[MUSIC PLAYING]
Good documentary writing does the opposite
of what bad documentary writing does.
Bad documentary writing makes it a lesson, makes it castor oil,
makes it something that is good for you but not good tasting.
It's eating your vegetables, you know?
The good writing permits it to be
a whole other fluid dynamic amidst other fluid
dynamics that, in their aggregate,
creates something that permits you not to have a one thing,
but a more than one thing, that celebrates perspective,
that tolerates contradiction in undertow in characters,
that is willing to not just be this
is but this may be also this.
And there's something incredibly liberating
and there's something incredibly joyous when that happens.
And it isn't just the writing, it's the writing and interplay
with first person voices and how we edit those
down from the whole journal.
And the images, and the newsreel,
and the sound effects, and the music, and all of the elements
that go in there, they are all in interrelation.
To have all those elements in play and to not say,
oh, you can't use that element because it's not cool
or it's not right or it's historically not
good is to limit your possibilities as a filmmaker.
Put everything in, and if you don't like it,
then take it out.
You don't need to do any interviews anymore.
You don't need to do first person
invoices if you don't want to.
You don't need to do narration if you don't want to.
But you're going to have to do something.
And filmmaking is always symphonic.
That is to say, it's multiple instruments
working at the same time.
For us, our films, for the most part,
are written, which means that we depend
as the central skeletal structure of our film,
a written narration.
And I remember coming into the documentary world inheriting
the sense that direct cinema, the cinema
verite experimental works were much more closer
to art or to cinema than anything that was narrated.
And I had a kind of initial suspicion
of that because I think I've always enjoyed literature,
I've always enjoyed good nonfiction and fiction.
The idea that narration is the voice of God
is somehow not good and not as pure as other forms of cinema
is just crazy because most of our literature
is based on third-person narrative exposition.
And that's pretty good.
And in some of the earlier films--
I did not invent narration in films,
I just figured that it ought to get
a different kind of treatment, that it
could have a dimension that could be at moments considered
literary and literature, and that it would not just
be connecting the talking heads, connecting
the dots of a didactic expository educational film.
I cannot tell you, in an industry where quite often
people are suspicious of words, how much they are central
to who we are.
And I would say, don't be afraid of them.
It's how we're communicating right now.
The script writing is the central determinant
of what the narrative will be.
And that so much of what comes out of the first draft
is telling us louder than anything else what the film is
going to look like or, more important, what
the potential film has the possibility of looking like.
And so in a visual medium, there's
nothing more central in our process than the word
because the writer will begin to assemble
the treatments and the ideas that we've
given to him and the research that he's done or she's done,
and constantly going back, providing new books,
adding new facts that we might learn,
perhaps giving them a talking head that's
arrived that we finished and we've selected the best of them
and think that it might go well in this scene.
If 10 people are talking about this world series,
we'll put all 10 in and immediately weed out seven
or eight and struggle over the last two
to figure out what's in the final film.
And so it's a completely unformed thing.
What we're looking for early on is
what is the unanticipated dramatic arc that the material
itself is demanding.
And we begin to emerge with something that
is going to be determinant.
Now that doesn't mean that it isn't changed
in a million different ways.
And of course, the addition of an image
is a huge, huge difference to it.
But I think in terms of the structural question
that everyone must be asking, you have to be asking,
those first drafts are hugely important.
Even if you're throwing them out,
because there's something that--
I mean, I've never thrown it out,
but even if there's wholesale changes that take place,
that's determining the basic arc of the film.
The English language is so beautiful.
It's so elastic, it's so expressive,
it's got so many nuances to it.
Why don't you take it out for a ride every once in a while?
So a really good example of what writing
can do that takes it beyond the didactic and just purely
expository, this is what you should know, the Depression,
you know, 15 million people were out of work.
We also describe the Depression, that in many American cities
the animals in the zoo were shot and the meat
distributed to the poor.
That in Pennsylvania, convicts went back to jail,
committed crimes because they could
get three square meals a day, whereas once they were released
they were on their own.
So what you do is you have the facts in there,
but you deliver it in a kind of poetic vehicle
that makes sense to people.
Everywhere, we look for ways to do things.
You can say, yes, you can say 6 million people,
6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.
But if you say in 1933, there were 9 million Jews in Europe,
in 1945, two out of three, two out of three are dead,
you've personalized it.
All of a sudden it's no longer 6 million.
It's like saying four score and seven years
ago because 87 just goes over your head.
It is the poetic dimension that well-used words
bring that it is, I don't know anything better.
The biggest thing about the narration, one
hopes it has the poetic dimension that elevates it
from sheer exposition.
But you hope that which is expository is true,
it cannot not be true.
It has to be true, you have to verify it.
And sometimes you multiple sources,
some that say that it didn't happen,
some that say that it did, and you
have to use the best and most available
scholarship, which is why every film we make always
has a board of sometimes two dozen scholars
who are helping advisors.
Sometimes even they don't agree about interpretation,
but we can try to get to some facts.
If you look at the Vietnam working script,
I think that the footnotes are longer than the actual script,
talking, citing chapter and verse
on a very controversial thing.
We don't have an accurate number of how many people
died in Vietnam.
The Defense Department has one figure, 58,000 something,
another group has this, another group as this, or x
number, 58,000 plus on the wall.
And so we finally, after years, just gave up
and said more than 58,000 because we did not
want to create an argument on something that wasn't true.
You really have to get those facts right in order
for the other things, the more emotional, interpretive,
the anecdotal, that are going to be communicated
through other media, to be able to permit.
If you don't have a strong structure based on fact,
then you're lost.
Then you're into conjecture, you're into argument,
you're into theory, you're into conspiracy,
you're into craziness.
That's where it leads.
The third-person narrator operates almost
in an objective sphere, describing what happens.
The first-person voice has a kind
of intimacy that says that those events occurred to,
or happened to, real people.
And that's an important thing because the combination
of the two creates something that's
fuller and richer and more dimensional.
In some ways, we're talking about the wonderful tension
and reconciliation that takes place
between objective third-person writing and first-person
experience.
In almost every aspect of the work,
there is a respiration that takes place.
There is an inhalation and exhalation.
It has to do with the pace and rhythm of editing.
It has to do with the length and duration and quality of image,
it has to do with the interplay between third-person narration
and first-person voices.
It's always a way of breathing so that you are permitting
an audience to do what they are actually doing,
which is breathing.
You do want them to hold their breath at times
but you also want to give to them their own agency with all
of the narrative that you've done so it seems less my film
than it is their film.
The important thing for us is that whatever is written
is not written in stone.
It is not the guide that informs shooting and editing,
it is something that is evolving along with the detective
work that's finding the archives and the talking heads,
along with the emerging structure of a film that
has nothing to do with the script and everything
to do with the script.
And it is a really complicated dynamic that goes on.
The thing that's so important that we insist upon
from the very beginning is that the writer
be free to write all the things that they
think should be in there.
And those are things that we've suggested, too,
that should be in there, and to write them for however long.
That writer cannot be worried about whether there are images
to illustrate.
That's not the writer's job.
The writer's job is to just write that scene.
And so inevitably, the process of work on the script
involves cutting it down, editing it.
And good stuff, too.
It just doesn't fit, as you begin to work in pictures,
in an hour or a two-hour time limit, what you can do.
We've got episodes that go over those limits because they work.
But for the most part, we're trying
to make sure that we have a coherent narrative.
And so we will undergo many, many drafts of the script.
I'll read it first from the writer.
I will change a few words, we'll submit to some historians,
they'll give some notes, we'll do a rewrite there.
We'll share it more broadly.
I will then record it.
And as I'm recording it, those words
will change again because things that you read
are not the same as things that are spoken.
We will then do a blind assembly, meaning
we will put the words up against nothing except a few talking
heads that might have arrived in in the course of shooting,
and begin to see whether the structure sounds right,
feels right.
It's not a radio play because you are seeing the talking
heads all chopped up into there many jump cuts,
and you are hearing this imperfect narrator, me,
read the words.
But we get a sense.
And on a big series we might do two,
might even do three blind assemblies before we say,
lets go to adding picture.
We are constantly revising, constantly reworking.
Sometimes it has to do with just nuts and bolts, changes
and facts.
Or we're just going to make it better.
And that might mean taking something out or rewriting it,
or we've restructured a scene and that
requires the rewriting of something
to make sure the thing flows.
And it isn't until the very end that we finally say no more.
And there are a thousand million things
that you can do that you have to do and be
willing to do all the way through the process
until you go, whoa, that's working.
In the beginning is the word, and the word
is throughout but it is not written in stone.
The excavation of history is a detective piece,
and in that archeology you don't get necessarily
every shard of that piece of pottery
that you're putting together.
And so you can't fully show what that is.
And so we have to figure out ways to, in our language,
communicate that it isn't absolutely true,
we just think it may be.
You can't say, they did this or they did that.
You can say, he may have been looking for, right?
That's the kind of wiggle room that we do.
We can't actually prove it because that person is
no longer around and all the evidence suggests exactly that.
But because we don't have that final piece in the puzzle,
you have to say may have been or would have been.
And there's lots of ways in which
when people write us letters and say, you said this,
we say, actually, it may have been that.
And we did that quite consciously.
And if we get to a point where we're uncomfortable,
that it's too suggesting, even the may have is not
a big enough qualification, we just won't do it,
we'll take it out.
It's better to err on that side than it
is to feed people's misconceptions.
The first full chapter after the introduction of the Civil War
series is a chapter called "All Night Forever," which is
about the reality of slavery.
We did not want any one of our viewers
to misunderstand why the Civil War came.
There's lots of different causes and stuff like that,
but there's one main principle reason that it happened,
one main cause.
And that's the existence of chattel slavery.
So for us, with the power of a Negro spiritual
that we have playing, and this unbelievably leveling
neutron bomb of a quote by Frederick Douglass,
it then suggested that our prose could be more straightforward,
that we didn't have to add anything to it.
In fact, if we did it would become
purple and overripe and hard to justify
in the face of the power of the Douglass quote,
the power of the spiritual, the power of the images you're
seeing, human beings in shackles,
human beings whose backs have been scarred from lashes,
human beings that are treated and prodded
like they're animals, wedding vows
that are changed till death or distance do you part.
It's a time when restraint in language is in itself poetic.
And then the narrator intones in a very straight fashion,
"'No day ever dawns for the slave,' a freed black man
wrote, 'nor is it looked for.'
For the slave it is all night, all night forever.
One white Mississippian was more blunt,--
NARRATOR: "'I'd rather be dead,' he said,
'than be a nigger on one of these big plantations.'"
A slave entered the world in a one room dirt floored shack.
Drafty in winter, reeking in summer,
slave cabins bred pneumonia, typhus, cholera, lockjaw,
tuberculosis.
The child who survived to be sent to the fields at 12
was likely to have rotten teeth, worms, dysentery, malaria.
Fewer than four out of 100 lived to be 60.
That's it.
And it's just straight.
And that just is the radioactive, the kryptonite
that just begins to alter what everybody's
view of what the Civil War was about,
which is this noble disagreement between northern states
and southern states, and states' rights
and nullification and economic and social and political
differences.
It's about that.
It's about that in a country that
had proclaimed that all men are created equal,
4 million human beings were owned by other human beings.
When we get into a discussion about slavery,
we abstract things.
I don't know how many times people have said,
well, you know, slavery would have died out
in a generation and a half.
OK.
So be a slave for a generation and a half.
You willing to do that?
Well how about just for a generation?
OK, if that's too much, what about a decade?
No?
How about a year?
How about a month?
How about a week?
How about a day?
How about an hour?
The abstraction of the reality of our historical past,
particularly with regard to slavery, is abhorrent.
It permits us to treat human beings who
live lives as full as we do to be abstracted into some force.
So it's not as if people weren't powerfully
aware of the moral injustice of it back then.
And yet, we just abstract it.
And we assume that thank goodness we're not,
so therefore there's no humanity.
And that continues to this day.
We still stop at the color of the skin
and not the content of the character, as Dr. King said.