Documentary interviewees can be guarded, and cannot recreate the immediacy of drama.
He's obviously not so loyal that he didn't lie to my face though.It's quite an unusual documentary in that the primary interviewee is on one level rendered un-interviewable because he is a proven liar.
A key interviewee in the documentary is Valerie Plame Wilson, the CIA agent whose identity was revealed after her husband, a former ambassador, wrote a newspaper editorial critical of the George W Bush administration.
Amy Winehouse does at least display some of the ska-loving unpredictable spirit of old Island but tellingly, unlike the queue of dewy-eyed interviewees in the documentary, she shares no sentimentality about the label and jokes about her confusion in thinking the A&R man who signed her came from Ireland.
All of my interviewees in this documentary seemed to have grown up in this hostile ambience, from regularly facing racist violence in their communities to the chilly rejection of the middle-class parents who warned their daughter off a relationship that they feared would result in 'mongrel children'.
In 1995, Schlesinger made a good interviewee in the definitive documentary about gay cinema, The Celluloid Closet.
According to one interviewee in the new documentary Cowspiracy, which landed on Netflix last week, milk is the enemy within all our lattes.
"There is no replacement for human bodies, standing as one, voices raised as one, making a political demand," asserts an interviewee in Disruption, a documentary featured on the People's Climate website.
Yet for all the stellar intentions; revelatory evidence; and thoughtful, wall-to-wall interviewees, this frustratingly overstuffed documentary indulges more in spraying buckshot than stalking a target.
But this film also poses questions about the role of the documentary.One of the film's interviewees calls the case "the first crowd-sourced investigation".
