Roger Nygard: How to Work Both Scripted and Unscripted

Announcer: Welcome to producing unscripted. What joke? And Biagio.

Angry Man: Is this some kind of joke?

Confused Woman: Biagio-WHO???

Biagio: This episode. It’s episode 109 and we’ve got the rector, editor extraordinaire, Roger Nygaard. Roger tells us how he found success in both scripted and unscripted film and television. His secrets to successfully getting your next film into festivals around the world. Shares inside scoop on his new documentary, The Truth About Marriage, plus a true storybook ending. It sounds like a fairy tale. Nope came true for Roger. Music courtesy Dave Pelman. Music Dave Pelman. Hey, everybody. She’s Joke.

Joke: He’s Biagio.

Biagio: We’re married. We make unscripted film and television and want to help you do the same.

Joke: Hopefully by teaming up with us.

Biagio: Well, it’s episode 109, and boy, is this one going to be awesome. Joke. What’s going on?

Joke: Well, we are so excited to be here today with Roger Nygaard. He’s one of those rare individuals who managed to successfully work in both scripted and unscripted.

Biagio: Yeah. Sure has. He’s produced, directed and edited a number of documentaries, including the classic Trekkies, which the two of us saw in the theater. He directed the famed grief counseling episode of The Office and has edited on huge shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm, Gray’s Anatomy, and my personal favorite, Veep, for which he was nominated for an Emmy. So I’m trying not to geek out too much, I’m not going to lie.

Joke: And he has a new documentary coming out later this year called The Truth About Marriage. Can’t wait to see that one.

Biagio: Maybe we’ll learn a thing or two.

Joke: Maybe. Roger. Welcome.

Roger Nygard: 109 episodes. Wow.

Joke: I know we’ve been going at this for a while. Married and still doing it.

Roger Nygard: What’s your secret?

Biagio: I do whatever she tells me. I learned, I learned a long time ago. Happy wife, happy life like that is.

Roger Nygard: We cover that in the documentary. Maybe getting ahead of myself, but I do talk to people about who’s the boss.

Biagio: And.

Roger Nygard: 100% agreement that it’s the woman that’s in charge. So as a man’s world surprise, it’s not.

Joke: Yeah. You know, raising a daughter and a son. I have to say, the women are responsible for building the patriarchy. So we have a lot to to self-reflect on there.

Biagio: I just I just realized I married out of my league, and I work really hard to take her lead whenever possible when I remember, too. You know, my guy, I forget sometimes.

Joke: Well, anyway, thank you so, so much for having us.

Biagio: So where are we at, Roger?

Roger Nygard: Well, thank you for visiting me. I’m at my office at Paramount Studios, where I’m currently editing season seven of Veep. Woo!

Biagio: Yeah, so I’m pretty excited to be hanging out here. I love Veep, I love the show. And this is also like a legendary lot. Actually joke used to work on this lot. Years ago.

Joke: I did my first job was working for Galen Herd here on the lot in the Ernst Lubitsch Annex.

Roger Nygard: Wow.

Biagio: Yeah. I mean, as someone who loves film and TV as much as you do, it must be pretty cool to be on this lot.

Roger Nygard: Do we see a lot of big names on every you walk by? Every building has a name, and I don’t know if you noticed, but every studio, every stage has a plaque listing all the famous movies that have filmed inside each of the studios. And it’s kind of fun to see the history that’s gone through here.

Biagio: That’s awesome. All right, now, before we get started, I want to talk about how we actually know Roger. So we were going out to festivals with our doc dying to do Letterman, and honestly, we didn’t really know where to begin. It was it was really our first serious attempt at a doc. We’d been in TV. Now we’re doing everything on our own, and there was a lot on the line and honestly, we didn’t want to blow it. So we reached out to Roger and he was so kind. He let us take him to dinner, and then he heard me blather on all night about the project, and then made one of the biggest intros of our career, honestly.

Joke: Yeah. You introduced us to the Cinequest Film Festival, which honestly, we not really heard about, and you were like, I know it’s a smaller festival, but they’re really worth it. And we met Michael and he loved the film and it was such an amazing experience. They take such good care of their filmmakers up there. It was like a nice, kind of like intro Into the world. And then from there, obviously we were able to do more film festivals. We won the Audience Award, the Jury Award, and were able to ultimately get a distribution deal with The Scope.

Biagio: Yeah, that dinner with Roger started a journey that ended up in a pretty great place. So thank you again.

Roger Nygard: Oh you’re welcome. Yes. San Jose Film Festival Cinequest is one of my favorites. Just every film festival has a personality based on the people who run it. And this film festival is run by great people. And that’s why. One reason I think they take such good care of the filmmakers. They’re good with marketing. Their taste in films is really good. Obviously they picked our films, so there’s evidence of that. So it’s one of my favorites.

Biagio: That’s great. So diving into the meat of today’s episode, there’s going to be so much good stuff here. First, we’re going to talk a bit about how Roger manages to straddle both the scripted and unscripted worlds. A lot of people want to do that. He’s doing it. Then we’re going to discuss being a documentarian today, how it’s changed over the course of his career. And finally, we’re going to give you some inside scoop on Roger’s upcoming documentary, The Truth About Marriage.

Joke: So let’s start. I hear from a lot of creative people. They want to work in both doc and script it. They want to jump between the best of both worlds. You’ve managed to do it. You’ve made documentaries that were box office hits, and then you’ve worked on acclaimed TV show. So a lot of people listening want to be you. So let’s start at the beginning. Which one came first scripted or unscripted?

Roger Nygard: Well, I started making films when I was seven years old, just because it was to entertain myself, and I never stopped throughout high school. They just got a little more elaborate in college, a little bit bigger budget. And when I got to when I graduated from college, I moved out to Los Angeles to go to film school. That was the plan. I ultimately didn’t go. I applied and got rejected. At some got into USC, for instance, but by the time that the semester rolled around to start, I already had gotten a job. So I just kept working. And I’ve been working ever since, and I never planned to get into documentaries. That was just kind of a lark. I’ve always had a philosophy of following wherever the universe sort of presents what the paths that are present say yes to opportunity, right? Yeah, it’s sort of if you want to boil it down. And I had made a feature called High Strung. That was my first feature. It was a comedy, a small, low budget, one room comedy written by a comedian named Steve Oda Kirk. And among those in it was Denise Crosby. We cast her as one of the roles, which is how I met her, and she had been on Star Trek The Next Generation a few years or so after completing that film, I had done another film, an action film. Denise pitched me an idea of doing a documentary about Star Trek fans, because she’d been going to the conventions and meeting the people and said how interesting they were as.

Biagio: A subject.

Roger Nygard: And so I said, I can’t believe no one’s done this yet. It seems so obvious. Of course. Yes. Why not? I mean, my my brother is a huge Trek fan. I’ve got a friend who’s a huge Trekkie, goes to conventions. I’d never really been into that world myself. And so we started exploring the idea of doing a documentary by watching several documentaries. Denise, Denise and I just gathered a bunch of films and watched them like My Brother’s Keeper, Hoop Dreams, the seven up movies 14 up, 21 up, etc.. Michael Apted films and learned by watching. We didn’t know any one of us knew about how to make a documentary. And then we found a producer who was willing to put up the money to go and shoot. One weekend she she gets booked as an actress. So she was booked to this convention in Los Angeles, where all of the original series actors were scheduled to be. And we thought, well, this is a great opportunity. If we don’t do this, we’ll never do it. So we had enough of a budget to go shoot one weekend. We were fledgling documentarians, didn’t really know much about it, and we just went and shot. And it’s really addicting. If you start making documentaries, you’ll become addicted because it’s such an enjoyable process. I mean, it’s hard and it takes a long time, and it’s after you start questioning your sanity after a while, but you, you get hooked on it because you don’t know where it’s going to take you. So it’s exciting. Whereas with a screenplay, you’re working really hard to achieve this idea you already have in your mind and you never quite reach what you’ve imagined, you get as close as you can for the documentary. You don’t know what it’s going to be, and you start filming and the response is like fishing you so, oh, I got a big one on the line, and we were fishing all weekend and got great interviews, really colorful footage. And from that point it was like, we can’t stop now. And so we went and filmed for another nine months and finished the film and and and learned kind of learn by doing.

Biagio: That’s great. There’s so much I love about that. One thing we always talk about on the podcast is that when you need to learn how to do something, you have to go watch. So many people don’t do that to make a documentary, or they try to make a pitch for an unscripted television show, and they haven’t watched 1 in 10 years. So that’s a great story about you guys watching all the docs. Of course, then Trekkies gets a theatrical distribution through Paramount. It’s a big hit documentary. It’s what every filmmaker dreams of. Honestly. How did things change for you after that, or did they?

Roger Nygard: Well, we went through that whole process trying to find distribution. It was the first time process for us, and I read a lot of books. I read books was it spike, Mike, slackers and dikes?

Biagio: Yes. John Pearson.

Roger Nygard: Remember that book and Rebel Without a Crew and all the films about filmmakers, Robert Rodriguez about making their film and finding distribution. And it just turns out that it’s two things marketing, making, making people aware of the existence of your film. And you have to do it when you’re trying to sell your film, as well as when you’re distributing it so that the distributors become aware of, oh, this is a product that we should have, and then it’s trying to navigate the world of when do you sell and how do you sell your film, and for how much and when is the right time. And you know, you don’t want to wait too long. When the interest has waned, it’s going to kind of peak at some point. And that’s what film festivals are forced to build up, maybe some reviews and some interest and some buzz, and then try to prove to to a distributor you’re building a case for. Why should they take a chance and spend their money and time putting your film out there? Are they going to make money back? Well, look, I’ve got all these reviews, I’ve got all this feedback. Here’s why you should take on our film. And we went through that process with Trekkies, and it was the first time that we had a product that people really liked and wanted. And so we had multiple interests between Paramount and Universal and some other smaller companies like tri Mark and Newline and Miramax all were also nibbling around the edges. But Paramount Universal made substantial offers and ended up bidding against each other, and so the price of the advance went up to one and a half. $1.25 million is what were it ultimately peaked for us. But that’s only because there’s multiple interests. If there’s not much interest, you’re lucky to get any advance.

Biagio: Yeah, I didn’t realize that Trekkies sparked a bidding war. So yet another thing filmmakers dream about it sounds like a fairy tale. Nope. Came true for Roger.

Roger Nygard: It’s hard to get two companies both interested in something enough because they don’t like to work against each other.

Biagio: Yeah, yeah.

Joke: I mean, they know what they’re doing. They know the price is going up and they’re paying more for something that if.

Unidentified Voice: The other person wasn’t interested.

Joke: They could get cheaper.

Biagio: So yeah, we have that same problem in unscripted television in that years ago you could potentially own your show, but now it’s so difficult to get two networks to bid against each other because they’re all part of conglomerates. It’s hard to find something that will work at more than one network. So it’s definitely the days of the bidding wars I think have waned a little bit now.

Joke: You did something amazing, which is you went from directing your own documentaries to directing on The Office. How did you parlay that career move?

Roger Nygard: I had made some independent films before Trekkies. Trekkies was my third film, so I had some experience doing narrative, and I went back to it and did another film called suckers about car Salesman, and in a mock documentary called Six Days in Roswell. In between those around the time I made suckers, it was doing film festivals, and it played at a festival called the US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado, in. A filmmaker named Mike binder was there, and he saw the film and liked the editing style. And so he offered me a job editing on his project, and he had a series that was going at HBO called The Mind of the Married Man. I ended up working on that for him, cutting the pilot and then and editing and directing some episodes on the series when it got picked up for a couple of seasons. So my way into television was through making my feature films. Somebody noticed what I was doing and discovered, or I discovered that it’s apparently very difficult to find good comedic editors. It’s harder. Apparently, it’s harder to do comedy than it is to do anything else, because it’s obvious when something isn’t funny.

Biagio: Dying is easy. Comedy is hard, right?

Joke: Comedy is all about timing, and so is editing. And if you don’t, you know it’s just per frame, right? If you don’t get it right, if you just don’t know what that right cut is, then it’s not going to be as funny.

Biagio: Yeah, it takes a special skill, which clearly you have when you’re when you made that sort of like crossover, like you went obviously from scripted to doc and back to scripted and you’ve, you’ve gone back and forth what skills do you find cross over and what you find is completely different between the two.

Roger Nygard: Well, one of the biggest flaws in Trekkies, it’s a very flawed documentary and now everybody copies the flaws.

Biagio: Congratulations.

Roger Nygard: It’s become sort of a template for fandom films, and we realize while making it that it was very problematic because the best documentaries are about one protagonist, or maybe a small number who have a goal or a problem. And there’s an ending, a climactic ending of some kind in their story arc. So to answer your question, whether it’s narrative or documentary or reality show, you need a good story. Documentaries need three act structure, ideally the best ones when you notice the ones you love the most. Probably had a good three act story structure with a protagonist and a villain, and goals and obstacles and then an ending. And usually the documentaries. The ending is something like it’s a court verdict, or do they win the big game? Or does Michael Moore find Roger Smith? He sets out in Roger and me to to interview Roger Smith and he never does. And so he solved that problem by interviewing an empty chair. At the end of the film. You need an ending of some kind. And I learned while making Trekkies that we didn’t have that we didn’t have a protagonist with a goal. And so the way we solved our problem and it’s a flawed solution is we did a bunch of short segments, short films, short moments, like chapters on Star Trek fans. Here you meet Gabriel Kerner. And what’s his life like now? You meet Barbara Adams, and what’s her life like so that as a viewer, you know that if you’re not intrigued by someone, there’s going to be someone else’s story coming soon. What keeps someone through to the end in 90 minutes is, is a question that they want answer at the end of the movie, or the end of a reality show is who’s going to win? Who’s going to get voted off the island? Who’s going to whatever you have to set up a problem. And we didn’t have that in keys. So what we relied on was, were these short segments of really colorful people who were so interesting that they alone, they had enough charisma or or something weird or bizarre or fun about them that would keep an audience watching to the end. So to answer your question, it always comes back to story and story structure. If you’re a filmmaker, a reality show filmmaker, a documentarian, you still need to read literature and study story and read all the books on story structure. Read story by Robert McKee. You know, read all. There’s so many creating unforgettable characters. You should read them all and really absorb literature and story.

Biagio: Yeah, it’s a really good point, because a lot of people don’t realize that documentary isn’t just roll a camera and whatever happens is your movie like that. Nobody would watch that. That would be awful. But I know when we were editing Diana Do Letterman and we’ve talked to some other documentary filmmakers, like that whole idea of the hero’s journey that Joseph Campbell, you know, there’s that book, The Writer’s Journey, I think, by Christopher Vogler, you know, which really sort of like broke down those steps that a protagonist in scripted usually goes through. But it seems like the best docs, as you’ve said, they have that in common as well, right?

Roger Nygard: I mean, but then again, there’s two types of documentaries, right? There’s there’s the, the the stories about a person or a protagonist that lend themselves to story structure. And then there’s the concept documentaries which which are harder to do. And of course, I’ve fallen into that category because I always have to pick what’s the hardest thing to do? And so the Nature of Existence was my previous doc, which is about existentialism. It’s a concept, so it doesn’t have a natural narrative arc, but it has a big question that I ask at the beginning what is the point of everything? So I’m going to try to answer that question over the course of the next 90 minutes. And in the marriage documentary, it’s also a concept documentary. So why is marriage so difficult for human beings? I’m going to set out to try to answer that if you’re interested in that question. If you stick around. I’m going to do my best to answer that question. So if you pick concept documentaries like food Inc. is a concept documentary, obviously advocacy documentaries or concept documentaries, you better have a really intriguing, strong question that’s going to hold people to the end. It’s much easier to hold people for 90 minutes with a story about one person who’s got an interesting challenge or problem that they’re trying to solve in their life, like they’ve been arrested or they’re trying to win the game. Whatever it is, we like stories about people. It’s really difficult to make a film about license plates, but it’s pretty easy to make a film about this crazy old man who collects license plates. Why would you do that? And so the documentarians question is why? That’s what you’re asking everybody. Why are you doing this? Why do you like that? Why do you live this way, etc.?

Joke: I think also the documentary filmmaker in and of itself is an interesting character because why would you make documentaries?

Biagio: Obviously the big bucks, right?

Joke: So definitely filmmaking is notoriously financially very stressful. How do you balance your documentary filmmaking goals or your independent filmmaking goals? What are its narrative or unscripted with your career? In scripted? Does one help the other? Does one feed the other? Do you? Do you want to do both regardless of the financial questions?

Roger Nygard: Yeah. It’s impossible. Almost impossible, right? To make a living making documentaries. You better be doing it for another reason. And that reason is probably because you’re really into the subject, or you get really into the process of making documentaries. You need some other motivation other than money. You might make some money. It’s possible to sell a documentary, what it’s done. And now there’s even more platforms, and there’s a voracious appetite from from all these different distribution entities. So there are more avenues to sell your film, which is the good thing. But I expect to lose money on every documentary I make because that’s more likely. I mean, I got lucky in one respect with Trekkies, and that I picked a subject that was salable and we had an interest in it, and we sold it, and that’s paid for my house. But that doesn’t happen very often. I feed my documentary habit by working in television through editing and directing and writing, doing other things that are more salable. I mean, editing Veep, you know, it’s an enjoyable career and I love doing it, but it also finances my documentary habit. Right. You need some way to finance films. It’s rare that you’re going to get HBO or Showtime or Netflix to pay you in advance for a documentary. Pitching a documentary to them is like trying to convince them to finance known expedition. How do they know if you’re going to succeed, what you’re going to do? Where is it going to go? The only likely way that they’re going to do that is if you have a history or a background, if you’re Michael Moore or whatever, you have a history, okay, we’re going to buy the next Michael Moore film. Well, if you don’t have that, you pretty much have to finish the film on your own. So it’s a self-financed venture. So you buy a camera, you learn to edit, you get some lavalier microphone, and you just bite the bullet and start shooting. And it’s a leap of faith. You don’t know what’s going to happen, but you have to be able to get there financially to the end, on your own. Keep the budget down. Something has to drive you despite that, to get to the end.

Joke: And this has become more of like a after hours weekend thing. Do you end up just spending whatever free minute you have on that passion documentary then?

Roger Nygard: Yeah, very much. And every hiatus between jobs, I will grab my camera and get on an airplane and go somewhere and interview people. And it’s also fun. I get to meet interesting people, spend two hours with a camera. My interviews take about at least an hour and often 2 or 3 hours. But you get to go and meet people and spend quality time having the type of conversation that you wouldn’t have, just meeting someone and talking about the weather or small talk. Whatever you talk like I’m talking about, is there a soul? What is sin? What are your best tips for for surviving in a relationship? How do you regain the passion once it’s gone? You know, these are deeper questions. And so when you have a conversation like that, you tend to bond with people, which is kind of the whole point of existing is to bond with people because we’re a social species. And documentaries are a way to, to to do that, to bond with people and tell their stories. It’s a way of, of enjoying what’s best about human existence, which is because we’re social creatures. It’s interacting with people on a deeper level.

Joke: And film festivals. Then, at least from our experience, it was like a great way then to finally share that, because it’s just even if you sell it and even if you have a theatrical release, you don’t. You’re not really there with people as they’re enjoying that journey of the story you told. But in film festivals you get to be there. And I mean, it was just amazing that first screening right in front of a festival. So, so talk about how important festivals are in your journey then as that filmmaker.

Roger Nygard: It’s one way you can get seen. Even if you don’t get distribution right away. You get to experience presenting what you’ve created to the world, to your social group, to the to a social network. That’s the whole point, is to create something and then present it to the world and and maybe they’ll respond. You hope they’ll they will respond. You’re going to get to experience that.

Joke: Neither good nor bad.

Roger Nygard: Yeah. And you’ll get both. You’re going to get good and bad. One thing about film festivals is that if you really want to be serious about making a documentary, save some money for film festivals. I have found my films get about a 15% response rate from film festival submissions, so if I want to go to 15 festivals, I better submit to 100 film festivals. You don’t just submit to 5 or 10 and then give up, because if I submit to ten. I might get zero responses and and think I’ve failed. But if I submit to 100 and that’s expensive to submit to all these festivals, it’s part of the distribution of your film. I mean, real serious filmmakers, they have a budget and for the making the film and then a budget for distribution, you have to be ready to self distribute if that’s what it takes to get your work out there.

Joke: What’s the tip in terms of getting into a festival? Is it. Is it building relationship with the festival directors? Is it just knowing kind of the audience for your film and figuring out which festivals kind of market that or have themes? How do you go about that?

Roger Nygard: Those are all important. The most important thing is the shotgun approach. Just submit to as many top tier and second tier and third tier. And when you get to the second and third and fourth tier, then I sort of combine it with, well, how much do I really want to visit that city?

Biagio: Yeah, right.

Joke: That’s a.

Roger Nygard: Good point. And if I want to go to the Bahamas, that sounds nice. And I’ll submit to the Bahamas Film Festival. How much do I want to go to to Cleveland? Well, it’s maybe not as exciting as the Bahamas, but their film festival is actually quite a good film festival. Each festival has a personality. They like a certain type of film because they’re programmers. They’re making choices. I’ve never gotten into Sundance. All eight of my films so far have been rejected by Sundance. They rejected Trekkies, which went on to be successful, obviously, and get the second highest advance in history of documentaries to that point. So it’s not about whether your project is good or bad, it’s about whether that particular festival likes something that’s that has the tone or tenor of your film.

Biagio: Right? Yeah, it’s a really good point because, you know, you’ve made successful film. The Sundance says, no, we got rejected by Sundance, you know, but a lot of times it seems like festivals almost have, for lack of a better way to describe it as semi political agenda. Like they want to program these kind of stories and the rest fall by the wayside. Have you found that?

Roger Nygard: Oh yeah. Absolutely. And I mean, just by the numbers alone, the number of submissions Sundance gets versus the number of open slots ends up in a every film having about a one third of 1% chance of getting in. And that’s pretty low. I mean, South by Southwest there there figure is about a 3% chance. So if you figure you’ve got a 3% chance of winning a jackpot when you pull a handle, a you going to waste your money on that one arm bandit. You know, you better enjoy pulling handles, right? You’re doing it for other reasons. And if you pull enough handles, though, you’ll get in. And then you’ll start meeting people, and they’ll start recognizing your work and you. And it’ll happen. But you have to be persistent. And there are hundreds, if not thousands of film festivals now. So you’ll get in somewhere.

Biagio: And there’s most of them have some sort of submission fee. I mean, you’re pretty successful successful at this point. Have you found that you’re able to get the submission fees waived, or are you paying for 150 submissions?

Roger Nygard: Oh I’m paying. Some of them have returning filmmaker reduced rates, or they’ll waive the fee. And you can take advantage of that. And I do and I like go right to the to the programmer sometimes and say, hey, do you want to see my film first? And I’ll send you a link. And they’ll say, don’t even bother with so many. It just send it to me. But that’s rare. I mean, you know, it’s been it took me eight years to finish this film since the last film and a lot of programmers have turned over. It’s all new people anyway, and so you’re kind of starting from scratch every time. So I’ve just found that it’s just the numbers approach. It’s kind of like dating. Yeah. You know, if you date one person and expect that to to to be the right one, your chances are low that you’re going to pick the right person the first time out.

Biagio: So speaking of which, I mean, that seems like a pretty good transition into the relationship film. You just you just made its new project coming out, the Truth About Marriage trailer is available. We’ll put it up on the with the show notes. And boy, do we have questions. First off, why the stock? Where did the inspiration come from?

Roger Nygard: Somebody I will always ask you at the Q&A on your your previous film. Okay what’s next? And then you have to come up with an answer. You can’t say, I don’t know, you better have something. And so somebody asked me at a festival, I think it was in Dallas. Somebody said, what’s next? And so I just thought about it, and the first thing that popped into my mind was, well, I got to come up with something even more inexplicable and difficult than the very fabric of existence itself. And so how about marriage? And I’ve got a good laugh. Oh, so now I got a good laugh line. So I’ve used that at other festivals and and that popped out of my psyche for a reason. Right. It is the thing that most perplexed me after existentialism was.

Biagio: It.

Roger Nygard: Was this marriage thing that everyone is working, grappling so hard with, with if if I’m a salesperson and I come to you and I say, I’ve got this great new product, you’re going to love it. Everybody’s getting it. You’re going to say, well, wow, I want it to. Is it any good? Well, it’s yeah, it’s great, but only but 50% of them fail and the other 50% that are successful take a lot of work to keep them running. Well, you’d say you better go and improve your product and then bring it out to market, because that’s not a good rate. You know, if Lexus was working with that figure, they’d go out of business. But marriage is something is keeping it going despite that. So the question, the core question I ended up formulating was why is marriage so hard? Something’s going on. And that was where I began from that main question. Then I started writing sub like, what is the normal number of times to have sex per week? Is how important is sex to marriage? Where does the why does the passion decrease? Everyone agrees it does. And can you get it back and how do you do that? And so I took all these questions in the editing room. Some of those questions really bloomed and some of them kind of didn’t. They weren’t as interesting. So then I would reduce as I meditated, I would start to reduce it to the real core questions. Everybody’s into the passion question, like where does the passion go and how do we get it back?

Joke: What was your most interesting interview? Did you kind of find the couple who was married for 80 years or something insane like that, and ask them what their secret was?

Roger Nygard: The I took a two pronged approach. One is that I started bringing my camera when I got invited to weddings, and I would film the wedding and interview the couple, and then bank the footage and wait for. I could do kind of a longitudinal study and check back three years, five years, seven years later and see, well, what happened after the honeymoon period. And it was always unexpected. Shockingly unexpected. What happened with my couples and the other half of the film was finding the experts, tracking them down and asking them to explain it, why? What’s going on, why the problems and how do we solve them?

Joke: Is the film locked now? Is it? Is it finished? Are you done? Okay, so what’s the rollout plan? Do you know the festivals you’re going to.

Roger Nygard: And I’ve I’ve just started the shotgun approach to film festivals and so I’ll, I’ll, I’ll know soon. But I’ve got some early responses. It’s going to show it also and in reading, Pennsylvania and Barcelona and some of the old favorites where I’ve screened my films are screened before ideally. So 2019 will probably be in the end of 2018. 2019 will be the film festival run for the film and then distribution of probably come at the end of 2019 or thereafter.

Joke: Now, from personal experience, we know that rolling out a film that’s a full time job. So how do you how do you do that while editing on V? Please tell me your secret.

Roger Nygard: Yeah. You can’t. It’s it’s impossible. You just do the best you can. So I’m submitting and I’m going to attend as many festivals on weekends as possible, fly out on a Friday night and come back on Sunday night so I can go back to my job. And it just takes a motivation. You have to be you have to pick your subject that’s going to motivate you to go all the way through to the end and have the energy to see it through to completion.

Joke: And you have to not be married and not have kids.

Roger Nygard: If I had kids, I wouldn’t have been able to make this film. I can’t, I would be paying for braces in private school instead of a documentary.

Biagio: Yeah. No, it’s it’s a good point because you’re you’re not married, right?

Roger Nygard: No, I’m not married. Never been married. I’ve gotten close a couple of times and it didn’t work out, which is part of the frustrating and an aspect of why is this so hard.

Biagio: Now, after doing this extremely in-depth documentary, do you think you might want to get married someday, or has it just scared you off for ever?

Roger Nygard: No. 100% still open to the idea of marriage. Maybe even more so. And part of the lesson I learned in making the film is that marriage isn’t something to be afraid of, or to put on a pedestal marriage. It’s a contract that deals with property. It’s a piece of paper that says, here’s how you’re going to split up your the things that are of value, financial value. It doesn’t. A marriage contract doesn’t say you have to be faithful or be a good listener or be nice. None of that is required. And these are.

Joke: Things, right?

Roger Nygard: Legally, all that’s required legally is sharing your money. So if you meet someone you want to share your money with, it’s probably because you’re having children and you want to make a commitment to pooling your resources in order to raise your offspring. But all of these things that make for a smoother, more happy relationship apply whether you’re married or not. And that’s a big part of the documentary, is learning some of these aspects. For instance, if men want to make your women happy, they need 15 minutes per day of listening time.

Joke: Don’t fear taking note, darling.

Biagio: Oh, I’m taking notes. I. The ten minutes I’ve been giving you is clearly not enough.

Roger Nygard: It’s like 5 or 10 at a minimum. 1530. Okay, that’s overdoing it.

Biagio: Maybe that’s.

Roger Nygard: But put.

Joke: Away, exaggerate.

Roger Nygard: Put away the iPad. Put down the cell phone. Make eye contact. Honey. How was your day? And then listen, don’t offer any advice. Just. Oh. That’s terrible. Oh, I’m so sorry. Just empathy. A woman’s brain needs to offload the emotions that she’s accumulated during the day in order to be at her happiest with her partner. Now women need to let men have it one day a week on average, to go away, to let him do his thing. Don’t ask him how he’s what he’s doing. Never ask a man how he’s feeling unless he’s bleeding or puking. You can ask him what he’s thinking. But men overload very quickly. Their brains overload. They’re not as capable at dealing with feelings and emotions as women are, so they call it flooding. Men flood very quickly. So when women want to talk to their man about something, you make an appointment so that he has time to prepare. It’s tomorrow. Okay? You don’t want to all of a sudden surprise a man with an emotional discussion.

Biagio: Oh, no. Oh, no.

Roger Nygard: Make an appointment. Say, honey, when is a good time? Today or tomorrow, hopefully to discuss this idea I have or this thought, or this thing I want to do with the house or the car or the kids, and then let him offer a time. Now, if he never gives you a time, then you’re not in a relationship right now. I’m telling you what, Pat. Doctor Pat Allen says in my film, this is what she taught me, what she teaches her students.

Joke: Quite the reputation.

Roger Nygard: Yeah, yeah. And and so these are a couple of little programs you can run in your relationships to make your lives happier and to go more smoothly.

Biagio: Excellent advice. And, honey, I will definitely open up my appointment book team anytime, anytime.

Joke: That’s the problem is, you never know what’s in your appointment book.

Biagio: That’s true. I have no idea what’s in my appointment book. She does so. So you’ll know before.

Joke: It.

Biagio: For you. Yeah, you just schedule it for you. There you go.

Joke: Tomorrow at noon.

Biagio: Yeah. So we’re definitely gonna put a link to this, to the trailer, into your website, your Twitter, everything in the show notes. You’ll be able to find those at Producing unscripted 109 since this is 109. And just as we’re wrapping up, is there. Is there anything else you want to plug or anything else you want to plug about this project?

Roger Nygard: Well, the film’s called The Truth About Marriage, and you can go to the truth about marriage. Com and I hope to see you at film festivals and I, I’m like, what’s my next project? Oh yes. What’s next? I have no idea, but.

Joke: I better complicated than marriage.

Roger Nygard: Yeah, I better think of something I don’t. That’s a tough one. To find something even more fascinating and interesting. And so there’s every good chance I’ll do another Trekkies documentary. Yeah, that’s a possibility for perhaps for next year.

Joke: That’s great. And any advice for documentarians out there? People who are maybe in unscripted, who want to move to scripted. What advice do you have for those producers?

Roger Nygard: I don’t think there’s really any difference whether it’s unscripted or scripted or documentary. It’s just about persistence. Something has to motivate you to just go go forward. Despite all of the the failure you’re going to experience. I have failed so many times and you haven’t failed until you’ve given up. Ultimately, you’re just sort of setbacks in the road toward completing something. And one reason it took me eight years to finish the current documentary is that it’s hard work. It’s really it’s a huge undertaking, but you just have to chip at it a little bit every month, every week, every day, whenever you can. I would just keep editing a little bit, go shoot a little more and just keep keep the ball moving forward. Something has to motivate you. And number one, it’s got to be the topic that you’re really you feel strongly enough about it and something in you has to have. You’ve got to be persistent and probably a second some kind of job, a day job to.

Joke: Pay for this.

Biagio: Yeah that’s great. Well, listen, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with us today. I think people are going to love this. There’s so many great takeaways from this. I’m already thinking about the quotes I’m going to write up from you that are going to tweets to promote this. There’s so many good ones. Thank you again so much. It was. And thanks for helping us in our own documentary career. I mean, that intro really changed things for us. So thank you.

Roger Nygard: That’s what people have to do. You know, you have to help up, you know, reach a hand down and help everybody, somebody else up because you’re going to need a hand at some point. You’re not in this by yourself. You make it. However you make it. However, how you make it on a ladder because you’ve made some connections and you have a social group of connections who are going to help you up at the same time. So that person you help might help you in the future.

Biagio: That’s great. Thank you so much. Great having you.

Unidentified Voice: Producing Unscripted with Joke and Biagio. Biagio.