Where does a filmmaker’s passion for documentaries come from? How difficult is it to commit to a specific subject? And with no script or defined timeline, how does a director know when it’s time to make their final cut? These were some of the topics discussed by four top TV documentary directors when they joined Gold Derby’s special “Meet the Experts” Q&A event with 2024 awards contenders: Prentice Penny (“Black Twitter: A People’s History”), Amanda McBaine (“Girls State“), Gelila Bekele (“Maxine’s Baby: The Tyler Perry Story”) and Christopher Burke (“For Love & Life: No Ordinary Campaign“). Watch our fascinating full group roundtable panel above, and click on each name above to view each contender’s individual interview.
“When you’re doing something fictional, you’re trying to tell a story, whether it’s in TV or movies,” Penny says. “You’re trying to progress the story, but you have to keep it moving in a certain way. I’m someone who loves wormholes. To be able think that I know what the story is, and then go deeper and deeper in a way that you’re not able to do with the time and the budgets you have with scripted television — doing this doc was the first time I had done something for two-and-a-half years of my life that was all-consuming. To be able to get deeper into something, where that’s your only focus, I thought so many special things came out of it.”
McBaine acknowledges, “You have to be willing to spend two to three years of your life with those people. You’re basically inviting them to your dinner table. This is literal, because I worked with my husband, so we are constantly talking about this stuff. I really do want to be surprised. I’m still learning with every film, so I can’t really say at any given moment what I want to be working on, but for sure with these last two ‘Girls State’ and ‘Boys State’ films, the state of our country and the division in our country was something we wanted to investigate.”
SEE Watch our lively chats with dozens of 2024 Emmy contenders
For Bekele, who spent a decade filming the father of her son, Tyler Perry, knowing when to wrap the film was complicated. “We thought we were finished when the Fort McPherson studio opened,” she admits. “Then a few months later the pandemic hit. Of course Tyler being Tyler, he started a whole formula to start production again. You kind of intuitively continue. It’s hard to say when to stop. The best way I can explain it is there’s an intuition that kicks in that says, ‘Okay, this might be enough for now.'”
Burke also reveals, “You never know when to stop. Especially with something, in our case legislative and funding successes, coming one after another at the federal level, while also a guy with ALS is fighting for his life and losing more and more physical ability every day. That was a really hard thing to figure out. Honestly, the forcing mechanism for us to stop was that we needed to premiere at a film festival, so we did.”
Penny was an Emmy nominee for “Insecure.” Other projects have included “Happy Endings,” “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” and “Pause with Sam Jay.” McBaine was an Emmy winner for “Boys State.” Other projects have included “The Bandit,” “Mayor Pete” and “The Mission.” Bekele’s career has included “Bai: Life is not Honey,” “Anbessa” and “Noir.” Burke’s career has included “Dogs of War,” Brew Dogs,” “UFC Ultimate Insider” and “You Can Do Better.”
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