Understanding the World through Documentary Storytelling
with Stephen Most

“As a writer, every sentence you write you're thinking about your audience…the key is knowing how the story is going to keep them with you.”

We spoke with veteran writer and documentary filmmaker Stephen Most about his insights on storytelling, writing, and his advice for filmmakers. As the saying goes, sometimes it’s more about the journey than the destination. For Stephen, documentaries and the way they can set forth on a journey toward understanding the world are critical for informing audiences, especially in this age of misinformation.

Why did you get interested in writing as a profession? What led you to documentary work?

I became interested in writing when I was very young, at nine or ten. Writing was my way of having some coherence in my life because as a child, I lived in many different places: Southern California, Hong Kong, Manila, and the Peninsula. We moved from house to house, so there wasn't the continuity of home or neighborhood friends, and writing became a way of telling stories that enabled me to think about and reflect on what was going on.

The form of writing that I liked best was playwriting, which happened to lead into documentary filmmaking. When I was working as a playwright in the first decade of my career, there were not many independent documentary filmmakers. I found, when I got to know documentary filmmakers in the early ‘80s, that people who knew how to take a camera out into the world didn't necessarily know how to shape the story. Skills I developed as a playwright came into play; I found I could help filmmakers with their storytelling.

What do you think is the role of a writer in a documentary?

A writer's role in a documentary is very different than it is in a play where you have sovereign control over every word. If you're writing for a documentary, you have to be prepared to throw it all away, because what you're doing is subordinate to a work that includes writing, but it also includes cinematography, music, editing, and more. What you're doing is creating a story in which your skill as a writer is used in many different ways, but very little of which is directly evident to the audience.

How do you approach writing when starting a new project?

At the very beginning. I'll write what I call a concept paper. What is the vision? What form might it take? What is it focused on? Who might the people be who are in the film? Who are the people who would best make the film?

And then, there are proposals to raise money to do it, or to attract the right people to be involved in it. An important kind of writing comes when you're interviewing people. First of all, you have to come up with good questions. You have to research the people and learn about them and get a sense of how to elicit the best insights and information they have to offer.

Then, you have a transcript of the interview that becomes raw material. I have to organize all of the transcripts and elicit from them the soundbites that are relevant to the different points that are made in the documentary - so that's also an organizational task. It is not writing in the normal sense, unless I need a narration to bridge the different points that they make and to put it into context.

Over time, we have started to see more variety in storytelling approaches and a shift away from the tradition of the omniscient narrator. What are your thoughts on this shift?

I don't like what we call the “Voice of God” except perhaps in some nature films. To me, this is very different from the impartiality I want from the narrator who is trying to figure out what reality is. The “Voice of God” is so-called objective and that closes off all debate, whereas a narrator who's searching, who's asking questions, who's open to views that are not necessarily the ones the filmmaker started out with, is somebody who could draw audience members into their own thinking, their own questions, their own investigation of the subject.

You also have to have the facts right because if you get the facts wrong, your whole work is subject to challenge. But it's not a matter of telling the truth, which is what the “Voice of God” implies. There is no truth here. It’s telling a valid story about a given subject, and people who have very different views than a given filmmaker has can craft a different but equally valid story about the same subject.

What storytelling structure do you gravitate toward?

A kind of narrative that I've been favoring is the journey to understand the subject of the film. When we made Wilder than Wild: Fire, Forests, and the Future, we didn't really know why wildfires were getting larger, more intense, and doing more damage. It wasn't in the news as a phenomenon, but we knew from our research that this was getting bigger. We didn't know the extent to which it would grow but knew there needed to be a film about megafires.

We started on a journey to understand the phenomenon. When I see the filmmaker or the people who are making a film, who are connected to the content, it helps me understand the context of how they're approaching the story. Sometimes you have luck when the narrator who's coming from the outside understands something personally. We had that kind of luck with the director, Kevin White’s cabin being threatened by the Butte Fire. All of a sudden, he had to evacuate the cabin. He grabbed his camera and started filming. That was a twist in the story because we were looking at a phenomenon from the outside and all of a sudden it was personal.

Another example is with River of Renewal, Jack Kohler was a producer who became the on-camera narrator. He's a Yurok-Karuk Indian who grew up in the city and had a very tenuous connection to his roots, so that became a way to look at a very large area, the Klamath Basin, with very different kinds of people in it. Jack, as a college-educated Indian, was able to speak to everybody, and he got a new sense of who he was on that journey.

In your book, Stories Make the World, you reflect on the role of stories in making and “unmaking” the world. What is the role of documentaries now, particularly in this age of misinformation?

First, I'll give an example of how stories unmake the world. Somebody in Southport, England, near Liverpool, attacked children who were at a Taylor Swift dance party and out came this false claim on social media that this was an immigrant to enrage people against immigrants. This is literally unmaking the world. It's turning people against people. It’s making them feel that they have enemies, enraging them and making people fearful of strangers. 

What a documentary can do is really the opposite. It can show us people who are very different from us, who we would never meet. We might not like them personally, but we can certainly learn from them. Films literally expand our world, but they can do even more beyond the media experience. What a film can do is provide an occasion in which people get together, people who may not be in agreement on a lot of different things, but who need to discuss something that's a mutual concern. And that is a world building activity.

Beyond the specific subjects that films are about, the journey toward understanding is something that is very much needed now, because people don't know what to make of the different kinds of information, disinformation and misinformation that's coming at us. Documentary as a medium requires us to put any subject in context, because otherwise our audience will not be satisfied that what they're seeing is valid.

Do you have concerns about the future of visual storytelling?

I think that the concerns about artificial intelligence, generally speaking, have been way overblown, but it's something that we need to pay close attention to in relation to documentary films. On the one hand, it can be a great help. For example, the work of going through interviews to find the themes that are related to the film, that's something that AI could do and take a huge load of work off the filmmakers. The threat of AI is that it can erase the distinction between a valid picture, a valid sound byte, and something that is made up. You can now make anybody say anything and it looks like the genuine article. It's going to be very hard to make that distinction. We have to safeguard the integrity of documentary filmmaking while using the benefits AI can give us. 

There's a way of weighing people that I've used, and it's a kind of grid. On one axis is the range between partisan and impartial, and the other axis is low context and high context. Someone who is partisan is like a lawyer who's pressing a case, who's only using the evidence that makes that case and ignoring everything else or trying to get that other evidence discredited. Someone who's impartial is like a scientist who wants the evidence that can undermine the theory, because that's the way to test a theory. If it proves a theory wrong, that's good, because you're interested in reality. You want a more comprehensive, more valid theory. That's impartiality. I think a documentary filmmaker should be like that because we might start out with an idea, but it could be wrong. That's the honesty of documentary filmmaking. There’s low-context impartiality like that of a doctor who sees only the symptoms and not the patient as a person, and there’s high-context partiality like that of a politician who understands all the constituents’ views. That grid offers a good metric when choosing people to interview and judging the value of what they have to say.

What is your advice for emerging filmmakers?

The first thing to keep in mind is who your audience is. Who’s going to come to this film? Find the right balance for that audience. As a writer, every sentence you're thinking about your audience and what's going to make them go from one sentence to the next. The key is knowing how the story is going to keep them with you. 

In Wilder than Wild, we were looking at a phenomenon that was growing but we focused on one example, the Rim Fire in a very specific place. It was a strategic place because Yosemite and that part of the Sierra we featured is a storied wilderness and a place many people love. It's the water supply for the Bay Area. It mattered to people. Finding something that matters existentially to your audience is a good place to begin. 

Also, it helps if the story has a form: a beginning, a middle and an end. That can be really challenging if you're filming something that's unresolved in the world, because you may have to manufacture an end somehow, or you may have to think in advance about what would constitute a conclusion and look for that. You also really have to keep in mind the emotional sequence as you're taking your audience through the film.

How has working on documentaries impacted your life?

When you make a documentary, it is your life. It's a very involving kind of work. It's not just a profession. It's not just making a movie. It's the kind of commitment that takes courage because you're going to meet all sorts of people, some who may be very adverse to what you're doing. You also need to have the courage to go out there and meet people who know so much more than you do and win their respect so that they will tell you something that is of value to others. 

It's been such a gift to be able to work with filmmakers who have an expanded view of the world and are really committed, hard working, and doing great things. I’ve also met many others through these projects who I am still connected to, for example Native people in the Klamath Basin. Those relationships stemmed in part from the values I have as a storyteller. I listen, I want to know what they think, what their experience is, and I want to pass it on to an audience - and that has given me lifelong friendships with people I continue to learn from. That is a treasure that has come from doing this work.

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