Morgan Neville, the director of “Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in Two Pieces,” always loved movies and writing as a child, but when he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, he wasn’t sure what to do with his interests. He thought that “writing seemed serious” and that “movies were too frivolous” to get into show business, but once he started working on his first documentary, “Shotgun Freeway: Drives Through Lost LA,” he knew he was pursuing his lifelong passion had found.
“I remember sending a note to my parents two weeks after I started my first documentary and saying, ‘This is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life,’” Neville said. “I knew right away that that documentary had all these different things that I liked: the storytelling, the writing, the research, the interviews, everything.”
As part of Variety Virtual FYC TV Fest, Neville joined Andrew Jarecki, director, executive producer and writer of “The Jinx – Part Two,” Mary Robertson and Emma Schwartz, directors and executive producers of “Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV” and Justin Wilkes, president of Imagine Entertainment and producer of “Jim Henson Idea Man” for a documentary panel discussion. Senior TV editor Emily Longeretta moderated the conversation.
Documentaries come in all shapes and sizes in the streaming age. Whether it’s a five-part limited series like ‘Quiet on Set’ or a two-part feature film like ‘Steve!’, documentary filmmakers have more control than ever over how to organize their films. For ‘Idea Man’, Wilkes and his team wanted to make a single film. This was so they could emulate Jim Henson’s innovative film techniques and follow the natural three acts of his life.
“Ron asked [Howard] thought, ‘Well, we’ve got to make the doctor feel like it’s Jim telling his story, the way Jim would want to tell his own story.’ So if you see, we’re using a lot of the same techniques with stop-motion animation and syncopated editing,” Wilkes said. “I think that somehow made us feel like there was a very natural beginning, middle and sort of, unfortunately, premature end to his story, that fit naturally into a three-act structure.”
When making a documentary, what a director takes out of the film is just as important as what he puts into it. While shooting part two of “The Jinx,” a docuseries about the unsolved murders of Robert Durst, Jarecki had to sort through “nine years of stuff.” To ensure he conveyed the story effectively, Jarecki turned to the trusted opinions of friends and family.
“A big part of that was making a list of all the people we trusted, and then taking some random people, like my kids’ friends, or people we just know are smart viewers, and asking them in a screening room to get,” Jarecki said. “You put something in there that you think is important. I remember a friend of ours who was an editor said, “No, yes, I understand that. It was great. It was like a relic,’ and we’re like, ‘Oh, my God, that’s out.’
A topic that is not often discussed in documentary filmmaking is the relationship between the filmmaker and his work. During the filming of ‘Steve!’ Neville saw as much of his own story in the film as Steve Martin’s.
“We don’t often talk about autobiography in our films, but I see so much of what I think about and deal with in my own life reflected in the choices I make, in the films I make and in the way I make them Neville said. “So in a way, I feel like with Steve, a lot of what he was working through were things that I went through in my own life as well. That way it really feels like a two-way street.”
Watch the entire conversation above.