Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry by R.J. Cutler (courtesy: Apple TV)
Acclaimed producer/director R.J. Cutler (The War Room, American High, Billie Eilish: The World’s A Little Blurry) came to MIA to assess the current state of the documentary landscape and to look forward to what the non-fiction filmmaking community has in store, all the time referring back to his ground-breaking body of work. “Neo-verité is the future and the future is now,” he maintained.
R.J. Cutler kicked off the keynote with reference to the first documentary he produced, Chris Hegedus and DA Pennebaker’s Academy Award-nominated documentary The War Room (1993), about the two (then) unknown figures who ran the strategy of bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign from an office in Little Rock, Arkansas.
“These filmmakers had a singular conviction,” said Cutler of Hegedus and Pennebaker, also citing fellow cinema verité pioneers such as the Maysles brothers, Barbara Kopple and Charlotte Zwerin. “They believed that documentary filmmaking and narrative filmmaking were not all that different. That if narrative films starring Marlon Brando or Elizabeth Taylor could command our imaginations reflecting off a 40 foot screen, so too could documentary films about Jagger or Bob Dylan, or a pair of distant cousins of the former first lady of the United States in a film called Grey Gardens(Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer, 1975) or some coal miners on strike in Harlan County USA (Barbara Kopple, 1975). If Robert Redford could be a movie star, so too could Jimmy Hendrix, and they believed in an approach to documentary filmmaking that, at its foundation, was empathic.”
That said, there was little by way of distribution interest in the film back then, Cutler noted. “There weren’t a lot of distributors who released documentaries in the first place, but those who did – Miramax, Sony Classics, Fine Line – were all certain that audiences had no interest in going to the movie theater to see the story of a campaign that ended a year earlier. ‘Everyone will know the ending,’ one exe said to me. On top of that, the first year of the Clinton presidency, wasn’t a particular triumph. His poll numbers were low and distributors were certain that would mean our box office numbers would be low too.”
Documentaries were having a hard time across the board then, with only one featuring in the previous year’s US top 200 (Brother’s Keeper, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, 1992). But the War Room team weren’t to be put off.
“Someone said, HBO is interested in acquiring The War Room, but Pennebaker wasn’t interested in HBO,” Cutler remembered. “’We made this film to be seen in theaters,’ he said, but if you put it on HBO an adviser told us, hundreds of thousands of people will see it on TV. ‘Perhaps,’ Pennebaker said, ‘but I don’t know any of those people. The people I know will go to the movies. That’s where they’ll see The War Room.”
Eventually the fledgling outfit October Films picked up the film. “[They] agreed to give us a hundred thousand dollars for a film that when all was said and done had probably cost us a million dollars to make,” said Cutler, reflecting on how nobody made much money out of the release. “All of which is to say that 30 years ago, there was no financial ecosystem for documentary films. Every film had to find its own business model. Making a film basically required you to volunteer your time. On The War Room none of us were paid. The Pennebakers deferred the cost of their cameras, the cost of their editing equipment, their rent, and their phone bills.”
But nevertheless the film performed well, confirming “what people like D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus and the other pioneers of the cinema verité movement knew. If you build it, they will come [citing the character of Ray in Field of Dreams, 1989]. The audience for the films existed. When October films put The War Room in theatres, it ran for months. Lines wound around the block and people went again and again, to see the unlikely matinee idols, [strategists] George Stephanopoulos and James Carville capture the presidency against all odds.”
At this point in his keynote Cutler zoomed forward to describe the current documentary landscape as he saw it.
“So here we are in 2021. And indeed documentaries have proven to be just as popular as narrative features. And just as big business feature docs are routinely commanding eight figure deals in the marketplace, filmmakers are enjoying lifelong careers and getting paid for their work. Some of them have even risen to the status of doculebrity. Most importantly, the art form itself is thriving,” he pointed out.
“And audiences are flocking to their work as never before. In a time where truth itself is under siege, our art form, which uses real life as the raw material to tell powerful stories that examine the complexities of truth is engaging with audiences more than ever before. The 2020s are indeed the decade of the doc. It took a changing technological landscape driven by the advent of streaming, the success of Netflix is nonfiction programming and the fierce competition posed by those who seek Netflix’s audience and awards for the vision expounded by the pioneers of the cinema verité movement to fully come to pass.”
So how did this all come to pass?
“To be honest, the rise of Netflix as a transformational driver of non-fiction didn’t come as a total surprise to me because I had some inside information for years when Netflix was still a DVD company that mailed viewers red envelopes of their favorite films,” Cutler said. “I would run into Ted Sarandos (CEO) at film festivals. And every time he would tell me that The War Room was one of the most popular DVDs on his service. ‘Our audience loves documentaries,’ he would say, so it made complete sense to me that when Netflix transformed to a streaming service and then began producing original content that the audience’s passion for nonfiction would continue to form a key element of the streamers success. If it works on Netflix, that meant it would work on Amazon, Hulu, Disney Plus, Apple TV, HBO… It didn’t happen exactly the way the Maysles and D.A. Pennebaker envisioned it, but it happened. Streaming services finally made their dream come true. If you build it, they will come.”
In 1998 Cutler was called to a meeting with a studio executive at Touchdown Studios who explained how network television business was in a crisis, with viewers rejecting network repeats in favour of first-run shows on cable outlets like HBO, such as Sex in the City. “’We need low cost, original programming we can air during the summer,’ he said. ‘Scripted shows are too expensive, do you have any ideas?’”
So Cutler immediately pitched the idea of non-fiction drama series. “I said, we take the same process we used on The War Room, but we fill more storylines. Then we edit in the way scripted drama series are edited. A, B and C storylines, self-contained episodes with continuing relationship dramas that carry us through the season. We could set it in a law firm. We could set it in a hospital. We get set in a high school.”
He was commissioned to make American High, a kind of non-fiction Beverly Hills 90210. Cutler tells how when he was meeting resistance from a high school superintendent who wanted to know what was in it for the schools and the kids, he had a light bulb moment. “She was right. We needed not only to film these kids, but to teach them to film themselves. Our documentary would also be a class that students would take in documentary filmmaking. Our crews would film them cinema verité style, but we would also give them all cameras to film themselves,” he says. “They would answer questions like who am I? And what do I want? They would become documentarians of their own senior years in high school… And when it was over, we donate the cameras and editing equipment to the school for use.”
The series premiered in the summer of 2000. “Critics raved, they said it was dramatic, emotional, revelatory. One said it was as significant a moment in television history as the moon landing,” Cutler says, but it wasn’t a hit, at least not initially. “Fox programmed us against the first season of Big Brother. And we got trounced in the ratings and eventually pulled off the air. But then PBS public broadcasting across the United States came to the rescue, picking up the series and airing it multiple times in succession so that it was on the air for 26 consecutive weeks. And come awards time we received the very first Emmy for non-fiction series. Take that Big Brother. If The War Room had been just like a real movie, American High turned out to be just like a real TV show.”
Then came Military Diaries in 2002, set in Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, and Freshmen Diaries (2003) for Showtime, set at the university of Texas in Austin. In 2004, Cutler made The Residents for Discovery, set at the UCLA medical center in Los Angeles. “For the better part of the [early 2000s] we produced TV series that endeavored to push the envelope of cinema verité filmmaking by giving cameras to our subjects,” he says, before underling the gamechanger.
“Then in 2009, the future caught up to our vision. That’s when Apple released the iPhone 3GS, the first iPhone with video recording capabilities. Suddenly we no longer had to give cameras to our subjects.”
“I remember realizing the potential of this when I first saw Asif Kapadia’s brilliant film Amy, which told the tragic life story of Amy Winehouse,” Cutler stresses. “Kapadia was able to tell Winehouse’s entire life story because her entire life story was captured on video. This is the age we now live in and the smartphone makes it so for every one of us.”
Self-shot footage is core to his Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry (2021), which “tells the story, both of a remarkable young artist coming of age and a remarkable young woman coming of age.”
“It’s a film I’m deeply proud of,” Cutler said, acknowledging the work of cinematographer Jenna Rosher and editors Greg Finton and Lindsay Utz. “Also among my collaborators were Billie’s mother Maggie Baird O’Connell who started shooting Billy’s life on an iPhone in 2009, when she was eight, and Billy herself who started shooting her life on an iPhone just around the same time.”
“We are living in a time I would like to call neo-verité which offers remarkable opportunities for documentary filmmaking,” Cutler concluded. “Every subject offers the chance to go more deeply into their personal experience than ever before. And verité crews in combination with subject-shot footage will, I believe, become the new wave. This is the future of intimate, emotional access-based cinematic, verité filmmaking. The principles of the cinema verité movement will still hold. More than ever these films will be just like real movies and both the business and the art of documentary filmmaking are ready to carry that mantle. But the form has evolved. Cinema verité has merged once again with technology, and the artform has been driven forward. Neo-verité is the future and the future is now.”
