A large part of my professional career has happened in the vein of ultimately producing documentary films. That has been one of the few things that has remained steady in my mind as I have navigated my way through this industry. When I started Art House, the goal was to ultimately angle the company towards documentary film & so far it has worked out in small ways.
As an individual, it’s important for me to maintain some kind of an approach in order to achieve my ultimate goal. In some ways that approach is extremely abstract and time-based, and in other ways it is a lot more of a solidified idea in my mind. Keeping these thoughts in my mind has allowed me to continue on my path as I carve it out of the mountainside.
In the abstract, my ideas tend to revolve around ensuring that I am telling stories that matter. There is no criteria around “what matters” to me. And that is because stories shouldn’t just matter to me. The stories that I tell should matter to many people. Not just any specific group of people, rather, each story will have it’s own unique subset of humans that care about it.
In the world of solidified ideas, I have some rules that I try to focus on for each project:
Take a position, but don’t force it on your audience
Maintain journalistic integrity
Film the good, the bad, & the ugly
Ask questions even if it will get you in trouble
Go beyond the traditional barriers
Experience the story
Go far & take your time
The biggest rule for me is to experience the story that I am telling. I believe that if I want to properly tell a story, I need to be able to experience what is being told. For example, if I am doing a story on a snowboarder I better know how to snowboard. If a small town in Iowa is losing it’s water supply, I better be there with the people of the town, living with it’s people & fully understanding the gravity of the situation. Who am I to tell a story without experiencing that story for myself. I believe the term is immersion.
I aim to fully immerse myself in the stories that I tell in the abstract and the physical. It’s so incredibly important to me and my process. I would like to believe that documentarians around the world have a similar approach, and I know that I would be wrong in that assumption. Not everyone has the same values that I do, and that’s not necessarily wrong. Other documentarians have their own ways of telling stories & if they’re successful enough then what’s the difference between how they approach their subjects and how I do?
There is none.