Interview: Nina Gilden Seavey
Nina Gilden Seavey is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and 35-year veteran of the documentary world. She recently published The Documentary Filmmaker’s Workbook and was kind enough to answer a few questions via email. (Edited slightly for clarity.)
What is your first step when you start working on a new film?
Research! I am a hound for detail. I always want o know everything about every detail that touches the subject matter of my film, whether it be a historical subject or a story that I am following in real time.
This research process helps me feel comfortable in the “culture" into which I am going to immerse myself, allowing me to become part of whatever group or circumstance I will inevitably find myself in. Most of all, I never want to feel like an “outsider” in the making of any one of my films. I want to feel part of the milieu. My research process - which is extensive - is the first exploration that I undertake to create an authentic. living portrait in my mind’s eye of my subject matter.
How do you find the backbone, or the through line, of a documentary?
You have to have patience. Many filmmakers don’t innately have this quality. I think the best filmmakers develop it.
You can’t hasten either the story that takes place in front of your camera nor can you speed through the creative process of making the film. When you are in production, you never know where you are in time - are you at the beginning of your story, in the middle of it, or have you reached the end? The answer to this question has a way of revealing itself. But you must be patient and you must have great storytelling chops, so that when opportunities arise over time, you know how to make the most of them. And then you have to have extraordinary patience once you enter the editing room to do that story its best justice. That takes time.
When you teach about documentaries, what thing has had the most impact for people to learn?
Trust. It’s a concept that comes in many forms. Your subjects have to trust that you will do your best work and tell the most honest story possible. Your crew needs to trust your leadership. You need to trust the process of filmmaking as it has many twists and turns over which you have little or no control. Literally anyone can learn the mechanics of filmmaking - how to shoot a camera or become functionally fluent in the techniques of editing - but it takes a long time to learn how to become a trustworthy storyteller.
Documentaries can throw curveballs at you at any time. What is an unexpected twist that stands out to you in your career, and how did you respond?
I was making a film about a band of Russian teenagers who came to America to become country music stars in Nashville. They had a lucrative record deal, a producer, a manager, the works. I thought “Oh this will be fun and easy! I’ll shoot them coming into this country, recording their first album, go on tour with them a bit, no problem - in and out in less than a year!”
Well as they say, “Man (or woman) plans, God laughs!” And there I was two years later, still shooting and the twist and turns still coming fast and furious at me. I’m not going to tell you what happened, but watch The Ballad of Bering Strait and find out!
How do you create emotional connection with the audience in a documentary?
Tell the truth. And I don’t mean “tell.” I mean “let the truth emerge naturally on its own through the character’s journey.”
One thing audiences hate is being instructed. They have their own experiences and their own truths. They don’t want to be lectured or dealt with in an earnest, patronizing way about my truth. That’s a total put-off to audiences. And filmmakers, in the interest of expedience and over investment in their own passions, frequently try to ram “truth” down the throats of their audience.
By contrast, the truths we tell through great storytelling are the truths that people remember and think about days and weeks after they’ve seen my film. Investing in my characters is how connect with the audience, because emotional truths are the best, most enduring, truths.
What project in your filmography are you the most proud, and why?
I made this unexpected little film called A Short History of Sweet Potato Pie and How it Became a Flying Saucer. It’s a short, only 17 minutes long and it’s a really funny film. It’s hard to do comedy in documentary because something funny has to happen in front of your camera - which is a really rare occurrence. Usually comedy in documentary is achieved through editing tricks and odd juxtapositions. But this little film has wonderful characters and what happens is simply funny. And surprising. And I love that little film - and so have audiences.
What documentary has impacted or inspired you the most?
I am the biggest fan of Capturing the Friedmans. I believe it to be the most brilliant film ever made. You never know who, in that film, is telling the truth or whether there is any truth ever at all. It really makes you question the entire world of documentary, something we should all be doing all the time. Andrew Jarecki totally nailed it in that film.
Looking back on your career, how have you seen documentary storytelling change?
Documentary has become much less didactic and much more character-driven. That’s a really good development. What’s not a good development is that distributors (i.e. the “business” of documentary) have conflated reality television with documentary. That’s not good. So what we are losing in distribution are the really finely crafted films that take years to make in favor of star-driven personality films.
You have a new workbook coming out for emerging and experienced filmmakers. What will this book help filmmakers do with their films?
The Documentary FIlmmaker’s Workbook is a culmination of my 40 years as an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, film professor, film festival director, and film non-profit founder and director. I have been producing, teaching about, and exhibiting films for all of these 4 decades. In that time I have learned so much about how film concepts are absorbed and how they can be most readily put into daily practice. So I wrote this Workbook.
The Workbook is two halves of a whole. On the one side is Directing Documentary. Flip the book over and turn it upside down and the other side is Producing Documentary. Documentary filmmaking is really a left and right brain activity and so the Workbook breaks all of the elements down so that they can be woven together into a great, final film.
All of explanatory text, writing prompts, budget exercises, and inspirational quotes are ones that I have formed in teaching literally hundreds of students from across the globe. I titrated all of this knowledge into this workbook (not a long, boring academic book!) that students, emerging documentarians, and even mid-career filmmakers can take out in the field and into the editing room to bring their storytelling processes up to the next level.
Want to see the first cut of your film in just 20 days? You need this.