interviews

I read two interviews with different filmmakers and learned how they felt about doing documentaries, as opposed to a film that is more planned out. The first interviews was with French filmmaker Laurent Cantet. He followed students in a junior high school of different ethnicities and looked at how they reacted to certain material they were learning. What was different in this documentary though is that some of the students weren't actually students at this school. He used their basic story and put them all in one setting together.

I found it interesting that he did this instead of casting the kids in their normal setting. When asked why he didn't just capture the kids' real lives in the documentary he responded with, "when you make a documentary, you don't control what happens or how it appears on the screen. You can't determine the outcome of the story and what becomes of the characters. I prefer to have the control when I make a film." This is a strange way to do a documentary. I always thought the point of a documentary was to catch things and people in their natural existence, without planning things out. That's the beauty of a documentary, seeing things how they really are.

http://documentaries.about.com/od/filmmakersatoz/a/laurentcantet.htm

The next interview I read was about an Australian director who had done several movies, which won awards. He later did a documentary about the life of a composer to commemorate his 70th birthday. He was asked what he thought the differences were about doing these two different types of movies. Was there a different approach to a documentary than another film? He didn't seem to think the process was any different, like I would have thought it was.

Hicks said, "In the end, a film is a film, and it is either truthful or it is not. My background is in documentaries, and after making a number of big narrative features [...] I was very comfortable returning to my documentary roots". He went on to talk about how with a movie, you have to plan everything out and have a script. You don't do this for a documentary. You have more raw materials in documentaries and may capture things on film that you don't really want.

When he was filming this at first, he didn't have the money to have a big crew or cameramen. He said that when he finally hired them, the whole attitude of the film changed. Before they came along, he could chat with Philip Glass (the composer) about life, family, art, and just himself as a person. After there were more people working on this film, it seemed like he became just the subject for a film, explaining music and the process he went through when composing. I think this shows that money doesn't make a great documentary. This film would have been find without the extra people on the crew. The closeness and rapport the director had with Glass had disappeared.

http://documentaries.about.com/od/documentarydirectors/a/ScottHicks.htm