D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus directors of ’Kings of Pastry’

Kings of Pastry is very different from the films you’ve done so far. Why this switch?

Chris Hegedus: Kings of Pastry has a combination of styles. In it we still follow a person that nobody knows who is really passionate about something, and through a real-life event that has a lot of drama in it. Some of the stylistic vehicles might have been different because the pastry competition that we shot, which was a three-day competition, nobody had been allowed to watch or even film it [before]. So the rules were very strict, we were not allowed to use any additional mics or lights. Different from the more voiceover type of narration, the fact that it is a bilingual problem formed certain problems.

D.A. Pennebaker: I don’t think the result comes so much from interviews. People talk to us, and we always welcome people talking to us, but if somebody doesn’t want to it’s fine. I don’t think of us as “flies on the wall”, I think that we have been sort of taken on by the people we are filming and allowed to be part of the group.

The way you actually shot it feels different…

Ch: Most of the films we have done are actually character-driven, just like this one. We see somebody taking a big risk in their life and we follow this real-life drama to see if they can stand up to the pressures they are putting themselves under - and also the pressures of being filmed because having a camera watch you for months going through something that is very important for you, that shows a strength of character that not everybody can stand.

Pn: You know, I think that most of the people we film, like politicians or musicians, don’t have to explain what they do to anybody… but here we have a person who does something very special. Without asking any questions, he just told us. We never really interviewed anybody in that sense, [except] at the very end, when we wanted to know what happened during the actual contest.

Ch.: I think that the similarities between our films and fiction films is that a lot of our scripts are really written in the editing. During the filming of the real-life events, you are filming what happens so there is kind of a linear aspect to it. It’s in the editing that you use your creative juices and try to make a story that has a drama in it. Although it is a real event, it is an act of your imagination.

Pn: We do not even have a preference of what we want people to do, we do not direct them to begin with. We have to figure out what are they going to do and then we follow them - they are always the leaders, not us. In the editing, that is when you make theatre out of it. Real life has to be turned into theatre, to be entertaining.

What do you think about the videos people put on YouTube which are also observational? How do you compare them to these kinds of documentaries?

Pn: Well, I haven’t seen much of it. I have seen the “dancing dog” and things like that, which are beautifully observational, but I think there is a difference between an observational video and a balanced scene as we are trying to make. A scene is an element of a film: a crucial element which has to have its own kind of drama and balance. It has to be complete and it has to find an ending, before it goes to the next scene. In general you establish a meaning, or an importance, by the cut […] you don’t necessarily understand it as a scene while you shoot it.

By Laila Hotait and Nadia Muhanna