Doc Fixer Monroe Explains Writing Three Sundance Films: 'Summit,' 'Sound City,' 'Who is Dayani Cristal?'

Mark Monroe came to this year's Sundance Film Festival as the writer of three distinctly different documentaries--"Sound City," "Who is Dayani Cristal?" and "The Summit." The writer of Oscar-winning "The Cove" and this year's Oscar-shortlisted "Chasing Ice" is proving to be a valuable asset. Not every documentary filmmaker is a writer-director like Alex Gibney, who brought "We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks" to Sundance 2013. Some filmmakers need help organizing complicate features, such as Nick Ryan of "The Summit," "The Cove"'s Louie Psihoyos or "Chasing Ice"'s Jeff Orlowski.

That's where broadcast journalist Monroe comes in. He's also a filmmaker, but he's proving so adept at helping others realize their projects that he's got writing gigs lined up like airplanes at La Guardia.

Anne Thompson: Give me, from your end, the calls from people telling you that one movie after the other was getting into Sundance.  How did that play out?

Mark Monroe: It was...beyond surreal.  

AT: Which one did you think would get in?

MM: I thought the Dave Grohl film ["Sound City"] would get in.  It’s a big, splashy doc, it’s entertaining as hell, so I thought that would get in.  Getting the call about "Who Is Dayani Cristal?" was amazing, because Marc Silver and Gael [García Bernal] had put so much of their heart and soul into this thing and we felt like it had come such a long way.  It was extremely special.  But “The Summit,” I have to tell you--we had so many arguments in our own camp about whether we had made the right film, and we didn’t even actually submit it to Sundance at first, because some people were down on the film and we thought, 'maybe it’s not the film we thought it was.'

AT: Like who?

MM: I can say we were second guessing ourselves so much with “The Summit.”  So to get that call, and the way it’s turned out--

AT: It was one of the first sales of the festival, to Sundance Selects. 

MM: Twenty-four hours of emotion in the first two days of the festival.  We just went from zero to hero.  I can’t tell you how proud I am of Nick Ryan and Ben Stark, the editor, and all those people who worked on that film.

AT: So who has distribution on world cinema opener “Who Is Dayani Cristal”?

MM: I know that the film will find a home, and it has (Mundial, the new joint venture with IM Global and Canana).

AT: And what is the “Sound City” distribution?

MM: That is through Dave Grohl’s management, and he’s an artist who wants to get his work to the people as soon as possible. They made a deal with Gravitas before we ever came to the festival, so you can get it on iTunes as of January 21st.

AT: So how did you wind up at Sundance with three movies?

MM: Apparently with documentaries, I don’t really say no. In order to stay alive, I juggle a lot of things.  I have a small company, Diamond Docs, with two other guys and we set out to make documentaries ourselves, and we have.  But we launched it right when the economy tanked and through word of mouth and people I know I started getting phone calls, and we realized there's a business model that’s not about starting documentaries from scratch but to help other filmmakers realize their dream. 

A lot of these documentaries are first-time filmmakers; they take years to do, years to develop.  A lot of times it’s just people who find themselves next to a story and begin to chase it, and then they become filmmakers.  So I started on the side, besides chasing my dreams, taking on these projects that seemed to need a form or a structure or a way to turn hundreds of hours of footage into ninety minutes.  So that’s how it began.

AT: That’s an editor’s skill, too?

MM: It is--I’m an editor, too.  I learned early in my career.

AT: Did you go to film school?

MM: No.  I was a journalism major--I went to CNN for five years after college and was a news writer for anchors.  I kind of burned out on that and eventually made my way to Los Angeles, made a lot of one-hour documentaries on television.  When the reality TV boom hit, I did a little reality TV for a few months and it was not for me.  And so I stuck with this biography form and that’s translated somewhat into film.  The first film I worked on was with the guy who’s my partner now, Paul Crowder.  He and I made a bunch of Behind the Musics.  I made a bunch of Beyond the Glories.  Paul made a bunch of television with Stacy Peralta and ended up editing his films, and we got a reject, basically.  Someone had approved Stacy for a film that had been started, and Stacy didn’t really see the value in it--it wasn’t for him.  So Paul was like, 'I’ll do it,' and he dragged me into it, and that’s how we made a film called “Once In a Lifetime,” about the New York Cosmos soccer team, America trying to buy soccer.  It was so much fun, I thought, 'I can do this.' And it started from there. 

AT: Which of the three Sundance films did you do first?

MM: I got involved first with “The Summit.”  From the beginning, from scratch.  A great friend of mine and the man who gave me my first credit, John Battsek at Passion Pictures--I wouldn’t have a career without him; he refers me to people who come to him--he referred me to this Irish filmmaker who he had talked to, Nick Ryan. He was connected to this story, he knew people who were on the mountain (K2) that day and he was interested in the sherpas.  He had made some short narrative films and done some documentary work, but he wanted somebody to help him with the story--it was very complicated and complex.  So I wrote a treatment with Nick.  We Skyped from Dublin and we talked about it for a few weeks.

AT: How did you know what the story was?  What access did you have to the material? So many times, documentaries are found as they go along.  They change, they morph, they evolve.

MM: All documentaries are found as you go along and as they morph.  The art of writing a treatment is to ask someone for money.  If I can be honest with you, that’s what it is.

AT: This is what you want the "The Summit" to be.

MM: Right.  This is what we can see right here, from this position.  And that movie had a lot to do with (mountain guide) Pemba and this untold story of the sherpas and how they had been lost in the shuffle of the Western media’s response and the 24-hour new cycle’s response to a tragedy on K2. (Nick) had contacted Pemba and had many conversations with him, and through Pat Falvey and another executive producer who’s a climber himself in the film, he had contacted Wilco.  We had articles and different things like that in order to write a treatment.

AT: You helped the filmmaker focus on the story; so many documentary films get lost in the details, in the woods.  Were you there throughout the filming?  A documentary is all about structure--what’s the time frame, when are we revealing what information?  Do you work with the filmmaker and the editor?

MM: Yes.  Initially, it’s a lot of work with Nick, because he’s going to interview all these people.  So I help him with questions.  From the very beginning, from the treatment even, we wanted to jump into the story.  We didn’t want to explain ropes and names and tents and everything for forty minutes before everything happened, we wanted to be on the mountain within ten minutes and to have someone fall to set it in action.  So we knew we wanted a complicated structure to go with the complicated movie.