“You Have to Trust That the Story Will Reveal Itself”: Top Doc Directors on Following Real Lives When the Stakes Have Never Been Higher

The directors of six of this year’s standout nonfiction films gathered for The Hollywood Reporter’s Documentary Roundtable in mid- November to reflect on the challenges and rewards of their work. The group comprised Oscar winners Laura Poitras (Netflix’s Cover-Up, a portrait of investigative journalist Seymour “Sy” Hersh) and Mstyslav Chernov (PBS’ 2000 Meters to Andriivka, which follows a Ukrainian platoon as it fights to reclaim a Russian-held village); Oscar nominees Petra Costa (Netflix’s Apocalypse in the Tropics, examining the rise of Christian nationalism in Brazil) and Raoul Peck (Neon’s Orwell: 2+2=5, exploring George Orwell’s enduring relevance); and Gabe Polsky (Area 23a’s The Man Who Saves the World?, about Patrick McCollum, an American convinced he’s destined to fulfill an ancient prophecy) and Mariska Hargitay (HBO’s My Mom Jayne, a study of the filmmaker’s late movie-star mother, Jayne Mansfield). While they took very different paths to these films, it turns out they have arrived at many of the same concerns about the future of nonfiction filmmaking.

Before we talk about your 2025 documentaries, let’s discuss how you wound up making docs in the first place.

RAOUL PECK Coming from Haiti, film, and documentary in particular, was something I started doing because I felt I had no choice. It was so people like me, from the Third World, could have a voice in the state of the world.

LAURA POITRAS I was always a big watcher of cinema, but I thought it was something you needed a big orchestra to do. Then I took a summer class at the San Francisco Art Institute, which was known for experimental avant-garde cinema. They gave me a camera, and I fell in love. I collaborated on a [2003] film with a great artist, Linda Goode Bryant, called Flag Wars, and that was when I learned about doing portraits of people and how, through those portraits, you can make a larger critique of society.

MSTYSLAV CHERNOV I was a sailor for five years. Then I went back to Ukraine to be a journalist and a photographer. Then the [2014] Maidan Revolution started, and we were all forced to become war photographers, videographers and writers. Years later, [the 2022 siege of] Mariupol happened, and by that time I wanted to be a filmmaker. I said to my editors, “Look, I can’t make journalism about it right now. I need to make a film.” And it all started there. [Chernov won the best doc feature Oscar for 2023’s 20 Days in Mariupol.]

PETRA COSTA [After making a few very personal docs,] I happened to watch Patricio Guzmán’s [1970s doc] The Battle of Chile and had kind of envy, like, “Oh, I wish I had lived through such a historic moment and was able to document it.” Then three months later, Brazil started having the same kind of political upheaval with a parliamentary coup against the first female president [Dilma Rousseff], so I started documenting that [in 2019’s The Edge of Democracy, which was nominated for the best doc feature Oscar] and have been in that rabbit hole for the past 10 years.

GABE POLSKY I was a hockey player. When that ended after college, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I had a roommate who was doing a lot of sketch comedy and writing, and that inspired me. I realized I enjoy connecting with audiences and changing how people think. I considered journalism and then filmmaking. I started off producing but realized it’s too indirect; you’re serving someone else’s vision. I needed to be more hands-on and had things to express myself. So the only thing to do was to try to do it myself.

MARISKA HARGITAY I’ve had the good fortune of working on [NBC’s Law & Order] SVU for 27 years and constantly having the power of storytelling affirmed. Because the show deals with sexual assault, it was a life-changing job, in that I started as an actor who wanted to express myself, and then, when I learned about the prevalence of sexual assault and domestic violence and child abuse by doing research for my character, I couldn’t believe the statistics. I couldn’t believe that everybody wasn’t talking about this. I also learned through the show the healing power for people of having their story told — it made them feel in community and not alone. In 2009, I learned from Human Rights Watch about the backlog of untested rape kits. I was trying to think of the most powerful way to share this news, and for me, it was through film. When I produced [the 2017 HBO doc] I Am Evidence, everybody said to me, “Are you going to do a film about your mother [actress Jayne Mansfield]?” I said, “No, I’m not,” because I wasn’t ready.

Can you pinpoint why you were ready when you were ready?

HARGITAY I’d had a lot of PTSD from the car accident when I was 3 [that claimed her mother’s life], so I wanted to be really careful. But I did a lot of trauma work, therapy, something called parts work and internal excavation, and realized that, after I did this work, I got so much internal space back. When somebody has PTSD and is traumatized, especially as a child, you don’t have the words. I would get these feelings, not knowing what it was because I didn’t understand what to compare it to. Sometimes I’d be driving and I’d have to pull over — I couldn’t be trapped. There were a lot of things that I didn’t fully understand. But I went deep and excavated that; it was an archaeological dig, both on my family and on myself. I wanted to untrap myself, and I wanted to be free. After I had done so much work that I felt like a different human, I went, “Oh my God, I can tell the story.”

Laura, you’ve been wanting to tell Sy Hersh’s story for 20 years. Why’d it take so long?

POITRAS I documented the war in Iraq. As I was preparing to go there, his story on Abu Ghraib, and the photographs, were published. It was heart-stopping that this torture was happening, and at a time when most of the mainstream press was cheerleading for the war and not asking adversarial questions of the government. Then, within weeks, I was in Iraq — I actually filmed at Abu Ghraib — and then came back and was editing. I knew that the so-called War on Terror wasn’t ending anytime soon and that my next film was going to continue on this, and that there was a crisis in investigative journalism, with Sy being an example of the opposite, so I called him up. I went to his office in D.C., and there’s Sy, with his tennis rackets, leaning back and asking, “What do you want?” We talked for 40 minutes. I was desperate to make this film, just based on his body of work. He could’ve been not such an interesting guy, and I still would’ve been interested, but once I met him, I became obsessed. But he left me a message, saying, “I love your work, but unfortunately even with the sources that live down the street from me, I have to go to other cities or countries to meet them, and there can be no cameras following.” Every now and then, I’d be like, “Hey, Sy, checking in. Maybe now’s the time?” Then I ended up making [the 2014 Oscar-winning Edward Snowden doc] Citizenfour, which was, in a way, also about journalism, and [the 2022 Oscar-nominated doc] All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which taught me about working with archival material and doing a large scale of history, with Nan [Goldin, the latter film’s subject]. It was also half a century, and her archive was very personal, but it was a great experience. So I reached out again. Sy had a longtime collaborator, Mark Obenhaus, and we decided to do it together.

An equally colorful character is Patrick McCollum. Gabe, how did you first hear about him?

POLSKY I got a call out of the blue from a producer who works with Jimmy Kimmel. We’d been wanting to work together, and he said, “Would you get on the phone with this guy Patrick?” Patrick told me this story about Indigenous elders of the Amazon coming to him and saying, “We think you’re this guy in the prophecy that’s going to help to unite the tribes of the Amazon.” I thought he was crazy, but something inside me wanted to know more. I met Patrick and started getting to know him, and it was like a machine gun of one insane story after another. I’d never met anyone that strange and fascinating. He seemed to have done everything from being a carny to a jewelry designer to a peacemaker. He was a kung fu master, a welder and a race car driver. He was best friends with Jane Goodall. It was almost overwhelming. But I knew at the end of the day, whether this prophecy was real or not, that he had something really deep to say, and I could learn a lot from him.

Petra, how did you convince Brazil’s political archrivals, Lula — whom you’d interviewed for The Edge of Democracy — and right-wing leader Jair Bolsonaro, to cooperate with you, along with Malafaia, a powerful televangelist?

COSTA As soon as Lula came out of prison [where he served time for corruption charges] in November 2019, I was contacting him and his team asking for an interview, and it took until four days before the 2022 election for them to finally accept. It was 10 hours waiting in a hotel, then he canceled, and then the next day he had pity and said, “OK, come have breakfast with me.” That was the best thing because it was a completely unguarded interview in his house, where he said things that he would never have said in a hotel setting. With Bolsonaro, I had the luck of filming him when he was the easiest congressman to have access to. For two years, he was desperate to have attention and was perceived by the entire media as a joke — and then he was elected president. With Malafaia, we decided to work with a journalist that had been covering the evangelical movement in Brazil since 2010, so the first interview with him she conducted alone and then she told him about us. We told him that we wanted to follow him for years, and he was willing.

Mstyslav, you didn’t have to put yourself in the middle of the fight for Andriivka, but during the 20 Days in Mariupol awards season, you began embedding with the Ukrainian troops. Why?

CHERNOV After Mariupol, I had an editor call me and say, “Mstyslav, you don’t have to do any of this anymore. Just get out of the country.” I said, “I can’t.” I kept looking for a story — not a story of Ukraine being a victim, but a story of being small and unable to really win the fight for your house, but still not giving up. Then, Mariupol started coming out here in L.A., and I kept traveling between Ukraine and screenings. It was so weird: Barbie, Oppenheimer and  20 Days in Mariupol — I remember taking pictures of those posters all together, not knowing how to feel about it, and then going to the BAFTA Tea Party and someone asking me, “Are you someone’s security guard?” I had this military coat on because I didn’t have time to change. So that was weird. Meanwhile, everything in Ukraine was on fire. I realized I could not tell that story from a distance. You just don’t have the moral right of being outside when you’re telling [a story] about someone literally dying in front of their friends. I never exposed myself to as much danger as any soldier would, and a lot of scenes in my film were filmed by soldiers themselves, but I couldn’t allow myself to be far away and observing.

Raoul, your film is entirely in George Orwell’s words, but you juxtapose them with images of the present.

PECK It’s about our reality. Orwell gives us the tools to understand what’s going on. He connects the dots. I believed that he was a science fiction writer, but no, he was talking about what he went through. He went through war as well. He understood the mechanism of power and politics, and he saw through it. He wrote about what he was seeing and living through in Europe at the time. His books weren’t just about Stalinism or fascism, they were about democracy and how democracies can become authoritarian as well. We are in the middle of that right now.

Some of you embarked on these docs having no idea where they’d lead you. Did you ever wonder if you were on a fool’s errand?

POLSKY I would ask myself, “What am I even doing here?” It was an existential, spiritual and psychic crisis. But I felt that you go with your intuition. As I’ve gotten more experience, I’ve come to realize that whatever happens, you’re going to be able to weave something meaningful out of it. You just have to trust that the story will reveal itself to you.

POITRAS I was really nervous. Sy had quit many places [where he had worked]. We were about a year into production, and I was like, “He could be quitting.” [Hersh, concerned about compromising his sources, told Poitras that he was walking away from the project.] But I was also thinking, “How generous of him to quit on camera,” because at least we can explain it in the film and don’t have to do a text card! (Laughs.) We also knew that Amy Davidson, who had edited Sy at The New Yorker, had a rule, because Sy had said “I’m quitting” a lot. If he said he was quitting, she didn’t call [New Yorker editor-in chief] David Remnick. But if he said, “I’m quitting and I spoke to Liz [his wife] about it,” then she would be like, “I have to talk to David because he might really be quitting.” With us, he came back pretty quickly, and with a completely open heart.

Can we talk about how the presence of a camera affects subjects? How long does it usually take before people let their guard down?

COSTA I think they’re actually always performative and always aware of the camera. If there are moments when the camera disappears and they have only the mic, then they can forget that they’re being recorded and you get some unexpected moments. Then it’s a question of how moral it is to use that. We had some things like that that we decided not to use because the character wasn’t really aware that we were recording, so I thought it wasn’t ethical. But, yes, they’re always aware of the camera, especially politicians — they’re actors.

CHERNOV It’s about establishing your role: Who are you? Are you filming from the perspective of a journalist? Are you just one of the guys? Are you investigating them? Are they performing for you? When I was filming in Mariupol, I was a journalist who came to try to tell a story. When I was filming 2000 Meters to Andriivka, I was not a soldier, but I was still joining them in their absolutely devastating and insane path to their goal, and you see me having conversations with them — you can’t even call them interviews, just conversations. We argue whose university is better. We talk about whether normal cigarettes or rolled cigarettes are better. All this stuff. Because that’s the role.

Mariska, one of the cool elements of your film is seeing you discover things — during interviews, in a storage facility, on a property that your parents used to own. Were cameras always rolling?

HARGITAY No, I was busy shooting my show. I would have a day off and I’d go, “Let’s go, we’re going to Vegas!” The first thing that I shot for the film was the interview with my biological father. I just did it when I could around my shooting schedule. And my edit took over a year.

POITRAS Your editing is so good. I mean, the turns and the reveals are extraordinary. You look back and realize you’ve planted seeds that pay off. Like at the beginning, they call you “Maria.” I’m like, “Why Maria?” But you don’t dwell on it, and it’s answered later. It’s so beautifully crafted, and the edit and the archival is just extraordinary.

HARGITAY The archival was truly the heartbeat of the movie and turned out to be such an incredible gift to me. This was a story about me trying to find my mother, to find out who she was “behind the pose.” [Mansfield’s] high voice made me feel so uneasy. To go from the beginning of the movie, where I was like, “I can’t handle the voice,” to the end of the film, where there was a scene — it didn’t make it in — where I was just laying on the couch, listening to her recite poetry and singing? To go from being repulsed to being utterly nurtured was an extraordinary journey.

One could search for more archival material, or conduct additional interviews, or keep editing, forever. How do you know when to stop?

PECK When to stop is a discussion I have with my editor, Alexandra Strauss, who I’ve made at least eight films with. I basically made a certain amount of choices of text from Orwell and gave it to her with a list of archival footage referring to each line or each paragraph, and I let her in the editing room for a week, and I came back, and it was there. We can always decide to look for more or better archival, but what kind of archival we were looking for, we knew more or less.

Let’s talk about the challenges of getting docs out into the world. PBS, which is distributing Mstyslav’s film, has been largely defunded by the Trump administration. Other distributors are afraid to touch certain subject matter.

CHERNOV We were very lucky in that we were able to finish the film, but now seeing people getting fired and everything being defunded and questioned and scrutinized? It’s hard. I had conversations with some bigger studios, and everyone was asking me, “When are you going to finish it? How is it going to end?” Very specific questions for films where it’s not necessarily clear how they are going to end or whether you’re going to be alive. That’s not OK for most of the big players because they need a plan, they need to be safe.

PECK Today is extreme, but films that go against the grain, that are radical, have always had difficulty getting distributed. It’s nothing new. What is new is that even the entities that claim to be progressive …

COSTA … are preemptively capitulating.

PECK It’s self-censorship.

POITRAS I mean, No Other Land [last year’s best doc feature Oscar winner] shamefully didn’t have a U.S. distributor. There was an audience for that film. It was a great film. But it was the institutions that didn’t support it.

COSTA Any film on Palestine will not get distribution.

What was your honest reaction when you heard that Amazon had agreed to pay $40 million for a Melania Trump doc?

PECK I would call that corruption. That’s what it is.

When you’re thinking about what to do next, do you consider that the majority of documentaries that now find distribution are about sports and/or music and/or true crime and/or celebrities?

PECK You don’t self-censor yourself in the beginning and say, “I will do this film only if I will be able to find a distributor.” You say, “That’s a later problem.”

HARGITAY I have a film right now [that she is executive producing] that people are scared to touch. I don’t want to talk about it. But the things that are said to me about it are horrifying: “We don’t really do that. We do things more for the masses.”

COSTA “We like happy endings.” Have you heard that one?

HARGITAY This censorship now in America is scary because we …

POITRAS … didn’t think that was part of us. And it is.

This story first appeared in a December stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.