Ready to dive into some worlds you haven’t realized yet? Check out the Documentary Competition at Los Angeles Film Festival and you’ll find a unique list of films that explore stories about rehab, relationship dynamics, women in the literary world, and the monopolization of the global economy. Who are the rising talents behind these films? We got the inside scoop on their work, their journeys to the big screen, and their perspectives on the power of docs.

What was the most effective thing you did to gain the trust of your subject?
I think it was the other way around, the men I interviewed were effective in gaining my trust. They were completely transparent and this created an unimaginable flow.

Have you ever had your intended story turn onto a different path, and how did you deal with that?
The story did take a different path once the camera was pointed towards my personal story. It’s been a process and honestly I am still dealing with the choice I made to include some very intimate moments from our lives.   Ultimately, I am focusing on the issue that exists outside of way it continues to help mine.

Was there one moment were you most proud that you were able to capture?
I shot an interview with my iPhone 5s. It was spontaneous. It turned out to be a pivotal moment in my life and eventually it became one for the film.

If you could travel back in time to do a doc on any historical figure who would it be and how would you approach it?
I would do a film about Harriet Tubman (an African-American abolitionist, humanitarian). The approach and style would be vérité , 16mm-black and white.

Who would win in a fight: Michael Moore or Werner Herzog?
Oy… I’m going to leave that one alone!

Daphne McWilliams / director, In a Perfect World…

What was the most effective thing you did to gain the trust of your subject?
I read the novels of the authors I wanted to meet. I went to conferences of romance readers, romance writers, and romance scholars—and I listened to them. Most importantly, I went into this film without pre-conceived notions of the type of person who writes or reads romance fiction. I think the subjects of the film sensed that and trusted me.

Have you ever had your intended story turn onto a different path, and how did you deal with that?
Susan Donovan, one of the main characters in Love Between the Covers, writes funny contemporary romance novels. I’d interviewed her and when I posted a video excerpt from the interview I’d done at our website, I sent her a link. I didn’t hear from her, so I called to make sure she got the link, and discovered she’d been in the hospital and nearly died. She went through more than 20 rounds of surgery, and had to have one of her legs amputated.  When I first met Susan, she jokingly called the Romance Writers of America “the Romance Vipers of America.” That day on the phone, after her amputation, she told me, “I know what I said before, Laurie, but I take it back. When I got home after several months in the hospital, there were more than 20 local romance writers in my house. They’d cleaned it top to bottom, they’d filled my refrigerator and freezer with food, and they were in the middle of building me a handicap-accessible bathroom! It was one the most amazing moments in my life, and it renewed my faith in human beings.”  So I got my crew together, went to Hagerstown, Maryland where Susan was living, and shot her with her prosthetist and trainer, and also with the romance writers who cleaned her home and renovated her bathroom.

Was there one moment were you most proud that you were able to capture?
The queen of romance, Nora Roberts, is very disciplined and rarely agrees to interviews. (She writes five books a year, and, as she says “I keep my ass in the chair.”) When she’s interviewed, she’s almost always asked the same superficial questions. It took me a few years to get my interview with Nora, but when I did, she was open and funny and willing to talk about subjects she’s never been asked about. A woman was sitting outside the room where I was doing the interview. I asked who she was, and Nora told me it was Ruth Langan, a romance writer she met 30 years earlier at the very first conference of the Romance Writers of America. They roomed together then, and have been sharing a room at the national conference ever since! Clearly Nora, a multi-millionaire, does not have to share a room with anyone! But I thought their friendship said a lot about the community. I invited Ruth into the room and interviewed the two of them together.

If you could travel back in time to do a doc on any historical figure who would it be and how would you approach it?
That’s a hard one to answer. There are so many people I’d like to meet! However, I would probably choose to meet Martha Ballard, a midwife and healer who moved to Maine during the American Revolution and kept a daily diary for 27 years of her life, from 1785-1812. My first feature film was based on her diary. Because the writing she left behind is so cryptic, I had to make a lot of educated guesses (with the help of first-rate scholars) to recreate Martha’s life and world. It would be so interesting to find out how closely our portrayal came to the reality of Martha’s life!

Who would win in a fight: Michael Moore or Werner Herzog?
If we are talking about a fist fight, I’d have to say Werner Herzog probably has the longer reach, but Michael Moore has the weight advantage. If we are talking about an intellectual fight, it’s a toss-up.

Laurie Khan / director-writer, Love Between the Covers

What was the most effective thing you did to gain the trust of your subject?
We gained their trust by letting them know we saw the heroism in what they were trying to do. It was important that our subjects see their participation in the film as an opportunity to use their difficult life experiences for something positive—to inspire and empower others. It was really exciting for them to realize they could change other people’s lives through this film as well as their own. We were all really moved by their candor and humility through the process, and deeply respected the courage it took to be so open and personal.

Have you ever had your intended story turn onto a different path, and how did you deal with that?
Every day there was a new development. It’s just about being flexible. Recovery is an unpredictable journey by nature. And mountain climbing is too.

Was there one moment were you most proud that you were able to capture?
I think we’re pretty proud of the film’s opening scene. There were two rickety ice ladders the team had to cross on Mount Rainier, one of which traversed a 60 foot deep crevasse. Both of us decided to shoot as much as possible while crossing. But when Sam got halfway across, the rope in front of him got held up, so he was stranded in the middle for a few seconds. While waiting for the rope to loosen he managed to do a rack focus from the ladder down to the depths below.

If you could travel back in time to do a doc on any historical figure who would it be and how would you approach it?
Sam: Ernest Hemingway. During his post-war years showing the effect the wars had on him and his strange adventures along the way. (He once shot himself in both legs trying to fend off a huge mako shark from his boat). Because I love Hemingway and I often wish I was more like him but I am also very introspective and nonviolent person, and I think Hemingway was kind of a macho asshole. I’d love to make a doc that both celebrates and questions his genius qualities at the same time.

Stephen: Maybe Nostradamus… or Rasputin? Someone of that sort that captured the public consciousness by way of the stories they concocted. Either they were actual visionaries with mystical powers or they were just amazing charlatans. It’d be interesting to find out which. Hopefully it’d be the latter, because charlatans make great doc subjects—there’s always a chance the camera will be rolling for that one moment where the real person reveals himself behind the curtain of mystery. And I kind of live for that.

Who would win in a fight: Michael Moore or Werner Herzog?
Werner. No question. He ate a boiled shoe on a bet. The man is a beast.

Stephen Scott Scarpulla / co-director, A New High

What was the most effective thing you did to gain the trust of your subject?
I bought them beer.

Have you ever had your intended story turn onto a different path, and how did you deal with that?
I set out do a small film about American workers, and ended up telling a global story unfolding in real time. The story took me through innumerable twists and turns as I tried to understand the larger global economics that impact whether American workers get jobs in the clean tech industries of the future.

Was there one moment were you most proud that you were able to capture?
There’s a really lovely moment in the film when Eddie, one of the solar trainees takes his girlfriend Tierra to a drive-in movie. While Eddie was trying to enjoy a James Bond movie with his girlfriend, my DP Omar Mullick was in the backseat trying to save a scene with no light to shoot. With the use of the car light and the flashlight function on the iPhone, Omar manages enough light to film Eddie and Tierra, and then steps outside the car to capture the moment.  In documentary film, necessity really is the mother of invention.

Who would win in a fight: Michael Moore or Werner Herzog?
Werner Herzog would win any fight with Michael Moore, hands down. But only because Herzog might be my favorite voiceover talent in the world. Herzog’s German accented ironic observations on life are a sheer storytelling delight. I would pay any amount of money to hear Herzog do a reading of the children’s book “Go the F**k to Sleep.”

Shalini Kantayya/ director-writer, Catching the Sun

Jade Estrada / Film Independent Blogger