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PODCAST

Documentary First: Conversations on Documentary Filmmaking

Documentary First

Conversations with the people behind documentaries and how the work changed them, from Ken Burns and PBS American Masters creator Susan Lacy to first-time directors finishing their first film. Documentary First is a weekly podcast for anyone who loves a true story, and for the filmmakers who tell them. Host Christian Taylor, director of the award-winning The Girl Who Wore Freedom (25+ international awards; distributed by Virgil Films, Swank, and Canal+), has talked with documentary directors,

tv & film film interviews

All Episodes

49:24

Archival Footage: Why Use Home Movies?

Documentary First: Conversations on Documentary... ·

2026/10/08

What can a few seconds of a stranger's home movie do for your documentary?Archival footage does not have to come from the National Archives or a big footage house. Home movies, the 8mm and Super 8 reels families shot from the 1930s through the 1980s, show ordinary life the way it actually looked: the clothes, the cars, the Christmases. For a documentary filmmaker, home movie footage carries a texture and an emotion that narration cannot supply, and it does it in a few seconds.In Episode 287,

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53:30

Ep. 286 l RKO, Stax, and Music Rights: How Does a...

Documentary First: Conversations on Documentary... ·

2026/09/10

Do you have a documentary, or do you have a Wikipedia entry?Music rights for film are the reason a lot of documentaries never get finished. Sophia Dilley has cleared them at a scale most filmmakers will never face. Her team's Stax: Soulsville U.S.A. needed more than thirty artists, multiple publishers and several estates on side before it could exist. And in June 2025, the company she helps run bought RKO Pictures, more than 5,000 titles including King Kong, Citizen Kane and It's a Wonderful Life.In

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40:58

Ep. 285 l How to Make a Documentary With No Film...

Documentary First: Conversations on Documentary... ·

2026/08/21

Who finishes your film if you can't?This episode is about how to make a documentary with no film school. Andre N. Jackson had never made a film. He had twenty years in technology and security, an idea that arrived while he was sitting in a barber's chair, and no way into the industry. He finished the film anyway, and he came on the show with three lessons for other filmmakers. Two more came out while we were talking.In Episode 285, Christian sits down with first-time filmmaker Andre N. Jackson to

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13:35

Why Can't Your Documentary Find an Audience? l Deep...

Documentary First: Conversations on Documentary... ·

2026/08/13

When did your audience stop being people and become a number?Most independent films and podcasts do not fail because the work is bad. They fail because no one ever felt like they belonged to them. This Deep Dive is about how to build an audience for your documentary before it is ever released, and the one ingredient that decides whether people stay with what you make.In this Deep Dive on Documentary First Episode 284 with Dutch filmmaker Jonathan de Jong, host Christian Taylor takes the idea at the

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51:49

Ep. 284 I How to Fund a Documentary Without the Industry

Documentary First: Conversations on Documentary... ·

2026/08/06

How do you fund a documentary when the whole industry says no?How do you fund a documentary without film funds, grants, or a commissioning broadcaster, and still reach a huge audience? Dutch filmmaker Jonathan de Jong did exactly that with Human Forever, the most-watched human interest documentary in Dutch cinema history. The government pulled his funding two and a half years into production, and he still finished the film, built a movement, and put it in cinemas around the world.In Episode 284 of

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13:51

Who Believed in You First? I Deep Dive on Ep. 238

Documentary First: Conversations on Documentary... ·

2026/07/30

Who believed in you before you could believe in yourself? In this Deep Dive, documentary filmmaker Christian Taylor makes a quiet case that we rarely overcome self-doubt on our own. Almost no one finishes anything hard alone. Someone has to see it in you first. This is a reflection on the power of belief, on the kind of encouragement that shows up right when you are ready to quit, and on how a few honest words can help a person keep going and change the whole outcome of a life.This Deep Dive grows

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54:11

Ep. 283 I 7 Filmmaking Tips From the Distributor Who...

Documentary First: Conversations on Documentary... ·

2026/07/23

What does it really take to make a documentary that finds an audience and earns its money back?“You have to have the passion for the story and the passion to do the work, because it will not be easy.”— Joe AmodeiIf you want to make a documentary, the hardest questions are not the ones about cameras. They are about access, money, and whether anyone will ever watch it. In Documentary First Episode 283, a distributor who has spent more than forty-five years releasing films, and has now directed his

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12:04

Ep. 282 I Finding the Heartbeat of Your Story | A...

Documentary First: Conversations on Documentary... ·

2026/07/16

How do you make people care about your documentary?Facts alone rarely make an audience care. The emotional core of a documentary lives somewhere else. In this episode of Documentary First, filmmaker Christian Taylor tells the story of how she found the heartbeat her film about the Battle of Carentan was missing. It was not in the archives. It was in the memories of a man who was six years old when the war came for his town.For months, Christian’s film Heroes of Carentan felt stuck in what one WWII

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11:29

Ep. 281 I 13 Letters That Saved a Dying WWII...

Documentary First: Conversations on Documentary... ·

2026/07/02

Can thirteen letters from an 88-year-old stranger bring a dead film back to life?For two years, Heroes of Carentan, Christian Taylor's documentary about the 101st Airborne Division and the June 1944 liberation of Carentan, sat on a shelf, half made. In this episode she tells the honest story of why a WWII documentary stalls, what it costs to keep going, and the thirteen letters from an 88-year-old man in France that finally gave the film its heartbeat back.In Episode 281 of Documentary First,

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08:14

The Disappointment You Didn't Choose I Deep Dive on...

Documentary First: Conversations on Documentary... ·

2026/06/25

What if the disappointment you didn't choose was the only door to the life you were meant to live?Three generations of one family chased professional baseball, and all three lost it to a career-ending injury. Each one found his calling in the aftermath. That pattern runs through Voices: The Danny Gans Story, filmmaker Andrew Gans's documentary about his father, the Las Vegas entertainer known as the Man of Many Voices. In this Deep Dive, Christian Taylor sits with what Andrew's film, and her own

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55:32

Ep. 280 I Danny Gans, the Man of Many Voices, Lost...

Documentary First: Conversations on Documentary... ·

2026/06/18

He Could Become Anyone on Stage. What Was He Hiding Offstage?Danny Gans was the Man of Many Voices, the highest-paid headliner on the Las Vegas Strip, and the first performer to sell a $100 ticket on the Strip. He could become almost anyone on stage. Privately, he carried a pain he kept hidden. In Voices: The Danny Gans Story, his son Andrew Davies Gans sets out to tell that whole story, the legend and the man, in his directorial debut.In Episode 280, Christian Taylor sits down with director and

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07:35

When Is Silence Wisdom and When Is It Complicity? I...

Documentary First: Conversations on Documentary... ·

2026/06/11

When does refusing to repeat a lie become complicity in it?The hardest question in documentary filmmaking is not how to find the truth. It is how to handle a lie. When a false story is already loose in the world, you have two choices that look almost identical on the page: refuse to repeat it, or amplify it by debunking it. The discipline of knowing which is which can decide whether your film tells the truth or makes the lie stronger.In this Deep Dive on Documentary First Episode 279 with Brian

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52:04

Ep. 279 I She Was Here: Heather O'Rourke's Family...

Documentary First: Conversations on Documentary... ·

2026/06/04

Was the Poltergeist curse real, or did the world get Heather O'Rourke's story wrong for 38 Years?On February 1, 1988, Heather O'Rourke died at twelve years old. For nearly four decades the world has filled that silence with rumors. She Was Here, the new documentary produced by Brian Pocrass and directed by Nick Bailey, is the first authorized account of what actually happened, told by Heather's mother Kathleen, her sister Tammy, and the people who knew and worked with her.In Episode 279, Christian

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10:05

The Two Kinds of “Alone” Every Filmmaker Knows I Deep...

Documentary First: Conversations on Documentary... ·

2026/05/28

What is the difference between solitude and loneliness, and why does every creative person need to understand it?There are two kinds of being alone in creative work, and they are not the same thing. One makes the work great. The other wears you down to nothing. The difference between solitude and loneliness is the difference between sustainable creative life and creative burnout, and most of us never learn to tell them apart.In this Deep Dive, host Christian Taylor takes a single line from her

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55:10

Ep. 278 I Adapt or Die: A Working Filmmaker with AI...

Documentary First: Conversations on Documentary... ·

2026/05/21

Adapt or die. What does that actually look like for a working filmmaker?Chicago documentary filmmaker Armin Korsos has a working filmmaker's answer to the question every documentarian is wrestling with right now. If you're not using AI, you will be losing work to people who do. In this conversation, Armin walks through how he turned 20 hours of pre-production paperwork into 30 minutes, how he uses AI image generation to send 40 pitches in the time it used to take to send 8, and why he believes the

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08:45

Anthropic's $1.5B Mistake. Yours Could Cost More. I...

Documentary First: Conversations on Documentary... ·

2026/05/14

What does a $1.5 billion AI lawsuit have in common with your unwritten will?In September 2025, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle the largest copyright lawsuit in U.S. history. The reason was simple. They built first and cleared rights later. Documentary filmmakers have been making the same mistake for decades. And in this Deep Dive, host Christian Taylor argues that the lesson runs deeper than music licensing or AI training data. It is the same lesson Jesus taught in Luke 14, the same

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25:27

Ep. 277 I Why Does One Documentary Clip Cost $70,000?...

Documentary First: Conversations on Documentary... ·

2026/05/07

How much does the average documentary filmmaker's biggest licensing mistake cost?A 30-second Jackson 5 clip can run a documentary $50,000 to $70,000 in licensing fees. Veteran ARC Producer Teddy Cannon has spent a decade in the messy middle between production and legal, and he is here to walk Christian through how to keep your film from becoming the next case study.In Episode 277, host Christian Taylor sits down with Teddy to break down the role most documentary filmmakers overlook until it costs

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15:33

The First Generation to Live Shorter Lives Than Their...

Documentary First: Conversations on Documentary... ·

2026/04/30

What if the documentaries no streaming platform will buy are the ones that could save your kid's life?Today's children may be the first generation in American history to live shorter lives than their parents. That's the central argument of The 100-Year Effect, a documentary I watched at the Julian Dubuque International Film Festival the same weekend I watched two other films that turned out to be telling me the same urgent story.In this Deep Dive on Documentary First Episode 276 with Robin Canfield,

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51:14

Ep. 275 I Robin Canfield on Teaching iPhone...

Documentary First: Conversations on Documentary... ·

2026/04/23

Why do documentary subjects freeze for a professional camera - but open up to an iPhone?Robin Canfield shares why he films with iPhones, how he teaches documentary in twenty countries, and the communication skill he says every documentary filmmaker overlooks.Robin joins us from Saigon, Vietnam, during a four-week documentary program with international students. He shares why he switched from Canon cameras to phones, how his crews rebuild story structure at 1 AM using sticky notes on a wall, what

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12:44

They Wanted My Voice to Train AI - What Thoreau Knew...

Documentary First: Conversations on Documentary... ·

2026/04/16

Someone tried to harvest Christian's voice for AI training. The pitch was polished, the project sounded real. But when she responded with ten professional questions, the conversation ended. Permanently.In this Deep Dive on Episode 275, Christian connects that experience to her conversation with Erik and Christopher Ewers, the brothers behind the PBS documentary Henry David Thoreau. Chris Ewers argues that every technological revolution has felt like the end of the world — the Industrial Revolution,

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