Alumni News

by Sasha Isenberg

In 2001, when Davis Guggenheim '79 released his first documentary film, titled The First Year, he fought to get it screened at film festivals and in theaters. That's no longer a problem, for either Guggenheim or audiences: his film Deaf President Now! was immediately available worldwide via Apple+ when it came out earlier this year. (For the director, a theatrical screening, with a panel discussion afterward, was just a bonus.) 

To the 62-year-old Davis, who runs the production company Concordia Studio and directed the biographical films shown at party nominating conventions for Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the sudden ubiquity of nonfiction visual storytelling is a mixed bag. Davis first broke through with his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and he has since directed acclaimed works such as Waiting for Superman, the Emmy-winning Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, and Deaf President Now! about the historic protest at Gallaudet University. Here he reflects on what has changed since his early success and how he looks for subjects that will appeal to an audience with many other options to choose from.

Would you mind telling me whatever version of your life story explains how you got from Potomac to documentary films? You just cut right to the chase.

How do you start an interview? Do you have a softening-up technique? Usually I have more time—I usually have hours. It's so different, person to person. I'm ready. I'm an open book and raw nerve. I'm ready to get into my childhood trauma.

OK, then. Tell me about your father. My father made documentaries and political commercials. For someone who was so accomplished, he was so modest and so personable. By the time he died, he had won four Academy Awards and had been nominated 12 times. He was a modest man. He rode his bike to work, and he just made one great film after the other. I thought that was the coolest life you could ever live. I remember taking the city bus down Wisconsin Avenue to his office and just watching his studio make films. It was, to a young kid, really exciting—editing machines whirring, people having deep discussions, and my father being the boss of it all.

But you didn't immediately follow him. By the time I graduated from college, I had this feeling that the best days of documentary were over. I turned out to be wrong.
What changed? I think audiences really like nonfiction right now. I think they find the world to be a scary place, and nonfiction explains the world to them. In the last 10 to 15 years, documentaries have had this amazing rise in people's consciousness. People expect to watch great documentaries on Netflix. They are, on the whole, much better and much more gripping, with great storytelling.

Is that due to technology? When I'd crew for my father, back then, you needed film cameras, which meant that every 11 minutes or so, you had to stop shooting and change the film. It was all very expensive and technically very difficult. Now, people make good documentaries on their iPhones.

You're not doing that, though. No, but we can make a documentary now, and millions of people can see it on the first night. That's pretty great. But at the same time, there's so much competition for your attention that you have to make something really extraordinary for people to see it.

But you started in more conventional Hollywood stuff. I tried that for a long time. I made a couple films but became more successful as a TV director on different shows; however, they were never my creations. When I went into documentaries, that changed—the storytelling and the vision were mine, very much my expression rather than me being in service of someone else's.

How did you make the shift? I was working toward directing this film that ended up being called Training Day with Denzel Washington, and I was fired. I'd sold the script to Warner Brothers, but they didn't care that I had been the one that brought it to them. They had no loyalty to me. It was heartbreaking and disillusioning. Then I started to get inspired by these friends of mine who were in Teach for America. I thought, "Maybe I should make a movie about a handful of first-year teachers going into LA.'s toughest schools." I bought a really small, inexpensive camera and started following five teachers. That became my first documentary.

You've done about a dozen more since. How do you choose your subjects? I've always been drawn to people that inspire me. The movies that I've worked on that are especially moving are portraits of people—it could be a public-school teacher or Michael J. Fox or Al Gore or a musician like Jimmy Page. I don't like being pigeonholed as this guy who makes issue films, because I think that misses the point. My films are always about a human being.

Why is that? In the simplest way, I see myself almost like a midwife who helps people tell their own story. You know, a midwife doesn't conceive the baby, or carry the baby, or nurse the baby. A midwife helps the person who does all that to deliver the baby. You're following people addressing a social issue more than exploring the problem itself. Of course, I cared about climate change. When I saw Al Gore's slideshow, I was like, "This is so important. We have to do this." But my approach to that movie was, how do you get to know this man in a different way? How do you understand this man who I admire, and get the audience to feel that? People didn't know him for who he really was, because he's always seen through a political lens. Same with Malala.

I assume one of the challenges with these iconic figures—Bill Gates and U2, or Barack Obama and Joe Biden—is that viewers come in thinking they already know them. All the elements need to come together to tell a good story so that, by the end, the audience feels a sense of connection, this sense of inspiration. It doesn't have to be a feel-good movie. Some of them aren't. Some of them are quite scary, like the end of An Inconvenient Truth. You feel kind of shaken after that, but you think, "Wow, I'm so glad this person is out there in the world working on this."

But your films don't seem to have a consistent visual identity. I think that's because every story is unique. The last film I directed was about Gallaudet University. It features four characters who are deaf, and their deafness and means of expression were so unique that I couldn't just make the film the same way that I had made films before. It has to be different. Each one has to be sort of handmade.

What does that actually entail? Every movie takes about two-and-a- half years.

There's a lot of research. Sometimes I'll do 10 or 12 interviews with a person—30 to 40 hours that become the core of the film. You don't use all of it, but it gives you the core ideas and themes in the movie. There's a lot of work shooting vérité—that's a pretentious word that just means you're following a person in their natural environment. Then editing can take six months to a year, assembling all that footage that you've gathered and finding some cohesion so that you can create a film in which the audience can find the story.

At the same time, you're running a production company that is developing and financing projects you don't direct. We're trying to find documentaries that the people will watch. There's nothing more heartbreaking than making a well- made documentary that no one sees, and that happens. It's lots of money, and it's two-and-a-half years of work.

It sounds like there are projects you want to do but haven't. I would love to do another climate change movie. I find it to be maddening that this many years after An Inconvenient Truth, we haven't done enough to really address the issue. So that's urgent to me, but I have to find a good story to tell. I've come close here, but it would be irresponsible of me to spend a lot of money and a lot of time making something that I don't think will be a good movie.

We got away from my first question. How'd you get here from Potomac? I was an insecure kid who wasn't good at school. Potomac didn't let me fall through the cracks. There was a lot of love, attention, and acceptance for a kid who was very, very lost. That made a huge difference in my life.