Movies with live soundtracks and narration - leavening film with serendipity and accident

The New York Times writer Dennis Lim wrote about an emerging arts phenomenon, movies with live narration and soundtrack music. Here's a description of how one director, Sam Green, stumbled upon the format:

The San Francisco filmmaker Sam Green introduced what he called the “live documentary” with “Utopia in Four Movements” (2010). In what amounted to a lavishly illustrated lecture-performance Mr. Green, a director of the Oscar-nominated documentary “The Weather Underground” (2003), stood before the audience, narrating and cuing images and clips while a band played live. The format proved such a success — he booked about 50 shows over two years — that he is repeating it for a second project, “The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller,” which will be performed at the Kitchen in Chelsea four times this week with a live score by Yo La Tengo.

As Mr. Green tells it, he discovered the form by accident. He was making a documentary on the concept of utopia and wanted to avoid a talking-head approach. He shot a few vignettes — a history of the universal language Esperanto, a portrait of an American exile in Havana — that each said something about idealism in an anti-utopian age.

“The connections were too oblique,” Mr. Green said in a recent interview. “I begrudgingly realized I had to explain more.” A friend suggested fine-tuning the material by showing it to an audience while narrating. What he considered a work in progress resonated so strongly with early viewers that it became the thing itself.

Again, as with live music, one of the appeals of this art form is the possibility for mistakes, accidents and serendipity:

Each performance of Mr. Green’s live documentaries — which he does not plan to adapt for conventional screenings or home viewing — is a singular experience, and a collective one, with the potential for human connection and human error. He said there have been occasional flubs but no major blunders, although one viewer was apparently so soothed by Mr. Green’s congenial tone that he interrupted the performance to ask a question.

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Documentary director: The more I let subjects speak for themselves the better

This exchange between interviewer Terry Gross and movie director Michael Apted says a lot about learning from mistakes and experience. Apted is the director of the "Up" series of films, that have followed a group of 14 people through their lives, with one edition every seven years. The first, "7Up," appeared in 1964 and interviewed the group as 7-year-olds. The latest edition, "56Up," is just out.

GROSS: So what was it like you? What's it been like for you every seven years to drop in on these people's lives and, you know, ask them about the landmark events that have happened in the seven-year interim?

APTED: What can I say? I mean, it's the favorite thing that I've done, the thing that I'm most proud of. It's nerve-wracking because you always think you're going to blow it, and you'll wreck the whole thing. It seems fragile. And I've learned a lot of lessons about it. I've made mistakes on it and had to correct those mistakes.

You know, particularly I got into a situation, I think, early on when I became judgmental about people, that if they didn't agree with my standards of success, failure, happiness, whatever, then, you know, that I would feel that they were lesser for it. And also I tried to play God. I tried to predict what might happen to people and sort of set it all up for that.

And I did that, and that was an embarrassing mistake. And I think what I've learned all the way through is the less I do, the better, that the more I let them speak for themselves because what's so interesting about the films to me is that they're all different.

Movie director Chris Weitz: "Animals never do what you want them to"

From Terry Gross' Fresh Air interview with director Chris Weitz ("A Better Life") as broadcast on June 22, 2011. Weitz discusses why he used computer-generated wolves in his movie "New Moon," part of the "Twilight" series:

GROSS: And one more thing about "New Moon." There are werewolves in it. The main werewolf is played by Taylor Lautner, but then there's, like, when they're actually the wolves, are those, like special-effect wolves? Are those, like, computer-generated graphic wolves or...?

Mr. WEITZ: Yes.

GROSS: So you didn't have to worry about directing large, unusual animals?

Mr. WEITZ: No, it's - we - it's best not to deal with animals because they never do what you want them to do.... In "The Golden Compass," we had mostly CGI animals, but I thought it would be very clever of me if the people who had gone through the sort of process to separate themselves from their spirit demons, with those people, we used actual animals.

And then I learned the joy of working with actual animals, especially multiple animals, which is that half of the time, they're looking for food or copulating.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. WEITZ: And that wasted a lot of takes.