The director of the Michael Jackson doc “Leaving Neverland", Dan Reed, on the art of exposing truth in documentary filmmaking

What if the most impactful stories aren't about the events themselves but the human experiences they evoke?

Dan Reed’s documentaries have earned 22 major nominations and 18 wins—for good reason. In this episode, I talk to Dan, the director whose hugely important films include the Emmy-winning Leaving Neverland, which investigates the sexual abuse allegations against Michael Jackson, and his Terror In… series, which explores the experiences of victims of terrorism. His body of work also includes numerous other acclaimed and award-winning documentaries that never fail to capture attention.

He does this by creating compelling narratives through firsthand experiences, motivated by the importance of authenticity and empathy in storytelling. 

This episode focuses on the subjective lens of storytelling, revealing the disjunction between life before and after catastrophic events and the emotional depth it brings to the viewer experience. We also delve into the wider skills of documentary filmmaking, where we discuss the portrayal of complex characters and the narratives they create to justify their actions, shedding light on their motivations and emotions.

Dan also talks about the power of collaboration between filmmakers and editors and how their broader interests and perspectives significantly enhance storytelling's emotional depth. Learn about the challenges and aspirations faced in documentary filmmaking and how building trust with subjects ensures truthful narratives. Our discussions also touched upon the broader impact of long-form documentaries in providing verifiable truth-telling in an era of commoditised information.

From capturing the raw experiences of individuals during the tragic events of October 7th - One Day in October - to the ethical considerations of documentaries like Leaving Neverland this episode sheds light on the complexities of crafting impactful stories. 

This is a fascinating conversation with someone who has created his own documentary style, driven by a clear mission and purpose. Please have a look at the chapter markers to dig deeper into the lessons this episode provides.

Dan Reed on IMDB

Dan's 18 wins and 22 nominations

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Incidental music composed by Birger Clausen

Chapters

• 0:02 Introduction
• 1:16 Chosing a story and using the subject matter to deliver meaning
• 10:26 Subjectivity and identifying with 'evil' characters - with South African Criminal gangs
• 19:45 One Day in October - The Importance of Emotional Context and the response
• 27:53 Long Form documentary as the last refuge of truth telling
• 31:25 Drama Directing and its impact on his Documentary storytelling
• 34:59 The Director-Editor Collaboration
• 44:17 The Michael Jackson documentary and trusting his victims - Leaving Neverland
• 50:18 The Truth and reputation
• 53:39 The Power of Listening

Transcript

0:00:02 - Nigel

Hi, I'm Nigel Levy, and in this episode of the DocFix documentary podcast, I'm talking with Dan Reed. With multiple Emmy and BAFTA nominations and awards, dan is one of the most acclaimed documentary makers working today. He tackles important subjects in his films, but what often makes them stand out is how intimate and subjective they are. You can see it in the way he builds his stories around the testimony of survivors of terrorist attacks, as well as with the victims of Michael Jackson's abuse in the Emmy-winning Leaving Neverland. As this podcast is about the skills of documentary storytelling, Dan and I focus as much on how he has chosen to tell his stories as we do on the subject matter. At the same time, we explore how his storytelling choices fit in with the expectations of what documentary film is for, for both critics and audiences. Just before we begin for more on the techniques behind world-class documentary storytelling, you can go to apply.thedocfix.com with more info and links to Dan's films in the show notes and, of course, if you'd like to, you can subscribe to be alerted when the next episode appears. 

That done, here's my conversation with Dan Reed. 

So a lot of what I want to talk to you about is not so much the subject matter of your films, but what you use the subject matter to say your storytelling. Because I know that the subject matter of your films, but what you use the subject matter to say your storytelling. Because I know that the subject matter of your films is very startling and extreme and I remember once we had a chat and you said it's the kind of subjects that get awards. That's not strictly true, because you know you can do lots of bad versions of films on the same subject matter. So how do you decide what you're going to say with your films? 

0:01:48 - Dan

you know what's always drawn me to? Stories that, like a lot of the stuff we do, are in the public eye, that being talked about in the media. You know it's a terrorist attack or a pop star, whatever it is. There's a, there's a public narrative, it's very bitty, it's in the news, it's in articles, it's it's all over the place. It's very hard, even if you're quite interested in the subject, to kind of put it together. 

And then if you're not particularly interested in the subject, you go like, oh my god, that was horrific, you know, oh god, and you read about it a bit and you sort of don't. You get a sense that something momentous has happened. And so what? What I, what I'll do, is just take that kind of free attention. You know, you've kind of got people's attention because people have hired that there was a whatever it might be a terrorist attack in mumbai, an earthquake in japan, or you know. Um, these are, these are subjects that are high in the news agenda at some point. And then how does that actually translate into human experience? And that's why one of the elements of my sort of dogma, if you like, is the only people who can really speak to the experience are people who have direct knowledge, so we're not really trying to say what happened. We're trying to put on screen what happened for a particular person and it's about the. It's about the individual's experience of extreme situations often, and how they make sense of that and how they make it into narrative, how they, how they tell the story, they tell themselves about what just happened to them. 

Right often the people in my films have experienced something which has created a very sudden and catastrophic disconnect between two parts of their life before and after. You know, we did a film called terror at the mall about this terrorist attack in Nairobi. It's not that I'm particularly interested in terrorist terrorism or terrorist attacks per se. I'm not a terrorism expert. I might have become one in certain in about certain incidents by default, you know, just from really studying them. 

But but what interests me is being able to to tell the story of that extreme disjunction between that, that that rip in the fabric of time, between the person you were pushing your trolley around a supermarket and then the person you are lying there amongst the bodies with your children trying to think about what to do next and watching a gunman calmly eat an apple, shoot someone dead and then pick up the apple and continue eating it. Do you know what I mean? It's sort of extreme truth, where people are tested beyond anything they ever imagined and reveal themselves in a way that is, I think, as authentic as you can possibly get. 

0:04:34 - Nigel

They're incredibly subjective. Extremely subjective and in a way, it puts you outside criticism because it's not about the context, it's about the human experience. You have been criticised for not giving context, if you see what I mean that the subject matter appears, that it needs to be contextualised, yeah, but you are talking about human experience and the people who criticise you don't understand what you're doing or it doesn't fit into the genre of what they think you should be doing yeah, so that's because we sort of straddle genres between current affairs, if you like, in terms of television, and sort of classical legacy media, terrestrial television, msm, whatever you want to call it. 

0:05:20 - Dan

My film straddled current affairs and documentary. And the reason people might, you know, want like, oh, give us a primer on sort of the war in Chechnya, or tell us who Al-Shabaab are, or tell us, you know, about Michael Jackson's musical history. And I always say, look, if I do that, it's going to divorce my audience from the subjective, the intensity of the story. And, quite frankly, you know, the aim is to give the audience just enough to be able to watch it without constantly going like where the fuck is this and what's going on and who? I, you know, like you don't want to confuse the audience. That gets in the way of storytelling. Anytime that the viewer, anytime their eyes just go like that or their brain just goes, wait a minute. That's bad that you're. You're interrupting the focus. You know, what I like is for the experience of watching a film to be totally consuming some people in order to make judgments about the situation they need to understand, they need to have, like, I read a wikipedia article and I kind of always say well, just read the wikipedia article, you know what I mean. I'll give you enough to kind of survive the experience of watching my film without being confused. 

And then, and then, if, if you have further questions, such as what's the population of kenya or you know which part of nairobi is the westgate mall in, then google it right. This is not part of the experience that I give you watching the film. If you want to watch news night or you want to watch an educational video, then do that. But you can't do both. You can't. It's about the like, engaging the chimp brain and the forebrain and you. You have to engage both. You can't just have like a dry lecture and say you know, once upon a time in kenya there was a big city and within that city there was a mall frequented by you know people with a bit of money, and and then one day four young men came in with guns and started killing everyone, and the reason for this is they belong to a terrorist group called al-shabab, and the reason why they were angry with the kenyans is that you know, blah, blah, blah. And then I'm sorry, but I've switched off by that point, right, I want you to. 

You know, a lot of my films are structured like what we call, maybe erroneously, the New Yorker structure. You read a New Yorker article and it goes something like Dan walked out of the building, looked left and smelt the smoke coming from. You know the burning fires. He made his way through da-da-da-da-da, and then suddenly in front of him was a tank pointing straight at him. Cut to six months earlier, right. 

So you engage people directly with the first scene or the pre-title of the film, and then you go back and you say how did we get to here? That's an easy, cheap trick. We call it New Yorker opening, but what it does is it tells the viewer let's do this dance, not a different dance, but let's do this dance. This is the genre that we're in and it immerses you very immediately and clearly in the moment, in the drama of the moment, the experience, the live moment, through the eyes of a particular individual. It's not a sort of anthology, it's not an overview, it's not a Wikipedia article we're talking about. What interests me is human experience, and in order to understand human experience you have to have context, and my films do actually supply a lot of context. It's just not the context that some people want. Some people want to know where Africa is on a map. I'm sorry, you know, get a map. 

0:08:56 - Nigel

I think that's very interesting because what it says to me is and obviously I agree with what you're saying if it comes to that kind of language, of agreeing what a story is but it's incredibly important to define the film, the terms of the film. This is why this film is a film in itself. This is what the story is here to do, and I think a lot of, because a lot of the people who will be listening to this are people who want to be documentary makers or people who've been struggling with their documentary making, and, I think, a big problem. My message to them is like don't, don't, don't do it. 

0:09:33 - Dan

Don't do it. That's something else with your life no, it's good fun. 

0:09:37 - Nigel

I mean, it's an astonishing experience making documentaries it is. You know that. But you have to define the terms of your story. This is the beginning and ending of the story. It's not life, it's not all life, it's not a chronology. Yeah, saying this is my choice. This is what I've chosen to say with the material yeah the beginning and this is the end and the funny. 

You use the term wikipedia page. A lot of things that I see and the frustration I get from people is I've produced something that looks like a Wikipedia page. It's because they haven't made that choice that you've chosen, which is define that subject experience at its most extreme. The most successful version of your film is this is the purest description of that human, subjective experience in that moment, as clearly and as authentically as you can Do. 

0:10:26 - Dan

You have people that you would like to make films about, that you feel it's not about any sympathy anyone has with their actions, it's just if you got into their brain, their truth, it would be worth making a film about them and you could make a successful film about them yeah, the first film that I directed, which was I was embedded for a year with a criminal gang in south africa, in cape town, and the gang was run by twins and one of the twins the twins was like the rapey guy and the other one was like a serious murdery guy and the murdery guy had like killed like probably like a dozen or a couple of dozen people and had been in a what we call the psychopath ward in in the prisons. A guy with lots of potential and some problems. Yeah, I guess you could say he's a bad, bad person, right, but I found him fascinating. I clearly was afraid of him as well, although we we developed a sort of weird kind of rapport where I could sort of turn up at his house at any time and just film him, and it turned into quite an interesting film, one of the sort of forgotten works, you know, but the perpetrators are obviously often more fascinating than the people upon whom they act and trying to figure out why and how and what kind of story that person tells themselves. I very much doubt whether any of the sort of let's take the terrorists who commit the acts in my film, in my terrorist films, terror in Mumbai, which is about the terrorist attack on Mumbai in 2008. 

Of the 10 young men with guns who came across the water from Pakistan, one of them survived and I got the tape of the police interview with him, lying there wounded in his hospital bed immediately after the attack, and he started to tell a story about his. You know he's responding to questions, but he's also saying look, you know, I grew up and I sort of I was lost and I couldn't really sort of find any kind of meaning. I was very poor. And he goes on to sort of I was lost and I couldn't really sort of find any kind of meaning. I was very poor. And he goes on to sort of construct this narrative of who he was and what led him to become, to join the family of this terrorist group called Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Army of the Pure, and then he ends up in Mumbai murdering people in a railway station. 

What's fascinating is the story that evil people tell themselves about who they are and why they do things, and that story is never a story of I am evil. People don't think of themselves. Most terrorists, I believe, think they're doing a good thing right, and it's important to understand that. I think it's fascinating, and the job of documentary is to tell fascinating stories that are somehow relevant and illuminating and maybe teach you a thing or two. That the teaching element is, for me, a long way down the list of priorities, to be honest, but I think it's important to realize that the way human beings tell themselves stories about their experience and we all understand everything through stories right, we? We're not capable of understanding anything except through a narrative, except you know mathematics, and even then you can say mathematics contains narratives of its own. 

If you get into someone's head and you're able to understand how they think of themselves and what the sequence, what the story is that they've made up around, why they did certain things, I think that's tremendously valuable. 

It's exciting and it makes us think about the stories we tell ourselves, about who we are, why we do things, and so I think that's a very fruitful thing to do. 

It's a fruitful thing to do on screen, because I found that the practice of documentary, where you have to go to someone, to a place, to meet someone with a camera and put it in front of the camera, imposes a much greater discipline upon you than print. 

I've worked alongside many print reporters and journalists, and many, you know, very fine ones. But you realize that the freedom they have to embellish and to elide and to digress and do all sorts of things in order to make the narrative flow better, we don't have that and it's like you know, when I was in rough places, I was used to trust the photographers a lot more than the journalists, because the photographers had to actually go somewhere to get the picture and if they didn't go to where the thing was happening then they couldn't get the picture, whereas the writers could talk to the photographers when they come back and then pretend that they've been there. That happens more often than you think, often than you think. So I, I think they, you know, talking about getting in someone's head and trying to tell their tell their story as they've constructed it. Listening to someone's voice, watching their face, watching them behave, tells you so much more about who they are, what they're doing, what they mean, than reading a text, and I think that's the magic of documentary I completely agree. 

0:15:23 - Nigel

I mean, I put it like this what you're saying is that the process by which that person describes their experience, their way of solving the problem in their life and we share the same way of exploring problems in our lives different problems, but the exactly the same way of processing problems, so that universality is like. That person finds himself in this situation and therefore that is their approach. 

0:15:50 - Dan

Yeah, I'm in a completely different situation, but there's a commonality in how we see the world as a human being yeah I think it's a very important thing to control that and be aware that you're doing that when you're making a documentary, because it's such very important thing to control that and be aware that you're doing that when you're making a documentary because it's such a key component of creating the empathy for the audience and they can experience that subjectively what I realized when, after making that film, was that, as a like a 27 year old guy from london, dropped into a neighborhood where, where there was no one who looked like me, and it was quite dangerous and it was kind of nuts and difficult but exciting, and felt really very privileged, I met a lot of people I really liked. What I realized was that I became so fascinated and thrilled and interested by the men of violence and their immediate environment and how difficult it was to capture that, and thrilled and interested by the men of violence and their immediate environment and how difficult it was to capture that. You know it was difficult to be there for the moment when there was a punishment beating or the guns came out or they bought rifles or the drugs were being picked up or whatever. And so when you got that footage, you were like fuck yeah, you know, god, did you see that? You know there's a whole experience and I'm not someone who's grown up around a lot of guns and violence and what have you. So there's an element of adrenaline and thrill and what have you right? So what I realized afterwards, when I came away from it, was that all of this was happening in a sort of council estate in Cape Town, very poor, very poorly resourced, and it was families, it was children, it was women. There was a whole world around these men of violence which I entirely ignore but I wasn't as excited by at the time. 

And if I was making that film now, I would put a lot more emphasis on that, not because I'm some kind of do-gooding person and I think it's morally right to sort of, you know, chronicle the lives of the weak and the vulnerable, as well as the perpetrators and the powerful, but just because a it provided a contrast. And it's really important in storytelling to have contrast and not be monotonal, not always doing the same thing, because you can do you know too much of a good thing, right, you can have like oh wow, that was, that was an amazing scene with those gangsters in that house, with those guns and blah, blah, blah. Then you have another scene with the gangsters in the house and guns and you have another scene, you know not, after a while it's like okay, dan, yeah, I get it, I get it, let's, you know, let's do something else. So I think some scenes with their mums, their families, their daughters, the people living around, how they saw that you know, just to create more of a world. 

I was too focused on, if you like, the exciting bit and in fact, to make it a better and more exciting film. Actually, I should have filmed around the edges of that, the main cast or the stars. You know you need a supporting cast, that's what you need. You need a proper supporting cast that is varied, and you need to understand the world that these men came from. 

And I don't think I went far enough in doing that. I think I was too excited and too fascinated by the, the sheer violence and you know, just the sheer, I guess, to me, the sheer otherness of that whole way of life where life was cheap and you know I was seeing things that I read about or watched in movies or whatever, and I was seeing them with my own eyes and it was like my mind was blown. But I should have been more. I should have been wiser and and more circumspect and added just a few little scenes of of that world and made it more poignant. Do you know what I mean? But the right, the right context, not the complex context. 

Here's a map and here's a political. It's an emotional context, exactly that's that's really important. Emotional context is hugely important. Emotional context is, it's part of story, you know. It's how people orientate themselves, situate how the subject situates, orientates him or or herself in the world they inhabit. Right, and in order to be able to decipher that, because we can't see the emotional world they inhabit, it's good to draw that in right. 

0:19:51 - Nigel

It takes me in so many directions let's talk about. I want to leap to your most recent documentary, one Day in October, and that was very, very interesting. The response to it was very, very interesting because the context was so in everyone's heads. You made a film in your usual approach that was hugely subjective about that experience and I remember there was a who could forget the guardian review that they pulled because they said you're not giving any understanding of why these people were terrorists. There's no context for it. Yeah, you're othering terrorists, right? I think I'm pretty accurate in saying that there was something like that. 

0:20:33 - Dan

It was comparing these Israeli families, you know, sitting there terrified and mostly unarmed, in these concrete boxes in their homes that were the safe rooms which in fact weren't very safe. But comparing those families and children to the Redcoat, the colonial Redcoat, heavily armed troops from Britain who featured in the film Zulu, along with Michael Caine and I can't remember who the director was, but a famous film Zulu from the 60s or 70s, and the idea that you know somehow, that the Hamas terrorists were being portrayed. They were like the Zulu, they're sort of righteous natives and the Israelis were the sort of iniquitous colonizers. And somehow, you know, I was sort of reenacting all that with my documentary. It was absolute horseshit. 

0:21:24 - Nigel

But you made it an incredible. You did what you do, which was create just a very powerful subjective explanation of an experience. 

0:21:32 - Dan

Well, yeah, I mean look, the idea was to tell us all about October 7th. To tell the story of October 7th, right? But rather than sort of telling the whole story and the complete overview and it should take three hours of Wikipedia I decided to focus it on a significant location, which was the biggest kibbutz with the most casualties, right? So an important location in the story, not an insignificant or a peripheral one. And I decided to tell the story of that day. 

Now, one of the reasons I thought that was fine is that Channel 4 said look, we're also broadcasting, also at prime time, 9 pm on a weekday. We're broadcasting a film from Gaza and a film from West Bank. And I said look, I want to tell the story of the day because this is a day that has gone down in history. This is the momentous day that had so many repercussions, right, so many tragic repercussions, both for the Israelis and southern Israel and also, you know, in a massive way for the people of Gaza, right? So we might as well know the truth of that day from the people who directly experienced it. 

Now, I would have loved to interview the Hamas guys. They were not available for interview, so I interviewed all the people I could get hold of and I tried to give a sense of what the Hamas guys were experiencing through GoPro footage, through all of the UGC and all of the recorded footage we could get from that day, all of the UGC and all of the recorded footage we could get from that day, you know, and there's this extraordinary footage from a car dash cam when they're driving along towards Kibbutz Beri, the location of the film, and you know they're obviously very, very excited at the thought of murdering some Jews, and you know so there is a sort of subjective quality to my portrayal of the gunmen as well, the mass guys, but unfortunately I wasn't able to sit down. 

I would love to sit down and interview them, you know, but it just wasn't possible. And also, let's face it, october 7th was an attack upon Israeli communities by people from across the Gaza line and you can't just smush it together with what happened afterwards, because there is a sequence of events First there was October 7th and then there was October 8th and the rest of it. Right Up to today, we've seen the horrible, the terrible consequences for the Gazans of what happened that day and the foolishness of Hamas in provoking the retaliation which occurred. And I think there are many films that need to be made, but I couldn't make all of the films about everyone at the same time. 

0:24:09 - Nigel

I think there are people who are listening to this who will have wanted you to explain, Just not that you should have, but that there's an emotional feeling that I want to know why this happened. 

0:24:21 - Dan

You know there will be Of course but, you can't simplify to that extent, you can't say, look, I'm telling you, in the end violence happens to a person or a small group of people. I mean, this is a relatively small group of people this violence, extraordinary cruelty and violence happens to. There's been a lot of violence in the history of Israel and Palestine and there will be much more violence in the history of Israel and Palestine to come. So for me, the only authentic and honest way to proceed is again to give that enough context with which to be able to follow the story. And then it's the story of this person Like. This is what happened to this person Now. 

Now, this particular person in this kibbutz might have not even been alive in 1948 and you know there are many historical essays that have been written and many more will be written but there's something about chronicling the day of an ordinary person who happens to live four kilometers from the Gaza fence. And you know, I think it's very hard to sort of encapsulate the entire history of a very long history of conflict, encapsulating it in a way that's meaningful in order to provide context to that story, because all you end up doing is like, well, you know, it doesn't really matter that this family was slaughtered in their safe room because you know a lot. There's lots of other shit that happened before and I don't think there's an equivalence there. Otherwise everyone could kill everyone else and have a great reason for doing it. But and it's a recent and very raw history for a lot of people. But but I think you have to be specific. Documentary is good at being specific about a certain number of people and you know if I think what would have been significant is, you know, if the people in the kibbutz were a community who'd gone and I don't know, raped, looted and pillaged like an entire village in the West Bank the year before, that would have been significant context and that would have been essential context to understand right, but they didn't. They were just there working the print works and growing mangoes or whatever it was, growing jojoba, and you know I did a fair amount of research to find out. Was there some kind of nefarious history between the people of kibbutz beri and the people of gaza over the fence? Was there? Was there anything like that? Drew the hatred in, especially beyond the fact that these people were jewish and israelis? Right, and there wasn't. 

If you listen to the narration by dominic west, you'll see that we you give a sort of potted history of the kibbutz and how it was established as part of a, as part of an attempt to extend the territory of of a future Israel in the year, in the years before the creation of the state. 

So these 11 settlements were created in the desert in order to expand the borders of a future state of Israel. So, you know, these are not facts that we shy away from, but each of the families in the film, each of the people in the film, that's a particular individual who just woke up on a Saturday morning and wanted to go about their day and instead they were subjected to an astonishingly cruel and relentless attack. And you know, and that day was is the sort of the point when the Middle East lurched closer to some kind of terrible outcome. And I think it was a story worth telling through the eyes of the people who were directly affected, because a lot of people go October 7th, this October 7th, that oh, it was fake, oh, it wasn't that bad, oh, it was there. So they did it to themselves or whatever. And I wanted to put on the record like, well, actually this is what happened, sorry to put on the record like well, actually this is what happens, sorry. 

0:27:53 - Nigel

The subjects that you tackle in your films are the kind that, as you say that, they're being talked about anyway. So there's always an interaction between your film and the wider world increasingly, nigel there is. 

0:28:05 - Dan

Long-form documentary is kind of the last refuge, I think, of verifiable truth telling on screen, because information has become so commoditized and so you know everything's, we're all. I'm trying to make a film about this. At the moment we're all hyper-connected, everyone's connected to everyone else all the time and, if you like the sort of the hierarchy of information which used to be well, there are some really good papers like the times or whatever you know, new york times, which, whichever part of the mainstream media you get your news from, you you really rate, and has a lot of well-paid, highly regarded journalists, etc. They may not write stuff that you agree with all the time, but you accept that they're professionals and you know they, they take their time to check facts or whatever, even if they assemble those facts into a story you disagree with. We all share the facts Increasingly. 

Obviously that isn't the case Right. So people don't accept the hierarchy of information and everything's like flat. So some conspiracy theorist who's got five followers from you know Darford has the same authority as the Washington Post and people don't have any way going back to context. People don't have any way of sort of knowing because they weren't there, and I think what documentary offers is because it sustains a story for a longer time and it's sort of harder to duck behind the sort of tropes and the memes and the shorthands and the little gotchas that increasingly short form media is prone to. 

Because you want it's, it's rapidly consumed and forgotten, right, the documentary stays the longer on screen and I think it offers our best hope for giving the audience the tools and the material to try and gain some kind of understanding beyond the, you know, the sweet pill of an easy takeaway. So I think documentaries become much more important and it's becoming more difficult. You know, broadcasters will pay for the kind of films that I love to make, which are complex, which are about issues that may have hit the headlines, but we treat them in a way that reveals their complexity. I guess right, and I don't know how long that's going to be possible. I don't know whether you know, maybe every song about a terrorist attack in future will have to have a celebrity in it. I don't know. It's certainly. 

0:30:24 - Nigel

Certainly the niche within which we exist is getting smaller, professionally we'll be back with Dan in a moment, but I just wanted to jump in and remind you about the DocFix storytelling program, which is the reason why I'm recording these interviews with great documentary storytellers. If you want to find out more about the program, which is there to help anyone who's struggling to turn an idea into a great story, you can go to applythedocfixcom. I'll send you a case study where I go over exactly the process I use when working as a producer, director and story fixer on feature films, including for Academy Award winners, series such as Netflix's F1, drive to Survive, and script writing for Sir David Attenborough. And, of course, if you have any questions, get in touch and I'd be glad to help. Now back to Dan, where we talk about the making of one of his most well-known documentaries Leaving Neverland that put the case against Michael Jackson. But first we discuss his time directing drama and the impact it had on his approach to documentary storytelling. 

I just want to make a slight diversion into the other films that you've made, because I think that kind of interesting to talk about storytelling you you have made drama yeah and as well as particular drama of your own kind, you have done more conventional tv drama, yeah, which has main characters and a context and atmosphere and tone and a plot that is very specific and a goal and all those things, because that's what's expected. What did you learn from that experience? I mean, you didn't stay in it. I assume you enjoyed it. What did you gain from that about understanding your storytelling and what you wanted to do with stories? 

0:32:06 - Dan

I learned a tremendous amount. I think it made me a much better documentary maker. You know, I did six or seven years of drama at a time when my first three kids were very young and they were growing up and it was good for me to be based in one place and to be able to come home at night. And you're right, a lot of the drama I did Poirot Lewis, you know, waking the Dead, like these big, very conventional, very conventional shows with quite big crews. They were quite sort of blue chip, sort of well-resourced productions, and it taught me a huge amount. It taught me a lot about directing. You know, I sort of think back to how I used to direct before and a lot of it was just raw kind of instinct. 

And I think what directing drama gave me was a way to structure and to speak about and to express directing thoughts about how something, how a scene, should go, thoughts about how to stage a scene, thoughts about how to lens a scene, thoughts about musical score, thoughts about the beginning, middle end of things, pace, randomness of things, you know, um, pace, all of these things which are very, which are the primary tasks of a drama director, the engineering of the story, because every documentary director has a foot in the journalist's world, has another foot in the sort of videographer's world, has another foot somewhere else. That would give them three feet. That doesn't really make sense. But you appreciate, that's for directing drama. Yeah, made me think a lot more about the devices and the, the tricks, what you could do to tell a story potently and efficiently, and and it taught you, it taught me a lot about staging and constructing in the edit as well, constructing the things you had to have. I mean, I never used to think really explicitly about. I need a transition here. I need to get into this scene and to get out of the scene. I need to. 

Obviously, when you're directing drama, everyone asks you how many shots in this scene are you going to see that corner, because that's where you want to put the generator or whatever you know? What color do you want that wall painted? What is the key angle going to be? What's the and, but most of all, how many shots and how long is it going to last? And so it forces you to think in terms of structure. 

So now, so then, when I walked into a room with a camera, I I saw immediately the same. I didn't write it down or express it, but I would think, okay, I'm going to start here with that and then I'm going to shoot this kind of coverage here with these other faces and these glances and these looks and a lot of it melded with what some of the brilliant cameramen that I worked documentary cinematographers that I worked with were doing when I worked with them. Before I've ever directed drama, but I didn't really understand what they were doing. I was just sort of I'd instinctively go, yeah, that looks good, or oh, wow, that's great, but I wouldn't really know why. And so I'd like to say that I've sort of really learned to direct properly through directing properly. 

0:34:59 - Nigel

I learned to direct in a more coherent way through directing drawn I want to talk about another of your collaborators, because the editor is obviously a collaborator and they're very interesting because editors work on multiple stories, so they have this objectivity about you. 

Come with your story, your amazing story that means everything to you, and they've done thousands of stories objectively, so very objective tools about the telling of stories. Because we both in common know Stefan Ronovic, the editor. It would be just lovely if you could just tell me something about the experience of working with Stefan, because he did some of your early, very early documentaries the Valley, I think he did with you, terror in Mumbai, I think, was one of his as well. Yes, yeah. 

What did you learn from that approach that he brought, or an editor but we can talk about Stefan specifically but that process of working with an editor in crafting the story. 

0:35:56 - Dan

I worked with Stefan very much in the early-ish years of my career, when I was too young and stupid to really understand or appreciate the brilliance of my colleagues, and Stefan is one of those and he's just got this amazing touch. And now I look back at some of the films we did together and I'm like, wow, that's just so. There's just an elegance and a flair about how scenes are put together. You know, I don't know if I could achieve that today, even today, you know, with another 20 years of experience behind me, and I maybe didn't appreciate it enough at the time. And sure we work collaboratively. 

So I guess I'd like to think that some of my taste is infused into his work and I certainly spent, you know, every hour I could in the edit with him and I learned a huge amount from him. But but really it's his talent and his, his feel, his, his ability to find in almost the sort of subliminal moments of an interview or a scene in which someone to bring pathos out of that, to extract poignancy, to put moments in that don't say anything that you could articulate in any other way. It's not verbal, it's not musical, it's just these moments. And Stefan never talked about his technique of editing, or never talked about his art, his craft. 

0:37:21 - Nigel

A couple of films I've made with him and one of the things that I kept telling people was I knew he was great because he never talked about editing he would talk about music. 

0:37:29 - Dan

He talked about Polish history. 

0:37:31 - Nigel

Lots about Polish history and anthropology and russian poetry, but never about the edit. 

0:37:38 - Dan

And here I'm looking for someone to edit, thinking they're going to talk about cutting, and it's as if that just happened as a consequence of caring about people and the world yeah, you know, we did have shorthand phrases for stuff sometimes and you know some of those only some of those are repeatable, and I remember we used to say, well, if you're going to bump it, bump it with a trumpet, and that means nothing at all to listen to your podcast, but what it meant is, if you're going to do like a crash cut, really go for it, right. 

If you're going to, if you're going to crash out of a scene, really go for it, right. If you're going to crash out of a scene or crash into a scene, you have to really go for it. You can't underdo it, and that was another phrase we used underdo it, you overdo it, then underdo it, you know. So these are the sort of silly shorthand phrases you have in order to give each other the courage to try things out and to do things that are that may jar the viewer, but jar them in a creative way, in a useful way. 

0:38:37 - Nigel

Can you just talk to something about again for the people who are looking for guidance in finding an editor or any any thoughts about that process that you think is desperately important that people should recognize and the value of it? 

0:38:50 - Dan

the the editor is the co-filmmaker. Part of what makes a good documentary director, unfortunately, is a certain level of arrogance and selfishness. Right, because I always thought of it as like you have to have an ego the size of a house, because by the end of your filmmaking process your ego will be the size of a pea. Right, because it will have just been battered. Documentary is extremely punishing. It's extremely punishing. All the kind of stuff I do anyways is you're constantly, you know you're driving for days, only to be told, oh, you should have come yesterday. You know, that's when the guys attack the village and now it's all over. Or or courting a subject for months, only to be told, oh you know what, the sunday times offered me 10 grand, or whatever you know. Or, as recently happened, a trial being cancelled when you're in the air with like a whole crew and a whole, you know. So you, you just get what was storytelling to be telling? Actually something completely different that you never expected. So your ego is just battered and your self-belief is just constantly battered and battered, and battered, to say nothing of the sort of the kind of standard neurosis and sort of self-doubt that directors, that anyone doing something creative, must have right. They say creativity is an anxiety disorder hitched to a work ethic. So come back to editors. So directors tend to be these sort of, you know, upped up people and traditionally, certainly in the uk, the sort of the sort of bbc like structure, of the sort of pecking order editors, as all as all have always been sort of the sort of bbc-like structure of the sort of pecking order editors, as all as all have always been sort of in the oily rag department, what we used to call the oily rag, you've got the sort of gentleman club of the directors and the journalists and the people who don't get their hands dirty, and then you've got the proper oily rags of the camera operators and the sound recorders and all that, and then the editors are sort of in between in a way. So there's this arrogance with which a lot of directors, I think, approach editors and I'm gratified to see that in recent years that's really been eroded and I think editors are paid more now than directors, right, but there was this approach that you know, I'm the director, I've been out on location, I know what happens and put all of it, put all the good bits in and, and you know, get on with it and I know certainly I was very arrogant and I pushed a lot of editors around and I didn't really appreciate their skill and what they could do for me and didn't often didn't give them the time to develop their craft and their art. And and I, you know, I'm older and wiser now and I've learned, I'm humbler, I hope, and I always put you know, when I'm nominated for an award, I always put the editor next to me, unless it's an award for directing, obviously, but it's like a you know BAFTA thingy or an Emmy or whatever. I always put the the editor on because they really are your co-filmmaker. They are your co-filmmaker if you choose them well. 

You don't want an editor who just sits around and says what shall I do next? Tell me what to do. You don't want that. You don't want that degree of control. You want there to be a brother or sister filmmaker there who can take your material, and it's an advantage for them not to have been on location. It's an advantage for them not to know your subjects because in the end, your rushes are what you have. 

That's the reality. That's what you've got to make the show with, never mind what really happened, never mind what else happened. Rather, what you've got is your rushes. And yes, you know, editors always try and their art kind of pushes them to like, try things and combine things, and sometimes it shouldn't be combined, combined no, that didn't happen like that. You can't put that shot next to that shot, because that wasn't the guy's reaction when, when this happened, you know, and so there is a bit of sort of journalistic rigor that has to happen where the director has to rein in the editor sometimes. But but yeah, I think you know, editors were long, for a long time really underestimated and you know, having working with a great editor is the most important thing. A great you need to work with a great editor and a great composer. Film score is one of the things I've also learned to appreciate. 

0:43:00 - Nigel

It's it's an extra storytelling voice and, and so you know I try and use that very carefully it makes me realize the difficulty that many first time or new directors have is because often they edit their own work and that makes it very challenging to be extremely good, so getting feedback from other people is incredibly important when you're in that position, when you have too much control over your own work. 

0:43:27 - Dan

Yeah, especially when you have to work fast, nigel, I think doing your own editing is fine if you have like months and months and months and years, you know, because then you can show the film, show the film to your mates or show the film to someone off the street and say, look, what do you think? And then you can slowly sort of adjust it. And with the passage of time, you know, the experience of being on location wears off and then you look at a position to be a fresh pair of eyes. But yeah, I mean it's just working with an experienced editor is such a huge advantage when you have to turn a story around in a short space of time. So yeah, I'd say, you know, if you're starting out directing and you have a load of good material, just take your time of choosing an editor. They're so important, they're not just they're probably a better storyteller than you are right well, they certainly made more films than you have. 

0:44:17 - Nigel

it was certainly the case. I just want to, as we're getting close to the end and thank you for your time, talk about the michael jackson film leaving neverland, because there were some very interesting things that it did, which was one of the things that we've talked about what documentaries should be, because it was again that very subjective description from people describing what happened to them mainly, and that seemed to confuse or annoy critics who were saying this isn't what a documentary is Right. What are your opinions about what you're meant to be doing as a documentary maker and how much you should be concerned about the expectations of what your film should be? 

0:45:03 - Dan

Yeah, I think you know the criticism of that film was that it tells the story from the point of view of the surviving person from the encounter in question. Right, so the film is about the sexual abuse of children, two specific children. Only two people were present when the sexual abuse was happening. One was dead. So the film was about a series of crimes that took place behind closed doors and to which no one else was a witness. That took place behind closed doors and to which no one else was a witness, and so it seemed appropriate for me to speak to the people with direct knowledge of those crimes and also to people who could provide context or support their narrative. In this case it was their mums and their brothers and other people who were there. 

I'm actually about to release a sequel to Leaving Neverland, which has other, you know widens the scope of contributors considerably. 

The Jackson camp refused to speak to me, and so Leaving Neverland is this account of a series of crimes perpetrated against children by the only person, the only person with direct knowledge of that crime. 

Now you might say they're lying, but I didn't find anything, and I did a huge amount of digging and research involving police investigations, involving a huge amount of material and evidence that was gathered against Jackson during the two very large police investigations against him and spoke to and interviewed detectives and prosecutors and whatever, and was satisfied that there was nothing that actually undermined the accounts that had been given by the boys, by James and and wade, the main, the protagonists, and so once I thought they were credible and I wanted to understand the story that they had told themselves at the time, which was the story of how michael jackson loved him and they were in love and you know, which is a horrible story when you think about what is one person seven and the other was like 29 or 30, and that was really the thing that sort of made me believe them on a sort of instinctive level was that they were telling me things that they really didn't have to talk about. 

They were really quite, very, very personal and potentially very humiliating very embarrassing to talk about really explicit sexual acts when they were children. 

It's an awful, awful thing to have to talk about really explicit sexual acts when they were children. It's an awful, awful thing to have to talk about publicly. And so I thought that gave me a certain amount of credibility. Because if they were just trying to spin a going to you know, somehow monetize their a set of lies, a, I don't think they would have been able to speak about their experience with such a lot of detail and texture. But also there's no need. They could have just said well, you know, he grabbed me in the, dragged me into his bed and did this and that and that's not what happened that's not what happened. 

He made them fall in love with him and he made them. 

He had a sort of perverted facsimile of an adult relationship, but with children, and so I had what I thought was a very strong rationale for telling the story from their point of view, and telling it in a very spare and stripped down way. 

I did have a lot of other material, but I chose not to put it in the film. I had a lot of other material that would corroborate what they said or would add context by bringing in the experience of other people who'd also been molested, of other people who'd also been molested, right, but I chose not to, and I chose to focus on that family, because I think it's really hard to understand how grooming happens specifically, it's really hard to understand what it looks like from a child's point of view, and I thought that was the sort of extraordinary thing that the film managed to do, is it walked you through the experience of an adult seducing a child from it, but, but, but not in a sort of disgusting pornographic way. It you know, these, these men are talking about it with the hindsight and the reflection of many, many years having gone by. And so, yeah, I thought. I thought the critics were completely wrong. Mind you, look to be fair, nigel. A lot of people said it was a super cool film as well. 

0:49:19 - Nigel

I know they did. And the way you're describing it, because you make these things in a very pure way, in a very specific way, it's almost defining a genre, an approach, a style. 

0:49:30 - Dan

Yeah. 

0:49:31 - Nigel

Of saying this is what documentary? It's perfectly valid for a documentary to do this because intellectually it is completely valid. Emotionally. You've ticked all the boxes, but you say this is a worthwhile endeavour, it's not missing anything and it's a very, very valid form of filmmaking that you're doing. 

0:49:52 - Dan

I would like to think so. I mean, I would hate to make a film for which there was no reasonable justification. You know, if I really thought that making Leading Neverland in the way I did was just a bit of a liberty, or serving someone's agenda, or compromised in some way, I would trash the film, I would destroy the rushes. 

0:50:17 - Nigel

You know, I really would. 

0:50:18 - Dan

There's nothing more precious to me than my reputation. So for truth it's not just my reputation as a person Like documentary is telling the truth. It's claim to truth is what separates it from fiction. Obviously, right, you're saying this thing you're watching is real, right, and the minute you betray that it's not a documentary, it's a lie or it's a drama. But you have to decide which you know. If you're going to do drama, you've got to tell the audience we're doing drama, this is not real. But if you're going to make a documentary, the unspoken deal with your viewer is this is real, this is true. Trust me to tell you a true story. Trust me to tell you, to show you what was important in this story. Trust me to represent the people in it Honestly, not just as they want to be represented, but as I think they should be represented. So there's an awful lot of trust and confidence that the audience must invest in the filmmaker, and the filmmaker must feel entitled to demand that confidence, and the filmmaker must feel entitled to demand of the subject that the subject tell them the truth, and the subject open up and speak their story, their human story, in all its sometimes embarrassing or terrible detail, with all candor. And so those two contracts, if you like, those two compacts one with the audience, like I'm going to tell yous. One with the audience, like I'm going to tell you, look me in the eye, I'm going to tell you the truth. And one with the subject is I'm going to tell the truth about you, not not the truth you want me to tell, but I'm going to tell. You have to trust me to to be honest with you, and that you know those are the two things that underpin the documentary director's right to be a documentary. That is your ticket, that is your passport. If you don't do those two things, you have no right to call yourself a documentary maker. In my humble opinion, you know. 

It goes back to I remember and this isn't really something I sort of thought through, it's something that seems to me all axiomatic, like it's fundamental or axiomatic like it's fundamental I remember sitting in in late 1992 I was just a kid, you know, from london. I basically sitting in front of this gangster in cape town, surrounded by other like really tough guys with like tattoos on their faces and stuff, and I remember someone knocked on the door. He's in a tiny house and someone knocked on the door and tried to sell this guy a. Look at mine like a naval high explosive mine and he's like don't go away. I'm talking to this guy and here I was we are from the bbc this daft kid from london sitting there. I remember sitting on my camera bag and I'd just been introduced to this gangster by another guy who later became my friend and saved my life actually. 

So I'm sitting there, my first meeting with gang leader, and I said I looked him in the eye and I said look, rashid, I've come here to try and show people what it's like in the year before the election in South Africa, the first three elections in South Africa which brought Mandela to power. This is an important year and I want to tell the story of the people here, the people in Cape Town. And I said I'm not going to do you any favours. I'm not going to portray you as a nicer, better person than you are, but also I'm not going to lie about you, I'm not going to twist what you say to me and we kind of connected. I looked him in the eye and said that I and we kind of connect. 

I looked him in the eye and said that you know, I was obviously a bit scared as well, but I thought I have to say this. I have to establish, like, what am I doing here? I'm not just some kind of you know, kind of ghostwriter of the story that he wants to tell. I'm here because I kind of represent and I didn't think this in a sort of grandiose way at all, but I'm kind of here to represent the people watching telly at home right, who I kind of I love my audience and I knew where they are and I want to be honest by them. And so I'm telling you you might be like the scariest guy, you might have like a big gun, a big pistol with like 16 bullets and you might be able to shoot me whatever you want, which you probably could and threaten to later, but I'm not going to do you any favors and I'm not going to tell any lies about you as well. 

And I think that's the fundamental thing, though you know that you, you have to feel that inside, and the important thing is not that that makes you kind of morally fancy, it's that it gives you in your heart the right to be there on the worst day in someone's life or to talk to them about the worst day of their life, or just to have the right to cry into their private world and their stories, because otherwise, you know what right do you have? Why should anyone, unless you have that bond of trust? And it's not like trust me to be nice to you or to help you, it's trust me to tell the truth, and the idea of the truth and the value of that is very nebulous In that moment. He understood and I understood, and that was the basis for our relationship for a year which went through ups and downs. 

0:55:10 - Nigel

What you're saying is exactly an experience I had with another film because I was dealing with people they're not violent but they're difficult, sometimes the subjects of my films and there was a process I was going through before I did this where I thought if I challenge them, if I tell them how they really are, they're going to get up and walk away. 

And then I was determined, I just determined to say to this person who I was interviewing all the problems that you're describing, all the things you're moaning about, all the difficulties that you're describing, are because of who you are, because you are a very difficult person. They've called you annoying and rude and disrespectful. And I said that because I had a relationship with him and I thought either he's going to stop talking or carry on talking. And I noticed this wonderful moment when he just decided to defend himself on camera. Because they feel in the chair that as long as they're given the chance to talk about themselves this is my experience, they will say it to you they believe they're given the chance to say who they really are. 

0:56:19 - Dan

That's exactly right, nigel, and that if you're listening, if you're listening and there's nothing more powerful than the ability to listen and to convey to people that they are being listened to and I think that's the other big element of being a documentary director as opposed to a drama director or working in some other visual medium is that you have these relationships with real people, and the power of documentary often depends on the words that they speak right and the sincerity with which they speak them and the openness with which they speak to you, and especially the difficult people like the guy that you just talked about, they will only speak to you if they. The reason he carried on speaking to you is because you were really listening. You were really listening and not many of us have the experience of being listened to, really listened to, and that is such a precious experience that people will even go to the lengths of revealing parts of their selves and their lives on camera for the whole world to see, just in that moment, because they know you're listening, not audiences listening. You're listening. 

Do you want to tell me about what's coming up next. I'm making a film about antibiotics and the fact that antibiotics these miracle drugs that kill infection and are the basis of modern medicine Everyone in hospital survives operations, and all that because they can get antibiotics, and those drugs are becoming less potent, less effective, and it's a global problem. And it's something that I feel I can. It's a story I feel I can tell and that will be useful to tell and may help to make the world a better place, because most of the films I make are about hell, about people doing dreadful things to each other. 

But would that be in the style, because what you're describing, it's different it sort of scares the shit out of me and and and I I don't know how to do it, so I'm trying to find out how to do it, but I'm doing a lot of filming in hospitals and it may be a huge flop, but at least I would have tried to do something. 

0:58:18 - Nigel

Good damn, that seems like we've come to the end of a conversation. It just you've. As a storyteller, as a documentary maker, you've just created the perfect ending to this interview. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. 

I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Dan and found it useful. If you're interested in working with me at the DocFix, all the links you need are in the notes below. There's a case study you could sign up for at applythedocfixcom that goes into some detail on how the system has been used in some of the TV shows and documentaries I've been involved with. There's lots of information there you'll find useful. And if you want to get in touch, you can send me an email to nigel@thedocfix.com and I'd be happy to hear from you. 

And as a last thing, if you're enjoying this podcast and you want to support the show and help keep it free and the conversations coming, you could do a number of things. One is just to share it with someone you think would benefit from it. And number two, take some time to leave a review. If you leave a review for the show on iTunes or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts, it just helps the algorithm to get it in front of the people who could benefit from it the most. So that's all I've got for you on today's episode. Have a good rest of the day and I'll talk to you again soon. 

Transcribed by https://podium.page