A Day in the Life of a Documentary Filmmaker

August 28, 2019 | Cat Elliott

From “Leaving Neverland” to Beyoncé’s “Homecoming,” 2019 has seen a lot of buzz around documentaries. Variety recently released a “Best Documentaries on Netflix Right Now” list, which includes one particularly tear-jerking film about a young mother with terminal breast cancer entitled “The Long Goodbye – The Kara Tippetts Story.” Director Jay Lyons has a thing or two to say about documentary filmmaking and shared with Casting Networks what a day in his life looks like. 

 

Jay Lyons

What goes into a shooting day?

A shoot day starts with making sure that all the gear was prepped the night before and that the crew is ready to go. If it’s a small crew, which it usually is, everyone’s doing multiple jobs. I’m usually doing the job of four people. The goal with a documentary is to shoot as much as you can because it’s all about documenting the real life and the real story. And you have to do it on the fly since you don’t have the luxury of telling somebody, “Hey, tell me that super-emotional story where you broke down and cried again. Tell me that over.” So you really have to know what you’re doing. Sometimes it’s just a once-in-a-lifetime situation that aligned where somebody is saying something so powerful that you just know you’re never going to be able to duplicate it. So you really have to know what you’re doing since you don’t really have do-overs.

 

What’s a non-shoot day like? 

I have my own production company, and we do everything in-house, so we’re putting out a lot of fires. When you’re making a documentary, people can think you just have tons of money and tons of people working for you. But you’re doing a lot of it yourself; you gotta hustle. And within the small team, everyone’s helping. My wife [Sofia J. Lyons] is the one responsible for getting Joanna Gaines [for “The Long Goodbye – The Kara Tippetts Story”] and selling it to Netflix and getting a distributor. I did none of that.

How do you work with subjects who are new to being in front of the camera?

I always assure them that I’ve done this hundreds – if not thousands – of times, so I’m going to get what I need, and they don’t have to worry about it. And I also tell them it’s going to be heavily edited, and I’m going to make them look and sound great. You also never say “action.” The moment you say that with a first-time subject, they freeze up and think, “I’m on!” I never use the word “acting” in any kind of documentary or unscripted situation, either, because you don’t want people to act.

 

Lyons comes from a background in reality TV, with credits like “My 600-lb Life” and “Made” under his name, experience which may lend itself to his documentary film work. “They’re like brothers, but a documentary is a longer, more relaxed form of a reality show without the network demand,” Lyons notes. The filmmaker adds that the challenge of making documentaries is balancing an expectation for the production value of a scripted project and the raw emotion of a reality series. According to Variety’s list, though, Lyons was able to walk that fine line and create one of the best documentaries on Netflix right now. 

 
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