"From Reality to Story: My Documentary Process"

I came to film from music. Fifteen years of making it, then producing and engineering it, before a chain of events I didn't plan put me on a beach in north-east Brazil filming surfers.

That route shows in how I work. I still think about a documentary the way I'd think about a record: not as a sequence of shots, but as something with a tempo, a voice and a moment where it has to land.

Here's the process, from the beginning.

Before anything, find out what the film is about

A subject isn't a story. "A surf school in Hossegor" is a subject. What makes it a film is why the person running it does that rather than something easier, and what it costs them.

I don't start filming until I have some idea of that, and the only way to get it is to spend time with people without a camera between us. First visit, nothing in my hands. Watch how the place works, who arrives first, what happens in silence.

It feels like a wasted day and it's the most useful one.

Let the camera become furniture

A lens pointed at someone early makes them stiff, and that's a completely normal reaction.

So I film hands first. Waxing, sanding, pouring, sorting, carrying. Nobody has ever been self-conscious about their hands, and it gives me real material while the person gets used to me being there.

Faces come afterwards, and by then they come easily.

Never build an interview set

The moment you place a chair, choose a background and set a light, the person understands they're being interviewed. From there they choose their words.

I talk to people while they're doing something: walking to the water, cleaning up at the end of the day, driving to a supplier. Hands busy, attention elsewhere, and the conversation stops being the task.

The one thing I insist on is a small clip-on microphone. Rooms echo, wind ruins everything, and a voice recorded from across a space is often unusable. It's the only piece of equipment that genuinely changes the result.

Ask loosely, then say nothing

Precise questions produce precise, lifeless answers. "How long have you been doing this" produces a number.

What opens people up is room: tell me about that day, what did that feel like, what would you do differently now. Then silence. The three seconds after someone finishes are where the real sentence usually arrives, and resisting the urge to fill them is the hardest habit to learn.

An hour of conversation for ninety usable seconds is normal. That ratio isn't waste, it's how long it takes for someone to stop performing.

Sound is half the film

This is where the music years show most.

I record ambiences separately and constantly: wind in the pines, a van door, wax on a board, a room before anyone arrives, the sea from far enough away that it's texture rather than subject. Thirty seconds of each, gathered while the light is no good for anything else.

Those recordings hold an edit together in a way music alone can't. And unlike almost everything else on a shoot, they cost nothing but remembering.

Music comes last, if at all. On the film I'm editing at the moment, a documentary about a French swimmer who won Olympic gold, I'm writing the score myself, and even there the score arrives after the structure is settled. Music laid over an unresolved edit hides the problem instead of fixing it.

The edit is built around one sentence

Somewhere in the recordings there's a single line that holds the whole thing: the reason, the cost, the pleasure. I look for it before I cut anything.

Once it's found, the film organises itself around it. Sometimes opening on it, more often keeping it for the end.

And from that point the images stop illustrating the words. They give them room. A hand, a road, a look out of a window. That gap between what you hear and what you see is the difference between a documentary and a corporate film with a voiceover.

Show it to them first

I show people their film before anyone else sees it, and I cut what they ask me to cut.

Now and then that loses a good moment. It also means the next door opens without my having to knock, which over a few years is worth considerably more than any single scene.

What it asks of you

Time, mostly. Several visits rather than one. Patience with silence. And a willingness to arrive without knowing what the film is, which is uncomfortable the first few times and then becomes the part you look forward to.

The other kinds of film I make are over here.