Tips For Editing Biographical Documentaries
Having directed two biographical documentaries myself and consulted on dozens, I’m happy to share some tips for navigating three of this genre’s biggest challenges.
First, let’s deal with the issue of being in love with your subject. Many filmmakers, myself included, pick up a camera because they want to pay tribute to a great person. But how do you avoid making a puff piece?
You can lay off the adulation and, instead, subject your character to the slings and arrows of critics within the first seven minutes, while your viewer is still forming an opinion about your film.
In Transcendent Man (2009), Director Barry Ptolemy brilliantly pays tribute to inventor Ray Kurzweil.
How? Ptolemy subjects Kurzweil to detractors. They criticize the futurist’s seminal idea, the so-called “Singularity”. Seeing Kurzweil hold his own in the face of such criticism, we are inspired by his vision in a way that interview accolades could never do.
The second big problem I see (and have personally faced) is condensing a long life into a feature-length film. Rather than trying to chronicle every seemingly significant event in the lifespan of your subject, consider focusing on a few key events that shape your subject’s character and portray their contributions to the world.
Often these key events are hinted at in the film’s title. For example, the Academy-nominated documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, clearly focuses on key historical events in the early 1970’s during the Nixon administration.
In the soon to be released documentary Father’s Kingdom, our editor collaborated with director Lenny Feinberg to reveal the untold story of Father Divine and his followers. Since we needed more screen time for the followers’ stories, we significantly cut back on Father Divine’s story while retaining the essential dramatic arc.
In my own public television documentary, I Shall Not Be Removed: The Life of Marlon Riggs, the title foreshadows the focus of the film: Riggs’ struggle to leave an artistic legacy before succumbing to AIDS.
To learn more about structuring character-driven documentaries, check out my popular seminar for the San Francisco Film Society, “Editing the Character-Driven Documentary”.
