When fact becomes fiction
Does using actors in documentaries cross a line between fiction and reality, or does it add to the fabric of the story?
The new Netflix documentary Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal carries an unorthodox tagline for a nonfiction film: ‘‘Starring Matthew Modine.’’ The award-winning actor plays William ‘‘Rick’’ Singer, whose academic-coaching business was a front for an elaborate cheating and bribery scheme to get the children of wealthy parents into universities that included Harvard, Georgetown and Stanford.
Although Operation Varsity Blues has plenty of talking-head interviews with witnesses and participants in the scam, most of the players were not available for filming.
Director Chris Smith wasn’t interested in making a film about the Singer episode unless he could find a unique way into the story.
His screenwriter, Jon Karmen proposed using the public record – hundreds of pages of affidavits and FBI wiretap transcripts – as fodder for a screenplay, and have actors play Singer and his clients.
The team also reached out to interview key players in the scandal, most of whom were unavailable or unwilling to be filmed. Singer’s most high-profile clients included actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, both of whom received short jail sentences after they admitted participating in the scheme.
‘‘I’m not one of those film-makers looking for an opportunity to do something in the narrative space,’’ Smith explains. ‘‘We didn’t have access to the parents, and we didn’t have access to Rick Singer. The next best thing were the transcripts of these conversations between Rick and some of the people he was working with.’’
Operation Varsity Blues is part of a trend in documentary film-making, a discipline that has historically frowned upon devices like reenactments, dramatisations and other conceits borrowed from narrative fiction.
As far back as Robert Flaherty’s seminal 1922 film Nanook of the North – billed as a candid portrait of the life of an Inuit family in the Arctic Circle and revealed later to contain scenes that were scripted and staged – purity has been used as an aspirational ideal and a cudgel.
In 2005, controversy erupted when Robert Houston’s short documentary Mighty Times: The Children’s March won an Oscar, despite containing undisclosed re-enacted sequences.
Years before, Errol Morris’ 1988 documentary The Thin Blue Line failed to receive an Oscar nomination, despite its groundbreaking use of narrative techniques such as re-enactments, stylised, slow-motion insert shots, a moody Philip Glass score, and a noir-esque, whodunit structure.
In fact, it was just those flourishes that reportedly turned off old-school members of the Academy’s documentary branch.
Morris used the actor Peter Sarsgaard in his
2017 documentary series Wormwood, about the CIA’s history of secret experiments with LSD. In
2010, Alex Gibney enlisted the actress Wrenn Schmidt to portray a sex worker in Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer.
In The Arbor and Notes on Blindness, actors lipsynced to tapes made of real-life subjects. The 2018 series Watergate, directed by Charles Ferguson, mixed straightforward interviews with scenes of actors performing taped conversations between President Richard Nixon and his advisers.
In Netflix’s 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma, about the malign effects of social media, film-maker Jeff Orlowski illustrated the observations of several executives, activists and academics by way of the travails experienced by a fictional suburban family, played by an ensemble cast that featured Kara Hayward.
Lisa Nishimura, vice-president of original documentary and independent films at Netflix, welcomes the innovations, emphasising that they’re ‘‘not about blurring the lines between fiction and reality, but about adding to the fabric of the story when it makes sense and supports the film-maker’s vision’’.
She adds that ‘‘every story is different. We have documentaries that use traditional techniques where there are no re-enactments and the filmmakers had access to rich archives and a plethora of visual material.
‘‘There are, however, instances where materials are limited and a story calls for bringing additional devices to already established and highly effective techniques – be it verite or archive.’’
Used with ingenuity and transparency, such conceits are valid means to the end of good storytelling, insists Taghi Amirani, whose 2020 documentary Coup 53, about the plot conceived by British and United States intelligence to remove Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh from office, includes sequences starring Ralph Fiennes as real-life MI6 operative Norman Darbyshire.
Like Smith, Amirani and his editor and cowriter, Walter Murch, had access to Darbyshire’s words – in this case, the transcript of an interview conducted by the producers of the 1985 Granada Television series End of Empire.
Amirani hit on the idea of shooting Fiennes as if he were being interviewed for End of Empire ,ina chintz-covered chair at London’s Savoy Hotel, much like the series’ original participants.
That choice resulted in some of the most absorbing and memorable moments in Coup 53 ,in which Fiennes delivers a crafty, utterly mesmerising performance.
It also resulted in vociferous pushback from the End of Empire team, who maintained that they never filmed Darbyshire and have criticised
Coup 53 for allegedly distorting the details of Darbyshire’s involvement in their film.
Amirani regrets nothing. ‘‘Are we telling you 100 per cent Darbyshire was filmed? No. But there’s not a shadow of a doubt that he said these things.’’ Having Fiennes channel Darbyshire’s words gives them more emotional weight and meaning than if they had merely been read as voice-over narration.
On a broader level, ‘‘there’s no such thing as complete objective truth in documentary,’’ Amirani says. ‘‘I cut my teeth in television doing observational documentaries, using a handheld camera and following everything.’’
That jittery verite style, he notes, has often been used to telegraph truth when even the most spontaneous, fly-on-the-wall film has been shaped by the person behind the camera.
In many ways, films like Coup 53 and Operation Varsity Blues are simply continuing a dialogue that has always existed between fiction and nonfiction films, wherein directors like Paul Greengrass and Kathryn Bigelow inject authenticity into their movies with verite ‘‘shakycam’’ techniques, and Chloe Zhao casts Frances McDormand and David Strathairn alongside non-professionals in her Oscar-nominated drama Nomadland.
Heidi Ewing, who makes nonfiction verite films with her frequent directing partner Rachel Grady, will release her first narrative feature next month. I Carry You With Me tells the true story of two Mexican American immigrants using many of the spontaneous and observational techniques Ewing developed over her career, as well as more straightforward documentary elements.
What was a hard-and-fast line when she first started has become more porous. ‘‘People have become freed up to give the story what it needs.’’
Murch sees the expanded boundaries between fact and fiction as a function of technology.
When cinema verite was the gold standard in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, independent film-makers couldn’t afford the bells and whistles of narrative film. ‘‘Any kind of fancy stuff was aesthetically frowned upon, but also expensive,’’ he says. ‘‘That’s all changed now. The sprocketed marble of documentary film-making has turned into digital clay.’’
For Smith, the elastic nature of his film’s visual language was designed to meet the viewers’ own experience. In addition to the dramatised sections of Operation Varsity Blues, Smith uses snippets of YouTube videos, television news reports, Google searches and social media posts.
The aim was to acknowledge how ‘‘the way we consume media has evolved, where you’ll be watching a film and have your computer or phone on and you’ll be Googling things the whole time’’.
The ultimate question, of course, concerns the film-maker’s unspoken contract with the audience: When we see a documentary, we assume that it will tell us, if not the truth, then at least a version of the truth that the film-maker has been honest about shaping.
For Amirani, the acid test is whether he can go home and say, ‘‘I have not misled anyone in this scene or this cut or this entire film, and I’ve used the entire cinematic toolbox to keep them interested and lead them through the story.’’
‘‘We didn’t have access to the parents, and we didn’t have access to Rick Singer. The next best thing were the transcripts of these conversations between Rick and some of the people he was working with.’’
Chris Smith Director