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If you're a budding journalist or filmmaker, you've probably considered writing a documentary. But what goes into making one? How is it different from fiction? And, how do you make your documentary as successful as possible for it to get picked up by a big company like Netflix?
Let's dive in.
A documentary is essentially a film that tells a story about real-life events and is based on reality rather than being made up.
It usually tells events from a particular point of view.
Some examples of powerful documentaries include The Tinder Swindler, which gave us insight into the jet-setting life of a scammer and his tinder date victims.
Another great example is the Up series which took a group of children aged seven years old from different economic and racial backgrounds in 1964 and returned to them every seven years as they went through different periods of their life. The most recent installment was titled 63 Up, broadcast in 2019.
The purpose of a documentary film is to offer an insight into an aspect of life or event that viewers watching wouldn't usually have access to in their everyday lives. They can offer a glimpse into the behind-the-scenes of organizations that we all wonder about: the police force, the FBI, and the White House, for example.
Films about public institutions often have a public service remit. They are designed to educate and reassure us, shining a light on the public bodies that run our lives. Skeptics would say they serve as propaganda.
Documentaries also create narratives from significant events and allow the protagonists to give their point of view about what really happened. The best documentaries leave a certain amount of ambiguity, such as The Staircase, which followed author Michael Peterson during his trial and appeal for the murder of his wife.
The five key elements of a documentary film are very similar to those we'd consider as making good feature films.
Who are we positioned within the film? And why? This will determine whose story we are telling.
A documentary, like a feature film, can have multiple points of view, but switching between too many points of view will confuse the audience, particularly if you are limited to just one hour. As a result, viewers are less likely to feel empathy if they have more characters they need to follow.
Complex narrative structures with flashbacks and flashforwards don't tend to go down well in documentaries unless you have the space and time to tell a bigger story.
Instead, even if it's complex subject matter and you start with a hook, it's best to tell the story from start to finish in chronological order and to stick to a simple three or five-act structure.
Even the most seemingly mundane interviewees can be brought to life by an expert filmmaker.
When selecting the segments of the interviews you will use, look for the pithiest talking points, moments of conflict during the interview, and what parts of the interview best highlight their personality.
Mystery and intrigue are what keep us hooked. An excellent documentary catches our attention by posing specific questions at the start, which should be satisfactorily resolved by the end.
Sometimes this mystery is created by the case itself: if it's a true-crime drama about a bank robbery, then we will want to know critical details such as why the robbery happened, why the robbers did it and if they got caught.
However, it's hard to create this kind of drama and intrigue if the case is well known. For instance, mystery about the fate of the Titanic would not be appropriate since it's a well-known fact that the Titanic sank.
However, we can create intrigue about specific less well-known aspects of the Titanic's sinking. For example, a British documentary on Channel 4, The Sinking of the Titanic, raises questions about the Titanic's construction that make us wonder if other factors contributed to its sinking.
We can create this intrigue through extensive research on the topic. This allows us to shed new light on aspects of a previously unknown subject to a broader audience.
Larger documentary productions often have a team of researchers that delve into the background of a topic.
Let's examine the six main types of documentaries.
These lean heavily on a specific point-of-view and often involve a narrator offering exposition on the subject of a document, guiding us through it.
These documentaries are rare and hard to pull off because they rely heavily on artistic images and scenes to tell a story, with the meaning implicit. Voice-overs and any explicit narratives are usually kept to a bare minimum. The most famous example is Olympia - Festival of Nations, a German propaganda film about the 1936 Olympic Games.
This is where the interviewer becomes part of the documentary itself, offering their version of the truth. The person asking the questions becomes a character in their own right, often creating drama. Some great examples include the documentaries of Louis Theroux, Michael Moore, and Stacey Dooley.
No interviewer acts as a character or a voice-over in a fly-on-the-wall documentary. Instead, the purpose is to simply film events without interruption to observe what's happening and let the audience decide.
Although they seek to portray an honest and neutral account of a particular event, it's worth remembering that all films have a point-of-view and an agenda that they are pursuing to some extent. With fly-on-the-wall, this agenda is constructed in the editing room.
These are documentaries where the presenter has some personal link with the subject matter and discusses both the experience of making the film and the topic itself. Supersize Me is a great example.
Another example is the documentaries of Frankie Boyle. His documentary about Russia explores not just Boyle's trip to Russia but the difficulties in making the film because Boyle is scared of flying.
Films like these have the added bonus of making us feel like we have been invited behind the scenes in the production process.
This focuses on behind-the-scenes and the relationship between the audience and the presenter. They can be a form of meta-narrative in which, as an audience, we see the construction of the narrative and partake in it.
The obvious primary difference between a documentary film and a feature film is that one is fiction and the other is a piece of journalism.
However, a documentary feature film, although rare nowadays, can often be more spectacular and may have a higher budget and get more screen time than a documentary TV show or series.
Louis Theroux's documentary film about Scientology had a cinema release and was grander in tone and special effects. It was also broader in scope.
To write your own documentary, you need to have an idea of the scope and what is realistic. Unlike fiction, you cannot just write what your imagination dreams up; you have to write within the confines of what you have access to and what budget you are likely to be afforded as a first-time documentary filmmaker.
To read more on this topic, you can check out our complete blog on how to write your own documentary.
To finish, here's our pick of the best recent documentaries worth watching for inspiration.
We hope this blog has helped you answer the question of what a documentary film is and how to start writing your own!
Happy writing from the Arc Studio team.
Harry is a professional writer. His first novel The Talk Show was published in the U.S and the U.K by Bloodhound Books in 2021 and he is currently working on adapting it for screen. He's also written for Media Magazine - a UK magazine for students of A-level Film, Media and Television Studies. In addition, he was a senior ghostwriter at Story Terrace from 2015- 2021, the private memoir firm.
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