Doc Walks

Keith and his wife caught it on a Tuesday night date night. Ben and his wife skipped work to see it in a theater, in the middle of the day. When was the last time a three-hour documentary caught the attention of just about everyone around? Just about never—so we had to talk about it. This week it's just the two of us unpacking YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING, the Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim film abo...

A seasoned mainstay of the LA documentary scene, Brett Morgen takes Keith for a walk around his charming Rustic Canyon neighborhood. Brett is the filmmaker behind major releases like MOONAGE DAYDREAM, JANE, COBAIN: MONTAGE OF HECK, ON THE ROPES, and the animated Hollywood tale, THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE. Just two weeks into his empty-nester era and newly back in his house, post-LA-fires, Brett...

Episode 75, the Diamond Jubilee, and it's just the two of us. With no guest, with no safety net or buffer, this one finds Ben feeling both naked and vulnerable. But Keith is there to calm his nerves with: a full craft episode, with three buckets. First bucket up, OBSERVATIONAL FILMMAKING. What's right & wrong about fly-on-the-wall as a premise and who gets it right. Ben walks through his plan for...

If you're looking for a beer and a sandwich you're in the right place… welcome to Red Hook, Brooklyn, home of dock workers and DocWalkers—meet Jeremy Workman. Jeremy is the director behind the arthouse success story, SECRET MALL APARTMENT. He's also known for LILY TOPPLES THE WORLD, and this year's festival hit, SCHOOL FOR DEFECTORS.  When thunder rolls in, we duck into the Red Hook Lobster Pound...

You may remember Dana Reilly, New York filmmaker, and UT Radio-TV-Film alum from our walk around Main Street at Sundance this year. Well, she's back in Austin to present her first feature, OUR BODY ELECTRIC, at the AFS Cinema.  From nimbus clouds, to a walk around the DAZED AND CONFUSED baseball diamond, Dana shares the stories that got her to this auspicious moment at the Northwest park trail. Fr...

We take the rain in stride and walk Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn with Geeta Gandbhir—the director who just became the first woman Oscar-nominated for both a documentary feature and a documentary short in the same year, for THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR and THE DEVIL IS BUSY. Geeta breaks down how a family tragedy in Ocala, Florida became a film built almost entirely from police bodycam footage: 30 h...

We hit the trail with Austin's own husband-and-wife filmmaking duo, Andrew and Melissa Shea. They've been married for nearly 30 years, partnered on every film they've ever made, and, according to Ben, may be the first couple to pull that off. Andrew's road to filmmaking was wonderfully circuitous. He started as a New York theater kid, passed the bar in two states, ran a regional theater in Santa F...

Welcome to the first-ever Doc Walks International! Keith treks to Sweden, to the tiny Baltic island of Fårö, where INGMAR BERGMAN built his creative base. Keith's there shooting for his new documentary, BERGMAN IN DALLAS, about the filmmaker's forgotten 1981 visit to Texas — enjoying an artist's residency at the Bergman Estate. And this journey into the world of Ingmar Bergman brought Keith to thi...

We walk Hyde Park with longtime friends Sam Wainwright Douglas and David Hartstein — the co-directing team behind Blue Suitcase — and it is not a short story. Turns out it started at Slamdance 2006: David was editing ALONG CAME KINKY: TEXAS JEWBOY FOR GOVERNOR and needed an editor who actually knew Texas; Sam had THE HOLY MODAL ROUNDERS: BOUND TO LOSE playing the same festival. One carpetbagger re...

Keith goes coastal this week, walking the foggy cliffs of Point Lobos, California with Bay Area filmmaker Chris Metzler—co-director of PLAGUES AND PLEASURES ON THE SALTON SEA, EVERYDAY SUNSHINE: THE STORY OF FISHBONE and RODENTS OF UNUSUAL SIZE. Chris and Keith go back to 2008, when they met at the PBS Producers Academy at WGBH, and their cohort reads like a Sundance roll call: S. Leo Chiang, Su K...

We walk with Margaret Brown, director of BE HERE TO LOVE ME, THE ORDER OF MYTHS, THE GREAT INVISIBLE, DESCENDANT, and THE YOGURT SHOP MURDERS, and winner of Peabody, Independent Spirit, SXSW and Sundance awards. She brings along Max Pickle, her nine-year-old wire-haired dachshund, who sets the pace: shade, water, and a hard stop whenever he's done. Margaret's deep in publicity mode on THE YOGURT S...

Keith walks Hyde Park—with a detour into & across the Hancock Golf Course—with LA's Gene Gallerano.  An East Dallas kid raised on the humanities and Poor David's Pub, Gene's an actor-turned-producer-turned-Emmy-winning director, fresh off multiple wins at the Waco FF for THANK YOU FOR LISTENING, his Texas Monthly short about country singer Joshua Ray Walker. The origin story is a rom-com: Gene boa...

We were supposed to be in Central Park. We are not. It's raining so we're in Penny Lane's apartment, shoes off, with a cat named Luna auditioning for the role of "the action," and Flaco the Owl on the TV behind us. So much for a walking show. Penny's deep in what she calls PR season for WILD INSIDE, her new HBO doc about the Eurasian eagle-owl who broke out of the Central Park Zoo in 2023 and spen...

Ben walks the lake at Mueller with David Liu—director, editor, producer, composer, and until 2024, an AI engineer. Fifteen-plus years in hardware, software, product design and machine learning, and then generative AI showed up and he decided he didn't want his name on where it was going. So he went looking for the one medium the technology can't enter without destroying it… documentary filmmaking....

When Hisko Hulsing is in town, you grab your camera & mic, and hit the trail, ready to court controversy with the best oil-painting animator this side of the Netherlands. Hisko is the wild artist that doc-maker Brett Morgen trusted to paint the inside of Kurt Cobain's head for MONTAGE OF HECK. He's a director who's marshalled the talents of dozens of artists over multiple years to bring HARRY RENT...

Spark up a big cigar with Ben and filmmaker David Alvarado in honor of  Luis Valdez, the central figure in Alvarado's new film AMERICAN PACHUCO (playing Austin's Cine Las Américas). A Dallas kid turned Brooklyn doc-maker, David found his calling twice: once when LA BAMBA (1987) showed him a Chicano family reaching the American dream, and again when a college cinéma-vérité class screened A TIME FOR...

We walk Austin's Boggy Creek Trail with acclaimed memoirist Lauren Hough — from a childhood spent in a cult to Air Force vet to ex-cable technician; and now, she's the writer whose viral essay about fixing people's cable got read 8 million times in a single weekend. Lauren's backstory is so enormous it usually eats a whole interview: she grew up in the Children of God, got run out of the military...

Take a spirited walk though East Austin, Black History, and the Texas State Cemetery with filmmaker, educator, and self-described activist-artist Ya'Ke Smith—on Juneteenth week, no less. We kick off our walk under a Moonlight Tower and basically never stop moving: past Franklin Barbecue (pour one out for the old Ben's Barbecue), over to the Victory Grill, and into a cash-deal for some Bass Reeves-...

We hit the streets of South by Southwest with Isaac Gale—director, artist, and one-half of the Minneapolis noise outfit Marijuana Deathsquads, in town to play the fest with his band. Isaac's the kind of guy who'd rather break a piece of software than master it, and that restless, try-anything energy runs through everything he makes. We wind through Ben's old neighborhood and retrace how the two fi...

Meet Juli Berwald—a marine biologist turned science writer and the author of an invertebrate page-turner—she's the founder of a coral-reef nonprofit in Honduras, aaaaand she's producing her first doc. Throughout our waterfront walk at Ladybird Lake Juli opens up about her adventures in science writing—how getting fired off a book project (& replaced by Elizabeth Kolbert) inspired Juli to create he...

We hit the boardwalk with Luke Korem—the Emmy-winning documentary director behind DEALT, MILLI VANILLI, and ACTION—and somewhere between a guy blasting EDM off a portable speaker and the bats under the bridge, Luke hands us a filmmaking philosophy worth bottling: it's all the same muscle. Doc, series, scripted—storytelling is storytelling, and the trick is knowing a series is a sprint and a featur...

Barlow Jacobs says: Walk to the Next Block.. easy to say when you're sitting there, not-walking on DocWalks. It's day three of the AFS Doc Intensive, and we close out our run in the room for a sit-down with actor-turned-documentarian Barlow Jacobs—a guy we've been hearing about for 20 years ever since he burst out of Sundance with LOW AND BEHOLD in 2007. Barlow brings his doc-debut, THE VOYAGE OUT...

Alisa Payne cannot be stopped… certainly not by a little rain. When the downpour chases us indoors, we're lucky enough to post up in a cozy podcast studio at Austin Public—the public-access station where, Alex Jones got his start—and the home to the Austin Film Society Documentary Intensive, where the Oscar-nominated producer is serving as a mentor. You may know Alisa as the producer behind Geeta...

We duck inside for the first time ever — into the Blanton Museum of Art, because it's pouring in Austin and Pete Muller had the brilliant idea to bring our show into a gallery. Pete is the National Geographic photographer behind BUCKS HARBOR, his five-years-in-the-making debut feature about lobster fishermen in Downeast Maine, premiering at Berlinale and playing Doc Days at the Austin Film Society...

Ben walks Glassell Park in L.A. with Bradley Jackson—screenwriter, novelist, and the documentary writer/producer behind FACING NOLAN, DEALT, MILLI VANILLI, and the Showtime sports-betting docuseries ACTION. Bradley leads Ben up his neighborhood  hill as he details exactly how he ended up in a "premium economy" English castle filming a bisexual British aristocrat for his very first doc—and why he n...