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Honest Truths: Documentary Filmmakers on Ethical Challenges in Their Work
Patricia Aufderheide
Peter Jaszi
Mridu Chandra
Documentary filmmakers identified themselves as creative artists for whom ethical behavior is at the core of their projects. At a time when there is unprecedented financial pressure on makers to lower costs and increase productivity, filmmakers reported that they routinely found themselves in situations where they needed to balance ethical responsibilities against practical considerations. Their comments can be grouped into three conflicting sets of responsibilities: to their subjects, their viewers, and their own artistic vision and production exigencies.
They commonly shared such principles as, in relation to subjects, “Do no harm” and “Protect the vulnerable,” and, in relation to viewers, “Honor the viewer’s trust.”
In relation to subjects, they often did not feel obliged to protect subjects who they believed had themselves done harm or who had independent access to media, such as celebrities or corporate executives with their own public relations arms. In relation to viewers, they often justified the manipulation of individual facts, sequences, and meanings of images, if it meant telling a story more effectively and helped viewers grasp the main, and overall truthful, themes of a story.
This survey demonstrated that filmmakers generally are acutely aware of moral dimensions of their craft, and of the economic and social pressures that affect them. This study demonstrates the need to have a more public and ongoing conversation about ethical problems in documentary filmmaking. Filmmakers need to develop a more broadly shared understanding of the nature of their problems and to evolve a common understanding of fair ways to balance their various obligations.
ETHICS AND DOCUMENTARY
By the late 1990s, U.S. documentary filmmakers had become widely respected media makers, recognized as independent voices (...) At the same time, documentary television production was accelerating to fill the need for quality programming in ever-expanding screen time, generating popular, formula-driven programs. Documentary filmmakers, whether they were producing histories for public television, nature programs for cable, or independent political documentaries, found themselves facing not only economic pressure but also close scrutiny for the ethics of their practices.
The trend towards faster and cheaper documentaries and the “assembly line” nature of work has proven challenging to filmmakers’ understanding of their obligations to subjects in particular. They also blurred the line between traditional documentary, reality, and hybrid forms. These developments often troubled documentarians: “[Facts] are not verified . . . It has no ethics. It’s increasingly entertainment. To look at a homicide that happened seven years ago, and look at who did it—it’s good entertainment. It has no ethical or redemptive value . . . It’s not increasing anyone’s knowledge.” Budgets demand efficiencies that may be ethically troubling. In one case, for instance, a filmmaker was on location shooting a wildlife film, trying to capture one animal hunting another:
We tried to shoot a few, and missed both of them. Unbeknownst to me, the [animal wrangler] broke the next rabbit’s leg, so it couldn’t run. So we got one. On the next take, they then asked, “Should we break its leg again?” . . .
Filmmakers also face pressure to inflate drama or character conflict and to create drama where no natural drama exists.
METHODS
The core data was gathered in long-form, hour-long interviews, grounded in open-ended questions, conducted usually by phone. Filmmakers were asked to speak about their own experiences, focusing on the recent past, rather than generalizing about the field.
The interview pool consisted of 41 directors or producer-directors who had released at least two productions at a national level and who have authorial control. Most of those makers had experience both with nonprofit outlets, such as public TV, and with cable or commercial network television.
Anonymity permitted filmmakers to speak freely about situations that may have put them or their companies under uncomfortable scrutiny. At the same time, some people encouraged us to make their stories public and volunteered use of their names.
DISCUSSION
Filmmakers identified challenges in two kinds of relationships that raised ethical questions: with subjects and with viewers. The ethical tensions in the first relationship focused on how to maintain a humane working relationship with someone whose story they were telling. The ethical tensions in the second focused on ways to maintain a viewer’s faith in the accuracy and integrity of the work.
SUBJECTS: DO NO HARM, PROTECT THE VULNERABLE
In thinking about their subjects, filmmakers typically described a relationship in wich the filmmaker had more social and sometimes economic power than the subject.
They usually treated this relationship as less than friendship and more than a professional relationship, and often as one in which the subject could make significant demands on the filmmaker.
At the same time, they recognized that professional obligations might force them at least to cause pain: Sam Pollard asked a subject to redo an interview in order to get a more emotionally rich version of a painful moment when he had been abused by police in prison. The second time, “he was crying, I was crying, we were all crying. It was so powerful. After I wrapped, I felt like a real shit for the rest of the day, felt like I manipulated him for my personal gain. It is a powerful moment in the film but I felt bad to push him to that point when he broke down.”
Filmmakers also recognized limits to the obligation to the subject. One diagnostic was whether the filmmaker found the subject ethically lacking, for instance, because of politically or economically corrupt acts. Steven Ascher said that “revealing a subject’s weaknesses or positions that the audience is likely to find laughable or repellant can be justified when they are taking advantage of other people or when they are so completely convinced of their own rightness, they would be happy with their portrayal. You don’t owe them more than that.
Finally, some filmmakers believed that deceit was appropriate in the service of their work with vulnerable subjects and their stories and with powerful subjects who might put up obstacles.
Pre-emptively protecting the subject
“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.
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.
Sharing decision making
The awareness of a power differential also leads filmmakers sometimes to volunteer to share decision-making power with some subjects.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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. 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.
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.”
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.
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."(...)
VIEWERS: HONORING TRUST
Filmmakers also asserted a primary relationship to viewers, which they phrased as a professional one: an ethical obligation to deliver accurate and honestly told stories. This relationship was, however, much more abstract than the one with their subjects.
This second relationship became primary in the postfilming part of the production process. Filmmakers expected to shift allegiances from subject to viewer in the course of the film, in order to complete the project. “I have to be careful not to abuse the friendship with the subject, but it’s a rapport that is somewhat false,” said one. “In the edit room . . . you decide what your film is going to be, you have to put your traditional issues of friendship aside. You have to serve ‘the truth.’ ” Another filmmaker unapologetically recalled alienating his subjects because he had, in the interest of the viewers and of his own artistic values, included frank comments that caused members of their own community to turn against them. Although the result was unintentional, he also felt no remorse. He is still in contact with his characters, but he admitted “they felt betrayed by [him] in some way.” They had expected the filmmaker to protect them by not including comments they made and remembered making. Still another grappled with this issue in the editing room: “I was complaining to someone [that] I feel some allegiance to them, and the person said that at this point your only allegiance should be with the audience. That was really helpful to me. In that part, friendship wasn’t helpful in making the film, even though it is during the production phase.”
Filmmakers accepted significant manipulation of the situation in filming without regarding it as a betrayal of viewer expectations. They were fully aware that their choices of angles, shots, and characters were personal and subjective (a “POV,” or point of view, was repeatedly referenced as a desirable feature of a documentary), and justified their decisions by reference to the concept “the truth.” This concept was unanchored by validity tests, definitions, or norms. Rather the opposite, in fact: faced with evidence of or a decision for inaccuracy or manipulation, they often moved “the truth” to a higher conceptual level, that of “higher truth.”
This “higher truth” or a “sociological truth” inadvertently invoked documentary pioneer John Grierson’s description of documentary as a “creative treatment of actuality.” Grierson used this flexible term to permit a wide range of actions and approaches ranging from re-enactment to highly selective storytelling.
Framing and editing
Filmmakers were acutely aware of the implications of telling a story one way rather than another.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
[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.
CONCLUSION
This report reveals profound ethical conflicts informing the daily work of documentarians. The ethical conflicts they face loom large precisely because nonfiction filmmakers believe that they carry large responsibilities. They portray themselves as storytellers who tell important truths in a world where the truths they want to tell are often ignored or hidden. Many even see themselves as executors of a “higher truth,” framed within a narrative.
At the same time, they themselves are vulnerable in a wider media system. They constantly face resource constraints and often are trying to behave conscientiously within a ruthlessly bottom-line business environment.
When filmmakers face ethical conflicts, they often resolve them in an ad-hoc way, keeping their deep face-to-face relationship with subjects and their more abstract relationship with the viewers in balance with practical concerns about cost, time, and ease of production.
Sometimes filmmakers are constrained by contract, but far more often they are constrained by the fear that openly discussing ethical issues will expose them to risk of censure or may jeopardize the next job.
Documentary filmmakers need a larger, more sustained and public discussion of ethics, and they also need safe zones to share questions and to report concerns. Any documentary code of ethics that has credibility for a field with a wide range of practices must develop from a shared understanding of values, standards, and practices. A more extended and vigorous conversation is needed in order to cultivate such understanding in this field of creative practice.
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