Film Courage: What’s the secret to finding truth when making a documentary?
I mean…is there anything that you say or do that helps you find it?
Joe Berlinger: We could spend hours and hours and talk about truth in documentaries because
I…look…I’m a firm believer that all documentary filmmaking, all media is inherently
subjective.
You shoot hundreds of hours of footage.
Only a couple of hours end up in your final film.
There are days you are not there to cover a story.
You have to choose a camera angle.
Every camera angle communicates a different emotion potentially.
You make thousands of editorial decisions.
So what’s guided me is that I’m not looking for the capital truth (capital “T” truth
in a situation) because I think the truth is very elusive and subjective depending on
from what point of view you are looking at.
What I look for in my films in as emotional truthfulness.
An emotional truthfulness about the human condition or the subject that you’re looking
at.
You know, in PARADISE LOST it because clear that these guys were railroaded.
But a different filmmaker possibly would have made a different film.
So I think filmmakers who think they are presenting the absolute truth about a particular subject,
I have potentially…certain kinds of films, straightforward, history you know I think
the more you know hitting the truth whatever that means is possible.
But what I’m looking for is the emotional truthfulness of a situation.
The truth rises to the top if you allow both sides to have their say.
Treat the audience like a jury and not pound a specific message over people’s heads.
It has always been the method that I’ve preferred.
Even in this film, even though it’s a film about denial, there’s a section of the film
in which those who don’t believe that it took place, they’ve been given a chance
to air their views and we allow the audience to make up their own minds about it.
So to me that’s what I mean about emotional truthfulness.
You air all sides of an issue.
Don’t pound a message over the viewers head and you let the truth rise to the top.
In CRUDE, some people were surprised that I allowed the executives to be interviewed
and to present their point of view about the case.
But I think I trust the audience to come to the right conclusion about the emotional truthfulness
of the situation.
And sometimes the emotional truthfulness of a situation is not necessarily what you think
the film is about.
You know for example, in CRUDE the indigenous rainforest dwellers of Ecuador and their American
representatives were making a case and confronting this major gasoline corporation for creating
this cancer zone the size of Rhode Island through bad drilling practices.
This company was claiming that this was not the case and the pollution that is there is
the responsibility of the state oil company.
Some people may think that I was making a film about the absolute truth of that situation.
For me, the absolute truth of the situation (the emotional truth of the situation) that
I was trying to talk about is that we are destroying the rainforest, that the people
who most deserve to be treated well were being treated horribly.
And that there were a whole other set of reasons I was making that film, to bring justice to
these people.
So sometimes the subjective truth of a situation is not always what the filmmaker is necessarily
trying to present, at least that’s how I look at it.