So You Want To Be A Documentary Filmmaker

Linda Soules treats documentary filmmaking as a habit of attention. She writes for the child who notices the person standing alone and wants the stories hidden in ordinary days. A documentary, she keeps saying, is a record and a made thing. You choose what to film, what to leave out, and how to arrange it, and you never fake the life you found.

The book's promise is plain: this really happened, and it is shown as truthfully as possible. A film is made twice. First you show up until people trust you, hay and a head-butting goat included. In the edit, a hundred hours may become ninety minutes. Beside soup, the same blank face looks hungry. Beside a toy, it looks tender. Editing order creates the feeling. In Nanook of the North, shaping turns into staged hunts and a half-igloo. Reality television picks a cast for conflict and steers people toward drama. The sample shoot day stays ordinary: a stomach gurgle in the headphones stops the interview.

Soules writes the way a good interviewer listens. The jokes are quick: a microphone in a fuzzy cover called a dead cat, Werner Herzog boiling a shoe. Barbara Kopple stays on a Kentucky picket line through threats and gunfire. A gorilla tugs at David Attenborough's shoes. The book stays with you because the dull work remains, the emails and the grant forms, and because she remembers the people who have to live with the film.

Readers from about ten on get the hard bargain of the work: you may wait years, you may be wrong about who the hero is, and a camera changes the person it points at. A curious kid can use this. So can the adult reading beside them. It is worth handing over.