Hello friends!
I am writing this from beautiful San Francisco, where I had the pleasure of presenting Wild Inside to a sold-out crowd in the biggest theater at the Roxie yesterday. Special thanks to filmmaker Jesse Moss (Boys State, The Overnighters, and coming soon to Netflix: Teenage Wasteland) for hosting a fantastic Q&A. We also sold out at the Coolidge in Boston, the Nitehawk in Prospect Park, Cinema21 in Portland, the Clairidge in Montclair and a bunch of other theaters around the country. As of now we’ve booked close to 100 theaters (find one near you here, or request one if it’s not playing at your local theater), which is a tiny release yet pretty epic for an indie doc! Audiences are loving it, and I am feeling super emotional to have the privilege of sharing Flaco’s funny, inspiring, tragic story with you all.
Yesterday, a man told me that the film made him cry for the first time in 18 years.
Folks, this is it.
This is why we do this.
But how do we do this?
How do we get viewers to care that deeply about some person (or owl) they’ve never met?
How to make a real person into a character
A few weeks back, I wrote about the peculiarity of making a documentary with an animal as the protagonist. But the truth is, making a documentary character out of a human being is just as weird — if not weirder!
Real people are not characters. Real people are inconsistent, repetitive, opaque, contradictory, and sometimes kinda boring. They possess infinite constellations of interests and desires and experiences and narratives, most of which lead nowhere and don’t obviously all fit together. They behave in ways that don’t make sense. Their lives do not really have arcs.
Movie characters are different. We expect a character to be coherent and to want something identifiable. We expect their choices to reveal who they are. We expect the details we are shown to add up to some kind of meaningful pattern.
So when documentary filmmakers talk about “finding” a character, we’re being a little coy. We don’t simply find characters. We create them — we craft them — by highlighting certain pieces of a real person and leaving countless others behind.
In order to succeed, we must take a real person and make them into a persona.
What do you mean by using the word “characters”? Isn’t that a fiction thing?
We refer to the people in our documentaries with a few different terms. Each of these terms comes loaded with its own preconceptions and philosophical baggage:
-
Subjects is the most common word. It’s usually seen as a neutral descriptor.
-
Participants is another option. Often used to signal a certain type of collaborative relationship between filmmakers and subjects.
-
Stars — basically never used. It’s kinda fascinating that everyone on reality TV or in porn, but not other forms of nonfiction media, is called a “star” — feel free to make of that what you will.
I use the word characters — especially when I’m casting and especially when I’m inside the edit — because it reminds me that I am indeed making movies.
But the word also names the central problem: How do you shape a messy, contradictory, real human being into a compelling movie character without lying about who they are? And what do you owe the real person who has to live forever with the character you have made from them?
