The 2 most important questions every filmmaker should ask
How to ask – and actually answer – them, at every stage.
Stephen Follows says these are the 2 most important questions for every filmmaker:
1. What is the audience expecting from this film?
2. What am I going to do with those expectations?
I love this formulation. These questions should be front of mind at every stage of filmmaking. But too often, they do not get seriously asked until the edit, or worse, until marketing. I personally think they should guide development, because they remind us that ultimately the films are not for ourselves but for the audience.
What is the audience expecting from this film?
Most of us do extensive research for our documentaries. Not only am I learning about my idea — the topics and events, the characters and the conflicts, the world and its texture — I’m learning about prevailing attitudes toward all of those things.
This is part of how I identify my audiences: this film is for people who feel this way about that subject. I will always have multiple audiences, and I should have an educated guess as to the starting position of each audience vis-a-vis my material. How will I meet viewers where they are?
I not only name these audiences, I rank them in terms of importance to me. Here is an example. For Listening to Kenny G, I conceived of my primary audience as people who dislike Kenny G’s music. My secondary audience was people who love Kenny G1, and my bonus audience was people who had no opinion, but who watch music documentaries on HBO.
I figured each of those audiences had a different expectation coming in. Kenny G haters expect a denunciation, fans expect a hero portrait, and the non-committed also probably expected a hero portrait (because that’s what 90% of music documentaries are), but more importantly, they expected to learn “who is Kenny G and why should I care about him?”
The design of the film is entirely based around making sure I could do something worthwhile and interesting with the expectations of all those audiences (but remembering my real target was Kenny G haters, because lord knows you can’t be all things to all people).
2. What am I going to do with those expectations?
I’ll never forget my friend Rich Pell describing his concept for Don’t Call Me Crazy on the Fourth of July, a short documentary about a man named Bob Lansberry who spent 30 years protesting government mind control on the streets of Pittsburgh.
Rich diagrammed his film this way:
“At the beginning of the film, people will think Bob Lansberry is obviously crazy, and the government is sane. By the end of the film, I want them to think, just maybe, Bob Lansberry is sane, and it’s the government that is crazy.”
That’s a beautiful example of how a great concept explains how you plan to manage and challenge expectations over the course of the film. Answering these two questions can help you find the shape of the story itself.
To some extent, we get to set the expectations ourselves. We do this with the concept we devise and with every aspect of form and execution. We do it by choosing a genre, each of which has its own expectations. Like: in a comedy (or a doc positioned as funny), the audience will expect to laugh. We all need to find the right balance between meeting expectations and frustrating them in each moment of the film and with every turn.
When it’s time to release the film, we ask and answer our 2 questions again, this time through marketing. We manage and court expectations with all the meta-textual elements around the film: the title, the key art, the featured stills, the log-line, interviews, exhibition and distribution venues, etc.
It’s extremely difficult to get all of this right along every dimension. Ultimately, we can only find out how well we asked and answered our 2 most important questions by soliciting (and learning from) feedback. But that’s a topic for another day!
Thanks again to Stephen Follows for the inspiration. His website is here.
Comings, Goings & News
Some news: I am officially a Substack Bestseller! For reaching this milestone, I get not only the satisfaction of feeling like I must be doing something worthwhile here, but also this cute little orange checkmark next to my name:
Thank you to all of you for reading, responding and sharing my newsletter.
Thanks also to Doug Block and Creative Resilience w/ Erica for hosting me and my business partner and producer Gabriel Sedgwick on The D-Word last week. The full conversation is available on YouTube. We talked about how we met and formed our creative partnership (my advice: lock in your creative besties!!!), how we built our production company, what a sustainable career looks like, and a lot more. Gabriel doesn’t do a lot of these kinds of things, so this is a rare chance for you all to get to know the person who actually makes “my” films happen.
If my goal had been to maximize viewership, I definitely would have shifted the order of those first two audiences, because the size of the “Kenny G fans” audience is much, much larger than the “Kenny G haters” audience. But I felt I had more to say to his haters, ultimately.
stealing these questions
As for audience expectations, I didn't go to formal film school. I learned most of what I know about filmmaking from seeing films in a cinema with audiences (this was pre-vhs and dvd days!) I learned what made them laugh, what made them sit rapt in silence, and how the best filmmakers (like Truffaut) knew how to shift tonally from one to the other seamlessly (see Shoot The Piano Player, folks). Whenever I edit, no matter how many times the editor and I diddle with a scene, I always imagine how it will land if I were sitting in a packed theater watching it.