I'm not sure if it's been shared here before, but there is an interesting article about HBO's documentary- production 'philosophy', which dates from July 2015.
If Reed took 2 years to make this Doc, then they probably started filming around Dec 16, so the article is reasonably close in time to LN being commissioned.
If HBO pay around $1million per hour, we know why this film is 4 hours long!
I was also struck by the 'Relatability and Relevance' quote. Heard that before from Robson's deposition, but I'm not sure of the date he wrote it. Likely to be from when he was writing his book, circa 2012.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3045903...r-emotional-truth-in-documentary-storytelling
05.07.15 BY KC IFEANYI
(NB Extracts only, here, as it is a long article.)
Includes quotes from HBO director Brett Morgen’s latest documentary, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, and Sheila Nevins, President of HBO Documentaries.
Inside HBO’s Quest For Emotional Truth
“There is no objective truth, which is why movies that are built on Wikipedia biographies are failed attempts to begin with,” Morgen says.
It’s hard to divorce yourself from personal experiences. Even when presenting someone else’s life, you’re looking at it through a lens of your own design. What makes a documentary compelling–or not–is how a director chooses to relate that emotional truth in an artful way. HBO has been a champion for such directors, acting as a megaphone for projects the network acquires, or building out its own films in-house.
HBO’s eminent voice in contemporary documentaries has, in large part, to do with
Sheila Nevins, president of HBO documentaries. Her boiled-down strategy: relatability, relevance, creative clarity, and, echoing Morgen, emotional truth.
RELATABILITY
“We have to cut through the morass of media,” Nevins says. “One of the ways to cut through is not just star appeal, but by
touching the population where it hurts and where it also energizes them. You have to zero in in some way–you have to find a way into it.
RELEVANCE
Nevins, more than anyone, can attest to how far documentaries and documentary storytelling have come. When Nevins first started at HBO in 1979 after leaving a job at ABC’s 20/20, she admits she didn’t know anything about making documentaries, and put into production films that recapped the decades. “They were so boring,” Nevins recalls. “And then I saw Jaws was doing well, so then I did a story about sharks. And when War of the Roses was doing well, I did a story about divorce and alimony. So I stole from the movies [audiences] were buying–ideas that could be documentaries.
We look for the things in the changing world that most people would be interested in at a given time. So it’s not a consistent thing–it’s what’s in the atmosphere of importance at a particular time and place. You have to feel the day–you have to feel the todayness of the day.”
Although HBO is vague on its exact budget for documentaries–a New York Times story reported the network pays, on average, “mid to high hundreds of thousands per hour, equal to the highest end of PBS” for documentaries–what really matters is tapping into and nurturing filmmakers’ creativity or being able to spot potential for acquisitions like with Going Clear.
TRUTH
“And it’s like, no you ****ing idiot.”
Morgen is in the middle of recounting a recent post-screening Q&A when someone in attendance took his statement that he’s not concerned with facts to mean he’s creating films based on lies. “It’s an acknowledgement there’s no such thing as an objective truth. There’s no such thing as an objective fact. But there is something called an emotional truth. That’s what I’m after, and I use real people’s lives, and I am so hardcore in my research. I did not phone this shit in. I want to **** every frame that comes before me–I want to know it inside and out.”
There can be an expectation for documentaries to cram every small detail of a subject’s life into a film, with no cherrypicking allowed. When documentarians speak of “truth,” however, what’s stressed constantly is the emotional undercurrent of facts. As Canadian filmmaker Michel Brault once put it:
I don’t know what truth is. Truth is something unattainable. We can’t think we’re creating truth with a camera. But what we can do is reveal something to viewers that allows them to discover their own truth.
“I heard Laura Poitras say something very interesting recently about Citizenfour,” Safinia recalls. “She said, ‘I am a journalist, but
instead of telling just the facts, I’m telling the emotions.’ I thought that was so powerful, because you can tell the same story, but you can decide to tell it through a different lens.”
For Nevins, producing game-changing documentaries like Montage of Heck is only part of the equation to maintaining HBO’s prominence in the field. It’s also, “How do we get into the heartbeat of that particular ethos of a particular time in a way that’s uniquely ours, and people won’t say, ‘I saw this documentary on television . . . ‘–they’ll say, ‘I saw this documentary on HBO.'”