As a documentary consultant I help documentary filmmakers develop their films to be the best they can be. These film ideas are often commissioned by Netflix, BBC, ITV or selected to play in top-tier film festivals. I usually work with directors before they go out to film, however sometimes I’m brought in after they’ve made their film and are struggling to get them accepted into festivals. Obviously, it’s much harder to turn a film around once it’s been shot.
The following mistakes that I see documentary filmmakers make, I’ve learned from my experience of both working with filmmakers as a consultant, and selecting documentaries for film festivals.
Mistake 1: They make a worthy film and think that an audience will be beating down their door wanting to see it
They feel that an audience “ought” to watch it as they feel it’s an “important” story. I’m going to quote the documentary filmmaker Michael Moore: “And the audience, the people who’ve worked hard all week – they want to go to the movies. They want the lights to go down and be taken somewhere. They don’t care whether you make them cry, whether you make them laugh, whether you even challenge them to think – but damn it, they don’t want to be lectured. They don’t want to see our invisible wagging finger popping out of the screen. They want to be entertained.”
Mistake 2: They spend a year travelling the world and spend $60,000 of their inheritance shooting a film with absolutely no understanding of how to craft a film.
As a documentary consultant I see lots of this type of film from filmmakers who are baffled as to why all their hard work hasn’t paid off and their film hasn’t been accepted into film festivals. And I just think – what a waste. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Just as you’d not go out and buy a violin then book a performance for yourself at the Royal Albert Hall, so a documentary filmmaker needs to learn real tried and tested rules to help them both identify if they have a film idea that has the potential to emotionally engage with an audience, and if they do, then they need to have the knowledge about how to go out and make that film.
As a consultant and filmmaker I use these rules constantly. They are my best friend. And when I pass them on to documentary makers I see the profound change that these rules have on not just their films but on their confidence as filmmakers.
Mistake 3: They make a film that fails to evoke emotion in a viewer
A film is not a newspaper article. It’s not an ethnographic film or a piece for the radio. It’s a living, breathing film. It’s more akin to poetry than journalism. What I notice about the documentaries that people love so much is that they evoke emotion in them. This could mean that a film moves an audience. Or entertains them. Or both. But the viewer is indisputably moved in some way.
If your documentary isn’t evoking an emotion in a viewer I suspect that there’s something wrong and should be addressed – usually at the early stages of production rather than in the edit when it’s probably going to be too late. And yet filmmakers often don’t think about this – it’s as if they are just going out making their film because they find the subject interesting and assume that an audience will be equally captivated.
Mistake 4: Not making a film with a great story
We as humans need stories. We are story lovers. We thrive on the dramatic arc of a story to draw us in. This is what gets us paying money to watch documentaries. Work needs to be done at both the planning and shooting stages – to ensure that there is a dramatic arc to your film. Without doing this you are very, very, very unlikely to find it in your edit.
To understand about story-telling the first thing I believe you need to have a grasp of is 3-act structure. And then you need to know a few basic rules of dramatic movie-making. Knowing these rules will help you craft your film into something that will hopefully pull viewers, broadcasters and festivals in.
Mistake 5: They can write 20 pages about their film but cannot sum up in one compelling sentence not just what their story is but how they intend to make it
If you can’t do that then you won’t be able to make a really great film. Trust me.
And at the beginning of my career I’ve been there too – writing the long pitch document – but unable to simply sum up in one sentence what the story is and how I intend to direct it. But it’s a fair ask – as you might be condensing 50 years of someone’s life into 48 minutes – and you have to be able to simply answer how you intend to do that and what your story is.
