By Roger Nygard
After a screening of “The Great Buster” (2018), a documentary about silent-film star Buster Keaton, director Peter Bogdanovich said, “With a narrative, you write it, then shoot it. With a documentary, you shoot it, then write it.” Finding the plot in your documentary is job one. Great documentarians are master storytellers with a plan.
After a screening of “The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft” (2022), Werner Herzog recalled when a young filmmaker came up to him at the Sundance Film Festival and said, “I’ve shot 850 hours of footage, and I’ve been editing for two and a half years.”
Herzog said, “My heart sank. This young man did not know what he was doing, where he was going with his project. I said to him, ‘Please, please, please, shoot what you really want for the screen. We are filmmakers. We are not garbage collectors.’”
The editor must fully understand the story in order to be able to write the final draft in the edit. Sometimes, the filmmaker is the editor. Other times a director works with several editors. The director-editor relationship is so essential that filmmakers often repeatedly work with the same editors. (It should be noted here that documentaries are often non-union, for a variety of reasons, although the Guild has taken steps in recent years to reverse that.)
Errol Morris (“American Dharma,” 2018) has worked with editor Steven Hathaway for the last 10 years. Davis Guggenheim (“An Inconvenient Truth,” 2006) feels that editors are his equal partners: “I’m sort of a co-writer, where the editor and I are writing the movie together.” Frederick Wiseman (“High School,” 1968) prefers to be the sole editor of his films “because I want the movie to be a reflection of my voice only.”
Marina Zenovich (“Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind,” 2018) believes the editing room should be respected as a sacred space “because you never want to make anyone feel bad. You want to boost each other up because it’s such a vulnerable creative space. You need to be able to say, ‘I know this sounds crazy, but what if we try this?’ You give each other space to come up with ideas and work off each other. The relationship between director and editor is best when they have a certain chemistry. It’s how you get along with someone, how they make you feel, how they inspire you.”
Before beginning with the editor, some producers and directors transcribe every interview. Then they copy and paste sound bites into what becomes the script. Some utilize an editor who will not be making creative decisions and who is just “a pair of hands.” The editor starts once a paper edit is completed. In the opposite case, an editor watches everything, makes all the decisions, and forms the story. There’s a middle ground where both watch everything and pull pieces to match an outline. Freida Lee Mock (“RUTH: Justice Ginsburg in Her Own Words,” 2021) has said, “I never hand over footage to an editor without mediating what it means or what the core ideas and characters are. I look at every frame, all the dailies, with the editor before we make pulls. It’s a total collaboration with creative input from the editor whose specialty in the art and craft of editing I rely upon.”
When I edited the docuseries “The Comedy Store” (2020), when we wanted to do a segment about a particular comedian or topic, we asked the assistant editor to word-search all the transcripts for every time someone mentioned that person or idea and then they made a string-out, collecting all those clips into one timeline. And then I took that collection, moved things around, whittled it down, and molded it until it flowed as a segment or chapter.
The first stylistic choice for the documentarian is: How will the story be presented? Will one person be guiding the audience? A main protagonist? A narrator? Will it be the filmmaker? Nobody? Maybe a series of graphics? Perhaps the interviewees will tell the story, their sound bites handing off the narrative baton to each other. To facilitate that, it helps to ask every interviewee the same core questions so you can intercut answers about the same idea or event, as told by multiple individuals. In “Wild Wild Country” (2018), several witnesses tell the story of Indian cult leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (a.k.a. Osho).
‘We are filmmakers. We are not garbage collectors.’
In “Trekkies” (1999), the guide is Denise Crosby, who was part of the “Star Trek” world. Even though I also conducted interviews, the viewer feels Crosby is the guiding presence throughout once that paradigm is set from the beginning. In “Super Size Me” (2004), Morgan Spurlock is the filmmaker, host, and subject, on a journey to test the limits of his body’s reaction to junk food. Werner Herzog is often the voice and sometimes the face guiding his audience, as in “Encounters at the End of the World” (2007). Luc Jacquet’s documentary “March of the Penguins” (2005) was initially dubbed with first-person dialogue for the French release, as if the penguins were telling their story. For the English version, it was changed to a third-person narrator in the form of the recognizable voice of Morgan Freeman. Many documentaries have no narrator. Jessica Kingdon’s “Ascension” (2021) has no interviews, commentary, or explanation. The scenes stand on their own, presented as a visual essay on capitalism in China.
The films of Ken Burns never have a host. Some of his more contemporary films don’t even have narrators, such as “The Central Park Five” (2013), because the story is closer to the present moment, and many potential storytellers are still alive. However, most of Burns’s films are narrated. He said it’s because “I’ve always believed in telling stories where there is no war between the word and the picture; they should get along. I don’t subscribe to the idea that somehow it’s not pure to have a narrator.” When he is 98 percent through the editing process, Burns brings in a professional narrator (usually Peter Coyote or Keith David), and when they lock a cut, it requires some adjusting because the pacing of the new voice changes relationships to shots and timing. “We never let narrators see the script ahead of time. We don’t ask them to speak to picture. We want them to speak to meaning.”
Frederick Wiseman’s goal is to create a dramatic structure from 100 to 150 hours of footage. “I try to figure out how the sequences might be thematically related in the editing. I’m attracted by the idea of imposing a form on my experience.” Wiseman said there are some shoot days where he doesn’t get anything good, “but six months later in the editing room, because of other choices you made in editing, a scene suddenly has value where originally it had none.” The challenge is to distill an overload of interviews down to a logical narrative that doesn’t overstay its welcome. It’s tempting to feel entitled to two-plus hours for your very important subject, but you will try an audience’s patience if you exceed 90 minutes.
Sam Pollard (“Slavery by Another Name,“ 2012) says that on every film, he puts story cards on the wall. He moves scenes around while building the structure. “Sometimes the ending becomes the beginning, and the beginning becomes the ending, and the middle becomes the first act. It’s a dance.” The cards will help make it apparent where the narrative thread is strong and where there are holes. What to keep or remove becomes evident as the shape of the acts comes into focus.
SEARCHING FOR STRUCTURE
A film may ultimately deviate from the plan, but having a three-act structure with an ending in place is a solid way to begin. One good approach is to find the ending and work backward. You may not know all the details of your conclusion, and it may shift as you shoot, but you must know where to look for it. If you are asking a question, solving a mystery, or searching for something, you have to get there somehow.
Some stories have built-in endings such as a verdict, finding the sought-after person, or winning the big game. A story that establishes the promise of a climactic finale, right at the start, has a better chance of holding an audience to the end. D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’s “The War Room” (1993) had a definite ending: either a win or a loss for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. Their gamble ended with an election-night victory. Crime documentaries have arrests, indictments, verdicts, and re-trials that can provide resolutions, though not always closure. “The Thin Blue Line” (1988) brought this style to the forefront and led to Randall Dale Adams’s release from prison. Errol Morris lamented, “I’ll never find a case quite like ‘The Thin Blue Line’ again. It’s like all the stars aligned. You don’t ever find a case that wraps up quite so neatly. Not in my experience.” Other examples of this type of documentary that followed are “Making a Murderer” (2015–TBD), “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst” (2015), and “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley” (2019).
Sports documentaries, such as “The Last Dance” (2020), end with winning or losing. “Grizzly Man” (2005) ends with death. With “Free Solo” (2018), even though you know Alex Honnold survived his daredevil climb, watching how he does it is gripping. When Liz Garbus was working on a past-tense story where she knew the ending, such as “What Happened, Miss Simone?” (2016) or “Bobby Fischer Against the World” (2011), she said, “I’m looking for narrative elements, of personal struggles or accomplishments that illuminate an individual’s journey as well as telling us something about the historical moment or social context. With a vérité film, I’m looking for a journey too. Those arcs may ultimately be the spine around which we structure the film in the edit and determine what to shoot and what not to shoot.”
The ending of a biography is clear from the start; the film examines how somebody’s life played out. “The Kid Stays in the Picture” (2002) was based on Hollywood producer Robert Evans’s autobiography. Viewers watched to see how he succeeded in Hollywood. “Three Identical Strangers” (2018) asked what happened to triplets separated at birth. “Crumb” (1994) profiled an oddball cartoonist who hit it big with one particular “Keep on Truckin’” comic.
Quest documentaries like “Roger and Me” (1989) and “Searching for Sugar Man” (2012) end when the filmmakers find the sought-after person or don’t. Filmmakers Malik Bendjelloul and Simon Chinn followed two obsessed Sugar Man fans who tracked down the once-celebrated Sixto Rodriguez. Michael Moore failed to get to his target, Roger B. Smith, chairman and CEO of General Motors. Moore solved his story-ending problem by interviewing an empty chair.
Davis Guggenheim was presented with a challenge when Participant Media asked him, “Can you make a film about public education?” Guggenheim declined, not seeing an obvious story inherent in the subject. But then he read an editorial by Thomas Friedman about the SEED School of Maryland, which had an admissions lottery. They used a random bingo selector, and if your ball rolled down the chute, you got into the school. That was a breakthrough for Guggenheim, who saw conflict and stakes: “Suddenly, I knew my third act. It was a plot device, but it was also a thematic container for the idea that a child’s future is decided by how a bingo ball bounces. I constructed the narrative of ‘Waiting for Superman’ backward, building to that point.”
In the world of vérité, getting to a satisfying ending can be harder. In Albert and David Maysles’s “Grey Gardens” (1975), the audience watches to the end to find out if two apparently delusional women will survive living in a decrepit house (and world) that is falling down around them. Frederick Wiseman has no checklist that he goes through. “I’m sitting there and looking at the screen, and I try various alternatives, and I say to myself, ‘Well, I think this one works.’ Someone else might make a different choice.” As subjective or random as his process may seem, Wiseman acknowledged there is always a specific meaning attached to his endings, representing his choice of how to end the film. Wiseman found a memorable ending for “Titicut Follies” (1967) by closing with a musical performance, where the inmates at the State Prison for the Criminally Insane in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, put on a talent show.
Once Sam Pollard has completed a first assembly, he asks himself: Now, how do we make it into a film? How do we make it engaging? He said, of his first cut of “The League” (2023), about the Negro baseball leagues: “It was all there. But was it exciting? No. Was it really engaging? No. It was: Here’s the history of the Negro Leagues. And so we went back in to reshape and re-edit, and change music, move things around, add and subtract voices, to give it more dynamics and drama.” When he showed the next cut to his executive producers, they pushed him to make it even more dramatic and exciting. “The documentary process is collaborative. You lay out the foundation of the house, and then you build the house, but then you’ve got to figure out how to make it into a beautiful house.”
A documentarian thinks about editing while shooting. Nothing but talking heads gets old fast. Will there be B-roll, stock footage, photos, newspaper articles, re-enactments, animation? To be able to shape a story, the editor needs cutaways: insert shots, close-ups, establishing shots, exteriors, and portrait shots. A portrait shows a subject walking, standing, or sitting, looking to the lens, maybe doing and saying nothing. It could be used as an interstitial shot or an introduction the first time you see them. These options will be needed later. When a moment feels dull during shooting, Frederick Wiseman pans over and picks up cutaways of people making notes, turning their heads, sharpening a pencil, or scratching their heads. He protects himself against missing interesting conversations by keeping the sound recorder running. If the action suddenly gets interesting, he pans back, without missing the audio lead-in to the moment.
Begin an edit by putting like with like. Collect all the pieces on similar topics into one bin, and soon these coalesce into chunks, and then segments, and maybe polished chapters. One of the challenges to creating an elegant flow is finding the links, the transitions from shot to shot and from segment to segment. The footage is a puzzle where all the pieces do not necessarily fit, but you must find a way to combine them. One way to lay the groundwork for the links is to ask theme questions so you can inter-cut answers, building sound-bite trains, where interviewees finish each other’s sentences. Or juxtapose opposing statements for maximum contrast.
Pacing is deciding when to reveal the next plot point—and the answer is probably sooner. Lead the audience and keep them from getting ahead of the story. If they can predict what’s next, they will lose interest. The audience needs to fully understand why you presented something, but at the same time, you have to move fast enough to surprise them with your next cut.
Ken Burns loves nothing better than an edit session that makes a scene better and more complicated. Although Burns has the ultimate say, the editors are at the frontline, choosing the images. “Yelling is forbidden,” Burns said. “It’s hugely important to me that the process be joyous as well as hard. Sometimes we’ve got a scene that works, and we don’t want to touch it, but then we learn new and sometimes contradictory information, and we dismantle it. If you find out information that makes a scene less stable, you’ve got to figure out how to make that instability part of the story. Sometimes that scene ends up not as good as it once was, but it’s truer to what actually happened.”
Burns’s writing and editing process is somewhat unique. He and his team begin by interviewing scholars and experts. The writers usually do not participate at this point; they might look at questions and suggest things, but the filmmakers shoot without a script. Then, the writer reviews the interviews and begins researching and writing a script. “We might have 50 interviews done by the time we give it to the writer, who throws quotes into various places,” said Burns. “Usually, every talking head gets moved at least once, if not 20 times, during the editing process. We want to be corrigible to the end.”
When the script’s first draft is done, it is sent to scholars. Burns and his team will chop it up; they may go through 20 drafts. “The script becomes a conversation among me, the writer, my co-directors and co-producers, and our scholars—who are not window dressing. In fact, we’ve been humbled, in some cases humiliated, by a subject we thought we knew. We never stop researching, and we never stop writing.”
They call the initial editing process a blind assembly. “We listen to it almost as a radio play, with me as the narrator and people in the office reading first-person voices (if that film has first-person voices).” All the talking heads are jump-cut together, and the editors don’t begin adding pictures until drafts three, four, or five of the script. And then it takes another year or two of editing to refine the film (particularly on a big series). “Any time you see a talking head in our film, its location is sort of a happy accident of trial and error.”
After seeing “Trekkies,” actor Walter Koenig had a criticism of the film: “You should have had more of me in the film! But that’s my actor’s ego talking.” I laughed and agreed. I especially missed him in the segment about the memories of the first convention. I explained how, unfortunately, because he was one of our first interviewees, our theme questions had yet to evolve fully, so we neglected to ask him about his first convention experience. Koenig’s criticism is typically the No. 1 criticism I have received from interviewees. After sitting for a couple hours and then seeing only two minutes in the film—or maybe even just one quote—it’s often a shock how little remains.
THIS IS A TEST
Sometimes you must remove segments you love because they don’t fit the overall scheme. The way that becomes clear is by watching rough cuts with an audience. Don’t rely on yourself and a few buddies to tell you you’ve got a great movie. Studios test movies for a reason. Film agent Glen Reynolds of Circus Road Films said, “I’ve been around several films that got into Sundance that would never have gotten in on the first cut before testing. Have five or six screenings of ten people, ranging from editors to your barista to your Aunt Joy. Sometimes you find common issues among people, something you might need to address that you wouldn’t have thought of. Some people get caught up in the belief, ‘It’s my vision, and I know it works, so I don’t need to do that.’ But that’s a mistake.”
An audience can’t tell you how to fix your movie, but they will show you where the problems are. You will feel where it drags when you observe people screening your film. Ask specific questions about the weaknesses you suspect your film has. If they confirm your suspicions, work on fixing those issues. If you disagree with their criticisms, go with your instinct. The film is your vision, not theirs. Liz Garbus said, “Tuning out the noise and listening to my gut is something I constantly have to remind myself to do. If you don’t listen to your gut, you’re lost because there will always be a sea of voices telling you different things. If you’re the filmmaker, you need to be tuned in to that voice.”
Freida Lee Mock wondered what people would have said if Picasso had done test screenings for his portraits. What if someone had said, “Oh, Dora Maar’s right eyeball looks weird. Shouldn’t it be closer to her nose?” Or, “’Guernica’ is too busy. There are too many animals and soldiers lying upside down.” With “Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision” (1995), Mock’s only screenings included those who worked on the film. For later films, Mock showed fine cuts to three or four friends who were not in the industry and whose opinions she valued. “Typically, I find out what’s not clear. I don’t change much, but it’s often an issue of clarity.”
Sam Pollard cuts without music at first. “I try to build things and then have the music work with the scene.” If you edit with music in place, it can hide problems. Adding music to a completed scene should support the natural emotions that the footage already evokes. Many documentaries use no score at all. Frederick Wiseman avoids adding a score. At most, there may be incidental or source music, such as in “Model” (1981), where music plays in the studios where the models are working.
After I add a temporary score pulled from movie soundtracks, songs, or library music, my composer and I watch the film together and discuss all the places where I placed temp music. This is called a spotting session. That music is then replaced with an original score by the composer. A documentary composer needs a diverse set of skills to avoid falling into one sound throughout; sometimes, you have to shake the audience up with something different.
Ken Burns approaches music differently. He records music early, well before a scene is edited. The music brings an emotional impact that he is trying to preserve by making the music primary. “We want music to be something more than just what’s added at the end to amplify emotions you hope are there.” For “The Civil War” (1990), Burns went through hymnals and popular sheet music from that era, collected around 35 songs, and recorded each in 30 different ways. “We don’t score the films; we edit to the music. We will change a line of narration to get out of the way of a musical phrase. My brother Ric [Burns] once said, ‘All the other art forms, when they die and go to heaven, aspire to be music.’”
If you begin shooting a documentary but it stalls out and you put it on the shelf for a while, this could turn into a terrific opportunity to follow up in the future to find out how your subjects’ lives have changed. During the hiatus, a story might have blossomed. Michael Apted’s brilliant “Up” series (1964-2019) utilized this technique to perfection, checking in with 14 individuals every seven years, beginning when they were seven years old.
For “The Truth About Marriage” (2020), I shot my first interview in 2012 with a rapper I met while traveling through Brazil. Don Blanquito was charismatic, funny, and the most unabashedly single person I had ever met. Calling himself “the Indiana Jones of the golden booty,” he said, “We’re not designed to be with the same person for six years. If you turn on the Discovery Channel, you’ll see female spiders trying to kill the males if they stick around too long.” He struck me as a prime documentary subject. After interviewing him about his relationship doctrines, I put the footage aside as I tried to figure out the rest of the film. Seven years later, this man, who had been living the epitome of bachelorhood, was married and had a daughter, so I interviewed him again. I also did a follow-up years later with a polyamorous couple and with a Hollywood screenwriter and his foreign bride from the Czech Republic. This gave my film part of the missing ending it needed.
Editing is refining raw ore to a pure form. The editing process begins during writing, is a concern during shooting, and continues in earnest once you arrive in the editing suite. Your project is your baby, and you want to get it to the editing room where you can make it beautiful. Nobody likes ugly babies, except their parents, and you want to sell more than two tickets. To a large extent, editing is about being methodological and organized in the face of mountains of footage. If you are good at organizing your garage, you might just have what it takes to be a good documentary editor.
This article is adapted from the book “The Documentarian: The Way to a Successful and Creative Professional Life in the Documentary Business,” by Roger Nygard, to be published in September 2024 by Applause Theatre & Cinema Books. Nygard has been a member of the Editors Guild since 2000.
Be the first to comment