Honest Truths: Documentary Filmmakers on Ethical Challenges in Their Work

Pre-emptively protecting the subject

The keenly felt power differential between filmmaker and subject led some filmmakers to make unilateral storytelling decisions, usually to omit material, with empathy for the subjects. “It’s important to lift up people who tell their stories, as opposed to making them victims. It’s a moral decision not to enter their lives to only show how poor they are,” said one. “When you have a scene or moment in the film, you may realize it’s just a great moment, and then you realize the subject doesn’t want that moment on screen. I always decide not to use that moment,” said another. One subject when drunk revealed something he had never revealed when sober, and in the filmmaker’s opinion probably would not. The filmmaker decided to exclude this information from the film. In still another case, an HIV-positive mother addicted to drugs asked filmmakers not to reveal where she lives. This filmmaker decided to take the story out altogether: “the harm that we could potentially do overwhelmed our [broadcasting rights] . . . we operate under a do-no-harm policy.”

The felt power differential also led them to protect their subjects when they believed they were vulnerable—not, however, at the expense of preserving their own artistic options. Most kept filming and postponed the decision of whether or not to use the footage. For a film involving high school students, filmmaker Stanley Nelson asked which students smoked marijuana. “Everyone raised their hands. We felt it was better not to use that scene. They were minors, and might have problems with their families or with the law.” Another director cited a situation where “one high school kid would lift a girl and put her head-first in a trashcan after the teacher had left. We said, ‘We can’t let this happen.’ We stopped filming and stopped this from happening.” One filmmaker who made a documentary about a company that employed illegal immigrants simply left that fact out of the film and did not report it, either: “We didn’t call the police—we felt like that would be a breach of trust.” Another filmmaker’s subject told a story about trying to bring her son across the border illegally. “It’s a powerful story, and its important plot-wise. We consulted with [an] immigration attorney . . . to figure out which of those statements could put the character at risk.” The filmmaker removed an incriminating line, while keeping the general information and preserving the filmmaker’s interests as a creator.

This protective attitude was dropped when filmmakers found an act ethically repugnant, often seeing their job as exposing malfeasance. In one extreme case, for instance, the filmmaker did not protect a subject who implied that he had committed a murder.

Preventing resale of images

Filmmakers also try to prevent material featuring their subjects from being reused by other filmmakers in ways that might misrepresent them in new contexts. Gordon Quinn recalled, “I made a film in the ’70s about an 11-year -old girl growing up. Twenty years later some people making a film about abortion wanted to use some of our footage to set the historical context of the times. I insisted that they show me the cut and when I saw that they were implying that the girl had had an abortion, I said, ‘You have to change that. She’s a real person and you can’t imply something about her that never happened.’ ”

However, filmmakers balanced this concern with the need to resell their footage to make a living and considered appropriate decision making part of maintaining their professional reputations. One said, “That is part of how you generate revenue as a filmmaker . . . it’s a case-by-case example. Who is it and how they are using it is also important, because as a small independent [filmmaker] you are personally accountable. It’s your reputation. If you abuse this, then you won’t get access to people for the next project.”

Sharing decision making

The awareness of a power differential also leads filmmakers sometimes to volunteer to share decision-making power with some subjects. Notably, this attitude does not extend to celebrities, whom filmmakers found to be aggressive and powerful in controlling their image. This distinction accords with filmmakers’ sensitivity to the power differential in the relationship.

Most subjects signed releases allowing the makers complete editorial control and ownership of the footage for every use early on during the production process. The terms of these releases are usually dictated by insurers, whose insurance is required for most television airing and theatrical distribution. Perhaps because the terms of these releases were not their own, filmmakers often provided more leeway to their subjects than the strict terms provided in them. Filmmakers often felt that subjects had a right to change their minds (although the filmmakers found this deeply unpleasant) or to see the material involving them or even the whole film in advance of public screenings.

The informal basis upon which they operated also reflects the ambivalence they have about ceding control and their wish to preserve their own creative interests. The ongoing effort to strike a balance, and the negotiated nature of the relationship, was registered by Gordon Quinn:

We say to our subjects, “We are not journalists; we are going to spend years with you. Our code of ethics is very different. A journalist wouldn’t show you the footage. We will show the film before it is finished. I want you to sign the release, but we will really listen to you. But ultimately it has to be our decision.” In some cases I will say, “If there is something that you can’t live with then we’ll discuss it, we will have the argument and real dialogue. In the end, if I can’t convince you then we’ll take it out.”

Some also believed that seeing material in advance helped make their subjects more comfortable with the exposure they would encounter, thus avoiding problems in the future. One director recalled, “I knew personal information about one of the [subjects] that I thought would make the film richer, but she was confiding to me in person, not as a filmmaker . . . We discussed it with her, and then she felt comfortable. We showed her the piece first. Then she was OK.”

However, when filmmakers did not empathize with, understand, or agree with the subject’s concern, or when they believed the subject had more social power than they did, they overrode it. In one case, a subject who had signed a release asked Stanley Nelson not to use an interview. The interview was important for the film, Nelson said, and he believed the request was motivated by desire to control the film. He “wanted us to interview someone else as a precondition [for using his own interview],” Nelson said. “We did talk to that other person on the phone and then decided not to interview them for the film. I felt that my obligation was fulfilled.” In another case, a director decided not to show footage to a subject who wanted approval over material used, because he feared the subject would refuse to permit use. In both these cases, the choices not to honor the subject’s requests reflected the fact that the subjects—both experts, not less-powerful subjects—attempted to exert control over the film’s outcome that differed from that of the filmmakers.

Sharing control of fine cut

Some filmmakers, however, did give subjects the right to decide whether or not their material should be included in the film. Filmmakers grounded this permission in two arguments: they wanted to demonstrate a trust relationship with the subject, and they wanted to make a film that was responsible to the subjects’ perspectives. As one said, “I don’t want to make films where people feel like they are being trashed . . . We make the films we make because of these relationships we build. It’s important to us that people agree with the film.”

In some cases filmmakers wanted to share the responsibility and often showed a concern to maintain good relationships. One filmmaker recalled omitting a section on request. “It would have made a fabulous turning point in the film, but I didn’t include it. Why? I was making a film about someone who was not loved . . . I wanted to learn more about why she did the awful things . . . it would have been a betrayal to not listen to her.” Ross Kaufman noted that the subjects disagreed with the coda at the end of one of his films, saying that “it did not ring true to them . . . They didn’t demand it, but they were right. I changed it . . . They were much happier, I was much happier, and the film was better because of it.”

Another recalled a prolonged negotiation. When the filmmaker showed a scene of a handcuffed minor in juvenile hall—a crucial and pivotal scene—to the family, in spite of having releases, the mother objected. “Her reasons were good—she did not want her son to grow up and maybe have a family, and 25 years from now have his kids find out he was arrested for attempted murder.” The filmmaker allowed the family to consider; eventually, “the kid himself spoke up and said that he was ok with it . . . legally I could have put it in [without the family’s approval], but hey, I want to sleep at night. At the end of the day, it became a mother-son deal and they worked it out.” In this case, the filmmaker’s objective was maintaining the relationship and salvaging key footage.

The decision to share material in advance with subjects was, typically, an informal decision. Only one respondent, Jennifer Fox, said that she offered fine cut approval in a legal document, with the caveat that the subjects couldn’t object to the film because they didn’t like the way they looked but could object to things on the grounds of hurting their family.

A substantial minority of filmmakers argued that they would never allow a subject to see the film until it was finished. Their common reasoning was that doing so in any one case would set a precedent, delegitimize the film, and jeopardize the independent vision of the film. They argued that the responsibility to control the film’s point of view lay squarely with the filmmaker. “No, I never show rough cuts to subjects. It’s part of our work and our interpretation,” said one. Another argued that letting subjects, especially celebrities or other people with social power, have input would threaten the credibility of the final product: “I don’t think the film stays credible if subjects are approving their sound bites,” said filmmaker Maggie Burnette Stogner. Another filmmaker said that while she would not show subjects the current work, she would show previous films she had made, as a way of gaining their trust.

Paying subjects

The question of whether to pay subjects was of great concern to filmmakers.

Filmmakers who thought of themselves as journalists resisted even the idea of payment. In journalistic practice, payment is usually forbidden for fear of tainting the information garnered. Jon Else said:

For years I never paid anyone for an interview. There is a huge danger that paying for talk will undermine the honesty of the talk, and that it will poison the river for the next filmmaker. Would you believe an interview with Dick Cheney if you knew he was paid a hefty honorarium? But I’m reconsidering, after seeing the good sense of Errol Morris’ paying his subjects in Standard Operating Procedure. I have come around to believe that a small honorarium is OK, that we should cover the subject’s expenses and lost work, and that we sure as hell should share profit if we can. This is an area that we haven’t really worked out, where a big conversation needs to happen. It’s one of those areas where our responsibility to our audience and our responsibility to our subjects can be at odds.

Many filmmakers believed that payment was not only acceptable but a reasonable way to address the power differential, even though payment often sufficed only to cover costs of participation.

An independent filmmaker said that his financially strapped subjects could see that “we had money to make the movie, and we were making money ourselves off their tragedy, at a time when they could not work because of dealing with [a difficult situation].” In this regard, many found institutional rules against payment to be arbitrary and even counterproductive. One filmmaker said “I might hire a scholar for a day to consult with me on a script, so why can’t I pay a musician who’s made little money and felt exploited by white people their whole life? What is the difference?” A cable TV producer argued that the ethical thing to do would be to pay subjects. “We have the money. We are spending $500 on a dinner for 5 people. Here this guy worked for five days and they get no glory, they go back to their regular jobs.” The producer noted that the filmmakers work for a for-profit venture, and “we’re making our money based on these people’s stories . . . It’s become an easy thing to do to say that we don’t pay. But this is an excuse to keep the budget down.”

At the same time, filmmakers sought to assess situations informally on a case-by-case basis. The filmmaker whose subjects were financially strapped did not talk about money in initial conversations, but a year later, when he was still filming, he offered his subjects a $5,000 honorarium. He chose to do this because the subjects had asked for money, and he felt that by then his access was not predicated on the payment, and that this was “an important gesture to make.” Another filmmaker found subjects, who were immigrants, asking to borrow money, which she refused to do because she feared it would jeopardize her working relationship with them:“You cross the line, are you the filmmaker or their best friend in America? . . . It was awkward for them but I did not want to set a precedent.”

Occasionally filmmakers even shared film profits with the subjects, although not as a contractual matter from the start. After Hoop Dreams became wildly successful, noted Gordon Quinn, Kartemquin Films shared profits (based on screen time) with everyone who had a speaking role in the film. It was the “right thing to do,” he said, because it “was their lives, their stories that made it successful.” The two central characters had equal shares with the three filmmakers.

Not everyone who paid did so in recognition of social inequality. One filmmaker sometimes paid because it was the easiest way to get the work done. “I usually say no, it’s a conflict of interest, but sometimes you really want someone to do the interview.” Another thought it was more a matter of cultural norms. “In London, people expect fees for interviews, etc., anytime you take up someone’s time. It’s an accepted norm to pay fees. In Egypt, I had a fixer who paid everyone as we went, that’s the way they do things there. I remember negotiating with a bigwig, he was in demand, he said he’d like to do it, and requested a donation to a nonprofit. I wasn’t comfortable with it but I did it. In that instance, I didn’t feel it would affect what he was going to say.”

Deception

Some filmmakers acknowledged that they occasionally would resort to bad faith and outright deception, both with subjects and with gatekeepers who kept them from subjects. In both situations, they used deception to keep someone with the power to stop the project from doing so, and they regarded it as entirely ethical because of an ends-justifies-the-means argument.

Filmmakers admitted to not telling the whole truth or concealing their motivation or their film’s “true politics” to get access to a subject or to “get the scene you want to get.” In one case, a filmmaker hid the fact from a political candidate that his film was about the opposing candidate. He justified it by the result: “Ultimately there is a story to be told, you may have to make these compromises. Hopefully you do it in a way that ultimately, with the finished product that I had a clear conscience. I may get in by a sneaky way but hold up standards in the final product.” Another gained access to someone in prison by writing on BBC letterhead stationery, although he was not working for the BBC. He said, “I didn’t have a [moral] dilemma. I had to do it.” While some said that they would never lie to a subject about what they were doing in the film, many believed that the decision needed to be taken on a case-by-case basis, considering the goal of the film and the relationship with the viewer. They had fewer qualms about lying to public officials or to representatives of institutions than about lying to subjects.

Framing and editing

Filmmakers were acutely aware of the implications of telling a story one way rather than another. One filmmaker’s client hired her to make an educational documentary for middle school kids and to leave out the fact that Americans dropped the first atomic bomb. She pushed for inclusion. “They said it will be upsetting for children, and that the film’s point is solely to talk about material science. I said, ‘I don’t care what you’re talking about, we have to put it in there . . . .’ First and foremost the kids’ education is at stake. Then, it’s got our company’s name on it. We are a respected educational program provider, [and] we would have looked bad, disgraced by it.”

Filmmakers expected to get to truth via the vehicle of a story and held themselves responsible for its implications. Narrative structure sometimes mandates manipulation, which they often but not always found uncomfortable. In one case, a filmmaker decided to withhold information about a public figure’s drug addiction in order to create “the strongest cinematic experience. We want to build him up as a hero and show the fall.”

The process of film editing—collapsing actual time into screen time while shaping a film story—involves choices that filmmakers often consider in ethical terms. Steven Ascher said:

You could argue that cutaways in a scene filmed with one camera are a distortion—you cut from a person talking to a reaction shot, condensing or reshuffling dialogue before you cut back to the person. But those kinds of distortions are often necessary to tell the story or to compress ideas that would otherwise take too long. Jump cuts might be more “honest” about the rearranging going on but might be unwatchable. Dialogue editing and reaction shots are necessary tools of documentary, and while sometimes manipulative, often fall under Picasso’s idea of art as the lie that makes us realize the truth.

“When I’m working on a doc, I try not to lie,” said Sam Pollard. “But that doesn’t mean that I don’t bend the truth. If you’re a filmmaker you try to create a POV, you bend and shape the story to your agenda . . . Especially on a historical documentary, I keep to the facts. But if you want to really explore it, you have to shape and bend. It depends on the project.”

Staging, restaging, and effects

Many filmmakers noted that restaging routine or trivial events such as walking through a door was part and parcel of the filmmaking process and was “not what makes the story honest.” But many filmmakers went much further, without discomfort.

For instance, filmmakers also regularly used re-creations (re-staging of events that have already occurred, whether in the recent or distant past), although they widely believed that it was important that audiences be made aware somehow that the footage is recreated. Stanley Nelson said, “People have to know and feel it’s a recreation. You have to be 99.9 percent sure that people will know.” Some filmmakers also “stage” events to occur at a time convenient to the filming. One said that “as long as the activities they do are those they would normally be doing, if your filming doesn’t distort their life… there is still a reality that is represented.” Another recalled asking her subjects to stage an annual event earlier in the year than it would happen in real life:

I would not want to put words in people’s mouth, or edit them in a way that’s not leading to the larger truth. But I feel like it’s important to get the big-picture truth of the situation on camera. The larger truth is that this conversation is going to happen in this city, at some point, and so it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t happen at this moment.

Video “sweetening,” or adding in layers of sound, did not concern documentarians in general—if it was incidental. One said, “If you add birds chirping to facilitate the story, the birds are inconsequential to the audience misunderstanding the scene, it helps them enter the moment.” However, a few noted that audio that changed the meaning—for instance, adding the sound of gunshots to a scene—was regarded as inappropriate. In general, documentary filmmakers tended to volunteer few comments about audio elements.

Use of archival materials

Treatment of archival materials (especially still and motion photographic materials) was widely recognized as a site of ethical challenges, but there was a wide range of responses. Filmmakers repeatedly referenced problems with using historical materials, which document specific people, places, and times, as generic references or in service to a particular and perhaps unrelated point.

Some filmmakers were adamant that only precisely accurate images should be used. One filmmaker said that she tries to be as authentic as possible, down to the year and the place. She said she was trained to think of archival this way, to think that as a filmmaker, “you put it out there as truth. Someone else will be culling footage from your film. If it’s 1958 Manila . . . you have to be truthful.” Louis Massiah reiterated this. “A good film often has many lives, and one of the lives is in educational institutions, within schools and libraries. The film becomes a historical document. So to use archival footage . . . inaccurately, for mood or tone, . . . not looking at archival footage as a document of a particular time and place, becomes problematic.” Peter Miller noted that

the more fundamental questions are related to matters of life and death. With the Holocaust, you really don’t want to show anything other than the exact day or place. [You have to be] obsessively careful. In a world where people deny the Holocaust, you don’t want to give wind to that fire. And you want to be honorable.

Jon Else noted that he once changed a shot that appeared on a TV set in Sing Faster because it involved a Major League Baseball game, and he had determined that he could not license the footage. He said, “It’s a rotten thing to have done journalistically. That is the most deliberate falsification I’ve ever done . . . My test for these things is, ‘Does the audience know what it’s getting?’ ”

Some filmmakers, however, were comfortable using “stuff that evokes the feel of the spot or the person or the subject matter.” They believed it was acceptable when it helped the story flow without causing misunderstandings, and they did not believe in disclosure. “Saying ‘this blurry figure is not our guy’ would ruin the scene,” said Peter Miller. “You use [the photo] with the knowledge that ultimately it’s not important if it’s your guy or not, what’s important is the story.” Another recalled:

[One subject] talks about his childhood, his family all died . . . he didn’t have family photos. I at this point had a hobby of buying super 8 films at a flea market, found some home movies from the ’50s of a family, it worked perfectly, a kid his age, house, it was perfect. I used it, and I’m sure 99 percent of the people who watched the film thought it was him and his family. In a certain sense there is something “deceptive” about that. There are purists who would feel that’s not right. Ultimately I’m not of that position. I feel like I approached the subject differently. One struggles enough in making a good film.

Ken Burns recalled having to decide between two photographs to illustrate the point that Huey Long was often surrounded by bodyguards. One featured his typical bodyguards, in street clothes. Another featured uniformed guards—a one-time, exceptional moment. After discussion with his team and with professional historians, he decided for the atypical shot, because it communicated his point (that Long used bodyguards) more rapidly. “I sacrificed a little bit of accuracy. But did I? The reason we still talk about [this] is because it was a perfect ethical conundrum. It spoke to the possibilities as well. It made the film better. It did not compromise an ultimate truth.”