If you’re starting out in the film industry as a director, there’s a few quality making-of documentaries and filmmaker commentaries that aren’t just actors marketing a film. Warts-and-all reality is how I learned from the best.
Of course make sure you watch the films before diving into the docs and commentaries if you haven’t seen them.
First of all, I absolutely recommend you study Ellen Coppola’s 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness about the personal hell her husband Francis Ford went through financing 1979’s Apocalypse Now himself. It’s probably the greatest warts-and-all making-of doc ever made.
Norman Jewison: Filmmaker is the de facto making-of doc for Fiddler on The Roof — my second-favorite film of all time — and it is a brass knuckles look at Jewison getting dirty in the trenches making that film. It’s about him rather than the making of Fiddler. Unlike many other BTS docs, this one shows the director actually directing. I enjoy his interactions with many of the crew, especially cinematographer Ossie Morris BSC, a personal hero of mine (he also shot The Dark Crystal).
Lost in La Mancha is a simultaneously insane and heartbreaking artifact that rose from the doomed 2000 first attempt at making The Man Who Killed Don Quixote by Terry Gilliam. The doc is the only thing that exists from that failed production.
A great foreign language making-of doc is Burden of Dreams that tells the chaotic production of Werner Herzog’s fantastic 1982 film Fitzcarraldo.
If you’re in the mood to purchase physical discs, you can find some goldmine audio commentaries by Ridley Scott for several of his films, particularly The Duelists, Blade Runner, Gladiator, Blackhawk Down, and, of course, Alien. Each commentary of Scott’s is a masterclass in A-list film directing. And these are all great movies in their own right.
For a glimpse at the genius and class, the following video is Sir Ridley Scott being interviewed by director Kevin Reynolds (The Count of Monte Cristo) about 1977’s The Duelists, which did not get all the good press it deserved because it was unfortunately overshadowed by a certain, far more commercially successful, 1977 film.
Another track I highly recommend is John Carpenter’s commentary on The Thing along with star Kurt Russell. This is probably the most fun commentary track of all due to the chemistry between the two filmmakers, but also a great exploration of Carpenter’s creative process, as well as the pain of dealing with the red tape during his first studio feature. The Thing ultimately did not do well at the box office due to another, friendlier extra-terrestrial 1982 film released by Universal.
On YouTube there are certainly some content creators producing decent studies on film. I recommend the channels CinemaTyler, Dan Fox, Every Frame A Painting, and American Cinematographer.
Of course, the grand daddy of all internet reviews is RedLetterMedia’s epic Star Wars Episode One feature-length review, which carefully dissects every flaw of that movie, standing as a perfect Film School 101 lesson in what not to do.
The official making-of doc for Episode One is actually superb as it does an excellent job exploring the nuts-and-bolts of many skilled technicians and creatives coming together to ultimately producea highly flawed film.
It’s hard for me to recommend most other BTS stuff as it’s mostly popcorn and fluff so you aren’t going to learn anything except maybe how good actors are at waxing poetic during a marketing interview.
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