“I found writing to be pretty isolating and lonely.”

The TPF Q&A with documentary producer Andrew Helms

I met Andrew Helms on a soccer field. (Brooklyn Bridge Park Pier 5, the pitch with the widest delta between the beauty of the soccer played and the beauty of the setting.) We were both there in our capacity as soccer writers looking for a kickaround. Then I co-founded Three Point Four Media, while Andrew would go on to pen the definitive piece about the failure of the United States men’s national team to qualify for the 2018 World Cup.

Today, however, he’s mostly a documentary producer, working on films including Stolen Youth, an upcoming Rafa Nadal series, and The Alabama Solution, which drops on HBO this weekend.

We chatted about the state of documentary filmmaking, why seven out of 10 is better than nine out of 10, and the age-old question of what a producer actually does.

Andrew pretending to know how to use a camera outside of Larry Ray’s trial for Stolen Youth

Three Point Four Media: So, a producer. What do you do all day?

Andrew Helms: It falls into a couple buckets. On the one hand, it’s budget, schedule, and keeping trains running on time: making sure the team is staffed and everyone has what they need to do their jobs. Most projects run on freelancers, so when a production company starts a project, they need to staff up. You have to put together your team. You’re hiring your editors, you’re hiring your assistant editors, you’re hiring your archival people.

Like the Avengers

Sure, the underpaid Avengers. Every project is a little bit of getting the gang back together again. I was really lucky early in my career to work full time for a production company that only made documentaries for Frontline. We had everything in place. Our whole team was full time with healthcare and benefits. That was the dream because you got to learn in an environment where you’d always be working with the same archival people. You’d always be working with the same editors. You’d always be working with the same assistant editors, writers, directors, and DPs. There was continuity. The model has shifted in the last few years and very few people make stuff in-house like that anymore.

The other major bucket is the more creative and story producing. I enjoy that more. Getting into the tape, doing a paper cut, and working with editors to really shape and hone a story arc across a scene, an episode, or the whole series. I was just looking at some selects I’ve made as we try to figure out the cold open of one episode for a show I’m working on.

The days can really shift. This morning, I was doing logistical stuff, and now I’m doing our creative side. It’ll change again soon.

Is being able to do the logistical side and the creative side a benefit? With budgets getting smaller, I can imagine there might not be money for two separate people.

There are definitely people who specialize in the creative side, the story producers. But it’s helpful to be able to do both. We had a golden age in the 2010s where so many projects were green lit. Now, work is happening, but the streamers aren’t necessarily supporting the bigger budgets. You need to be able to do things more cheaply, so being able to do both is super useful. If you want to specialize in story, it’s probably better to just go ahead and be an editor. Learn how to cut. You’ll make a lot more money, too.

How did you think about what your career might be when you were 18 or 22?

For a long time, I wanted to write, but I didn’t really know how to make a living doing that. I freelanced a little bit and I had some stuff come out that I was proud of, but I never felt like I had a viable financial path. I was a teacher for a few years, and when I left that, I ended up getting this job at PBS. I had always loved documentary films, but I’d never given it much thought as a career. I was learning about the medium and about how to do that type of storytelling on the job.

We turned things around so quickly. The projects I’m on now have timelines that are two or three years. At Frontline, we had four to six months. I got to do the process a lot and got a lot of reps.

What I liked most about it was the in-depth reporting. I started thinking, “how can I take what I learned from PBS and apply it to other types of stories?” That’s when I tried to do some writing about soccer and a podcast project about the first women’s pro soccer league for 30 for 30. That was going well, but I landed a job producing a documentary series. I took it, partially for financial reasons and partially because I really was interested in the subject matter. That led to more jobs working on bigger documentary series, where you get to combine all of those pieces. You get to do the big, longer-form research. It’s nice to work with people. I found writing to be pretty isolating and lonely. It’s nice that on these projects, it’s collaborative, and you get to work with a team of editors and producers to try to shape a story.

How do you find new projects? Are you at a place where things come to you? Do you have to pitch yourself? When do you start looking for the next project?

I’ve been really lucky to have more or less one consistent employer on sports docs for the last year and a half. In this uncertain time in the industry where a lot of things are changing, that’s great. I have a bit of a track record, so they’ll come to me with projects. I haven’t had to cold email or pitch myself to someone in a while.

The really great stuff, the stuff that challenges you, leaves you astounded, and makes you wonder how they got that footage, that stuff takes years of putting together… I’m not sure where those types of projects come from anymore.

Looking ahead, there’s also the question of do I want to be a producer for hire for other people forever. It’s a fun and a cool life, but I have other ideas I want to explore. I had a call the other day about a story that I’ve been trying to develop for a while. I want to keep the wheels turning, to get that going. That would be something that I would be doing on my own, independent of one of these larger production companies. Maybe in a year, instead of signing up for another one of these jobs, I will spend the time trying to develop something independently. That’s a much riskier road.

You talked earlier about budgets coming down. Functionally, what does that mean for a film?

Maybe a documentary makes financial sense for a streamer at a budget of $750,000 instead of $1.2 million—and for people in the indie doc world both of those budgets would feel high!

The difference I’ve felt in the last few years in the streamer doc series land is that you can still make the project, but you can’t have the extra producer on staff working on it. You can’t have the extra assistant editor. You can’t have that extra expensive piece of archive that you really want to use. Maybe the music budget’s lower. You go across the board and start reducing stuff. You compress the timeline a lot. Instead of two years, it needs to take one. There are audiences for these things, but they are maybe smaller or less monetizable than we thought or hoped.

Does that make a difference? Does the audience notice?

The money difference is a quality difference. A DP I work with made this point to me: there’s no benefit for making a film that’s nine out of 10. Everyone’s happy if it’s on budget, on schedule, and seven out of 10. No one loses their job, no one loses their hair, no one gets mad. But the really great stuff, the stuff that challenges you, leaves you astounded, and makes you wonder how they got that footage, that stuff takes years of putting together. That takes money. And that’s rarer today. Someone needs to put huge resources towards making that type of film. I’m not sure where those types of projects come from anymore.