How to Direct a Documentary-Its all in the interview questions

How to Direct a Documentary- Become a better filmmaker and storyteller with these 5 quick tips! There is a lot that goes into making a good Documentary, in this video I talk about some of the things Ive learned about becoming a better filmmaker and its all in the interview questions!

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Contents of this video:

00:00- Intro

00:46- Interview questions

02:36- Rephrase the question

03:15- Have a Conversation

03:58- Direct the Conversation

07:15- Bonus tips






Good Directing starts before your on set, it starts with the preparation and in this case I’m talking about the interview questions.

When you're preparing your questions you kind of have to reverse engineer the conversation that your having with them. In other words, start with the answer that you want to get to.

Ask yourself what is it that you need them to say and work backwards from there. To give you guys an example I'm going to show you guys a diagram of this though process so you have a better idea.

So here is the answer that I'm trying to get to, If you try to get them to say this exactly chances its not going to come out genuine and it’s also just not real.

What you want is to use this as a guide for the conversation.

From the answer I work backwards. What bread did your mother make during the holidays? Who did she make the bread for? What did it smell like what did it taste like?

The goal is to get her to talk about the emotions and in this case even the senses so the audience could have a better idea of the importance this bread was to her.

All of these questions guide her to an answer that your looking for, but along the way your goal is to try and get them to be as descriptive as possible and when it comes time for the edit you’ll have more than enough to work with.




HAVE A CONVERSATION
The next tip is to have a conversation with them. Its extremely important to try and actually listen to what they are saying. This so many times gets overlooked but when you are really listening to them and you ask them questions based on their response and not just whats on your paper thats when the best interviews happen.

So while your on set try not to look at your paper the whole time or mess around with the camera try to give them your full undivided attention.

Let them finish
A big part of the interview process is knowing when to stay quiet and let your subject finish their story. I know that you have a ton of questions that your trying to get through but
the second you start speaking or asking them another question, they're going to stop that train of thought or they're going to think that you got the information that you needed.

Another reason why this is important is because the second you start speaking you have to cut the audio in the edit and there has been so many times where I have said something too early and I either cut them off or I missed the opportunity to have that extra second of silence that could have added drama to the edit.

So know when to be quiet.


KNOW WHEN THE CONVERSATION IS GOING NOWHERE
Now that being said, know when the conversation is going nowhere. Most of the time your going to get two types of people. The person who answers your questions in one or two word answers and the person who will go off on a two hour rant about absolutely nothing, and when you get back home you look at the footage and your like oh shit… I dont have what I need.

So how do you handle this?

This is where having that answer written down is going to save you. What i’ll do is, if I feel like an interview is going nowhere I’ll then know the example answer that I’m looking for, and I’ll say for safety we need you to say something like this. If they dont talk enough then you explain to them we just need you to be a bit more descriptive like this.

And if they talk too much let them know that we only have a small amount of time to get the point across can you say something like this.

And read it back to them in the way you want them to say it, sometimes people need to hear your voice to have an example of how they should say it or sound.



Ask again
My last tip is as you go through your interview process take not of questions that didnt have strong responses and at the end after you asked all of your questions ask those again. Most of the time your subject wont start getting comfortable and confident until the end of the interview so what I like to do is go back and ask the beginning questions again and youll be surprised how much better their responses are.


That’s it for today if you guys want to learn more about Documentary filmmaking don’t forget to subscribe to the channel, like this video if you havnt already and I’ll see you guys in the next one.