By Joe Flint
Lisa Nishimura's job is to be on the lookout for the unusual
story that even the Hollywood fantasy machines can't make up.
"So many of the richer stories live in nonfiction," says Netflix
Inc.'s vice president of independent film and documentary.
Ms. Nishimura, 48, has had a knack for getting those stories on
Netflix, which is becoming as well known for its documentaries as
it is for original movies and television shows. The true-crime
miniseries "Making a Murderer," "Taylor Swift: Miss Americana," Ava
DuVernay's critically acclaimed "13th" and Errol Morris's
genre-bending "Wormwood" are among the documentaries Ms. Nishimura
has greenlit over a decade plus at the streaming-video giant.
Now, in the pandemic, she has become a tastemaker with
quarantine streaming's must-see: "Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and
Madness," another project Ms. Nishimura championed. It has become
one of Netflix's most-viewed original shows ever since it premiered
in March.
Ms. Nishimura recently spoke to The Wall Street Journal by video
from her home in Los Angeles, where she has been in lockdown since
mid-March. Here are edited excerpts:
WSJ: Are you hearing pitches now?
Ms. Nishimura: Most definitely. Some either via Zoom or through
Google Hangouts. It's always wonderful to be able to see one
another. It's helpful to see certainly if they have visual
materials. But more than anything, I just love seeing the
filmmakers' expression. You understand their enthusiasm. You get a
better sense of what the vision is.
WSJ: Documentaries seem to be gaining popularity. What in
particular is bringing more awareness to the form?
Ms. Nishimura: We've always had a recognition and appreciation
for the craft and the form. Historically, however, documentaries
have fallen victim to inconsistent funding and a very disaggregated
distribution model. What we bring to the table is a scale and a
global arena for filmmakers to engage audiences. We make it pretty
convenient for people to sample.
WSJ: When many of us were kids, our eyes would glaze over at the
word 'documentary.' Now it's a genre often more innovative than
traditional movies and television. How has storytelling
changed?
Ms. Nishimura: Not every documentary has to feel like
seventh-grade science class, right?
We worked with Errol Morris on his very ambitious series,
"Wormwood." He has 12 different camera angles trained on one
subject, all because it is in relation to this idea of the collage.
We're very complicated beings as humans. We're multifaceted,
multilayered and he has a visual language that's attached to that.
Then he goes further and has scripted, fully narrative elements
that he's interweaving.
Bringing innovative storytelling, bringing these new techniques,
and being really rigorous about the storytelling universes people
want to explore is incredibly important to making stories that can
be broadly enjoyed.
WSJ: How surprised were you by "Tiger King's" success?
Ms. Nishimura: You can never truly know. You can have an
intuition and an instinct. When I heard the first pitch on "Tiger
King," there were elements reminiscent of "Making a Murderer." The
filmmakers had been committed to their subject over a long horizon
of time and had an incredible amount of footage that was vérité and
first-person.
WSJ: If I were pitching a documentary to you, might I look at
Tiger King and say, "Well, clearly the more outlandish, the
better?"
Ms. Nishimura: We're not trying to be sensationalistic in our
storytelling. The way in which a filmmaker chooses to handle and
present a story that's sensitive, whether it happens to be
something in the judicial system, whether it's somebody's own quest
to recognize and realize who they are in the world -- these are
deeply personal stories.
WSJ: How comfortable are you with re-enactments in
docu-storytelling?
Ms. Nishimura: There are some cases where a re-enactment is
enhancing. Every story is different. We have documentaries like
"Crip Camp," (about how Camp Jened, a camp for disabled children
and teens, helped inspire the 1970s disability rights movement.)
There are no re-enactments. It's not necessary because they cracked
open this remarkable archive for us to swim inside and we had
access to current subjects. Same with "Wild Wild Country," (a
documentary about a cult and its clashes with the Oregon community
where it resided.)
This is the fun part of sitting with a creator and understanding
the story you want to tell and the tools that you have to tell
them.
WSJ: Do you have enough docs to get everyone through the rest of
this year and into next?
Ms. Nishimura: We have a pretty rich pipeline. We have a whole
release schedule of films and series that are either complete or
near complete. We're also active in the acquisition market. So we
still have folks who have finished films coming to us and we are
evaluating those as well.
WSJ: How are documentary filmmakers -- who already operate on
shoestring budgets -- affected by the economic fallout of the
coronavirus?
Ms. Nishimura: The whole filmmaking community is going to feel
the effects of this for a long time. And it's not just documentary
filmmakers. It's people who work day-to-day, job-to-job. We've
created a $150 million hardship fund, primarily focused on our
productions and that includes our documentary productions.
WSJ: Have you been pitched any coronavirus documentaries?
Ms. Nishimura: What do you think, Joe? Think I've gotten a pitch
or two? Yeah, we've certainly heard some pitches. For us, it's
about: Can this be done safely? And how do we think about it? We're
not in active news, so a lot of the consideration is around what is
the perspective and what is the take? The benefit of time is going
to give more of a rich story of exactly how all of this has come
about and the global response to it.
Write to Joe Flint at joe.flint@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 10, 2020 09:14 ET (13:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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