Interview: Jennifer Beman, editor
Jennifer Beman has edited over 120 documentary films and non-fiction television programs, ranging from Michael Moore to Frontline and National Geographic. Editing stories is her life's passion, and she was kind enough to join me for a conversation about her process over the past three decades. (Edited for length and clarity.)
Listen and watch our unedited conversation on Youtube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts
How did you get started as a documentary editor?
I wanted to be an editor from pretty early on, mostly because I really bonded with my brother over watching movies. It was something that we went out and did together a lot, and I was attracted to the editing side of it. When I started working in Washington DC, my first internship was for a PBS show called Smithsonian World, and I just fell in love with it. I decided this is the kind of editing I want—documentary editing. There's so much to learn.
Every show that you're on is a deep dive masterclass in whatever the subject is, something that you never would've known about in other circumstances. You get to discover new things, listen to really smart people talk about it, and really spend time with the material—an eight-week or ten-week edit, or a six-month edit on this one topic. It's a really interesting on the world, I think.
What’s your first step when you're starting to work on a new film or program?
I talk to the person I'm working with about what their vision is, where they're going, and what it's about. Sometimes people give me things to read, but typically the first source is the material that they have. So I do a deep dive into that, and out of that comes this sense of what is this film about? What are people going to say? How are we going to tell this story? It's more like immersing yourself into the material.
There's a lot of patience in trying to do a pass and think, "I'm just going to watch, I'm just going to observe and see.”
It's all really interesting, but it's also the level of attention that you need for an extended period of time. You're not just listening to everything. You’re having to take every moment that you're seeing and ask, what does this moment mean? How is this moment affecting me? You've got to be constantly aware of yourself as the viewer and your reaction to the material as you're watching and pulling selects.
Are you in continual conversation with the director on what you were intending with a scene? What does that interplay look like?
It varies a lot. I'm trying to make my way through the story relatively on my own, based on the conversations that I've had with the filmmaker or the producer who has their ideas about where they're going. Maybe they'll give me what they think is a sort of shooting script, or maybe they've looked at all the material and they've put together some sort of outline. But that's something to keep on the side as a reference. You really have to follow the material. But then other times I've worked really closely with a producer or a director.
One of the things I've told people in the past is to not try to give me a shooting script. The thing that I want more from them is—you've got a bunch of scenes, for instance, that you shot—what are the meanings of those scenes and what do you think are the ideas that you're going to hang on that scene?
I've always thought that documentaries are kind of fractal. As you dive into a scene, it has beats too. And as you dive into even the level of a shot, it has beats. A shot begins and has a middle and an end.
You worked on Michael Moore's first film, Roger & Me. What was that process like working with him on his first film?
I had never edited anything. I was an assistant at Smithsonian World for a couple of years, and then I met Michael Moore and I offered to cut his demo reel for free. And then he had an associate producer that he brought with him from Flint, Wendy Stanzler, and she wanted to edit. So he said, can the two of you—completely novice editors who have never edited anything—would you edit my movie? And we were like, yeah!
It was such a great experience. We were editing on film. We had two Steenbecks in this grungy little office near Georgetown, George Washington University in DC. He had one little office, and then we were in the living room and all the film was in the bathtub.
I remember we got the beats of the story together pretty quickly, and he knew a lot about what he wanted. There were some scenes where he would go and shoot some interview with somebody and he knew there's this piece where this guy says this bit. There's one where he interviewed this guy standing outside of a plasma donation center, and the guy said, "Yeah, I'm here Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, but Saturday and Sunday they're closed." And that's kind of all we used from him. He came back from that shooting and said, here's the piece we want.
If you look at that film, it's like a bunch of little vignettes. And those vignettes, half of them probably, he knew what was going to be in that vignette, and we never even looked at the rest of the material. So the problem that we struggled with for a long time—we edited that for, I don't know, ten months—was what order to put them in. We'd take everything completely apart and put them on little cores, and then we'd rearrange them and then we'd sit and watch them again. And we did that for a really long time.
Finding the structure, and I think that's true for everything that I've worked on, takes the time. And a lot of scenes, a lot of scenes you cut the first time and it barely changes. And what changes is what order you put them in, how you transition from one to another, how the story builds.
How did that experience working with Michael Moore compare to working on some of other films like Frontline that are more absent of personality? And how do you adjust your editing to films that have such differing styles?
One of the things that was nice about working on Michael Moore's film so early in my career is it really set me off in a place of thinking that documentaries are wide open. They can be anything. His documentary, when that came out, was groundbreaking. This was not a kind of documentary that had been seen. There had been some things like that, but it was different and it was very personality-driven, and that was new.
A narration-driven documentary like Frontline has its place. Those are a great way of communicating complex issues. And then the range of documentaries that we have right now, the documentary styles that we have right now, is so vast and fun and amazing. I love working on all of them for different reasons.
I don't think there's one kind that is really a different way of approaching it. As an editor, you're still always looking for the moments—the things that really communicate deeply to the audience or quickly to the audience or emotionally to the audience. Even in a Frontline documentary, you're looking for those.
So in a lot of ways, I approach them all the same because we're trying to tell a story. We're trying to communicate to people. We are trying to captivate them and capture them on this journey that we're going to go on together. And how do we do that in whatever the style is that we've
This interview is part of The Radio Edit, a newsletter for documentary filmmakers.
Get it straight to your inbox by subscribing!
Documentaries often throw curveballs. What's an unexpected twist in your career that stands out, and how were you able to adjust to that and figure out how to keep going?
I've been on projects where the field crew goes out to shoot something and it didn't turn out the way they expected. They didn't get what they wanted. And I think some producers can have a hard time—they're so consumed with that. They didn't get what they wanted. And I look at it and I see, well, yes, you didn't get what you wanted, but look at what it is. It's something else.
That's one thing that an editor can really help with is to say, look at the footage you have and let's see what it can be that you shot. You have to clean your brain of all your expectations about what the footage is and follow what it is. And a lot of times those turn out to be great scenes. Those are really, really powerful scenes that are important.
And I've definitely had that as an editor where you're looking at really painful stuff. And you have to—because you're every moment trying to judge it for what it is—you have to open yourself up and leave yourself, to some degree, a raw nerve so that you could feel what it is. But then you've opened yourself up like a raw nerve and you have nightmares and you can't sleep because that can be one of the hazards of the job. But you have to open yourself up to all sorts of things.
As a filmmaker, I have the greatest respect for documentary filmmakers that put everything that they put into their film. And I come on for this brief period. They've already been working on it for years, and I come on and I work with them. We have a great experience, we make this great film, and then I go on to my next job. And now they've got to sell it. And they're just heroic people to me.
How do you build an emotional connection through your editing with the audience?
That's the big question, really. I build it with myself, right? I am the test case for does this touch me? I only have me to understand what's going on, so I use myself as the guide.
And then you show it to other people and you listen to what they say and they have a different perspective. I always think of it as I never want to let go of the hand of the audience. I don't want them to wonder why they're looking at this shot or why or what he just said. I don't want them to wonder unless them wondering is what we do want. Sometimes you do want them to wonder.
And then we use all the tools that we do to use. We use music and we use rhythm, and we use surprise and we use emotion. When do we want to see the person cry? And we're bringing all these tools together into this thing that is going to hopefully make people feel the way that we're trying to make them feel. The sound design and the rhythm of what someone's saying and the cutaway. An unmotivated cutaway and you've lost people. There's just a fine detail to every piece of it.
Have you seen a change in the documentary genre over your career and what are your hopes for the future?
Oh God, yeah a lot. I worked most of my career outside the Washington area, so that's my market. My dream was to work at National Geographic, which I did for many years. And I love natural history and science and all the things that National Geographic did and Discovery Channel. And that's what I raised my kids with, doing those kind of shows.
And then the styles would change over the years. Sometimes we'd do a tease at the beginning, the style of teases at the beginning changed periodically, or the amount of narration changed. The amount of narration that's in style has gone up and down. So a lot of stylistic changes.
And more like the feature documentary world has just exploded in the kinds of styles and things people are doing and the kind of footage that people are using to tell their story.
Then a year or two ago [the industry] all collapsed. I think everyone's trying to find their way now in a new world. A lot of the clients that I was going to just a few years ago, they're not making those things anymore that I was making with them. I'm looking for new clients, trying to figure out how to make work now that my kids grew up.
When my kids were young, my husband stayed home. He homeschooled our kids, so he was the stay-at-home parent. I raised my kids—our whole family—as an editor. When a job ended on Friday, I needed a new one starting on Monday. And I would take whatever there was and there was a lot of work.
Bow my kids are in college or we've paid for their college, and I'm really branching out. I want to do more feature documentaries. I've done a couple in the last couple of years and I've got one coming up. So I'm really leaning into that, which is good timing because the other stuff I was doing is kind of dead in the water, at least in the Washington market it is. And I think elsewhere as well.
I'm happy to be changing with that and trying to find new ways to market myself and meet more people, make more connections. We all have to find new ways to talk to filmmakers because the studios, Netflix, and all the big guys aren't doing any favors now.
I think that where documentary is now, what it looks like to me, is more real, more being in the moment and building stories out of those things really happening. You didn't set it up as a filmmaker. You went there. It would've happened whether you were there or not and you're filming. I think that seems to be the priority for documentaries now.
What are you working on next and how can people see your work?
I did a film a couple years ago, Call Me Dancer, which do really well in festivals. So many other great films did not get picked up for any kind of distribution, sp I can't tell you where to go see that, sadly.
The most recent film I did, about the Dalai Lama and Buddhism, it's playing at Buddhist festivals, but we're trying to figure out where else you can see it.
Right now I'm working on something for Maryland Public Television about the history of Maryland. As a Marylander, that's fun. I have a website but mostly I'm on LinkedIn and I try to post there a lot. I found that it's been really interesting to start to try to talk and write about the process of storytelling, how we build stories, how we think about footage, so whenever something occurs to me, I try to write it and put it on LinkedIn.
Looking for editing help with your documentary? Let’s chat.