Making a Film: The Rude Awakening

I used to believe that documentaries were honest down to the last detail - something you could count on, like your local library or your grandmother's recipes. After all, it was right there in living color, and how can images lie?

That was before I tried to make a documentary myself.

The first painful truth I learned is that you can't tell a story you don't have the footage for. Like the cave...

"So I wormed my way under these stalagtites and around the corner and -
"Did you shoot any footage?" my producer asked.
"My camera didn't have a video light."
"Too bad."

The second thing I learned was that all travel documentaries must follow a clearly defined route and have an attainable goal. Unfortunately I stumbled across this fact two years too late. My trip had taken me across Vietnam four times. I had visited Sapa seven times. I'd driven the train three times, smuggled animals twice, even got kicked out of the country once and had to sneak back in on my Swiss passport ("Did you get footage of that?"). And my search - for the real Vietnam - was far too nebulous to be a clearly defined goal.

The third Truth was that I had exactly twelve double-spaced pages with two-inch margins to narrate my entire journey. The same journey that took 289 pages to describe in my book. I also had fifty-two hours of footage that I had to whittle down into a fifty-six-minute-and-fifty-four-second program. That's one minute per hour.

So I began whittling away at the sequences and narrative. Reality started to get squished, and massaged, and sometimes even tweeked a little. "Too complicated" became my albatross. "Fact" struggled with "clarity". Details got lost, or rearranged.

"But I didn't go from Sapa to Mai Chau!"
"But could you have?" my producer asked.
"Well, yes - "
"Fine."

There were some things I didn't do. I never pretended to do something I hadn't. I was absolutely true to the people I met along the way. And I never manufactured personal feelings or events. In the end it was a film I could live with.

Then I started putting together this website and realized that the excerpts from the book weren't always going to match the video. I thought briefly about trying to make it all fit together, but in the end I just decided to come clean. The only other alternative is to air all 52 hours of footage, and I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy.

Background   

The Trip   

Writing a Book   

MOM