What If You're Not Actually Failing? Deep Dive on Ep. 272 with Director Quinnolyn Benson-Yates
What if failure isn’t the enemy—but the training ground?That’s the question Christian Taylor explores in this episode of Documentary First: The Deep Dive, sparked by her conversation with filmmaker Qu...
5 Mar 16min
Episode 272 | Quinnolyn Benson-Yates on Epic Bill: Failure, Reinvention & the Filmmaker’s Endurance
Award-winning filmmaker Quinnolyn Benson-Yates made her first feature documentary before film school—and its seven-year journey from short film concept to PBS distribution holds lessons every indie fi...
25 Feb 1h 8min
Finding The Good Guys | Deep Dive on Ep.271 With Joe Amodei
How do you know if you’ve found a Joe Amodei—or a predatory film distributor?That’s the question Christian Taylor explores in this episode of Documentary First: The Deep Dive, after her conversation w...
19 Feb 17min
Episode 271 | Joe Amodei on Documentary Distribution: Budgets, Genres & Building Your Audience
Virgil Films founder Joe Amodei shares the hard truth: $250K is your budget ceiling, traditional marketing no longer is effective, and you must build your own audience.Joe has distributed films from t...
13 Feb 1h 5min
Why Viewers Forget 90% of Your Film | Deep Dive on Ep. 270
“People are going to watch your movie for such an infinitesimally small percentage of their life. What they’re going to do is remember it.”That insight from Emmy-winning editor Charles Olivier—who’s c...
5 Feb 16min
The Imposter Gap | Deep Dive on Ep. 269 with Jeffrey Roth
Imagine standing in an ancient Egyptian tomb, camera in hand, as a sarcophagus is opened for the first time in thousands of years. For filmmaker Jeffrey Roth, that moment sparked a realization: "No, t...
5 Feb 7min
Episode 270 | Charles Olivier on Editing "Surviving Ohio State" for HBO
Emmy-winning editor Charles Olivier reveals how he restructured HBO's Surviving Ohio State and what it's like getting notes from George Clooney.Charles has cut some of the biggest docs of the last dec...
29 Jan 57min
Episode 269 | Egyptian “Indiana Jones”, Zahi Hawass of “The Man With The Hat”, Interview with Jeffery Roth
Jeffrey Roth has spent his career letting extraordinary people tell their own stories—Apollo astronauts, President George H.W. Bush, and now Dr. Zahi Hawass. In this episode, Christian Taylor inquires...
15 Jan 1h 15min
