Zack Canepari & Drea Cooper's "California Is A Place" showed me how independent doc shorts for online were possible, and also that they could be quirky, stylized and emotionally resonant. This, along with MediaStorm's short multimedia pieces, opened my world to that wonderful blurry space between film + journalism on the web.
What is your favourite documentary, and what did it change for you?
What's your favorite documentary? I'm glad you asked. It's Errol Morris's film Fast, Cheap & Out of Control I saw this film at a festival in college, and in a single viewing it completely changed my perception of what a documentary could be. Since then, I've had an unrelenting obsession with documentary film.
Faces of NPR questionnaire, KEDM / NPR, 27 February 2017 source ↗
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Mo Scarpelli
filmmaker and documentary director/producer
Recorded
Elaine Sheldon and Sarah Ginsburg, She Does questionnaire/interview page, She Does Podcast, 2015
source ↗
Jim Loehr
Performance psychologist; co-founder of the Human Performance Institute
I love ESPN’s 30 for 30. I adored the one on Andre Agassi. I love the story, the documentary on Ray Mancini’s life. This is food for my soul. I love the inside story because that’s kind of the world I live in. And a lot of the stories I can’t tell, but I have such deep appreciation when the honesty and authenticity of an athlete is out there.
Pete Adeney
Writer of the early-retirement blog Mr. Money Mustache
I’ve actually got a huge, huge list of documentaries that I’ve been meaning to watch, many of them collected from the guests in your Tools of Titans book. The one I did watch and enjoy is actually a series rather than a documentary; the remake of Cosmos. ... The topics he covered in those episodes was so stunning, and it was a great education for my son who is very, very into science himself. So that’s the documentary that stands out in my mind, probably the most interesting thing in the last five years, anyway.
Michael Gervais
Performance psychologist; host of the Finding Mastery podcast
I love documentaries. I really do. I think documentaries – I’m much more interested in non-fiction than fiction; just the way that I think about things. I can’t remember a documentary that I said, “That’s a bad documentary.” ... But as far as titles of documentaries? You know what was good was Amy. ... It was really good. The beauty and tragedy of an artistic genius.
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Ricardo Semler, Charlotte Cook, Brian Koppelman, Jim Loehr, Pete Adeney, Michael Gervais
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