Oscar-Nominated Directors for Best Documentary Detail Why Obsession Leads to Better Stories: ‘You Jump Off a Cliff’ (Video)
thewrap.comhave to tell is critical. “Compelled, obsessed — I mean, you have to really love [a topic]. You have to just feel like it has a gravitational pull towards you,” “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” director Laura Poitras said.“A film is very often like a fever dream.
You jump off a cliff,” said Shaunak Sen, the director of “All That Breathes.” “It just takes a sort of life of its own.” Poitras and Sen were recently joined by fellow 2023 nominees Sara Dosa (“Fire of Love”), Simon Lereng Wilmont (“A House Made of Splinters”) and Daniel Roher (“Navalny”) in a panel hosted by TheWrap’s CEO and editor-in-chief Sharon Waxman in Los Angeles.
The wide-ranging discussion, held as part of TheWrap’s Oscar-Nominated Documentary Features Showcase and its 2022-2023 Awards Season Screening Series, covered everything from how documentarians establish trust with a subject, how they find the right structure to tell their story and why they film with – or without – an audience in mind.Sen continued, explaining that when he and his producer Aman Mann began their film about brothers in New Delhi who rescue Black Kite birds, worrying about an audience was far from front-of-mind. “I’ve never made a film that’s been distributed.
And the thing is, at least when we’re making [a film], you make something because it doesn’t exist. I don’t really think of the audience at all, actually, because I’ve never had an audience.
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