>> if you do it right, get the parody and make it look like one of the things that's somehow funnier, because it subverts your clappings to the movie to watch documentaries. it makes you feel like i'm watching this thing that feels and looks like an important movie except there is one little thing off from it. >> ian mcewan and "documentary now!," when we continue. >> rose: funding for "charlie rose" has been provided by the following: >> and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and information services worldwide. captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> ian mcewan is here, his novels include the children act, atonement and the comfort of strangers. his 1998 novel amsterdam was awarded the mann booker prize. his new book "nutshell" is told from the point of view of an eight-month-old fetus. first time at this table. welcome. >> thank you. nice to meet you. what a concept. where did all this come from? >> the first sentence drifted into my mind during a lull in other activities and i sat on it for a while because i always think hesitation is important and i started building up around it and sooner or later i had a talking fetus who knew a great deal about the world from radio and podcasts and knew a great deal about his mother's private life. >> or talking to himself inside the womb. >> talking to himself, addressing the reader, as it were. strangely enough, once you enter this very confined region, you find areas of freedom. he has to, for example, listen to his mother's heart and so he knew more or less her emotional state at any given time. he gets into bed with her, of course, and can observe her love life rather close up. >> very up close. he can reflect on the world he's about to join because he listens to the radio so much with her, and he's listening to a terrible plot. his moth around his uncle are planning to kill his father which is a rather familiar story from shakespeare. >> and it's a retelling of hamlet in a way. we'll talk more about that. i want to ask you a little bit about the up close. the language is graphic at times. the descriptions of what he's hearing or seeing or worried about, that is our fetus. >> as he says, not every person knows what he's like to have his father's rival's penis inches from your face. so he has a closeup view of events. he's smith what of wine connoisseur. his mother likes to drink against all medical advice. he finds having listened to 15 podcasts on wine, he knows his way around the french vineyards and when she has a drink, he really can't say no, so that's another aspect of his life. >> he knows his way around a stanza as well. >> he certainly does. he seems to be born with the innate ability to know about poetics and he eats already in shakespeare's world, already. >> his biological father is a poet and you set up the plot a little bit. we talk about it being a modern-day retelling of hamlet. so his mother is having an affair with his uncle. >> his uncle, yeah. you had the first sentence. you had, i believe it's your daughter-in-law was pregnant at the time, that's part of the genesis of -- >> that came into it, too. that was a hint a little before that sitting in the room, talking about the baby, she was maybe a week or two away from giving birth, and i was aware that we were talking in the third person about a presence in the room. that's when an idea lodged in my mind that it was later that suddenly the first sentence came into my mind and i thought, ah-ha. here's a given. what can you unwrap from this first idea? so a matter of taking notes and building up around it. at the same time,isms rereading hamlet and somehow these two ideas got braided together. he discovers early on that the man who is his mother's lover is, in fact, his uncle. his father's brother. his father is a poet -- i mean, hamlet's father is a tough guy. he comes back as a ghost. he's ruled denmark with a fist of iron, made the trains run on time and he's asking his rather stay-at-home, intellectual son to avenge a murder, which is a big task and, of course, hamlet can't seem to do it. and i thought, well, if you're thinking of lack of agency and inability to act, an 8-month-old fetus is rather in the same position, squashed up tight, can't move. >> slightly more handicapped position but, yes. >> he's able to kick his mother awake in the night. she gets insomnia, she'll listen to the radio, they both end up better informed by the morning. so i diverge from shakespeare's plot here. i made the fetus' father a poet, quite useful because he likes to proclaim his poetry. he's written poems in celebration of the moth soar we get to know what she looks like. it's a matter of finding devices all along the way to build a picture. >> so the uncle is not claudeous. >> claude. the mother is trudy off gertrude and we've established the biological father as well. the first sentence, a memorable one, i'm hanging upside down -- >> so here i am, upside down in a woman, was the first sentence, and it survived in tact into the final draft. so there it is. once you have that, you're very grateful. sometimes ideas come like that wrapped up in a sentence and it's rare. usually you have to fight your way towards the concept of a novel with forced starts, changes of mind, abandoned paragraph pages, chapters even. when this sentence arrives, almost like a ticker tape in my thoughts, i knew that it was, as it were, pregnant with all kinds of possibilities. i can go in all kinds of directions with this. so it was a lucky break for me. i had a lot of fun setting this up. >> you can tell reading it. when you come up with the first sentence, is there a pregnant pause then? >> yes. or is it off to the races? no, pause, i think, is crucial. i like to just sit on these ideas for a while, two or three months even, occasional notes, building up the notes, trying this, trying that, and my thoughts, often not committing too much to paper, and i had a superstition sometimes that you don't want to even put words around some of these ideas because it narrows down the possibility. and then finally, you say, well, let's try a couple of pages, and then tentatively, let's find his voice. how much does he know? how clever do i want him to be? what's the language he's going to speak in? should i give it a special verse like spring? that was a decision i took to write a lot of sentences in iambics, the basic pulse of the english language, and all of those decisions need to be made over time because you're going to commit a couple of years to this. you want to know you're on the right track with the right subject. >> it's a different voice for you based on what you have been doing the past couple of decades. there's been a lot of realism. this is fan t.s.a.icle. this is an imagined fantasy with the fetal narrator. >> absolutely. i've abandoned all rules of physics and biology. in the past, i've done a lot of research for my novels. this time i didn't have to go see anyone, which was a real pleasure, too. in some ways, having just stepped out of the plausible, i found myself connecting to a younger self. back in the '70s, i wrote two volumes of short stories, rated often by fantastical figures. one for example is narrate bid an ape having an affair with a woman novelist who is struggling with her second novel. then there are all kinds of dark, psychotic figures. i very much in a sway of franscofca at that time who had a dog narrating, a gorilla narrating. so it was rejuvenating to say, to hell with realism, let's find out if i can reconnect with my 22-year-old self. >> this is the 400th anniversary of shakespeare's death. we talked about hamlet. coincidence? had you been planning any sort of a shakespeare retelling? >> i started in 2014. i was well into 2015 when i thought, of course, i knew very well when shakespeare died but i connected with the year that was coming up. so it seemed like a piece of luck, really. i didn't write this to come out in the anniversary but i'm really glad it did. suits me fine. quite a lot of novelists around the world write impressions of macbeth, winter's tale and hamlet. i think we have to accept whether you've read shakespeare or been to the plays, if you are an english speaker, you are speaking a language drenched in shakespearean invention. he littered it with what we now think of as cliches. there are maybe 2,000, 3,000 sayings people use daily drawn from the plays. i heard someone in a taxi say on the phone, in my heart of hearts, well, that is a shakespearean formulation. first time you heard it, you would think what a wonderful idea your heart could have a heart. now we hardly hear it, it's just a cliche. so it's right, it's fitting so many novelists as well as poets are writing in celebration of this extraordinary imagination. >> what would chic spear think of our language today, of our speech today, of literary modernism? >> well, i think for a start he would be able to understand two-thirds, three-quarters of it straightaway. there obviously would be internet words would take a bit of unwrapping for him, but he would get his mind around it very quickly. i think he prefigures modernism in many ways. he knows acutely what he's doing. he's aware in a way i think the great modernists always were that every sentence contains the instructions, as it were, how to write it, how to read it. that self-consciousness is often there in a shakespearean play. he will be startled by many other things in the world. just walked through a room full of computer screens, graphs, figures, and i think he would reach for his metaphor stock for that. >> when you initially went to your editor with this concept of the fetal narrator, the reaction was what? >> well, i was sitting with dan franklin in ireland in a castle, and he said in a gentle way that is half saying what are you up to now? i said, well, i'm retelling the story of hamlet from the point of view of a fetus. and his eyes glazed a little and he said, great. ( laughter ) when he got the type script eight months later or so, he was delighted with it, and we didn't look back. >> you tail off then even when you say fetus. i wonder, is part of you still convincing yourself that you wrote this? >> no. i was talking here at the y last night and found myself saying "my fetus." i had to stop myself and say, what man can say that? ( laughter ) once you launched on this conceit, as i said before, you just have to say -- i kept thinking, i'm loving doing this, this is so playful and such fun, but that makes me suspicious, you know, if you start to enjoy something too much, you wonder, am i just being carried away? would anyone else like it? when a writer tells me that he or she we want as they typed out their last chapter, i think, watch out, you know, you might be in trouble. and i think that might be true if you're hugging yourself too much. >> but you certainly do hug the characters. that's question, whether you like the characters or you just like your creation, because some of the characters in this book are obviously despicable and the actions they undertake, but that doesn't mean you don't enjoy the process of creativity. >> absolutely. and as my narrator says at some point, when you're in on a murder plot from the beginning and you're running it from the point of view of the conspirators, there is one bit of yourself that always wants to succeed, however much you despise it, as long as you're in it from their side and point of view and you start worrying about how all the things can go wrong as trudy and claude decide to carry out their murder with some poison, some glycol, there are a million ways it could go wrong and, in fact, it does go wrong. so -- >> part of it goes wrong, yes. there is a pleasure in creates characters, however gruesome they are. as long as they come to life, that's all you need and want. when they do, how far awful they, are there is a spring in your step when you begin to see them form. >> our unborn child, he has that edge to his personality as well. >> yeah, he's what i would call -- >> rose: i say our. i mean your. >> i take ownership here. yeah, he's what i would call a reliable narrator. he's not going to tell you any lies. he is your good, straightforward, fast-talking fetus. he doesn't have a name. he has no allegiances, as he says, no commitments, no religion. he is a sort of blank slate, as it were. you can trust him. no spin about him. and he worries about the world. that's his bad dream because "nutshell" is taken from that famous speech of hamlet, i could be king of infinite space, i could be bound in a "nutshell" and count myself king of infinite space were it not i had bad dreams. the bad dreams are the news he's getting about the world, about migration crisis, about the international crisis, about the new nuclear arms race we have, the crisis of global warming and then the denial of it and so on, this is the world he's going to join and own, and he's trying to also cheer himself up with good news about the world -- half billion people taken out of poverty in 50 years, literacy rates at amazing low level unprecedented in history, people living longer, then all the benefits of maternity like anesthesia, oranges in winter, the lamp light. >> i love that, oranges in winter. >> so taken for granted. a king would look at the ordinary joe on the street in manhattan and count him a king. >> you talk about the current events which the narrator comments on a bit and upbraided it. >> we've had a national trauma. comfort for some and despair for other. i'm in the second group. i think we should remain. the e.u. for all its faults is one of the best treaties you find in human history. it's kept the peace largely. as my generation does remember and younger ones don't, just that our back in europe, we have a fantastic by gruesome history of warfare and genocide and we've just lived through 70 years of an extraordinary peace and prosperity, relative prosperity. so i think we should remain in that, and part of me is still in denial. i feel that what we're going to come up with as a brexit treaty or a set of arrangements is not going to satisfy those who wanted to leave. i still feel there is a case to be made for a second referendum when we know exactly what the terms are. so we wait and see. a lot of us are getting used to it now, i suppose. but it was a shock the first time around. >> no lack of topical material for the next novel, if it becomes a little more realistic. >> the world is changing under our feet, yeah, and, of course, we wait to see who you choose for your president, and that will have a huge impact on everything. >> i did want to ask as well about some present works or they may be past now, but the screen plays you're working on. >> yeah. two of them? . as soon as i go back, we go straight into rehearsal for my last novel, the children act, but, at the same time, just by coincidence, a screenplay i wrote a little while ago for my novel on chezzle beach starts more or less on the same day. so i will be shu shuttling betwn two different rehearsal rooms for a week or two and in mid october they will get going, so that will be very absorbing. >> and has your approach to that changed over the years because, as you know, some novelists who write the novel and want -- just divorce themselves from that process, that's obviously not you. >> on the whole not. i tend to either write the screenplay myself or become an executive producer and stay involved. i love moviemaking. i love movie sets. the long lead-in to actually getting the cameras rolling, often very frustrating. but i like the expertise that people have. for example, the schedule comes from the assistance to me every -- from the assistant every week to me, a week ahead of the prepping. it used to be addressed to four people. a week later 12 people, now there's 70 people, all been hired, carpenters, hairstylists, an army is assembled for then six weeks of controlled panic of trying to get this in the can against, you know -- things will happen and go wrong for sure and everyone needs to pull together and if you sit most of your writing life, working life at a desk alone dealing with ghosts, imaginary things, to be in this world of real things and anxiety and friendship and collaboration, it's a great break. it's another kind of holiday. >> it's not frustrating. because i imagine it could be frustrating given the control you have at your keyboard. >> the frustration is the emotion. you're king of infinite space inside your novel. suddenly, you're just the writer. the screen writer in movies, i know it's changed in tv, but the screen writer is still fairly down the pecking order. it's a directors medium, a complete historical axum, but there it is. a lot of people pitch in and say, i don't think she would say a thing like that. wait a minute. what do you know about what she would say? she's my character. but it's too late. you abandon yourself to the collaboration. >> and you're comfortable with that, now? >> yeah, i think a movie is a different thing from a book and you are not simply making a version. you're trying to make a good movie, and the demands are entirely different. novels are so interior. you've got to find ways and means of translating that inner nature of novels to a highly real medium-like cinema. so in doing the screen plays, my first move is to move as far away as i can. if i can get an opening scene or an opening shot even, it's just to one side of what you've got there on the first page or any page, or even taking somewhere in the middle as your starting point. throwing her up in the air, i think that's part of the process. and it's delightful. i've written scenes for on chezzle beach that i wish i thought of at the time of writing the novel. >> i hesitate to ask this, but when you're writing the novels now, do you have the potential screenplay or the movie in mind? >> no. i mean, writing -- >> this would be challenging. i thought this is movie proof. and, so, at least i won't be doing that. almost immediately someone offered to make a movie. i just want to hold back for now. i guess through computer-generated images means anything is possible and you could have a highly articulate, rather pleasing, audience-friendly fetus chatting away at you but i'm not sure i would want to write that screenplay. >> it's fan t.s.a.icle. it's a murder mystery and it's the retelling of a famous play, so i suppose possible. >> it's a murder story, yeah. my feeling now is i don't want to write it, but then as the voice's problem, i don't want to write anything, by the way, i should say that, but i don't want anyone else to do it. that's the thing. so that's another reason why i get involved. >> and if they come to you and say, we're going to make this into a movie and we want this person to write it, you say no? >> well, i'm on the edge -- because that's not giving up control, is it? >> it's difficult. there is going to be a three-part tv version of my novel solar about climate change, and i think i will stand back for that one because i can't spend my whole life recycling myself and turning my own novels into -- i mean, between here and death, i could just knuckle down and turn everything i've ever written into a movie, that would not give me great satisfaction. i want just to keep exploring where we are or who we are. >> you mentioned solar. you still are heavily involved with solar aid. >> yes, that charity. i'm a trustee of that charity. it's grown and grown. i just did a charity appeal on the b.b.c. for a few months ago. of course, fantastic response. it's very simple technology. very cheap, easily installed solar panels, and it illustrates a very important thing about literacy. there's no literacy without light. and it gets dark pretty early in the evening in africa, in the tropics. kids walking home from school get home, it's too dark to see, and they're off grid, and the only light source otherwise available is kerosine lamps which are very, very poisonous. so to install a lamp that will give three hours' light, reading, home work is done and it's transformative. such a simple thing. >> which these digital devices allows you to read in the night where you night not have before. >> sure. can also keep you up at night. >> sure. you mean back here in manhattan, yeah, where no one sleeps. but in a small house with maybe just one or two windows, 7:00 in the evening, it's not possible to do homework or read a novel or read a book on intermediate technology that might change the lives of people around you. so it's remarkable how some of the simplest things, mosquito nets and solar lamps, can transform lives. >> i was surprised to hear recently that you've -- you're interested in writing a memoir or some version of it that is not the usual memoir? >> i have been saying this for about ten years, and i think, all right, i'm going to do it. then something else comes along. i'm bored by other people's memoirs, and that's why i can't quite cross the line with this and get going. >> because they're so self-congratulatatory. >> i don't want to hear about the the grandfathers who kent to school and then started their careers. i think, there must be some other way of doing this. i haven't yet found it. but it stays alive, just the notion of ming a memoir, but i would kneed to find some other trick, some other approach to discuss a life that doesn't just a to z me, a to z. i don't think that's enough. i think there is call to be some turn, some magic, some way of discussing life that's more novelistic, even though it's based in truth. >> if anybody can find it, ian mcewan probably can. ian mcewan, the novel is called "nutshell." very nice to meet you. >> thanks for having me on. good evening, i'm matt zoller seitz, tv critic for "new york magazine" and author of the book. "documentary now!" is from co-creators bill hader, fred armisen, seth meyers and rhys thomas. here's a look at the new season. >> i'm helen mirren and i'm delighted to host the brand-new season of "documentary now!" >> i'd like to tell you about a pinnacle of pitches and what we have going on here. >> six new ground-breaking films from political pioneers. >> red bone. and albin. to quirky conley virtuosos. i finds myself at -- arturo says am i doing this right. >> the historic performance of eccentric pieo near as to the man who stole the world. >> if you have their name, they want a globe. get out there. >> bermuda. take my hair piece off and throw it under the car. >> join me for the brand-new season of "documentary now!" on i.f.p. >> joining me is executive producer and writer of "documentary now!" seth meyers and two stars bill hader and fred armisen. >> i love that this is the 51st season. >> yeah. the 51st season. we felt very strongly when we started we wanted to be the 50th season and they were kind enough to let us call it the 51st season. >> talk to me a little bit about your obvious fascination with documentary film. >> this began with a sketch we worked on "snl" called history of punk which was their last season on the show and fred played the one punk rocker the fan of margaret thatcher and rhys thomas shot this incredible specific. everything looked like it came from the right era, and it was really fun. it was just a five-minute sketch but afterwards i remember bill saying that would be the kind of show he would want to do. >> we were talking about possibly doing something, you know. we knew we were leaving and we thought, what's the thing we could do and andrew singer who is the producer on our show and says, you know, if you have app idea take it to i.f.c. because portlandio has done well and we have such a great relationship with them. we did our last show on "snl" and the week later we were saying, yeah, it's a straight documentary parody show. i think any other place they would have said no thanks but they were so on board with it and loved it. >> do you think the very fact they already signed off on a show that was specifically about portland? >> yeah. and had the confidence some creative mindset would be able to make something that does not sound like a hot cell. a hyperspecific documentary. >> it is hyperspecific, almost called a method parody where you're trying to become the thing. you're poking fun at it but mainly you're affectionate towards it. >> yeah, a movie i remember early on i was talking to rhys and alex, zellig in the woody allen movie, or even take the money and run, this was this insane you can tell he love movies and you're, no, if you make it funnier because it subverts your relationship to the movie and to watching dormandocumentaries. this feels like an important movie except there is one thing off from it. >> the movie that comes to mind immediately is young frankenstein which they didn't have to do it in black and white and get the original electrical machines from the universal prop room but it adds a lot. >> flipping through channels, it's, like, there is a frankenstein movie. >> let's talk about the obsessional quality of how you achieve this. you have an episode that's a spoof of nanook of the north, arguably the beginning of cinema and looks like it's shot from that period. was it green screens? >> no joke. so you're on an ice slope skittering around -- >> it was more of a mountain. i think probably to them more of a hill. but it was a little bit of a drive. but it's kind of near ski resorts, but it was still, like, very dramatically freezing. like, if you turned your face for a little while, your face starts to burn, you have to turn away again. and we had to wear real fur, real pelts. and i thought, when you see them, it doesn't seem like something that would really work because they're actually thin and it totally worked. they advised me to wear nothing underneath because i wanted to wear snow gear and they said, you will sweat. but really that's what they wear. >> this was one of my favorite stories because i was not in iceland when they were shooting it is there was a beautiful wide shot of fred and supposedly someone was walking into the shot to talk to you about your rental car, which is just my favorite. >> i wasn't aware of it. but the director is, like, why are they doing this now? >> it's important. yeah. one of the things i love about this particular episode is that it's a spoof of a very specific thing, but then as in so many episode of "documentary now!," something else happens to it, something else happens that this character canuck isn't what they're asking him to pretend to be, so there is something going on with the artifice of making documentaries in the first place. so it becomes an acting challenge, i almost hesitate to use that word, almost as much as goofing around. >> it's silent sowf thing is one shot. it was actually very easy because the changes all happen in the writing, which the whole thing was written by seth meyers. that's all him. >> and as the production goes on, he begins to try to seize the control of production so he can tell his own story. >> it's funny to take the tropes of massively egotistical movie star and say not only do documentaries start here but this is where the raging egos but also crap service started in this movie and i feel like guy putting his girlfriend in a movie and all these fun tropes, it was the beginning of all of that. >> and tyrannical directors. i mean, that was a nice thing where we sat down and we're talking about third acts of this and once we cracked that, we were very satisfied. in its own way, there are documentaries about that. >> i wanted to talk about an episode coming up in season two, a spoof of the war room, a documentary about the 1992 presidential campaign, you replay that, it's a dpoobtorial race. i want to show a clip to give the viewers a sense of how accurately they're capturing this particular movie. >> they didn't like clinton, they liked me. >> i bet i said something you could take out of context. you weird guys got to stick together. ( laughter ) >> have lit million common except campaign gurus. >> browns is a frenchman who wears jeans with a black leather jacket. he's just not us, but then we will win. >> they say, why do they portray you like that? we sent our children to college, you go up there and you act like some kind of weirdo. >> now, that's fun, talking on the telephone to reporters. ( laughter ) >> hey, listen to this, modest though he is, ben herndon yesterday handed his campaign over to a rogue gallery of political gurus including teddy red bone, so-called mississippi valley and the boy hunk of the beltway. i feel like i'm shy. >> they always write the same thing about me, mississippi mcvalley or suc succubus or suspected author. but they always leave out "undeseated." >> didid you forget to take your shoes off? >> a lot of this is due to rhys thomas and the directors, they really study these movies, and we know them and john ma laney who wrote this up sewed, he knows it. but when you're there performing it, they're trying to very hard to capture all those nuances and knowing, you know, you can't -- okay, they know d.a. had one camera, so you can't, you know what i mean -- so the camera's over here and it follows him. you know, you can't cut to sitting there, that's cheating. >> according to the rules of the war room -- >> according to the rules to have the the war room we had the same thing with the parody. one camera, so there is no cutting and popping in things, and if you have a cutaway, it needs to look that it's one from another scene you spliced in. they're very -- you know, the amount of detail that goes into that. and all the conversations have it on set which is really interesting. >> let's talk in a little more detail about the writing process. do you all see each other? do you get together in the same room? >> no, we don't have time. we have a helpful two days before we started the season of sitting down and figuring out which ones we want the do, talking about what we think moves will be, and then sort of assign them out and people just go off on their own in pairs and work on them. >> different cities pretty much. and then we have a table read which is really helpful. but it's a lot like "snl," which again the show is inspired there. "snl" writers have an idea, write the sketch maybe with one other person, maybe one alone. there's a little rewriting but mostly you try to keep with one person's version of it. it's not like in l.a.y everyone piles on jokes and you try the to keep it in line. >> both seasons, we had a moment where an episode wasn't working or this year was an episode that was too expensive and we went into the season trying to do this one and it was too expensive and we were trying to figure out how to do it, john malini called me up and said why don't we do with smalling grey because that's all you sitting at a desk. then called rhys and alex and said what do you think about cambodia, they said that's a great style because that's not like any of the incredibly cinematic style. so that was one where we called them and said what do you think of swimming cambodia, you want to watch it because we're writing it and shooting it in 48 hours. i remember you calling saying this is great. and me and john explaining here's what we were thinking it would be. it's, like, great, yeah, let's go, you know. >> do you start with let's go something like grey gardens or characters, a particular set of characters and ask what particular kind of documentary would be good to showcase these characters. >> a lot of times it's going where did this style start. the big thing is what's the thing that fred and i could both play. grey gardens is the perfect thing, style and the two characters for us as two people. it was one of the things the minute seth said it, we did grey gardens and the whole room laughed. >> it's one of the best-known documentaries. >> especially for the first one. i feel like the poster at the very least, it was sort of a signal of intent, like here's what we're out to do. >> here's what we're doing, exactly. and it was also fun to do -- i remember we talked about should we do the jinx, something like that? where did that style started, that kind of cinematic recreations and the music and start with thin blue line. then we said, well, let's do thin blue line. then we have one in this season it's kid stays in the picture. ththe 2d animation where the subject is talking. which they've done a ton since then. >> you mentioned the jinx. there is some contention as to how much of a doc a documentaryt movie is. if it isn't some kind of narrative fiction, at least the way the material is arranged. is that something you think about when you're shooting these, putting them together, like, when do we reveal this information? are these the questions that come into play when you're doing scripted, regular filmmaking? >> one of the biggest problems we have and certainly why we abandon the staircases and the jinxes, it's hard enough to take a 90-minute documentary and boil it down to 22 minutes, sort of impossible. but great documentaries have a narrative structure where you find out for as you go, so that's been fun. some are easier because it's a story of some someone's career. some are trickier and you try to let it out. >> i know what you mean about the jinx because some people thought it was egregious to reveal certain things about the case later. >> there have been a number of documentaries that posed those sorts of questions. >> yeah, but we get a bunch of material -- i was watching brother's keeping recently, a phenomenal documentary, but i could see -- i wonder -- you know you're till having to lay that out in the editing process and tell a story, and you're ending with the trial and, you know, you're trying to add some sort of tension, narrative tension to it, you know. >> i was reading an essay before i came over here about an american family, the reality series, and it talks some about the idea of verite, and saying verite arose as a way to capture reality and not intervene and shape the material, but the writer was saying you're kind of manipulating reality anyway in deciding to be there and where to point the camera. >> the brooks' movie, he's making fun of the american family. that's the joke of the movie, i want to get real life. charles grodin, when he's eating with the family, he's so conscious, enjoying your pizza, honey? having a good time? and everyone is, like, why are you acting h this way. >> and they manipulate it like this. >> only four of the jokes ever worked, we have three of those. ( laughter ) >> yeah, but that idea, too, is -- i always think that all the time when i watch documentaries. oh, but look at this person, he's so nice with the family and stuff. there is a camera at his house. >> i made a note to myself as i was binge watching season one, and there's a little bit of performer in everybody, and you see that with just watching a documentary. you see people just supposedly everyday people, not performers. there is sometimes a feeling like they're performing. >> their accents a little bit. early documentaries, gate to heaven, you know, or where the old lady is talking about -- supposed to be talking about her dog, and he lets her talk, then it turns into this whole thing about her son who was in jail, and she starts talking about the things in her life, and you're, like, someone's just paying attention to her, and they have a camera, and, you know, that's what's so fascinating about that movie, you know what i mean? it was all the -- observe obsers about pet cemeteries but it's about these people in their lives and their emotions and what they aspire to be. >> fast, cheap and out of control, vernon florida and all of his movies are like that. he's sometimes accused of giving people enough rope to hang themselves with but i never feel he's actually a hangman. >> i don't think so. well then people say the opposite to him about the rumsfeld documentary, oh, he didn't let rumsfeld hang himself. he just lets them talk and say their thing and then he does it. i don't know. i like him a lot. >> obviously you do because the thin blue line period you did is eerily accurate. >> as we talk about performing, one of my favorite things in that is that fred's guy doesn't use the cameras to make the case for himself. he's the worst defender of himself and it's just so fun to see. usually in documentaries, you see people making an aggressive case. they understand the camera is their friend. >> in tend, that's what he's supposed to be there for. he's still had about the tv not working. we shot an initial ending to it that i couldn't get to because i kept laughing where it was my character was being interviewed, and then your character opened up a door and was, like, hey, uh -- he knocked on the door and was like, hey, uh, when you say you're going to interview somebody and tell them 11:00, make it 11:00. it's been 15 minutes. the himmaker said, well, his interview is going over. and he's, like, i have a small window to do things. could you please -- >> threw him a banana. he said, what's that? that's breakfast. i never got through a single take. every time i would be talking and hear the door, hey, hey, excuse me, i would start laughing. it was awful. >> you definitely get to play roles within the context of these fake documentaries you might not normally get to play, and i sense the joy you have when you're able to do that, when you're rolling around on the kitchen table and wearing a heahead scarf and things like t. >> yeah, but also to get to play what could be a very sketchy character, playing them very nuanced and real and giving them some sort of soul to them, you know. a lot of people like the end of the blue jean committee because it is kind of -- it's this moment with fred and i where we lead with these two guys that don't speak to each other anymore and we talk. i forgot how that scene initially went. >> what if they left it for when -- i feel like they set it up, but when we were shooting it. >> so, yeah, you guys -- and i remember rhys being, like, make it that awkward necessary where you don't talk to someone -- like that was it. and that was the thing, it was written but kind of improvised like, well, i'll see ya, yeah, well, we'll hack out or whatever. people love that scene. that was a thing that was very nice for rhys thomas and alex bono, i really give them credit for allowing for those moments. we need the moment to make the episode work. >> we all came from sketch and one thing you don't get to do often in sketch is tell stories, and it's sort of nice to have the time to do that. i feel like we get to spend enough time with characters and you don't get to go in five-minute sketches where you have an emotional moment and that's been a fun thing to do and it's been fun to come up with things that further the plot along which you don't usually do either. >> yeah, finding the emotion, like what's the emotion driving this thing. >> and the relationship, too. is driving it. >> and it's not making sense of episode this year called final transmission. it's really wonderful again because it's still fred and the band and very different from blue jean committee and you have to get the relationship watching them on stage as opposed to talking heads, not the band but the actual device in documentaries, but it's so impressive to watch what these guys do in a concert documentary where you watch and realize, oh, i'm getting to see how these guys get along. >> what kind of compliments or comments or questions do you get from fans of the show, people who really watch documentaries. i know a lot of people who are or seased with them. >> yeah, we're lucky enough that there is a -- i think the people who are obsessed with them is probably a thin slice of the viewing public but very passionate. >> and they're obsessed. lot of details, they know all the teeny things. >> and they don't watch just one kind of documentary. >> they watch everything, yeah. and that's also -- i watch a ton of documentaries, but i didn't realize food documentaries are huge. we did one rice and chicken based on sushi and i didn't even know that was its own subgenre of documentary. it's huge. >> and so successful there have been many, many more. >> yeah. even the time i feel like we decided to do that, there's been more. >> yeah. it's been -- yeah, that was definitely one i didn't know existed. >> and we sat down at the beginning of the year and said we want to find six different topics that want to be easy to fall into. we could do all six about those kind of worlds but it's fun to find things like -- you know, then you come up with food or, you know, like parker gail, spaulding grey, you're so relieved to be, oh, this is great, this won't be how something went wrong, you know what i'm saying. >> we tend to not get into sports too much. >> andy did these likely great and he's going to do more so we're kind of, like, oh they're doing that. >> biased is my favorite sketch about documentaries. a pored landia sketchy -- portlandia sketch where fred wants to do beatles documentary. >> there are so many. landing, going on ed sullivan, growing mustaches and stuff. >> it's great. fred talking to cary. he's so excited because he doesn't think anyone's come up with this idea. >> the breakup. ( laughter ) >> it's that enthusiastic idea. they'll come off the plane and go crazy! ( laughter ) then they get a little older and they break up. >> thank you very much for coming on the show. >> thank you. >> rose: for more about this program and earlier episodes, visit us online at pbs.org and charlierose.com. captioning sponsored by rose communications captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org >> rose: funding for "charlie rose" has been provided by: >> and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and of multimedia news and information services worldwide. man: it's like holy mother of comfort food.ion. kastner: throw it down. it's noodle crack. patel: you have to be ready for the heart attack on a platter. crowell: okay, i'm the bacon guy. man: oh, i just did a jig every time i dipped into it. doug: ...which just completely blew my mind. woman: it felt like i had a mouthful of raw vegetables and dry dough. sbrocco: oh, please. i want the dessert first! [ laughs ] i told him he had to wait.