Sheila Nevins

April 2008

Sheila Nevins, the president of HBO Documentary Films, loves ordinary people and the extraordinary stories they can tell. She has overseen such programs as Alive Day Memories: Home From Iraq, a 10-part series that conveys the physical and emotional cost of war with James Gandolfini of The Sopranos as host, talking to ten young soldiers who survived near-fatal wounds in Iraq. And Autism: The Musical focuses on the mother of an autistic child who helps a group of autistic children write, rehearse and perform their own musical, defying their diagnosed expectations. Nevins, who admits she is easily bored with sameness, is always on the lookout for the next common, everyday person, with a very uncommon experience to convey.

WS: What kind of exposure does HBO offer a filmmaker that a theatrical release does not?

NEVINS: We offer a sure-fire audience. I can’t promise you people will buy tickets to the theater but I can promise you that HBO will have subscribers watching, most often in larger numbers than you can get for an art film in the theater—although there are certainly exceptions to that. But the docus that don’t attract a large audience in the theater attract a larger audience on television. And I can tell you that whether we buy it or we make it, we love it. If we love it, we do everything we can to make it surface.

WS: What impact have the big movies Fahrenheit 9/11, An Inconvenient Truth and Sicko had on the documentary industry?

NEVINS: Any documentary that can be an economic success is good for all documentaries. But the truth of the matter is that there are hundreds of docus made every year and essentially the theatrical docu is always an underdog. When it makes it, we all applaud it, we are so excited for it, even if it’s not ours, and very often it’s not ours. But it’s a tough business out there to ask real people who are infused with so much reality on television and their own videos and their own YouTubes and their own Facebooks, to go to the movies to see real people. And that’s why the ones that tend to crest are from people that are famous to begin with, like Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock or Al Gore, or birds or penguins. They seem to fall into a class by themselves. There was a time when everyone thought docus could make enormous sums of money because two or three films hit at the same time. I think it was Spellbound and Winged Migration and then a Michael Moore film all came out within 18 months, and everyone said, “Oh docus make money! They cost $3 million and make $135 million.” I don’t think that happens too frequently.

WS: Some people don’t want to pay to see documentaries in the theater when they can watch them on TV.

NEVINS: They don’t want to see them in the theater or they don’t want to pay money. But the credential of having a movie in a theater, even if no one is watching it, seems to be something a lot of filmmakers really want. And some films do belong in the theater. Winged Migration would have been silly on television. Fahrenheit 9/11 belonged in the theaters and Super Size Me belonged there. And that’s not just Monday morning quarterbacking, they just seem to have been bigger and brighter there. But sometimes they are bigger and brighter on television because that’s where they belong.

WS: Something like Alive Day Memories?

NEVINS: That could only have been on television. It used the medium—intimate theater—and it was made for television. There are made-for-television movies and there are made-for-television documentaries, but most documentaries by the very nature of their simplicity and their uncommonness are made for television—made to be in your living room, or your bedroom. They are intimate experiences. I call them people that you would invite into your house. They are not actors who wouldn’t come in anyway. These are your guests and real people tend to belong in your house—not always, you wouldn’t want a bird flying back and forth or a penguin!

WS: What responsibility do you feel toward your audience?

NEVINS: I’m working for pay television. I’m not working for advertiser-supported television or foundation-supported television. I’m working for everyman who is finding in his limited budget a way to pay for [HBO] when there is so much out there. I owe him an enormous debt of gratitude and I owe him a special kind of programming. After all, he doesn’t have to buy this. I never forget this, maybe it’s because I started in theater but I always feel like people are buying tickets—and I ask, Is this program worth buying a ticket to? It may be a home-movie ticket but it’s still a ticket.

So I take that very seriously and maybe that’s why it’s very hard for me to distinguish between a movie theater and pay television because you are paying for this television. You are buying a ticket for your TV to show you this presentation. I’ve always thought of it as home theater even before the TV sets were so big and even before there was such great color and HD. But it is theater at home. Shakespeare probably would have written for pay TV! [Laughs] He would have loved it! I think I would have gotten along with him!

WS: This is an election year. Are you preparing docs about the issues facing the United States?

NEVINS: We don’t go directly at issues. We don’t do, Oh woe the wounded vet. We do Gandolfini talking to guys coming home. It could be heroic, it could be patriotic, could be full of pathos. We don’t [tackle] the subject head on. We have a circuitous route. I think our main contribution this year will be [from] the same filmmaker who did Baghdad ER, Jon Alpert. He is doing a film for us on Arlington National Cemetery where parents and relatives have basically camped out during this war. There is a section at Arlington [for soldiers who died in] Iraq. There are parents and wives and children in many cases who can’t let go. [The program is about] the talking to the dead that goes on at Arlington. And I think if we are making any contribution that would be it. It’s subtle. We’re not telling you who to vote for. We’re saying goodbye to some kids who won’t be here this November and who were somewhere between 18 and 23. There is one scene where a woman takes off her coat and puts it on the grave. It’s September and it’s chilly and she’s worried that her son is cold—it’s that inability to let go of a child who has gone off to fight a war. One guy comes in on his son’s birthday to have a drink with his son. He pours a drink on the grave and then he drinks and says, “You died for your country. I love you and I’m proud of you.” I guess you could say it’s patriotic on one level and full of waste on the other. But that’s our contribution—the question of this war or maybe any war.

Our films are very subtle. In The Boys from Baghdad High cameras were given to four high school kids in Baghdad during the worst part of the war and you see that they are just like the kids next door. They are singing to Britney Spears. It’s a glimpse into the civilian population of Iraq, which has been of interest to us because it has been so underexposed on TV.

WS: And Autism: The Musical is so moving.

NEVINS: There is an example of a regular woman with an autistic child who becomes sort of like a saint. I’d rather chase her than Mother Teresa.

There is something about people who are so uniquely courageous. I just love to find people who do extraordinary things, and they are often not at all famous. I don’t like famous people usually. I don’t like repetition. I’m easily bored and I think what happens with fame—not with everybody because there are certainly a lot of famous people with good hearts—is that they develop a persona that protects them and you can’t penetrate it. It’s programmed. You see it on one show, then you read it in the paper and then you see it somewhere else. But nobody would give a voice to the people that we give a voice to at HBO. And that is exciting because they don’t even know, half of them, that they have a voice. Those kids who came into the studio to talk to Jim Gandolfini, they weren’t scared of him. They had practically given their lives for America. And it was fascinating to watch their poetry. They spoke lines as good as any playwright. They were just kids. When the women with one arm says, “I won’t be able to hold my child with both my arms,” that’s a pretty poignant line for a 24-year-old.

WS: And they are all so young.

NEVINS: So young and they never had a chance to live their lives. But Alive Day Memories is the day that you celebrate because it’s the day you came so close to death and you are alive, so it’s kind of an ironic title.

WS: What do you enjoy most about your work?

NEVINS: Forgetting myself. Total immersion. Forgetting how you look, what you’re wearing, what you’re eating. And sometimes when it really clicks; out of all the hundreds of docus that we make, sometimes there is something so great and it’s great when you look at it a year later or two years later. Docus age, the pace of the time changes, the way people want information changes, the competition changes. And competition is very invigorating.

WS: After many years of heading up HBO’s documentary division, has your programming philosophy changed?

NEVINS: It constantly changes. The market changes. The competition changes. What matters to people changes. The politics change. The world gets smaller when there is something like 9/11. There are new discoveries in science and medicine, like in addiction or Alzheimer’s. We are responsive to changing currents, whether they are economic, political, social or medical. We’re trying to keep people up on what is happening in the real world.

WS: Do you still prefer to focus on the stories of real people and not always of well-known people?

NEVINS: Well, I have a particular passion for people who wouldn’t be known unless we embraced them. So a biopic or a biodoc isn’t unusual for us. I think common men and women have uncommon things to say. Just human survival has its own eloquence and fame is not necessarily any more worthy of television or of a documentary’s attention than anonymity. I like anonymous people a lot. I like the stories they have to tell.

The uncommon in the common is just so incredibly interesting to me. I like to talk to people and I like docus that talk to people. And it’s so odd to be in a fame business and find that the best docus are usually about unknown people. When we did Alive Day Memories: Home From Iraq [about Iraqi soldiers who had survived terrible injuries], the biggest star was James Gandolfini [from The Sopranos], but the real stars were the Iraqi vets. It’s this constant discovery of waitresses and shopkeepers and survivors of all kinds that I find particularly interesting. Ordinary people have extraordinary stories, I think that is basically it. And famous people very often have the same story and you can’t uniquely present them because they are presenting that self or that image wherever they go. So they don’t intrigue me as much, although I would say the Polanski film [Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, acquired at the Sundance Film Festival] is definitely an exception.

Oddly enough, what interested me most about the Polanski film were the things that he experienced not as a famous Hollywood director but as a human being—you know, survival of the Holocaust, the incredibly horrific death of a pregnant wife, a complex American justice system. I find that to be infinitely more interesting than the a story on the movies themselves, because the movies are genius and you can watch those. But the story of the man behind them was really quite extraordinary.

WS: How much of a glass ceiling was there when you started in the business?

NEVINS: I’m so used to banging my head wherever I am! I guess it was always hard but I always looked ahead and not up. I’m sure there was a glass ceiling and I’m sure there is less of one now, but it’s always been really tough. Every day is tough. It’s tough to make a good film whether you are a man or a woman. It’s tough to wrestle real people to the forefront. It’s hard to get a product that satisfies you. It’s hard to get it through the establishment. It’s hard to get it out there. But I never felt at HBO in any way that I was handicapped because I was a woman. But maybe I was and I wasn’t aware of it because I was so product-oriented—I was so into the film and the editing room and the making it happen; the miracle of making real people make a movie.

WS: There is a saying that there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women on the job. Has it been important for you to champion women filmmakers?

NEVINS: First of all, I don’t believe in hell. If somebody is good, man or woman or whatever, I want to help them because I want to look good. So, I guess I champion excellence and I don’t really know gender. I do seem to have more women around me than men. And I do get great pleasure out of the success of people who work for me, although I always introduce them as people who work with me, because that is more accurate. I do think I hire more women than men. I think there is a special place in hell for anyone who doesn’t really feel generous at some point in their career and understand that the success of somebody younger is not their failure but possibly their success.