Morgan Neville is an Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker. For over twenty years he has been making films about music and cultural subjects including Troubadours, Search and Destroy and three Grammy-nominated films: Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story, Muddy Waters Can’t Be Satisfied, and Johnny Cash’s America. His non-music films include The Cool School, Steinbeck and Shotgun Freeway: Drives Thru Lost L.A.. Neville has also produced many documentaries, including Pearl Jam Twenty, Crossfire Hurricane and Beauty is Embarrassing. In 2014, 20 Feet From Stardom, won numerous awards including the Academy Award for Best Documentary. His next film, Best of Enemies, won an Emmy Award for Best Historical Documentary at the News and Documentary Emmy Awards in 2017. The film was also shortlisted for the 2016 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Recent projects include Ugly Delicious, Abstract: The Art of Design, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, and Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, a documentary about Fred Rogers which was released by Focus Features in 2018 and has become one of the best reviewed and highest grossing documentaries of all time.

MORGAN NEVILLE

What I generally say is I make films about culture. That's kind of my default. And by culture, it's not only film and art and music, but it's food and clothing and language and media and the culture of politics. And I'm much more interested in culture, which I define as how we define ourselves and how we define other people. That's what makes up culture, and those are the kinds of questions I always find incredibly interesting and compelling and, in a way, kind of the great underappreciated force for empathy and understanding, which is what our jobs are as documentarians is to foster empathy and understanding.

I think it's interesting because I feel like in scripted films people are trying to infuse a spontaneity and a reality and a being in the moment into something that's very artificial. And I feel a lot of what we do as documentarians is try and impose a structure or a form on something that is utterly real and alive and in the moment and uncategorizable in many ways. So, we're kind of the opposite, coming from opposite ends of the same goal, which is to kind of create something that is or feels authentic to a certain truth, an emotional truth, or a literal truth. I think of it as scripted film is about your voice. And documentary is about your ear and what you hear. I come to this realization working with kids out of film school for years, when I work with people and young kids come in and people with a film school training you're told, "What do you want to say?" And I think when you make documentaries that's the wrong question. I think when you make documentaries the question is "What do you hear?"

When people say, "How do you do interviews?" I have a lot of techniques for doing interviews, but the main thing is I listen really, really hard. I think it's important to be fully engaged in a conversation and really listen to what they're saying and not go in with all these preconceived ideas. I think it's good to go in with an idea or a plan, but you have to abandon that once you're there in a real moment because otherwise you're trying to make real-life conform to your preconceived idea and it's never going to be that. And it's probably going to be more interesting that whatever your preconceived idea is. So, I think for me as a documentarian, I have to be in the moment as much as my subjects. And that's what keeps them in the moment to the point where they can forget that there's a camera there. Or they can forget there's a movie being made because to them we're just here doing something and we all get carried away in the process and that's when it gets really good.

It's good to go in with an idea or a plan, but you have to abandon that once you're there in a real moment because otherwise, you're trying to make real-life conform to your preconceived idea. And it's never going to be that, and it's probably going to be more interesting than whatever your preconceived idea is. So I think for me as a documentarian, I have to be in the moment as much as my subjects, and that's what keeps them in the moment to the point where they can forget there's a camera there or they can forget there's a movie being made. If I'm doing an interview I'll typically write up...I'll think about it, I'll research it, I'll write up a list of ideas. And generally, those ideas are one or two words. They're just reminders for me. And I have a list that might have 80 words on it that are kind of prompts, but basically, by the time I'm doing the interview, I never look at that paper again.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

You would lose eye contact.

NEVILLE

…I'm done with it. So I never want to lose eye contact, and I rarely ever look at paper or questions or anything during an interview. And part of it is conversation has a natural flow to it, and you want to honor that flow and go down those alleys. And like, I'm prepared to not get to something that I wanted to talk about if the conversation is naturally flowing in a different direction. I think it's better to honor the flow of a conversation than to kind of impose your interrogation upon your subject because it's not an interrogation. It's a conversation.

Even when I did Won't You Be My Neighbor, this film about Mr. Rogers, this children's television host, when I first came up with the idea for the film, and I went and I talked to his widow, Joanne Rogers, what I said to her is "I'm making a film about ideas." You know, I think the ideas are the thing that I find really inspiring. And often I feel that way about the stories I get excited about, which is what's the emotional truth or the ideas? What are the ideas that really motivated and the facts and the kind of ins and outs tend to be often the least interesting. I feel like there's in documentary, there are certain documentaries that can veer towards more of a Wikipedia kind of storytelling, which to me is not great storytelling, which is: and then, and then, and then... Then they did this and then they did that. And I kind of love doing as little of that as possible, avoiding exposition as much as possible. Like, you only use facts and exposition and stories to underline the big ideas or the emotions. At least that's how I make film.

For somebody like Keith Richards, who has been interviewed so many times and everybody asks him the exact same questions. How do you not do that? Well, what does Keith want to talk about? How do we not ask those obvious questions and ask all the questions people never ask him? And once we did that, he completely loved it. So that film was, I think, a representation of who Keith really is without having to list off how he feels about Mick Jagger or how he feels about this song or that song. You know, it's much more of a portrait of who he is now.

Every case is different. I mean, my Johnny Cash documentary is not about Johnny's life story. It's called Johnny Cash's America. And it's about why is Johnny Cash one of these rare figures in our American culture that connects with punk rockers and evangelicals? With the left and the right, with young and old? What are the commonalities and how, through examining those ideas, can we understand the things that actually connect us that we can agree about? I mean, that was really the idea that that film was about.

I remember within two weeks of starting my first documentary when I was twenty-five, I wrote to my parents and said, "Oh, this is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life." Like I knew instantly that this was the job for me because it involved everything I like doing. And most of all, it involved being a curious person, which I think is kind of the number one job trait to want to do documentaries.

It's often the stuff in between that you get from interviewing people. If you read an article, it tends to give you the essence of something or give you the top line of something or give you the greatest hits of something. But when you talk to people, you get to go down all these alleys and follow all these tangents, and I find often that those things lead to more interesting things. I love being able to go down conversational alleys and taking it that way.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Let's look back at documentary making. What you thought it was and the possibilities.

NEVILLE

So when I started, which was the early 90s, there was nothing cool about documentaries. In places like France or the U.K., you could get documentaries made, some for state television or in America, there was public television or maybe HBO, but the outlets were few and nobody was clamoring for documentaries. There was no real audience for them other than people like us who made documentaries. And so I'd say one major transformation, putting the filmmaking aside, is the change in the audience for documentaries, which is people discovered that documentaries can be fascinating ways of telling stories. I think documentaries have been getting better and better. And I think the streaming services have also broadened the audiences. Now you've got a place where it's easy to find documentaries. Lots of people go towards them. And so places like Netflix I think have built an audience for more documentaries, too. And that's amazing.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

And I'm very interested in knowing creative people's ideas about the solutions to the problems or the obstacles we face now. So as you think about the future, education and the environment or the political situation. If you could focus your energies, what are some things you feel, to arrange solutions that could be done? And how can documentary or the arts be involved in that?

NEVILLE

I've talked a lot about curiosity, and I feel like one of the great divides we have culturally is a curiosity divide. I can't remember who it is said that if you want to cure prejudice, give everybody a passport and make them take a trip. I think documentaries are, in the words of Roger Ebert, empathy machines. They're about letting you understand how other people live. And that very act is one of selflessness, of getting out of your own experience. And I feel like we have a tremendous amount of people who don't want to learn, who are actively kind of fighting against science or education or racial understanding. There are so many bad problems. And I think trying to figure out ways to reach those people. I mean, Mr. Rogers, that documentary was very intentionally me trying to figure out a way to tell a story that reached a lot of people who have different backgrounds who I don't agree with, but we all grew up watching that show as children say, and we weren't formed as politically at those times. So everybody has kind of a pre-cultural connection to that character. So it kind of short circuits the normal cultural baggage in the same way that Johnny Cash did. And that's this kind of well I've come back to again and again of trying to find ways where we could talk about the stuff we do agree about. Or why do we all like this thing or understand this thing? And what's it really about?

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Sophie Mackin. Digital Media Coordinator is Yu Young Lee. “Winter Time” was composed by Nikolas Anadolis and performed by the Athenian Trio.