01.07.26
Limitations, and the prospect of failure
01.07.26
This has been the week in which the limitations finally started to bite. I knew it would happen at some point.
When I started out on this film, I revisited some of the documentaries that I’ve admired in recent years, in particular Asif Kapadia’s work (Senna (2010), Amy (2015), Diego Maradona (2019)) and some of Alex Gibney’s films, which are a bit hit-and-miss, but the best of them are useful references. This was just about finding some inspiration, looking at well-constructed films and clarifying some of my own thoughts.
Like most documentaries, including my own back catalogue, Gibney’s work makes extensive use of on-screen interviews, which occupy a hell of a lot of screen time and reduce the need for other visual material – you just run the interviews and arrange a relatively light amount of b-roll and archive around them.
Asif takes the opposite approach: there are no on-screen interviews, the visuals are drawn exclusively from archive. Asif’s approach is much more difficult, and far more expensive; I found it incredibly inspiring.
I’ve written before about the concept behind the film I’m making, which is to try and achieve a kind of audio-visual poem where the primary driver of the story would be the audio track – voices and music - and the visual layer would float on top, impressionistic and abstracted.
When thinking about that visual layer, I naturally returned to Asif’s films. I remember first raising the potential of his technique back in my former company, and immediately hitting a wall of objections: it would require far too much archive, it would be prohibitively expensive, it would be impractical and time-consuming. Although at the time I could see the logic of those arguments, I also felt that you don’t really know until you try, and as a creative I want to stretch myself, and explore new ideas, rather than immediately dismissing them out of hand. That type of siloed thinking ultimately contributed to my decision to leave the company.
But those objections were voiced in the context of having large accounts with the archive agencies, with wide access and researchers on hand. Whereas I’m now trying to apply this idea when there are maximum limitations, and when something that was once deemed to be too expensive, too impractical, too time-consuming now has no money, few practical resources, no time-saving assistants.
And I’m well aware that I’m not going to be able to pull off anything even barely close to what Asif achieves - he marshals enormous resources, Maradona had over five hundred hours of archive, a massive budget, a team of archive researchers and, naturally, you see it on-screen. In fact, when he was making Amy, his team reached out to me, because they thought some of my previous work may be of use and wanted to explore licensing, so I got some sense of the scale of his production.
What’s interesting about Asif’s use of archive is its coherence. He is able to obtain a whole sequence that someone has shot on Maradona for a news report in the 1970s or 80s, various angles, matched action, same light and lenses and so on, which enables him to construct visually consistent sequences which in turn produces a film that feels as coherent as it can be.
I’m dealing with material which is far more scattered and threadbare, most often single shots, so it will feel disjointed - more of a montage or collage – and even there I’m running up against limits in available archive. I’ve been dragging in a mix from libraries, public institutions, public records, and I’m relying heavily on public domain content. As I’ve mentioned previously, this is not a crime film, but there is a criminal justice angle to it, and so there’s been a lot from courts, sheriff’s departments, and other state agencies which are very slow to respond to requests.
So I’m struggling for pictures, having to think creatively of how I can overcome that issue, and finding myself filled with doubt as to whether this film is even going to work, doubt which I also need to overcome. I need to not become discouraged, I need to get to the end and see what the complete film looks and feels like, which was always the aim in the first place.
There was a point, a couple of weeks back, when I realised I was not going to have enough, and so I pivoted to building some animated sequences, rendered in a particular style which I think complements the thematic layer of the film. I’m optimistic that that might help solve problems as well as forming a genuinely compelling part of the visual register, but I’m also conscious that every time I hit a wall, I can’t just pull the animation chain as an all-purpose escape route – it adds a hell of a lot of work.
When I was first starting out amongst other young and passionate filmmakers, all of us trying to produce in constrained circumstances and without much experience, I would often hear critical problems dismissed with the phrase “we’ll fix it in post”. Now, I would always edit my own films and, as a consequence, I always had an advanced working knowledge of post. So when I’d hear “we’ll fix it in post” I always thought, “OK, how? How are you going to sort this issue out in post? You can’t just make this announcement and expect that the magic post fairy is going to fill the hole in your film. What is your detailed plan?” I developed a heightened awareness of that trap, and so on this film I am trying not to address every problem with “an animation sequence will sort it out!” – firstly, I don’t want this to turn into an animated film; secondly, I want the animations to earn their place, rather than act as some universal panacea which somehow avoids hard choices; and finally I don’t want get to the end and find that I have months of animating to do.
I’m continuing to try and work through this limitation crunch: more archive hunts, chasing up sources, thinking as creatively as possible, using abstract imagery, but trying to maintain a visual logic which runs through the film and aids its coherence.
I really don’t know whether any of this is going to work, or whether it’s a giant waste of time when I really need to be looking for income. But that was, in its way, the whole point of making the film in the first place – to find out. I’m going to try; both failure and success depend on that, so I’m never deterred by the prospect of failure.