Hoffman On Documentaries

I became a filmmaker because I have always been interested in personal stories. I am intensely curious and was never afraid to ask people any question, no matter how potentially uncomfortable it might be. I wanted to hear the personal experiences of others and then tell their stories in dramatic, entertaining and enlightening ways. I suppose I also asked questions to help me understand myself and my own life better.

I came from Levittown, a suburban community on Long Island and, being lower middle class, I hadn’t traveled except occasional summer trips to a small Maine island with my father who was an artist. I wanted to see the world.

I also had a strong feeling that so-called "important" people were really no more important than me and my friends - that ordinary people and the stories of their lives were as dramatic as the lives of the rich and famous. I believed that every person had at least one great story in them that they were just waiting to tell.

When my documentaries began to run on TV in the early days of PBS, I quickly found that a surprisingly large percentage of the audience liked real people stories. It made people consider their own lives. Dramatic fiction films can do this is as well, of course, but there is something about the documentary and its simplicity that is quite unique - people just telling you how they live, how they see things, what happened to them - and the results can make you laugh and cry and provoke you, haunt you, change you.

Are my stories “true?” All films are made in the editing room, and although I tell stories about real people, my films are carefully edited. As I see it, my job as a filmmaker is to put together a story that holds the audience (in other words, prevents them from grabbing for the remote) and presents them with the essence of something. I feel that all of my films reveal a bottom-line truth, the underlying feelings people have, the ways that they would articulate things if they had the skills, the time, and the money to reveal themselves exactly as they would want to.