15 Must-Watch Documentaries About Filmmaking

"Overnight" used to be a cautionary tale. Director Troy Duffy pulled the brass ring of all brass rings — a $300,000 paycheck for his first script, a $15 million budget to direct it, a recording contract for his band, and the guidance of the powerbroker that personally mentored Quentin Tarantino. All the circumstances that made his meteoric rise possible are extinct or incarcerated. It might as well be a "Twilight Zone" episode now.

But despite the devil involved, there is no catch. Duffy's implosion is a staggeringly fast series of unforced errors. He ridicules every actor interested — Brad Pitt, Keanu Reeves, Kenneth Branagh — based on, at best, a meeting's worth of interaction. "Success has nothing to do with how you live your life and how you treat your friends," he says amidst B-roll footage of dwindling allies watching their shared success circle the drain.

The off-camera punchline is that he sets it all on fire to make "The Boondock Saints." Once upon a time, "Overnight" was a car crash for indie dreamers to gawk at on their way to work. Now, it's a cannon act with no net, even more fantastic, and even more violent.

The human condition is captured between credits at a desk top-heavy with unopened bills. Aspiring filmmaker Mark Borchardt slits them one at a time and bemoans each fee like losing lottery numbers. In the last envelope, however, he finds a new Mastercard. "I don't believe it, man," he beams. "Life is kind of cool sometimes."

So it goes for Borchardt, though it doesn't take a Menomonee Falls mailing address to empathize. He lives shift to shift as a graveyard night janitor. What he doesn't accidentally blow on peppermint schnapps and long-distance calls to Morocco he sends to his three kids. Waking hours are spent with unfailingly supportive family and the usual local suspects, like amiably spacey best bud Mike Schank. But somehow, some way, he will complete his passion project, "Northwestern."

The method he settles on is shooting and selling another movie entirely. Production happens between delinquency notices, Burger King runs, and late-night loiters at the grocery store. It's the American Dream as a hang-out picture that just so happens to be non-fiction, enough to make anyone want to grab their friends and film something, credit cards be damned.

Filmmaking is a confidence game. Decisions made are compounding wagers against the self, with wins or losses months, if not years, away. "Hearts of Darkness" takes Francis Ford Coppola, an unstoppable force fresh from "The Godfather Part II," and crashes him into an endless series of immovable objects until even his basest instincts are shot: "I tell you from the bottom of my heart that I am making a bad film."

Knowing "Apocalypse Now" is one of the greatest films ever made stains each doubt fatal; the crew worry about finishing a movie, but have no idea how narrowly they finish the movie. Typhoons flatten the sets. Marlon Brando falters on the schedule, then the script. Harvey Keitel is fired a few weeks into production and Martin Sheen, his replacement, suffers a severe heart attack not long after. 14 weeks of rolling cameras turn into, give or take, an entire year. The meter's always running and always on Coppola's dime. 

In the midst of a historic disaster, Coppola asks the unaskable question that every filmmaker knows by heart: "Why can't I just have the courage to say, 'It's no good'?"

"If I abandon this project, I will be a man without dreams," says Werner Herzog, hiding behind a primal thicket of beard. This is not a documentary about the unmaking of a major motion picture, though the regular disasters are presented without varnish. "Burden of Dreams" is an unblinking stare at the inherent mania of filmmaking. Herzog knows that he's challenging all possible gods with the act of creation, but without daring to do it, he's less than human.

"Fitzcarraldo" is about a real-life dreamer, a rubber baron determined to haul an entire steamship over a mountain. The actual man did it piece by piece. His fictional counterpart, as written and directed by Herzog, saw no need for deconstruction. The agonizing drag transcends metaphor — Herzog's impossible boat is Fitzcarraldo's and his, Herzog's. Why is he hellbent on beating the odds, in an environment he hates that he suspects hates him back?

Documentarian Les Blank doesn't offer any easy answers or apologies for his subject, but by the end, he finds something like understanding. It's as close as any documentary gets to defining the indefinable compulsion that keeps filmmakers making.

When Keanu Reeves asks David Lynch if he's done shooting on celluloid, the filmmaker weighs it like a life sentence: "Don't hold me to it, Keanu, but I think I am." Such is the appeal of "Side By Side," an eavesdropped montage of directors and cinematographers passionately disagreeing with each other about the most fundamental process of filmmaking.

For his pioneering work in digital cinematography, George Lucas is referred to alternately as an egalitarian messiah and a reckless philistine. Take it as the rule: Battle lines are drawn sharp and wide, with little dynamic range between them. "I'm not going to trade my oil paints for a set of crayons," says Wally Pfister, Christopher Nolan's long-time DP. Early adopters like Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher, and James Cameron are never turning back. Computers will improve, but film can't. Digital means democratization, but more noise. And what of all the jobs that can't, won't, and haven't made the leap between?

The war still rages. The celluloid faction has lost considerable ground. The doc doesn't crown a winner, but that's the beauty of it — film or digital, "Side By Side" drags everyone into the fight.

Steven Spielberg fought Verna Fields in the editing room — also her pool house — over that darn shark. Every successful take cost him years of his life; the director wanted to see more of it. The editor, affectionately known as "Mother Cutter," wouldn't let him. Spielberg might've made "Jaws," but Fields made "Jaws" terrifying.

"The Cutting Edge" is both history and practicum. There are plenty of high-wattage anecdotes, like James Cameron learning the power of frames after disastrously removing one every second from "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," but the theory is the thing. Legendary editor Walter Murch defines his role as "the ombudsman for the audience," a band apart for their behalf. The Russian school of Kuleshov contradiction is celebrated alongside the softer emotional rules of the French New Wave. The only absolute is touch — every cut needs an artist holding the scissors.

Documentarian Wendy Apple sheds vital light on film's most invaluable, most invisible process. Editors spin straw into gold, even though their only reward might be Steven Seagal "playfully" demonstrating choke-out moves on them because they won't cut his fights the way he wants.

There's something perversely appropriate about a screenwriting documentary looking like a DVD extra buried three menus deep. With the exception of relevant film clips and B-roll footage trying to make the writing process look cinematic, it's wall-to-wall talking heads. The endless conversation is a feature, not a bug; nobody ever listens to screenwriters off the page.

"Tales from the Script" is equal parts frustrated tell-all and Scared Straight program. Viewers expecting a warm or poetic reflection on the form need not apply. This is about the Business with a capital-B. In the tough love words of "2010" director Peter Hyams: "If you're not prepared to do a lot of push-ups, don't enlist in the Marines."

There are few miracles here. There are only one or two accounts of the right script finding the right desk within the first hundred tries. The only thing more random than failure is success, something "Last Action Hero" scribe Zak Penn compares to "winning the lottery for something you actually did." Perspectives range from one-time wunderkinds to battle-hardened veterans. Acclimate to the despair in the air and there's a lesson for every screenwriter. The simplest comes from John Carpenter, the biggest pragmatist in any room: "Learn to love it."

There are independent filmmakers, and then there's Larry Cohen.

"Larry Cohen is so much the invisible man in relation to mainstream Hollywood," diagnoses screenwriter and critic F.X. Feeney. From his earliest days toiling in the mines of live television, Cohen was a conceptual prophet. "The Invaders" foretold "The X-Files." "Coronet Blue" foretold Bourne. A spec script he wrote for "The Naked City" in 1961 was eventually sold to "NYPD Blue" in 1995. What makes him, and the doc, essential is his spirit.

Herzog gets all the credit for encouraging filmmakers to break the law, but it was Cohen who staged a shooting in the middle of a New York City police parade without warning and convinced Andy Kaufman to pull the trigger. No obstacle or threat of self-preservation ever got in his way. And what if somebody stops him? "Who cares? What do they know?"

With its stolen airport fistfights and printed apologies for raining shell casings off the Chrysler Building, "King Cohen" is an anarchist's cookbook read by the man who wrote it, still proud of his recipes all these years later.