Bio docus put big personalities in awards race

Life stories intrigue all filmmakers

LOS ANGELES, Nov 12, (RTRS): Life stories intrigue all filmmakers. This year, there are a string of outstanding biopics in contention as both documentary and narrative filmmakers tackle larger-than-life, controversial personalities.

Among the docs, Alex Gibney’s “Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine,” Davis Guggenheim’s “He Named Me Malala,” Liz Garbus’ “What Happened, Miss Simone?” and Asif Kapadia’s “Amy” enter the fray with an advantage: their subjects come with built-in notoriety, fame and keen interest from audiences.

While fictionalized bios alter timelines and sometimes take extensive dramatic liberties (inventing dialogue and combining characters), “Malala” director Guggenheim says, “Documentaries need to be authentic; they can’t be those things.”

Producers Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald originally bought Malala Yousafzai’s life rights with the intent to fictionalize her courageous story as a champion for girls’ education. However, the real Yousafzai proved to be such a powerful force and compelling subject that, along with Guggenheim, they opted for the nonfiction route.

Sticking to the facts does not necessarily restrict a documaker’s filmmaking process or ability to express a point of view. “They have to be true to this person’s life; but that doesn’t mean they can’t be creative in the way of constructing the film,” says Matt Cowal, senior VP of marketing and publicity at Magnolia Pictures.

Restrictions

“There’s so much more freedom now with documentaries. I don’t feel documentaries are defined by their restrictions, now the format is changing so much you can do almost anything,” says Guggenheim, the Oscar-winning filmmaker of 2006’s “An Inconvenient Truth.”

He points to the 20 mins of animation in “He Named Me Malala,” commissioned to recreate historical scenes where no archival materials existed, and capture the almost storybook landscape of Yousafzai’s homeland in Pakistan’s Swat Valley.

Technical and post-production advances mean that innovative techniques, like animation and complex graphics, give today’s documakers an arsenal of cutting edge cinematic tools. Additionally, a surfeit of archival material — from home-video footage to private cassette recordings to news reports — is available on most famous modern-era subjects, providing filmmakers with abundant source material to cull from once they track it down.

Traditional talking-head style interviews have given way to extensive personal audio and video clips, news and performance footage allowing deceased subjects to virtually narrate their own story in films like “Amy,” “Miss Simone?,” Brett Morgen’s “Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck,” Stig Bjorkman’s “Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words,” John McKenna and Gabriel Clarke’s “Steve McQueen: The Man and Le Mans” and Stevan us who contends “Miss Simone?” is more than just a biopic as it expands beyond the artist and her work.

“Although Nina is a transcendent individual, the film is also about the civil-rights movement and its promise; it’s about those who survived the movement,” Garbus says. “It’s also about domestic abuse, genius and being a black woman America.”

By relying on audio-only from present-day interviews, combined with the wealth of footage shot during Amy Winehouse’s tumultuous young life, Kapadia was able to keep “Amy” “in the moment.”

Drawing a comparison with his previous film, “Senna,” the innovative biodoc about Formula One driver Ayrton Senna, Kapadia says: “Even if you know the characters, the idea was to make the audience forget the ending; the story is how they got there. I interviewed over 100 people and everyone’s stories were different. I realized that there was no one around Amy every moment.”

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