Barbara Kopple on How Documentaries Have Changed Since She Won Her First Oscar and the Enduring Appeal of True Stories
variety.comAddie Morfoot Contributor In Barbara Kopple’s 40-plus year career as one of America’s greatest documentary directors, she has won Academy Awards for the seminal 1976 documentary “Harlan County, U.S.A.” a portrait of a Kentucky coal mining town in crisis, and for “American Dream,” a 1990 examination of a meatpackers’ strike at a Hormel plant in Austin, Minn.
A pioneer of cinema vérité that got her start with the Maysles brothers (directors of “Gimme Shelter” and “Grey Gardens”), she was most recently nominated for a News & Documentary Emmy award for “Desert One,” a doc about the 1979 Iran hostage crisis.
Kopple will be a keynote speaker at Variety and Rolling Stone’s Truth Seekers Summit on Thursday. She spoke to Variety about her decades-long career in nonfiction filmmaking.When you look at the documentaries you’ve made, what’s the through line that connects them?I don’t know if there’s a through line.
I think that they are all just stories. You could throw me a story about anything. I really love people, and I love telling their stories, and I feel so excited when I’m able to do that.Has the way you make films changed over the years?I don’t know that I’ve changed the way I make films.
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