00:16There's a huge difference between the subject and the story, and I think at the end of the day,
00:21that's probably the most important distinction, that we both forget and remember and re-remember
00:28when we forget again.
00:30The subject is the subject, it is what it is.
00:33And in the kind of documentaries that I make, historical documentaries, it's true.
00:38It's the monolith of fact, it's the temple that you go to again and again.
00:44You leave because the story is itself a fabrication and a manipulation of aspects of that subject
00:51that you are trying to stitch together into a story.
00:55And this is a huge evolutionary process in which you can't possibly conceive what it
01:01looks like at the end, at the beginning.
01:03And so what you're trying to do is make sure that the lines of communication are continually
01:09opened, or at least reopened when they're broken, between the story you're developing and the
01:14facts of the subject that you are committed to try to bring back in some new way.
01:19The art is in that selection, in that manipulation of the stuff, but so are all the treacherous swamps
01:27and quicksand of it, the times in which the entertainment outweighs the facts, the times in which you make
01:34decisions of omission that actually are detrimental to important truths of the subject that should
01:45be surviving.
01:47And so what you have is, say in the case of a multi-year project, a continual centering of
01:55what you're trying to do all the time in relationship with the facts.
01:59And the second you get away from the subject matter, then what happens is I think that the
02:04art and the entertainment and the storytelling can overwhelm and sometimes capsize the truths
02:10and the complicated truths of what the real subject is telling you.
02:23We want to cast at the beginning as wide a possible net as possible in every area of doing
02:29it.
02:29So we're buying lots of books, reading lots of books, giving the writer lots of books, suggesting
02:33the goalposts of the episodes that we've decided to there, where do we get to, what do we need
02:39to do, and then we're learning.
02:41So the writer's beginning to shape a narrative.
02:43Meanwhile, we're out in another area, casting a net really far and wide, interviewing people,
02:50trying to figure out who we should talk to, what they have to say, and get as much as we
02:54can from them.
02:55We want our writer to be free to write the battle of Yadrang Valley without worrying about
03:00whether there's a, or the battle of Shiloh, without worrying about whether there's a photograph
03:07of that.
03:08We want to be able to go into an archive and bring back all the images that we're drawn
03:17to compositionally, because they're good photographs, but also because of what they're
03:23showing, and not worry about whether we're trying to fit it in.
03:26Now, does that create huge problems in editing?
03:29Yes, it does, because sometimes you end up with writing for which there's no images,
03:33and then you have to figure something out.
03:36And sometimes you got a lot of images for which there's no writing, and then you are creating
03:40a new scene.
03:42That's great, though.
03:43Then you're not just illustrating.
03:44Every time you say Lincoln, or every time you say this, you're showing this, or showing
03:48Lincoln.
03:49You begin to have a freedom to range around.
03:52And that if you never stop researching, and you never stop writing, that you don't feel
03:56that that writing, then your process flows into one another.
03:59It's organic.
04:00And so you collect as much as you can and see what is talking to you, because as soon
04:04as you put some stuff in collision, it will begin to talk to you.
04:14Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of sources go into making a film.
04:18And just the archival sources for the Civil War was 163.
04:22And I think they were all in the United States.
04:24Now, for Vietnam, we've traveled around the world.
04:27We got stuff from archives in Vietnam and China and Russia, you know, in Europe.
04:33It's just too numerous.
04:34So, you know, we have home movies from people.
04:37I gave a speech once in Missouri, and somebody came up to me and said, my brother kept tapes,
04:45reel-to-reel tapes that he would send to us and we'd send to him.
04:48And so we made him a character in the film.
04:50Those tapes are unbelievable.
04:54It's not really that bad.
04:56In a way, I like it.
04:57It's just being away from home and everything that I don't like.
05:00He lived in a tiny little Ozark village in southwestern Missouri, and he would send tapes
05:06back to Missouri, to this little town, and the whole community would gather to hear the
05:11tapes, and then they'd make their own.
05:13Hello, Michael, this is your mother.
05:14This is your dad.
05:15You know, I like your mustache.
05:18Somebody's saying so-and-so broke up with Darlene.
05:21I mean, it's just, it's like a picture of America and who actually goes to war.
05:24And meanwhile, he's over there saying, they light these villages on fire.
05:28Yeah, I don't really understand it, because if they are, you know, not V.C., and we do
05:35that to them, you know, treat them bad, then they're going to turn V.C.
05:40The Army does everything backwards.
05:46And he's killed.
05:50So you, this is what you never knew starting.
05:55And if you're corrigible to the end, then you have the possibility for serendipity and
06:01surprise.
06:02And that's what life is about, too.
06:11The greatest challenge, I think, for a documentary filmmaker, producer, director, all you want
06:16to say is to make sure there's not too much daylight between the subject, the thing you're
06:22interested in, and the story of that subject you're trying to construct and tell.
06:27If there's too much daylight, then the entertainment has won, and the casualty, the first casualty
06:33is the truth.
06:34You have to hold yourself to the standards.
06:36So we are constantly double-checking and making sure we've got a citation for where that thing
06:42came from and what, you know, source it was.
06:46It's usually reputable historians.
06:48And even then, you know that stuff changes.
06:50So we're always anxious to hear more scholarship about something.
06:55And what was interesting is that many of us, in our comments about Vietnam, nothing migrated
07:00after the fall of Saigon.
07:02We had our opinions, and nothing changed over the next 42 years.
07:05Well, the scholarship has changed, and we took advantage of that, and we're able to say,
07:09no, what you think is exactly the opposite.
07:12You think this happened?
07:13It's actually the opposite.
07:14And here we can prove it, and we can prove it with cables.
07:16We can prove it with testimony.
07:18We can prove it with tape.
07:19And if we're going to say that this president lied, we have to be damn sure we can prove
07:24that he lied.
07:31The only preparation you need is to be open, to listen, to read, to investigate, to explore,
07:38to discover, to not be too sure you're right.
07:41And that's a hugely important thing.
07:43And then when you've put yourself in harm's way, because it is, of course, fraught, all
07:48of those things, it's understanding that it will be difficult, that there will be assumptions
07:55that you make in the beginning that will disappear.
07:57There'll be some things that you're certain will change that will stay the same, and it's
08:02just flabbergasting.
08:03I'll give you one example that is across many films.
08:07If I say the 1920s to you, you might think of something.
08:11You might think of a jazz band.
08:12You might think of a gangster.
08:14You might think of a prohibition agent or a flapper dancing on a table.
08:18That's okay.
08:19That's what the conventional wisdom says.
08:20That's in my mind, too.
08:22I've been through the 20s in about 10 or 12 of my films.
08:25It's never the same 20s each time I do it.
08:28It's totally different.
08:30So if something like that, which we think we have a handle on, is constantly changing,
08:36what is that story that you think you know something about?
08:39Baseball, big.
08:41Civil War, big.
08:43The Vietnam War, big.
08:44Or something specific, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Shakers, the Statue of Liberty.
08:48These are all subjects we've done, biographies that we've done on people.
08:51And so you sort of engage yourself with the idea that I'm going to have, in each production,
08:57my molecules completely rearranged.
09:00That's a good thing.
09:07When you are doing history, you just necessarily have to get a lot of different perspectives.
09:14And you can extend that and realize that an opposite point of view of the same event can
09:21actually be true.
09:22You know, I mean, the guy who spoke for two hours before the Lincoln's Gettysburg Address,
09:27one of the great orders in the world, two hours.
09:30Edward Everett said, Mr. President, I should flatter myself to think that I came in two
09:34hours as close to the heart of the subject as you did in two minutes.
09:37But the Chicago Times, the Chicago Times, in Lincoln's own state of Illinois said,
09:42the cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat, dishwatery utterances
09:49of the man who turns out to be, to intelligent foreigners, the President of the United States.
09:55So this is the Gettysburg Address, what is not even arguably just is the greatest speech in the American language.
10:05And you've got the guy who spoke for two hours before him saying, I couldn't touch that.
10:12And a newspaper from the President's own state saying, it sucks, the silly, flat, dishwatery utterances.
10:20I mean, that's what you need to be able to contain.
10:23And those perspectives more precisely help to define even how great that speech is.
10:37To finally liberate your story, you have to escape the specific gravity, the dark matter,
10:47the black hole of conventional wisdom, which says it's just like this, this, and this.
10:52It's very simple.
10:52It's this sort of thing.
10:55And I find that I come in, the first thing I have to do is understand what my baggage is
11:01and then check it.
11:03And so, you know, in Vietnam, like I lost my baggage like the first day.
11:07It didn't show up at the carousel.
11:08And 10 years later, it's still not there.
11:10And, you know, hallelujah, that's really great.
11:12But it was funny, the extent to which I went in, rather arrogantly thinking.
11:16I knew a lot about it because I'd lived through it.
11:18I'd been in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a hotbed of rebellion.
11:20We think the first teach-in took place at the University of Michigan in March of 1965.
11:26And, you know, hallelujah, I know everything.
11:28I knew nothing.
11:29It was a daily humiliation for 10 years.
11:32I did not know anything.
11:34And I had to, in some ways, just reset to zero and say, forget everything and start with the basic
11:42assumptions, most of which were wrong.
11:45On numerous occasions, I've had my entire point of view rearranged by being willing to go beyond the conventional wisdom
11:54and learn new facts.
11:56And new facts are harder for conventional wisdom to absorb because conventional wisdom just says, hey, you don't have to
12:02know about it except these little ABC, even though XYZ is equally important.
12:07In Vietnam, we went and explored what the North Vietnamese perspective was.
12:12Nobody had done that.
12:13We explored what their citizens felt.
12:14Nobody had done that.
12:15We heard what the Viet Cong guerrilla had done, what the South Vietnamese, our allies, our erstwhile allies felt as
12:22civilians and protesters of their government as well as their soldiers, their brave soldiers who were often denigrated because we
12:28didn't like to blame ourselves for this situation.
12:51All of those people provide a variety of truths of things which we are desperately as filmmakers.
12:59Here's the big subject, trying to distill into the story, tend to want to make the simplest thing so that
13:04we end up with conventional wisdom or the superficial knowledge that we're just bumping along from generation to generation.
13:10And we just said, no, time out.
13:12That helps complicate it, makes it super hard to tell the story.
13:16But when you tell it, then all of a sudden you've got a story that's possible, true-er.
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