I came to documentary filmmaking by accident. After switching majors in college a few times, I landed on a degree in English and social justice and assumed I would one day be a civil rights litigator. But through a series of missteps in the right direction I write to you today with two Emmy Awards, 10 nominations, and enough hours logged to feel, on good days, like I know what I'm doing. 

What drew me to documentary, initially, was the idea that I could make positive change through storytelling and the opportunity to see the world on someone else's dime. What I couldn't have known then—and wouldn't for many years—is that the practice of documentary storytelling turns out to be a contemplative practice of becoming a better human. Which is at least on par with free upgrades on Delta. 

The Koan at the Heart of Documentary Filmmaking

I first encountered koans in an intro to world religions course in college. In Zen Buddhism, a koan is a paradoxical question or statement designed to exhaust the analytical mind and catalyze sudden insight. The koan of documentary filmmaking is something like: the moment you think you know someone’s story, you stop seeing it. Which can be a little brutal, because it means the better you get at this work, the more you have to forget in order to do it well.

After years in the field, I'd developed a real feel for the work—pattern recognition in people, instincts I trusted, and shortcuts in process that maximized efficiency. My ability to "be really good with people" served me until it didn't. I could quickly decipher who people were (or so I thought) and built narratives around it, later realizing I often missed what was actually there.

The resolution to the koan is, not surprisingly, also Buddhist. Zen practitioners call it shoshin—"the beginner's mind," and we all know the adage: "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few." As a doc filmmaker, you want those many possibilities. You want the threads that pull, the surprise, the sense that people can challenge your expectations. Because if you start fitting someone’s story into a shape you've already created before you hit record, it doesn't matter how compelling that shape is: It's yours, not theirs. People are not patterns.

This discipline is harder than it sounds, because our brains are wired to do the opposite. This is why I think of documentary filmmaking, like yoga or meditation, as a contemplative practice. And why that practice is contemplative. Since this kind of “conscious seeing” isn’t our knee-jerk reaction, we must recommit to it, over and over again

What Research Says About Curiosity and Judgment

I'd been teaching a kind of  “conscious seeing” exercise in my doc class for a year or so—following intuition and noticing surprising threads in a conversation, particularly when people have told the same story more than once. Then I encountered the research of Angus Fletcher, a story scientist at The Ohio State University, whose work confirmed and deepened what I'd been observing in the field.

In his book Primal Intelligence, Fletcher observes that judgment works through labels: the moment we categorize someone, “She’s a classic soccer mom; He’s a bro; They’re all a bunch of social climbers,” we've closed off our ability to see what's actually unique about them. I should add that even a “positive judgment” (i.e., She’s an amazing soccer mom) leads to a dead end. 

The antidote, Fletcher found, is staying in the territory of specific, curious questions rather than rushing toward explanation. His research with U.S. Army Special Operations, some of the most effective listeners in the world, revealed something counterintuitive: more than 95 percent of the questions that surface the most revealing information are: What, When, Who, Where, and How. Almost never Why. As Fletcher puts it: "We all want to get to why, but the fastest way to miss it is to ask it." I can tell you firsthand the practice is active, difficult, and requires a sustained effort. But it keeps the proverbial aperture open.

Fletcher's research illuminates what happens inside a conversation, specifically how the questions we ask either open or close the person in front of us. But the practice I'm describing starts long before that. Like when you read an article about someone before you cold-call them, when a mutual contact introduces you to a potential client. If staying curious is the technique, then withholding judgment is the ethical underpinning of it. And in documentary storywork (and, I argue, in life), you can't really have one without the other.

Why This Contemplative Practice is Bigger Than Filmmaking

Documentary filmmaking has taken me to corners of the country I never would have found myself in otherwise, and introduced me to people I would have never encountered if I stayed in my own life. It has, and I cannot emphasize this enough, repeatedly shown me how wrong my assumptions are. It’s a humbling profession. 

But you don't need a film crew or a broadcast platform to practice this. The raw material of documentary isn't expensive equipment. It's life itself. It's the person sitting across from you at the coffee shop. It's the new neighbor whose name you've never learned yet. It’s the debate happening at the city council meeting you’ve never attended. 

The technical skills of filmmaking: framing, composition, the building blocks of a scene, are learnable, and I teach those, too. Anyone with a smartphone and a willingness to pay attention can begin practicing documentary storytelling. But the deeper practice, the one that actually changes things, is learning to see people. To stay curious. To withhold judgment long enough to discover who someone actually is, rather than who you thought they were.

What documentary has given me isn’t just an impressive reel of my favorite projects. It’s given me a new lens through which to move through the world, one that requires the same thing that any contemplative practice requires: showing up with fresh eyes over and over again.