On March 26th, 2014, as part of our Doc U Conversation series, we invited audiences into a conversation with Oscar®-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville (Twenty Feet from Stardom ) as he spoke about his 20-year career spent creating the very best in music and fine art documentaries. Interviewed by local hero and renaissance man Henry Rollins, the duo offered some great insights into what makes a music doc—or any doc for that matter—stand out in the crowd.
Documentary is like 3D journalism.
It's the perfect job if you love to learn, because you're constantly learning and changing your mind and discovering new things. When I was young, I always felt that journalism was a real career and doing something with music felt like too much fun, felt like a hobby. At one point I realized I could do something with both by melding the two together. That was when I realized I could become a documentary filmmaker.
If you really want to get to know a musician’s story, listen to their music.
Spend time listening to the songs and then figure out how to tell their story. Hank Williams' songs (in Hank Williams: Honky Tonk Blues (2004)) are so autobiographical. I created soundtracks and that's the rough structure of my story. The music isn't there as adornment or filler; the music itself is the story. Of course it has to be more than the music, but once you bait your audience with the music, you can tell them all kinds of interesting stories about communities and society and humanity. Embedded in the DNA of Stax's music (for Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story (2007)) was the coming together of black and white communities.
You have to strike a balance between getting the history right and making a great film.
As a filmmaker, you feel an obligation towards the history but there’s a lot you have to truncate, trim or leave out to get the story right. With Twenty Feet, I decided to make it their emotional story. The last few months was me cutting out a lot of the past of back-up singing, but I wouldn’t have arrived there without having the context of that fascinating history first.
Get your subjects to ditch the standard answers that they’ve been giving out forever.
It's about listening to your subject; really engaging with them and then picking up on things and asking specific, even oddball follow up questions. People get excited when you do that and realize they haven’t talked about that subject or thought about it before.
Find a story nobody has told before.
When I was making Twenty Feet, all the famous people sat down and told me they had never talked about back-up singing before and didn’t know how much they had to [say] about it. They had never thought about it before.
Win your subjects over.
Show your subjects that you care and won't screw them over financially and will tell their story responsibly. People are protective about their stories. But after Twenty Feet came out, they came up to me and said they wished they had said more. So now, I tell people to tell me more, to not have any regrets later about wishing they had said more.
Don’t let the production interfere with the vibe you’re trying to create with your subjects.
Cinematographers often, by their very nature, want to keep tweaking lights. At a certain point, it cant be about that. If your DP is insensitive about this, you need to work with them to explain that you don’t care what it looks like. It’s about that moment and respecting what is happening in that room.
Deal with music rights right up front.
Sometimes the rights are with one person/publisher and you can try and show them that they have a vested interest in the film you’re making and try to get a good deal. A film like Twenty Feet is as tough as it gets, with multiple labels and publishers; mostly, we tried to guilt them into it. Another strategy was getting the biggest, baddest music lawyer in the business to clear the rights, which was expensive but saved us a tremendous amount of money in the long run. The other thing we did was use a tiered system to pay, whereby we paid a small amount to the record label up front but promised to pay them in incremental bumps if the film did well. And we've paid out those bumps.
You don’t have to like the music, but you do have to have great stories and great character points.
So many of my favorite music documentaries are about musicians that I love, but many of them are about music that I don’t like at all. It doesn’t matter, because all of them have great stories and great characters. Every song in Twenty Feet from Stardom is a story point or a character point. That’s what the music doc primarily survives on. Otherwise, nobody needs to see another doc about yet another band.
Morgan Neville (partial filmography):
Twenty Feet from Stardom (2013)
Troubadours (2011)
Search and Destroy: Iggy & the Stooges' Raw Power (2010)
The Cool School (2008)
Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story (2007)
Hank Williams: Honky Tonk Blues (2004)