Laura Poitras, David Siev, Ryan White on THR’s Documentary Roundtable – The Hollywood Reporter

In the midst of a golden age for documentary films, there is no shortage of docs worthy of being seen and discussed. But the directors of only six of 2022’s standouts could be represented on The Hollywood Reporter‘s Documentary Roundtable when it convened in November: Peabody Award winner Margaret Brown (Netflix’s Descendant), Oscar nominee Matthew Heineman (Nat Geo’s Retrograde), Oscar winner Laura Poitras (Neon’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed), first-time filmmaker David Siev (IFC’s Bad Axe), two-time Sundance grand jury prize winner Ondi Timoner (MTV’s Last Flight Home) and Emmy nominee Ryan White (Amazon’s Good Night Oppy). The sextet discussed the origins of their projects, hot-button debates in the doc community and more.

When someone asks you about your film and you have just a few seconds to hook them, what do you say?

DAVID SIEV Remember that year 2020 that just happened? I capture a portrait of that year through the lens of my Cambodian Mexican American family living in this small rural town of Bad Axe, Michigan, where we own a small restaurant and were trying to keep the American dream alive during a very uncertain time.

MARGARET BROWN The last slave ship was discovered in 2019 in my hometown of Mobile, Alabama.

MATTHEW HEINEMAN My film is about the final eight months of the war in Afghanistan, the longest war in U.S. history, seen through the eyes of the U.S. military, Afghan military and civilians desperately trying to flee the country.

ONDI TIMONER My film is about my father, Eli Timoner. It charts his final weeks on this earth, and it also looks at our family and everyone who comes into his room grappling with life and death where they encounter my father cheering them up and facing it courageously and making everyone laugh along the way.

RYAN WHITE My film is about a robot that went to Mars and was supposed to live for 90 days but ended up surviving for 15 years. It’s often described as “a real-life WALL-E,” which people understand on elevators, as well. (Laughs.)

LAURA POITRAS It’s a portrait of Nan Goldin told through her art and her activism, including her effort to take down the Sackler family because of their involvement in the opioid and overdose crisis.

Now that we’ve spoken about these movies in the most reductive way, I want to get more in depth and discuss how these journeys began for each of you and perhaps relate to your prior body of work. Laura, you’ve made wonderful films about governments and secrets, including the Oscar-winning Citizenfour. How did you come to know about Nan, and does she relate to the rest of your body of work?

POITRAS I’ve known Nan’s work for as long as I’ve been a filmmaker — I studied it — but we weren’t friends. Then I started reading about her doing these actions inside museums, first to get them to stop taking Sackler money and then to take down the Sackler name, and I was pretty inspired. I think it sort of connects to my other films, in the sense that it’s an intimate portrait of somebody taking on power, and it unfolds in real time.

Ryan, your most recent film before Good Night Oppy was Ask Dr. Ruth, about Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Other than both featuring adorable subjects, there’s not a ton that obviously connects the two.

WHITE The subject matters of all of my previous films are completely different, but they’re usually following some sort of remarkable journey in someone’s life, and they’ve been vérité, for the most part; I’ve never made a historical film. I was always a massive space geek. I wanted to be an astronaut growing up. I never thought I’d be a filmmaker. Since I became a filmmaker, I’ve been looking for a space story that had that feel of something unfolding and that would be character-driven, the types of films that we like to make. This one was pitched to us [by Amblin Entertainment] in early 2020, and the logline was just so lovable — a robot that was supposed to live for 90 days survives for 15 years — but the question was, “How do we make this in a way that isn’t retrospective?” And so we tried to present it as a journey unfolding by taking the audience to Mars in a way that has never been done before, with photoreal CGI, where you watch Opportunity and Spirit, her twin sister, as their missions unfold.

Ondi, it’s hard to pin you down as you’ve made docs about everything from climate change to Russell Brand. Is there any pattern that connects your previous projects to one about your dad?

TIMONER Dad’s my favorite leading man by far — sorry, Russell. But they’re all about “impossible visionaries,” as I like to call them: people who take on the impossible and sometimes act impossibly as they get to the goal. For my siblings and I, my father was really our hero and our greatest role model. Then, the most tenacious person we knew suddenly said, “I have to go, it’s time. If you love me, you’ll help me die.” He begged our whole family, and we were just stunned. He had been paralyzed for 40 years, since I was 9 years old, and never complained. He rooted for everyone else. He was the most generous soul. Now he’s asking for something. And thankfully in California there’s the End of Life Option Act, and he was able to have agency in the last weeks of his life. Out of desperation not to forget his voice and his personality, because I can’t remember him from before I was 9, I felt a real urge to film him, but not to make a film. I was just trying to bottle him up. I asked him and he said, “I instinctively know you’re on the right track.” So, I think he knew more than I did. And it wasn’t until my sister asked me to make a memorial video that I realized he was alive inside the Avid.

Matt, for your docs you’ve followed cartels, people in hospitals during the earliest days of COVID, ISIS in Syria and now the people at the center of the war in Afghanistan. You seem drawn toward the things that the rest of us run from.

HEINEMAN It’s definitely not the danger or the fear, that’s surely not what motivates me. If there’s one throughline in my work, it’s trying to take these huge, amorphous subjects that we’re inundated with in the news and put a human face to them, trying to humanize these issues that feel so distant and so far away. We began this project during the Trump administration. It took two or three years to get the permissions and the access that we needed to be able to tell this story. The original intent was to be with the last U.S. deployment to Afghanistan. But two months into filming, President Biden pulled out our troops, and I was left with what I thought was either not a film or just a first act of a film with a story that wasn’t finished. So I reached back out to this Afghan general who was working with the U.S. military that I was filming with, General Sadat, and I asked him, “Could I come back and embed with you and see the end of the war through your eyes?” And he said yes. And that’s what we ended up doing for months all the way up until the final moments at the airport in August 2021.

Margaret, speaking of a thread through one’s work, Descendant literally goes back to an earlier film that you made. Can you connect the dots?

BROWN I made a film in 2008, The Order of Myths, about the 2007 Mardi Gras in Mobile, Alabama, which is racially segregated. There’s a white Mardi Gras and a Black Mardi Gras. Helen Mayer was the queen of the white Mardi Gras that year, and I remember my mother saying to me, “Her family is the family that brought the last slave ship to the United States” — she just wanted me to know that — but I didn’t realize how directly that would influence and impact the film until after Mardi Gras. I was filming Stephanie Lucas, the Black Mardi Gras queen, with her grandparents at their kitchen table, and we were talking about a ball that both of the queens had been at, and her grandfather sort of casually said, “Oh, my people came off her people’s ship.” And I looked at the cinematographer, and he looked at me, and it was like the ground shifted underneath us. We knew the film would be centered around that relationship. Years later, there was talk that the ship, the Clotilda, had been found. It turned out it wasn’t the ship — it was a ship the community calls the Notilda — but it did spark the filming of Descendant.

David, this is your first feature-length documentary, so we won’t get into how it connects to a larger body of work. But talk about what set it in motion.

SIEV Before the pandemic hit, I’d just gotten done working as an assistant for about five years for this director Jeff Tremaine, who’s the creator of Jackass and a lot of crazy MTV shows, and I ventured out to New York, where I met up with my girlfriend, who’s now my wife. We were going to start a life together in New York. I was freelancing, taking on camera work, and then the pandemic hit. Like so many young adults, we were scared and didn’t want to be in New York. We’d always joked that if there was ever a zombie apocalypse or something, Bad Axe, Michigan, would be the place to go because it’s so remote and my dad has guns (laughs), so we relocated there.

When I look at my parents and what they’ve been able to achieve — this Mexican American woman and this Cambodian refugee who came here in 1979 after surviving the killing fields, who decided to settle of all places in Bad Axe, Michigan, and opened up a doughnut shop that failed, and then tried to turn it into a restaurant — I felt, even before the pandemic, that that was a story I wanted to share.

I just thought I would write a script; I never intended to make a documentary. But in those early days of the pandemic, I wanted to get an oral history of how the restaurant came to be, figuring I might reference that for a script, and I kept filming, just knowing it was an interesting time in history. So it really started off as home videos, special memories I wanted to hold on to and pass down to my children one day, of all of us coming home and being under one roof again. But it was around the time of the Black Lives Matter movement when we really started editing, and I realized that if I wanted to tell this story of the American dream, it had to be told with the backdrop of 2020.

Let’s talk about cultivating trust with the people you’re documenting. Laura, Nan tells you things in All the Beauty and the Bloodshed that she says she’s never talked about before. How did you foster that relationship? And is that related to why some of her interviews are audio-only?

POITRAS In the case of this film, that kind of level of intimacy wouldn’t have existed if there had been a camera. But the issue of trust is crucial to everything that we do as documentary filmmakers. In this case, there was a point where we started doing the interviews, and she was so emotionally vulnerable that we agreed that we would talk freely one-on-one and that she would have an opportunity later, before anyone else heard anything, to listen, and if there was something that went too far she would tell us. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t have the final cut — I did — but it created a safety net around the process so that she felt that it was just her and I. And in the end, there wasn’t any topic or theme that she wasn’t OK with, but some details were too much.

So, you approached it in the way that she approaches her slides?

POITRAS Yeah, and also the people that she photographs. She has that sort of reciprocal relationship. If they don’t like it, they can tear it up. There’s no way, I think, that Nan would have let me or another filmmaker make a film about her life without it being truly collaborative.

Margaret, how did you address people’s concerns about being included? Some of whom you featured in The Order of Myths did not agree to be in this one.

BROWN Yes, a lot of the white families that had spoken to me for Order of Myths declined to speak this time. This is, in some ways, the biggest case for reparations in U.S. history, and I think with the specter of that looming, people were maybe afraid to speak.

Ryan, when you came on board for this one, was there already an understanding that people at NASA would be available or did you have to recruit them one by one?

WHITE I thought that was going to be the biggest challenge. When I said yes to doing the film, it was based on this idea of the robot, but it was also based on the idea that Amblin had gotten access to a thousand hours of footage of these robots’ lives from before they were even “born,” so to speak, when they were just an idea in people’s heads, all the way through their “deaths” and “funerals,” so to speak. I assumed, and I think a lot of us do, that scientists and engineers, especially at NASA, would be very unemotional, detached people. But we began the film in the summer of 2020, so we couldn’t be in rooms with these people. It was the height of COVID, and NASA has the strictest of protocols; even years later, when we were filming the film, we couldn’t necessarily even be in rooms with these people. So we did pre-interviews on Zoom — I don’t do pre-interviews myself because I don’t want someone on camera to feel like they’re telling me the story again — and they shocked me. That’s when we discovered this incredible emotional bond that these people who you would never assume would attach themselves to a robot had formed over the years. And so then it became really an embarrassment of riches, and our challenge was, “Who do you include and who do you not include?”

Matt, one of the things that’s so striking about your film is the candor of the troops, who are generally pretty reserved. It’s one thing just to get access to these guys, but to then get them to let down their guard with you — how did you do that?

HEINEMAN For everyone at this table, trust is the bedrock of what we do, and trust is not something that’s just given, it’s something that you have to earn and continue to earn. In my case, the stakes were incredibly high, especially with General Sadat. He had the world on his shoulders. He felt like if he held on to Helmand Province, he could maybe save the country.

A lot of people write about vérité as “fly on the wall.” I really detest that term. A “fly” implies a lack of agency or communication. What I say often is, my goal is to try to become part of the fabric of the daily lives of my subjects. I rarely get to know them before I start shooting. I often just start shooting immediately so that the way they interact with me is through my camera because I shoot as well. I’m often shooting from the moment we wake up in the morning until when we go to bed because you never know when those moments are going to happen.

Ondi and David, I see a connection between your experiences because you were both asking family members to reveal themselves to others during very difficult moments. Ondi, as you said, it wasn’t your plan from the get-go to make this into a film, but once that became what you wanted to do, how did those conversations go?

TIMONER Mom was relieved that there’d be something of Dad left after he was gone. And Dad was always so unquestionably supportive of me as a filmmaker, even when I started. There was no business in documentary filmmaking 30 years ago. I remember that during my one phone call from jail, after getting arrested on Dig! [Turner’s 2004 documentary about rock bands The Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre], all they cared about was just breaking me out; they were just supportive. My sister [a rabbi] feels, and understandably so, that what is sacred should remain private. And though I’ve been filming her for years, and filming my family for years, I was always going to make a script about Dad because I had no archival footage. So I had a script that I was actually reading to him, and she said, “Mom and Dad, I’d rather not have filming happening, but if it’s important to you, that’s what’s most important to me.” My sister was first upset with me because it was supposed to be a five-minute memorial video, and it turned into a 32-minute memorial video that I turned in the night before the memorial, which threw her program out of whack and turned it into a film screening. She didn’t like that, and she was kind of upset with me for months, apparently. She finally told me that she was upset with me, and then when I said, “Well, actually I now have a feature, and I’d really love to show it to you,” she looked at it and said, “It’s beautiful, but I don’t want this seeing the light of day.” And I definitely panicked at that point because, to me, my whole career has been about learning and sharing what I learned, and here was the most transformational experience of my life and all of our lives.

What got her over the hump, I think, was seeing that my mom watched it every night and that it helped her through grieving. And then she shared it with some clergy. And the thing about it is it’s so intimate — you’re seeing my dad, but at the same time we hear from people that they see their own families. They’re playing out losing their own loved ones, and their own issues, and they leave less fearful and with a greater confidence because of the way that my father handled it and my sister handled it.

David, in your film there’s a moment when your mother confronts you and basically says that you’re going to be able to go back to your life in New York, but they’re going to be left with the fallout of what you’ve done.

SIEV Yeah, when my mom turns to me after we get the threatening phone call and says, “You don’t live here, David,” it’s so true. I was just so frustrated with where we were as a country. Growing up in Bad Axe, Michigan, in a very conservative area that’s 97 percent white, those frustrations build on you for years, and in early edits of the film, I lost sight of why I was making the film in the first place. I wanted to get on my soapbox and yell about everything that was wrong in our country, which is not how a conversation starts. And I really have to credit my family because, throughout the editing process, the question they always brought back to me was, “Why are you making this film?” And the reason I wanted to make the film is because I wanted to share this story of the American dream, and that just stemmed from the love that I had for them, and that the thing I had to come back to in the edit bay was love. The family was so much a part of the editing process — I showed them cut after cut — and by the time they saw the final cut, I’d really gained their trust.

There are a lot of debates at the moment within the documentary community, and I’d like to ask you all to comment on a few of them. For years, people were vehemently against reenactments or animation in documentaries, but Ryan, there was no way that you were going to be able to tell the story in your film without them.

WHITE I think back to Laura’s film Citizenfour, and it always being described as a “thriller.” It was amazing storytelling, and it was a documentary that was perceived by mainstream audiences in a really exciting way, but it was a true documentary. So the whole boundary-pushing conversation is always fluid to me. There was no other way to tell this story. I suppose there was, but it would have been a really educational sort of DVD or something. The motto of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is, “Dare mighty things.” These people were told that you could never land something on Mars, it’s impossible, and they came up with the technology — totally crazy technology — and a way to do it. So we felt like if we were going to tell a story about that team, that we as well should be pushing at least technical boundaries in terms of what’s possible — we use visual effects in our film, and we have the sound designer from Dune and Mad Max: Fury Road. I think the more interesting question is, as documentary broadens and as our audiences get larger, why can’t that toolkit broaden as well?

POITRAS To expand the form is, I think, crucial. But when you’re dealing with people’s lives, those are real stakes, and I think these are really productive, important conversations. For something like Ryan’s work, which is so incredible, it’s just important that there’s transparency so that the audience knows. Same with the recent Warhol series, where the audio is generated through AI.

Another hot-button conversation happening now, more than ever, is about who can or can’t tell a story. Margaret, in your film you’re telling the story of a slave ship and the descendants of the slaves who are Black. You are white. Some would argue that you shouldn’t tell that story.

BROWN Yeah, I’m so glad that conversation is happening. When I started the film, I thought that, like Order of Myths, it was going to also be about the white families, and I think that, as white people, we should tell the painful stories of our country. I feel like that’s part of my job, or at least something that excites me about being from Alabama and the painful place that I’m from: art helping process that. I thought that the white families would talk to me — since Helen Mayer was in my other film, I thought she would be in this film; and also other white families, I assumed they would talk to me again because they did before. So when I reached a point where I was like, “Oh my God, no one is talking to me,” I was like, “Do I stop making the movie?” I knew I didn’t want to make a movie just for white people, and I knew that I had so many holes in my vision and blind spots as a white filmmaker, so I had to have partners that helped me with these blind spots. One of my producers, Essie Chambers, was a good friend before she came on as a producer; we were already organically having these conversations about things in the movie that I think white audiences would think, “Oh, that’s a little thing,” like leaving in my voice in certain parts. But after talking to her and Kern Jackson, who’s in the movie and wrote the film with me, I realized that I had to open it up and remove things — they seemed small to me at first, but then as we continued, I realized, “No, this makes it so the film is not for everybody.” I’ve never showed scenes as I was making a film to people in the film, and this time I did. It was just a totally different way of making a film for me.

There are moments in each of your films that feel pretty magical. What, for each of you, was the moment when you were like, “I can’t believe I found this piece of material,” or, “I can’t believe that this just happened”?

SIEV I don’t necessarily know if mine was in the making of this film, as opposed to the journey that it’s been on since. A week before South by Southwest, I had $101.99 in my bank account. This was nine months ago. And every sales agent and every studio passed on the film and just said it was too personal. But after that premiere, luckily IFC was in the room, and they made us an offer the next week, and I was able to pay my rent. And now, being in the middle of this tour of promoting the film, this is the pinch-me moment, just being with my parents and celebrating our story. I always tell people I feel like I’m living my American dream right now.

HEINEMAN I don’t know if I’d say it was a pinch-me or magical moment — it was deeply distressing — but I’ll never, ever in my life forget being at the Abbey Gate, one of the gates to the airport in Kabul, as thousands of Afghan civilians were packed like sardines into a 4-foot sewage ditch, desperately trying to flee what they knew was about to happen. And 18-year-old Marines were making these impossible, Sophie’s Choice decisions of who to let in and who not to let in, as the Taliban was a hundred yards away at gunpoint watching us, as ISIS was circling in suicide vests waiting to attack, which happened 12 hours after in that very spot that I was filming. I’ve cried a lot making these films over the years at different stages, but never in my life had I ever cried while filming, but I just had tears streaming down my eyes and kept having to wipe the lens down. And all I could think was, “What have we done?”

TIMONER I share in David’s feeling of being stunned by the impact of the film — it was something I started just so instinctually but really privately — and what sharing something so personal and intimate can do to actually help and heal people and hopefully make it possible for other people to have this basic human right. There are only nine states where [the right to end one’s life on one’s own terms] exists now.

WHITE You hear about many films, “They went into a closet and found this footage that had never been seen before — unmarked tapes!” But I’d never had a film like that. And this is that film, finally. All of that footage was turned over. I wasn’t getting to do what I normally love to do, which is to follow something with my camera out in the world — this was during COVID, and we were watching a thousand hours of archival footage alone in our rooms — but that was where the real fun, and the real discovery that normally happens for me in the field, was happening with this film.

BROWN I’ve known Kern for 15 years, we’ve worked on two films together, and I knew he had archival material, but he really downplayed it. He wanted to do this interview in the chair’s office of his department — he’s the head of African American Studies [at the University of South Alabama] — and I was like, “Can we just film in your office?” So we go in there, and it’s just a disaster. He starts pulling out VHS tapes and putting them in, and they’re the elders of Africatown, many of whom have long since passed, and we were just freaking out.

POITRAS This is the first film that I’ve done that has so much archival material that I didn’t generate or wasn’t involved in shooting, and it was kind of incredible. There’s a scene where Nan’s talking about her dear friend David Armstrong, and she says this is her first photograph she’d taken, and we had a wide shot of it and she’s like, “David and Tommy in the sandpit,” and we had a wide shot and that was there. And then we got a close-up of it and it was just so moving that this image existed.

Interview edited for length and clarity.

This story first appeared in a December stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.