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MillimeterInput
Aug 18, 2009 12:00 PM, By Cynthia Wisehart
At Sundance this year, I sat in the Filmmaker Lodge with Davis Guggenheim flipping through his iPhone; it was filled with his photographs from his documentary It Might Get Loud, about guitar legends Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White. We were talking about what it takes to get performers to not perform. Guggenheim has some experience with this because he works with politicians—so we dished a little about how he got Al Gore comfortable enough to make An Inconvenient Truth, what it was like to make Barack Obama’s infomercial, and then his approach to It Might Get Loud.
Good documentary filmmakers are improvisers; that’s nothing new. But many times they are improvising around too little. Guggenheim was talking about what it’s like to be dealing with too much—in both his characters and his media options—and the way that can overwhelm a story, for both the filmmaker and the audience. So he chose to start with simple recorded interviews, and that process wrote the story and the script. He then mined all the modern conveniences—film, HD, YouTube, road trips—and then let Page, White, and The Edge have their heads and run with a multicamera live shoot.
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He brought a mindset and a road map to the storytelling that said, “Yeah, there are tons of tools, tons of options—but what kind of party do I want to throw and how do I want to use technology to shape it?” It’s just that timeless thing of starting with the story, nothing so revolutionary. But I thought Guggenheim chose his weapons in a particularly conscious way. We do so many things now because we can—we shoot reams of tape, we aggregate sources from all over the planet, we Facebook. It’s all movement, it’s momentum, it’s new ways of doing things—great ways. Old ways have unique energy too; I’m thinking of conversation, still photographs, and having an experience instead of aggregating it or commenting upon it.
Modern tools, techniques, and training are vitally important. You have to be fluent, and you don’t want to bog down in process. That’s why Jan Ozer took a run at Apple Final Cut Pro 7 and David Leitner did the same with the JVC GY-HM100U. There’s no end to how good we can be technically—it’s a bottomless well of feature sets, sources, options, and tricks of the trade. So once you’re good, what do you do with them?
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.