For a long time, documentaries were considered the “spinach” of the movie world, according to filmmaker Morgan Neville. They were the hardy option that bettered you, but didn’t go down quite as easy as, say, Mission Impossible. Around 10 years ago, that changed.
As the rise of streamers sparked demand for massive libraries of content, documentaries proliferated as a cost-effective option: no multimillion-dollar actors or advanced CGI required. (For reference, the highest grossing film of all time, Avatar, cost $237 million to make; the highest grossing documentary, Michael Jackson: This Is It, cost $60 million.) Meanwhile, viral stories of true crime and truly odd individuals—Tiger King, anyone?—made the genre feel less like homework and more like entertainment.
But as documentarians began commanding larger budgets and loftier expectations, an important part of the ecosystem felt a squeeze: the mid-budget feature. Across the film industry, the sector has been wiped off the docket by increasingly bottom line-conscious studios. That shift is particularly dire for the documentary category, where the tier once accounted for the majority of projects.
This pressure is compounded by “an increasing culture of repression that we’re experiencing all around the world,” says filmmaker Sara Dosa, pointing to the insidious creep of censorship and governmental influence that has creatives on alert. (Earlier this year, Amazon paid upwards of $75 million to produce and promote a documentary about Melania Trump, a move widely seen as an effort to curry favor with her husband’s administration.)
Dosa is best-known for her Oscar-nominated Fire of Love, about a volcanologist couple who died on the job. Her latest film, Time and Water, is a look at climate change through the eyes of Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason. She joined Neville—director of the Oscar-winning 20 Feet From Stardom, as well as Roadrunner, Won’t You Be My Neighbor, and this year’s Man on the Run and Lorne—on a call to discuss the state of the form. Also phoning in were Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni, whose debut Oscar-nominated feature, Cutting Through Rocks, follows Sara Shahverdi, the first woman to be elected to the council of a village in northwestern Iran. As is often the case with documentaries, the recent outbreak of war in the director couple’s home country gave their work new meaning.
Together, the group discussed what it really takes to make a documentary at a moment when the job is more difficult—and vital—than ever.
Morgan, you’ve been at this the longest. To start, how did you land on documentary filmmaking as a medium to tell these stories?
Morgan Neville: I remember the times before documentaries were really a thing. I started my first documentary in 1993, and I remember a lot of people trying to avoid the word “documentary” because they just thought it was poison. I mean, documentary was kind of seen as the spinach of filmmaking. It’s something that was good for you, but not something that anybody actually would volunteer to watch.
I was a journalist, and documentaries are journalism in many ways. I just decided to make a film—I thought I would spend three months [on it] over the summer. Three years later, I finished my film. I learned and made all the mistakes you make, but I also knew it was what I was gonna do for the rest of my life.
I’m interested in what you think about the line between journalism and documentary. Do you feel beholden to being an objective observer?
Sara Dosa: It depends. I always want to do justice to the story and to the people in the film, and make sure that they feel accurately represented. Something I really love about the form of nonfiction cinema [is] that it can borrow trappings from what many people might think of as fictional storytelling, but can place you in somebody’s own experience.
Sometimes it’s really hard. In my last project, my protagonists had passed away 30 years before we began making the film, so there was always an active question: How can this feel true? How can this be journalistic in a way that accurately represents them when they’re not here to guide us? In that case, that meant interviewing all of their loved ones, reading the nearly 20 books that they wrote, watching all of the films they shot, and trying to intuit their spirit. It can be really complicated, but I do feel like the co-creation process can help with that balance of feeling accurate and reflective of a truth, while still being creatively playful.
Mohammadreza Eyni: I started with archaeology when I was 18, and then after a few years, I was like, Instead of spending time with dead bodies and corpses and graves, I would really love to spend time with real people. But what I learned from archaeology was being sensitive about details, even small details, and information you can get.
Sara Khaki: In the case of Cutting Through Rocks, the relationship [with protagonist Sara Shahverdi] became a real collaboration over time. When we first walked into this village, we had no idea that we would spend seven years in production and one year of editing, and now we are in year nine of working on this film. Mohammadreza is a native Azeri Turkish speaker from the northwest of Iran, where Sara is from, and because of my presence as a female director and Mohammadreza’s presence as someone who understands the nuances of the culture, our collaboration created a kind of intimacy. At every step, we kept Sara informed of what to expect.
It’s been bringing attention to this person’s life who has been hidden from the headline, only known within her community, and now not only known to the entire country, but also internationally. She’s a person that could be recognizable and that could help protect her from any potential harm that could happen.
Neville: I feel like we are in the trust business. We are asking people to share themselves, honestly and vulnerably, and then we share our interpretation of that with the world.
My films are often interview-oriented—that’s more my background in journalism. I feel like I often end up in these para-therapeutic relationships. I’m asking them about the most important events of their life and helping them process them. It can get very intimate. At the same time, I’m not there to make them look good or bad. I’m just there to understand. People like to be understood, so they establish a connection with you that lets them open up.
We’re coming up on Oscars season. Morgan, I know you said you have a slightly strained relationship with the awards circuit—
Neville: Who doesn’t!
Fair enough. But for documentaries—a genre that often relies on word of mouth more than a big rollout—awards can bring a lot of attention. How important have awards been in your careers, either in securing distribution or simply in getting people to see the film?
Neville: I mean, awards matter, but looking at the biggest issues facing documentaries today, I think it’s distribution. Awards may affect that by a few degrees here or there. Maybe some people pick up a few films because they think they may do well with awards, but that’s usually more the exception. What I’ve seen over the last six or eight years is the change in how people consume everything and the loss of so much of the art house cinema market and smaller distributors and some governmental funding around the globe for documentaries.
The crisis I see is that the documentary world is bifurcating. It’s either splashy things that the algorithm loves or very important small films that are loved, but have a very hard time finding an audience. The middle part of documentary—t’s not completely niche, just people telling interesting stories, which are many of my favorite documentaries—I don’t know where a lot of those films find a home these days.
Khaki: Documentary filmmakers spend a lot of time witnessing and observing a character. That idea of vérité filmmaking is something I really admire, but there is no platform that would support that kind of filmmaking anymore. Usually when you’re in the midst of finishing working on your film and you’re looking to see if there’s any interest, they say, “We would love to see a rough cut,” and once you have a rough cut, they say, “We would love to see the finished project,” and when it’s finished, “What festivals did it go to? Did it win? Is it shortlisted? Is it nominated?” It’s always this game that they would like to play, even if the film has that merit to meet the audience.
Eyni: Distributors, by acquiring specific films, are sending a message to a young generation of filmmakers that if you want to be successful, you should make films like this, not like those films. This is really dangerous for the future of this industry. I think it’s alarming.
Dosa: It is alarming right now, the consolidation of story. I do feel like there is a kind of tyranny of algorithms out there these days that is saying: These are the stories that are valued. That’s combined with an increasing culture of repression that we’re experiencing all around the world, and definitely in this country. I want to center the hope that you’re talking about, Sara, and champion those kinds of films … that can sit alongside these entertaining, splashy, more visible stories. It can all coexist in this ecosystem. That’s, perhaps, the idealistic dream.
It’s interesting to hear you guys talk about this because there’s this narrative that there’s this big boom in documentaries—with streamers coming in and funding so many projects—and people may be looking for documentaries more than they once did.
Neville: That’s been happening for 10 years. [Documentaries have] come a long way, but what I see now is a lot of things masquerading as documentaries that aren’t really—certainly not auteur-driven in that way.
Part of the tyranny of the algorithm is that it’s looking for the widest common value, which often means the lowest common denominator. Covid changed our viewing habits. For people to feel that they need to get off the couch and go to a theater to see a documentary, that bar gets incredibly high. It used to be something people would do weekly, and that theatrical documentary market just doesn’t exist much anymore.
Dosa: It’s interesting, the “golden age of documentary.” I feel like I’ve heard that term referenced, especially a few years ago [when] there were these really exciting sales coming out of Sundance.
I feel extremely lucky because my film Fire of Love was acquired out of Sundance. I feel like I am the beneficiary of this mythical idea that a sale can happen out of Sundance—you can have a dream distributor like NatGeo. But I absolutely know what it’s like not to have that. I feel like, though, there is a golden age in terms of creativity.
The way people are utilizing technology—I’m always in awe of the creative uses of the camera. I just watched The Alabama Solution, and there’s cell-phone footage being smuggled out of prisons that is so skillfully edited together. The way people are turning surveillance on its head to be used in storytelling, the plethora of new tools, is so exciting right now.
Eyni: Sara, you said it’s a golden age regarding creativity, but also we are living in very dark times everywhere in this world. So we need storytellers to remind each other about possibilities, and also about standing against authority. Directors are against dictators.
What kind of power do you feel like you have as directors to speak to a general audience about these issues, or to impact these issues on a large scale?
Neville: The film is many times a Trojan horse. Cutting Through Rocks is an amazing film that illuminates a story that most people wouldn’t think, “Oh, I need to investigate or understand this.”
The humanizing alone, the understanding of the people of Iran that you get through that film, especially at this moment, is so needed. But essentially, our job is to help people see the world through other people’s eyes. That’s empathy. Roger Ebert said, “Films are empathy machines.” That’s essentially what we’re trying to do.
Dosa: Sometimes I think of each film as its own cohesive world that you can enter. When you use a word like “empathy,” I feel like that is such a phenomenal gift—especially at a time that is so polarized politically, culturally, economically.
Eyni: Yes, you’re right. I can talk about the experience last night. We had a screening here in New York, and I went for the Q&A. Afterward, some Americans talked about similarities. For them, it was not a film happening in the northwest of Iran. They talked about the idea of leadership or equality, and these are very relevant topics to talk about even here in New York. Then some Iranians are so emotional because they said the headline news is full of many things about war or authorities, but the film is talking about real people.
What we are doing is talking about people—people [who are] very hard to find in the headlines. We need to give real people power by telling their stories.
You’ve all spent so much time with your subjects who are doing incredible things—things people wouldn’t have thought they could do. Do you feel like shadowing these kinds of figures rubs off on you, or comes back into your life and the way you approach your work?
Neville: I tell [my subjects] that the experience of making this is gonna be a bit like therapy for you, but the thing you don’t know is that it’s therapy for me. It’s something people don’t talk about much, but I think we leave a lot of ourselves in these films too.
Dosa: I almost feel like I have all these new sets of glasses through which I can see the world, thanks to the subjects I’ve worked with. For example, there’s a film I made a few years ago called The Seer and the Unseen. It was about an Icelandic woman who is in communication with spirits of nature. I will look at a mountainside now and think, Maybe there are trolls there. I’ll see a rock and understand that there’s a life force inhabiting it.
Khaki: When I reflect about my own life and also Mohammadreza’s life, the circumstances that led us to start this journey together were… kind of like how Sara was going from one setback to another with a lot of tenacity. The title Cutting Through Rocks ended up being so fitting for what happened behind the camera and even after production. Everything really was, and has been, cutting through rocks in a way.
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