

- Adversity is a natural element

in which a movie is getting created.

In a way,

filmmaking is not welcome to the regular world,

and you have to anticipate there will be controversies,

there will be adversities...

- Almost every single film,

you think you're going this way, you hit a wall,

you have to go this way,

and, lo and behold,

it takes you into an area that is unexpected

and actually is your movie.

With A Place Called Chiapas,

I ran into a real wall

with Subcomandante Marcos,

who was one of the major figures,

the iconic figure of the Zapatista uprising,

and the two of us ended up arguing.

You know, we didn't get along,

which was like a nightmare.

And besides all of that, he was busy!

He was running a revolution, right?

- Subcomandante Marcos!

- It cranked up the stakes of the film on all sides.

It made it a more sophisticated film,

a more complex film.

- From all sorts of sides,

there are forces intruding on you,

and you have to keep them at a distance,

and you have to... to move on anyway.

- You have to be able to be alive to the moment.

You have to be so aware of everything

that is happening around you.

- When I get something that reads on screen

the way it was unfolding in reality,

it's still magic to me.

- You're always gonna miss something,

but it's okay.

What you need to get, you'll get.

- I think the access you go in with

is often not the same access you come out with.

In a way, just by your presence,

your friendships, your behaviour,

you hope that the trust and the access deepens.

You have superficial access, but it's your job

to then make it deeper and deeper and deeper

to people and what they're feeling,

but also often higher and higher and higher in the hierarchy,

because people in power

are always so reluctant to be filmed.

- Even once Kofi Annan said yes,

all the worker bees

didn't want to know anything about me,

but there was one person who was key to me -

and she was a woman who was gonna lead

a peacekeeping operation over to the Congo -

and even she said to me, "I know why you're here,

"and I don't want to have anything to do with you,

"I don't want to be filmed,

"I don't think what we do is public,

"it doesn't help me that you're here,

"and I'm gonna make it as hard as I can

to make it impossible for you to film."

And I said, "Okay." Her name was Meg Carey,

and I said, "Okay, Meg, well, there we go.

I mean, I'm not gonna leave..."

And we headed off to the Congo the next week

and it took about a year for Meg to come onside,

but eventually she did,

and eventually Meg became the film.

And she became my conduit

inside this extremely complex organization.

- ... It is once again a unilateral action

taken by the government...

- I actually do not like meeting people

before... if I'm going to film with them.

I do not even go through any organizations

or any contacts at ground level. I just go to the area.

- Ninety percent of the people I've interviewed in the film

are people I've never met in my life before.

- I decided not to use microphones

and lights and, you know, any kind of intrusive equipment.

I shoot with a tiny handycam.

In that, sort of making the person who I'm with

completely comfortable.

- I'm following something, I'm like on a river,

I'm following it, I don't know where it's going.

And that's the scary side of it, because I think, you know:

Maybe I won't get a story, maybe things won't happen,

but the sort of wonderful side of it

is that you could be somewhere and it all starts happening,

and you're filming it.

- Do you want to go off to bed, darling?

- In Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go, there's a scene

where there's this little boy, Ben,

and you can see that he's very, very quiet,

because he's in love with his mom

and he doesn't want to move.

And you can see that she's already disengaged,

she's already going on and wanting to leave

and go back to her own life.

And you can see that the social worker's rather cross with her,

'cause she's late and she knows she doesn't really want

to be there, she's already moved on.

So you can see these three things.

- Ben, it's time to go.

- I'm hoping the audience, in that one scene,

will see it from all different points of view.

And I think the only way that can happen

is if the scene isn't controlled.

- Good boy, Ben. I'll see you again soon.

Keep up the good work, Ben.

- There's a kind of looseness to it,

so you can put yourself into it, so they're long shots

that hopefully the audience can put themselves into.

- You're constantly having to be aware

that you shouldn't interfere with the action,

so your body cannot get in the way of the door,

or the relationship with someone else in the room,

or you have to be careful that your presence

isn't going to block somewhere they might go.

And I like the lack of communication,

I like the fact that that's just me working that out,

so I know what I want from that person,

and I know how, maybe,

I'm going to sit with them and shoot with them.

The nightmare is obviously: being a cameraman

is a whole job in itself and quite a complicated job,

and there's a lot that can go wrong.

- Allez. Allez...

- The feeling of holding a camera

and being a part of a scene,

and reacting and responding to a scene,

it's just thrilling.

And that is the secret that camera people never tell,

that the joy is in the shooting.

- I don't think the way most cinematographers do,

getting a wide shot and a close-up

and a reaction shot and so forth.

I see things the way I would as a person,

and I think that helps the process,

for the person who watches it,

to feel a greater closeness to what's going on.

- You can see how complete it is.

The bible runs as little as $49.95...

- The opening scene of Salesmen

is such a perfect kind of forecast

of what's to come.

- Which plan would be the best for you?

The A, B, or C?

- I'm really not interested. I want to think it over

with my husband. - Yeah. Yeah...

- Also such a perfect revelation

of my camera work at its best.

In the middle of that little scene,

you see the child on the mother's lap yawning,

and then it seems it at... at exactly the right moment,

but a moment totally chosen by the child,

not by me.

She goes over to the piano

and knocks out a tune that Beethoven

couldn't have created more appropriately for the mood.

- I just couldn't afford it now.

We're swamped with medical bills.

- In the kind of shooting that I do,

the smaller the team,

the better able you will be to, you know,

not interfere with the process that you're trying to shoot.

So I think, you know,

it's best if the person who is the director

is either doing sound or shooting,

and not just standing around and conducting.

Which, you know,

I just would want that person to be out of the room.

- I think when you work with a cameraperson,

the difficulty, I'm sure for every director,

is that the cameraperson has to be your eyes, you know,

and you have to have a certain trust in them.

I work with Claire Pijman,

who's a Dutch camerawoman,

and we've worked together now for about 14 years.

While I create and imagine

a lot of scenes,

finally it's up to Claire to see it the way I see it.

In Don't Ask Why,

I wanted a very particular way of filming the scene

when Anusha is walking through the bazaar

and there are all these men, you know, staring at her.

I'd explained it to Claire, she shot it for me,

she showed it to me and she said,

"Is this what you want?" And I said no.

I told her that I really wanted it

to be more threatening.

More like people are really looking at her

and watching her. And I wanted to get

a lot of faces in and so on.

And then she was able

to create that for me.

- The cameraperson is confined to what they see and hear,

I'm looking at the broader horizon,

I'm seeing what's happening outside the frame,

and I'm directing them to the things I want to see.

And with a really good cameraperson -

and I've had very good relationships

with very, very good people -

it becomes a tango, it becomes a dance.

You know, you're whispering in their ear that, really,

if they'll just go a little longer

and pan a little to the right, you know,

that's really where I want to be,

and they'll find two faces there.

And, you know... So it's... it's a process

of literally directing the shot.

And so that's a very important component for me as well,

the visual sense.

- For Bones of the Forest, Heather and I were trying

to give you an experiential sense

of the beauty and grandeur

and subtlety of the old-growth forest.

So you could actually feel for yourself

how important they were to save.

And in order to express that fully,

it seemed that we needed to go outside the usual palette

of just solid, standard nature shots.

You know, we wanted to actually show you

the time of the forest, which has its own pace.

So time-lapse photography was part of that.

It's not eye candy.

It's not just special effects. It's really about trying

to break through patterned thinking

and allow us a fresh perspective on something.

- I do think that not nearly enough emphasis

is put on the visual side of filmmaking,

of documentary filmmaking.

Because the story is so important,

and the people who tend to make documentaries

are... are... are, I mean,

they're the high priests of that issue,

and they're just so swept up by the rightness of the issue

that they forget that they gotta tell a story.

And they gotta tell a story to people

who don't care nearly as much about this subject as they do.

- On the one hand, many of my colleagues

were working to... - I was really, really careful

about where I filmed those people

and when I filmed them.

And I had spent so much time at the UN building in New York,

that I knew at 4:00 in the afternoon

on a certain kind of weather day,

if I put Meg in this room there, the light would be good on her.

And I would only film her at that time,

because I knew she was gonna give me

the same kind of material,

whether we filmed her at 8:00 in the morning

or 4:00 at night in this better light,

so why not make the effort

to film it when the light is just right?

- ... because you felt, what am I doing wrong,

that I'm not being able to convince these member states

that they need to provide the troops necessary

to save these lives?

- You're presenting a palette of colours for the editor,

so that he or she can really edit with pacing

and with the abstract rather than the literal.

And then you're really... then you're really storytelling.

There's one shot in A Place Called Chiapas -

and it's done by a wonderful Mexican cinematographer

by the name of Eduardo Herrera.

Marcos says the Zapatista movement

is, in fact, more about ideas than bullets...

The entire press core is parked on the edge of the river bank,

and where does Eduardo put himself and his camera?

Right in the middle of the river.

He swings to reveal 50 photographers.

And so there's a huge payoff!

There's a beginning, a middle and an end

and a sense of humour to the shot.

There's a place for great art in all of this.

- I read this book - about two men on a mountain -

and I said, "This is such a wonderful subject

for a documentary, but how the hell do you do it?"

You couldn't make that story as a fiction film either.

People have been trying for many years.

Tom Cruise, for instance, had the rights.

Lots of different people had the rights.

And nobody had managed to make a fiction film out of it,

because, again, it's all internal.

And documentary is wonderful for the internal,

because people love to talk in a documentary, so I thought:

The only way to do this is to combine

some elements of drama with elements of documentary.

But I was so nervous about doing that.

That was the real challenge.

How do you get reconstruction that matches up to reality,

especially matches up to this extraordinary story?

- This pain just came flooding down my thigh and my knee.

It was very, very, very painful.

- The re-enactment...

is not re-enacting anything.

It's there to make you think about reality,

about what we take to be reality,

what we think is reality,

what claims to be reality.

- Because the whole time we're screwing around

and not doing the damn job, Americans are dying.

- Standard Operating Procedure

is a movie with three ingredients.

One of them is interviews with real people.

The second ingredient is the photographs.

The photographs that were taken at Abu Ghraib

in the fall of 2003.

And the third element...

is re-enacted material.

Bits and pieces, detail.

I like going after odd details.

- ... with wires on his fingers

and he was told he would be electrocuted

if he fell off.

- And those are constructed.

But underneath all of it is this pursuit of some truth.

- ... I mean, that would keep anybody awake,

so it was part of the sleep plan.

- When you open your newspaper or you hear a news report,

you just get the facts.

And the way in which things actually happen

is very complicated and circumstantial.

And it comes out of so many different influences.

And I think in a film like Battle for Haditha,

you try and re-create all that

using ex-marines,

using Iraqi refugees.

It's very much based on research

that one would've done for documentary...

... with a pretty defined structure.

Very little dialogue actually written out,

and allowing the real people

to bring themselves to those roles.

So you create many layers, hopefully, of understanding

that you don't get from the news reports

and other media.

- In the wrong hands, that's quite dangerous,

which is when you re-create with real people

who come with all that sort of extraordinary behaviour

when people have been in a situation.

They know how to behave. And, I mean,

I think Battle for Haditha is absolutely brilliant,

and I think: Thank God it's Nick doing it.

Because as a technique, it's quite dangerous

to re-create reality, because it's so seductive.

You really, truly believe that is what happened.

If reality programs are borrowing

the sexy packaging of fiction

and fiction is borrowing the immediacy and excitement

of documentary and news as we know it -

I don't know where that's going -

then it's so confusing for people to know

what is or isn't truthful in the end,

and what is whose view,

and what actually happened or didn't.

And I just think it's something we should be careful of,

and just sort of speak more about the fact

that there is this real crossover.

- For me, the distinction between feature films -

I mean narrative feature films - and documentaries

doesn't exist that much.

For me, it's all movies.

And the borderline is quite often blurred...

In documentaries, I keep inventing,

I keep using my fantasy.

I invent dreams.

- I think that sound is like the heartbeat of a film.

If the sound isn't good, then the film's thin.

You know, the sound is where you get the emotion of a film.

With Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go,

the classrooms are sonoisy and you look at it

and you don't maybe appreciate what Mary's done.

- Are you disappointed?

Well done.

- Because her sound's so good, people just accept it.

- Don't hurt other people because you're cross or sad.

- You can hear everything everybody's saying.

They're all in different sides of the room,

there's all these kids screaming in the room

at the same time,

but you can hear everything really, truly.

The film would be unwatchable if it hadn't been for Mary.

- It's okay to feel like that. But you need to let us help you.

That's why we're here. - I'll twist your arm off.

- You don't need to do that... - And they have to be so strong.

I mean, she's kind of, you know, like a ballet dancer,

getting close to everybody, following everything,

watching me, we're working together...

It's a whole skill, you know, which...

which people don't often notice. - Alex, in a mainstream school,

you can't be under the table all the time. Can you?

- I wouldn't do that. I never used to do that

in the last two schools I went to.

- One of the things that's really an error,

in the way things are going these days,

is that people actually think

that a sound recordist is disposable.

And that you can do it yourself,

or your poor cameraperson, who is supposed to be framing

and making sure that the world is in focus and lit properly,

is supposed to take this on,

or - God forbid! - the director do it.

- This is an unlawful assembly.

All persons...

... whether on the streets, the sidewalks,

or in the doorways, you must disperse,

or you will be arrested!

- When we start off with an awareness of sound

as an important aspect of the overall film

and leave space for it and anticipate it

and work it in while we're picture editing,

the marriage of the two can become quite profound

and can move us to much deeper places.

You can tell another level of the story,

and sound takes us to deep places

in a way that scent does, for example.

Sound triggers emotions,

sound triggers memory.

So we can really hit people at a deep level with sound.

- One of my favourite pieces of sound in Touching the Void

is the sound of the crevasses.

It should be something that's scary,

but something that also has a human tone to it.

We played around with all these different sounds.

Eventually, one day, the sound editor said, "Yeah,

"I've got this great sound for you, listen to this.

This is the underlying sound for the crevasses."

He played it to me and I thought:

Wow, that's very spooky. "What is it?"

He said, "That's the sound of a leopard roaring

slowed down 50 times."

So it was this wonderful animal sound,

but it felt so deep and profound

and kind of frightening,

but mournful at the same time.

- I knew before we went to China that I wanted the design

to emerge out of the industrial soundscape

that we were going to be immersed in.

So we gathered an enormous amount of wild sound.

And I wanted the density of that industrial soundscape

to be apparent in the film,

but also that sometimes melody or rhythm

would emerge from that soundscape

and you couldn't tell - Am I hearing?

Is this music, or is it just, you know,

the rhythm of some hammer or machine?

And then it would go back down into that soundscape

and come out and go down without ever -

only a few times emerging as a clear, distinct element

before subsuming itself

back down into the sound.

- I really, uh... love music,

and I think more and more documentaries

are starting to think

that you don't have to be purist about it,

that you can, like all other aspects of cinema,

that audiences really need an aural-scape,

as well as a visual-scape.

- I don't like music...

that is supposed to tell you what to think.

But I do like music that creates a bed

where things are driven forward.

The soundtrack to The Thin Blue Lineis,

I think, one of the best things that Philip has ever done.

It is essential to the movie.

- ... why did I meet this kid? I don't know.

Why did I run out of gas at that time? I don't know.

But it happened, it happened.

- If this is a non-fiction film noir,

that idea of inexorability,

the idea of being trapped in a web of fate,

those ideas are really...

driven home by the soundtrack,

by the Philip Glass score.

- Music is an integral element of storytelling,

of changing and guiding our perspectives,

our emotional perspectives, but not only emotional.

It gives new perspectives, new insights,

a different kind of vision.

- The music creates unifying shape.

But a part of sound, of course, is narration.

And I think

it's a phenomenally powerful element.

Uh, it's... it's the voice of a storyteller.

And what could be wrong with being told a story?

- Narration in documentary films

sometimes is a very beautiful element,

and most times

it's a... prosthesis.

It's like crutches, you know,

it's like to help tell a story

without having the images, you know.

Because you don't have the images,

so you have to tell what's happening,

instead of showing.

And showing is always better than telling, you know.

- I do get annoyed when I hear people say,

"Oh, we don't want narration."

Or they hire you as a narration writer

and they say, "Well, we didn't really want narration,

"but we wanted to bring you in

because we've got some problems in the storytelling."

Well, then, don't use narration.

If you don't like it, don't use it.

But if you use it, love it.

And it can be beautiful.

It can be the invocation to a dream.

- I was always fascinated by air power,

like so many other boys, dreaming of being an RAF pilot.

Playing in the rubble of bombed-out buildings.

Secretly sorry I missed the war.

- I think of narration

as being a voice in your ear

who's telling you a story,

and which is a very different way to think of it

than a booming voice of God or from a public podium.

- We've all been targets ever since.

This is a film about bombing people.

How it got started, how it continues,

about what's right and wrong in war.

- I will write things and then will start

to assemble scenes, write to the scenes,

and then will go the other way around.

We'll use the writing as a guide to the scenes.

It's a dance back and forth.

- I think editing is a really underrated skill.

- It's like a puzzle. - This is important,

that's important, that's important, throw away the rest.

- Creating a story

where there really is no story.

- I've never, ever trusted the process.

I sit in the edit absolutely all the time.

- But then you say, "Well, what does that cutaway do?"

- There's a kind of mind game.

- And that's one definition of a lie.

- Endings are tricky... - The shaping and sculpting...

- Weaving together...

- Vous coupez, vous l'arrangez...

- And it's sometimes extremely painful...

- You have to massage the material over and over

over and over again, until it looks so simple

that everybody will say, "What took you so long?"

- It's the despair, I guess, I think you go through

almost every time you make a documentary:

you come back and see your rushes

and they seem such poor, pathetic things,

and you think: This isn't the film I wanted to make.

And then you have to figure out,

well, what is the film that's in there?

What's speaking to you about these rushes here?

- The biggest problem you find in the cutting room

is that that usually, the creator, the director,

is not willing to accept that shadow, that gap,

between their intentions and what the material gives them.

- Your allegiance eventually transfers

from your memory of the event

to what you have captured on film,

and once that transfer takes place,

that's when editing really starts to happen.

When you know: Okay,

this is the finite universe I have to deal with.

- There's times when you're working on something

and you think: Gosh, it would've been amazing

if I had known that first. And that's what I try to do,

in the film, is try to create the ideal journey

and replicate those moments that were really memorable

along the way of making the film.

- You look at the elements that you've got,

and you figure out, you know,

how to literally form a braid out of those elements

that will allow each strand to inform the other,

and to keep re-engaging the audience's interest

in the moment.

- When we first met,

you know, the age difference was a big problem for me...

- You're interweaving material to create a more complicated,

and yet enlightening, result. - Then Philip came into my life,

and I said to him - hopefully, you'll edit this right out -

I said, "Great, I'm gonna fall in love with you

and you're just gonna to die on me?"

I mean, I was so callous!

But I just didn't want anymore loss,

you know? And he had lost...

- I don't think my films

are made in the cutting room.

I think the cutting room is more a place

where you simplify material,

and you find themes and arguments

that run through the material,

and clear, in a sense, the brush from it,

so that they become more obvious.

- With The Peacekeepers,

there were so many different ways to go with that film,

in the editing room,

that for the first couple of months, we struggled,

because we were putting way too much into it.

I mean, I had a whole history of the Congo and Mbutu,

and how it got to this point that there was a civil war,

and all of that stuff.

And in the end, nobody cared. They didn't care.

They just cared about... they cared about Meg.

- You may not want to deal with them,

and they may have committed all sorts of human-rights abuse,

but, unfortunately, you have to deal with them,

because they're the ones with the power.

- What do these military leaders want?

- People need a human being that can lead them

through a kind of political, psychological,

logistical minefield.

And once Meg came on screen, the film came alive.

And all of this other stuff that we had thrown in there

about the history of the Congo and how it got to this point,

people didn't care about.

We couldn't make them care about it.

- You have to be able to dump very good footage

and not put it... fit it in the film somehow.

Just dump it, because it doesn't fit

into that movie, that's it.

- This case is no more and no longer about Kathleen.

The D.A. has to win. That's it.

He doesn't care how and, basically...

by the same token, my lawyer, they want to win.

Truth is lost in all of this now.

Truth is of no meaning whatsoever...

- ... All he wants to do is win.

And I understand that!

- The film is gonna reveal itself

out of the unexpected moments, not out of what you planned,

not when you were working with pencil and paper.

It's going to come out of things that took you by surprise,

and that you maybe even forgot,

in the whole welter of shooting.

You put two things together on the editing table,

and you're like, "How is this possible?"

And then it's in front of 1,000 people

and they all go, "Wow."

- I sometimes think of a movie as a sausage casing,

and you're trying to ram

as much meat into that sausage

as you possibly can, but there are limits.

Then you have to stop.

There's a dream

of actually influencing the world in some way,

righting some wrong,

correcting some evil...

It's the documentarian as possible super hero.

You know, the guy who fixes the bad stuff.

- The films that we make are our teachers.

I mean, they're our teachers,

and then we sort of surrender to them.

- You know, I often say to people

that the answer to life

is becoming a documentary filmmaker.

If you want to solve all your life's problems,

become a documentary filmmaker,

because it offers you everything.

- If you look at just the number of titles

that have been playing theatrically,

that people are really talking about,

the stylistic breadth of those films

has really widened.

There's a lot more inventiveness

in terms of what's accepted.

- New types of distribution systems

have been developed with the advent of the Internet.

Everybody now literally is a documentary filmmaker,

or anybody with a cell phone.

- I can't imagine anything more important

than portraying -

in a very truthful, authentic fashion -

what's really going on in the world.

- I've been able to be in so many situations

that are not part of my life.

Not only be there,

but have to make some sense of it

for somebody else who's not going to be there.

That I really love.

That's still as much fun to me as it was day one.

CNST, Montreal

- Um, what was I gonna say?

- That's a complicated question.

- J'ai pas bien compris.

- Is there any water? Is there any water around here?

- Thank you. I like the lighting.

- Je crois qu'il y a une fin de cassette qui s'annonce, non?