As we continue to collectively grumble about “Green Book” and, simultaneously, thank the Academy Gods for giving us Spike Lee, unfiltered after six champagnes, The Hollywood Reporter has released their final award season roundtable, this week focusing on the documentary filmmakers including Academy Award winner Chai Vasarhelyi (“Free Solo”), in addition to Morgan Neville (“Won’t You Be My Neighbor”), Julie Cohen (“RBG”), Tim Wardle (“Three Identical Strangers”), Bing Liu (“Minding the Gap”), and Rashida Jones (“Quincy”).
The conversation touches on a number of subjects, including political filmmaking in the age of Trump, as well as connecting to the filmmakers subject matter and what they learned during the process.
Beginning with Vasarhelyi, who co-directed “Free Solo” with her filmmaker/climber husband Jimmy Chin, originally had an ethical problem with shooting climber Alex Honnold’s free solo climb of Yellowstone’s El Capitan. As she notes, “We thought it was too risky. So a different sort of convincing began to happen because we had to really sit with that debate [whether to film the climb or not] if this was something we were comfortable with … Nonfiction is unexpected, you do not know what’s going to happen next, but clearly, we trusted him to make the right decisions and trusted ourselves to do a good job. If Alex died, we would’ve had the horrible task of making a film with that fact.”
READ MORE: ‘Free Solo’ Wins Best Documentary [Oscars 2019]
Wardle, who was unceremoniously shut out from an Oscar nomination for his popular “Three Identical Strangers,” had a similar ethical problem. As he says, “Those ethical questions are really interesting – when you have footage and [have] to confront characters about things that other people have told me. Should I do that? We had that to a degree as well. You’re learning things about these guys in my film, their past mental health issues and their past genetic backstories. Where does my duty as a filmmaker end and my duty of care to the contributors – where is the line? It’s always shifting.”
For Morgan Neville, who directed, I think we can all agree, a film that should’ve been included in the awards conversation, he decided that “I wanted to make a film about his [Fred Rogers] ideas, no about his biography … When she [Fred’s wife, Joanne Rogers] gave me her blessing, because she had to give me complete control over the film, she said, ‘Don’t make him into a saint.”
Cohen, on the other hand, made “RBG” knowing that Ginsburg would eventually see the film. Her experience, “showing Ruth Bader Ginsburg the film that we had made about her life was incredibly nerve-wracking. Her first time seeing it was at the world premiere at Sundance. We did not want to show it to her in advance because we didn’t want to public information apparatus of the court involved in trying to make any changes.” As Cohen says, though, the screening went well, as RBG approved, in the end.
READ MORE: The 2019 Oscars By The Numbers
If Ginsburg was comfortable around the cameras, the subjects of Bing Liu’s “Minding the Gap” had a bit of adjustment, even though, “they had been around cameras. Part and parcel of what it means to be a skateboarder is you’re being filmed. Skate videos are the throbbing heart of the skateboarding culture, so they grew up with it. But at the same time, they saw themselves in moments of celebration all throughout their childhoods because [that’s how those] edits came out. So they weren’t prepared for what was going to be in the film. But at the same time, they were, because they were there when we filmed all those dark moments. Ultimately, I think it mattered more to them that they had a voice. It felt like their lives were validated.”
Be sure to check out the entire roundtable discussion below:
