Interview: Nic Davis, Director
Nic Davis is an Emmy award-winning documentary filmmaker, and the founder of 4:08 Productions. (And happens to be from my home state of Montana.) Nic was kind enough to join me for a conversation about directing documentaries and all the fun and challenges involved. (Edited for length and clarity.)
Listen and watch our unedited conversation on Youtube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts
How did you find your way into documentaries?
I've always been obsessed with film and music and media. Ever since I was a kid I was walking home from school and I was making up songs. I've always had this deep passion for music from my dad. And then I've also always loved film and movies and TV. I was going to the journalism school at the University of Montana, and during that phase of my life I started to merge the two worlds a little bit.
I was getting an education around using cameras and storytelling, and I was merging that with this love of music. I [started] reaching out to music festivals and being like, hey, I'd love to work with you and sort of collaborate. And so I started working with a couple of Montana music festivals.
I think I'm just also a student of life. I love to learn about different pockets of humanity. Through this career, I've interviewed dozens of the biggest musicians in the world and I've filmed with them on stage. I've worked with some of the highest level CEOs in the world. And I've told stories of just everyday people and people who maybe don't get like the normal glitz and glamour treatment but who have really powerful stories.
So I think that there's this passion for storytelling and adventure and getting to know people. And that led to the creation of my company.
When you're starting a new project, what's your first step to start working on it?
I've directed three features so far. Each one of them was, was very different. My model when I was younger was just sort of jump in and let's figure it out. And now I'm becoming a little bit more like, let's do a little bit more of a deep dive into this, into the storytelling of it first.
I think it's partially a symptom of getting bigger budgets, bigger crews. Like when you're dealing with that scale, you just need to do a little bit more pre-production work than when it's just myself, my director of photography and our producer. That's a different world than when you have some money attached and some bigger financial obligations that are attached or bigger crew or whatever it is, you need to have more prep going in.
Like I've started directing some stuff with slightly larger crews for my world, which is maybe like 10 to 20 people. And once you start to get to those larger crew sizes, you just have to, you know, you have to be prepped. So now I'm moving a little bit more into a bit of additional pre-pro time to map everything out and make sure things are pretty lined up.
The negative of that is maybe you're losing a little bit of the spontaneity of just going out and finding it. But hopefully there's a nice balance where you can have some degree of pre-pro, have things prepped, but you can also still leave in room to have some spontaneous little moments too.
What is a curveball that stands out in the films or projects you've done and how did you overcome that?
Oh my God. So it's like, which curve ball? Enormous is our film on the Gorge and we had such limited financial backing on that because it was our first feature. On screen we've got Dave Matthews and tons of artists, tons of incredible music. But the licensing of that was incredibly difficult.
Someone once told me production is constant problem solving. And it really is. You're taking all these creative inputs, you have this vision for how you want this thing to be. And sometimes the most difficult shoots turn out beautifully. Some of those hardest projects are some of the coolest.
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How do you create an emotional connection with the audience in a film through your directing?
The Gorge is a good example. It's not about a person. It's just about this place. And so there are so many different ways that anyone could go about telling that story. It could be a very dry, boring, logistical history of how the Gorge was created. That was one thing I was very conscious about is, how do we bring a human perspective to this place? Why is this place so important to people and how do we show that?
So we were experimenting with lots of different stuff. Like we were sending GoPros to fans and [asking them to] document your experience. We obviously talked a lot of artists to get their experience.
We [also] had made this Facebook page and Darren and Pat, two of the main characters in the film, had reached out on that Facebook page and told us their stories. And Pat's sister winds up dying from cancer and her wish is to have her ashes spread at the Gorge so she could be dancing on the cliffs forever. So to me, it's like, how do we bring in these very emotional human stories into an otherwise like non-human place?
You've directed the feature length documentaries and then also several short documentaries. What are the pros and cons of short docs versus long form docs?
A lot of it for me is, let's let the story dictate how long this film is. We feel like we've got at least a feature here. Like with Enormous or with the Ivan Doig project, we're like, we think we have at least a minimum broadcast hour.
And with both of those films, we explored longer cuts of them. And we wound up cutting them down a bit, because we didn’t want to stretch it out for the sake of stretching it out. We wanted to let the story dictate the length.
With the shorter projects, usually the shorts I'm doing are commissioned. So there's usually a rough length, whether it's five to 10 minutes. So there's still an element of letting the story dictate the length, but we know we're going to be within a certain frame.
Where do you see the documentary genre heading into the future, and where would you wish it could go?
I think what I see happening is there's a lot of tools. AI is creating all of these amazing new tools, which there's a lot of pros and cons to it, right? It's already becoming really difficult to tell what's real and what's AI. But there are also these incredible tools for being able to tell stories and create.
I'm curious to see. I'm just trying to make cool stuff and figure out how to bring interesting people together and make cool things. I feel like I'm an artist at heart. I love music. I love to create. So we'll see where the industry goes.
What's up next for you and how can people see your work?
For the last year or so I've been hunting for the perfect documentary project to dive into, something that's a little bit more music-focused again, and other commercial projects too. 4:08 Productions is our company and I'm @directedbynick on social.
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