Directing the Non-Actor, Volume Three

Volume Three of filmmaker and educator James Blue's interview project gathers together the wide-ranging conversations he conducted with some of documentary cinema's most influential voices, from British pioneers Paul Rotha and Basil Wright to cinéma vérité revolutionaries Richard Leacock, the Maysles Brothers, and Jean Rouch.

This final volume of the series turns the central question of Blue's interview project-how do filmmakers coax authentic, compelling performances from non-actors?-toward the documentary tradition itself, revealing that the boundary between staging and spontaneity has always been more porous than purists admit. Across three sections spanning classical and staged documentary, faux documentary, and observational cinema, Blue's probing dialogues illuminate the passionate ideological battles of the 1960s and '70s between "Protestant" vérité absolutists and those who embraced a more "Catholic" openness to interviewing, reenactment, and provocation. The result is an unparalleled record of filmmakers grappling honestly with questions of truth, performance, and craft-and an indispensable resource for anyone who wants to understand how documentary cinema thinks about the real.

Directors and critics interviewed: John Boorman, Kevin Brownlow, Shirley Clarke, David Hancock, Stanley Jackson, William Klein, Gerald Krell, Richard Leacock, Terence Macartney-Filgate, Louis Marcorelles, Albert and David Maysles, Edgar Morin, Paul Rotha, Jean Rouch, George Stoney, Johan van der Keuken, Peter Watkins and Basil Wright.