Hosted by Documentary First | Christian Taylor · 🇺🇸 US · EN · 294 episodes
Established thought leaders with verified media credentials.
The craft and business of documentary filmmaking — from people who actually do it. Documentary First is a weekly podcast for working and aspiring documentary filmmakers who want honest, in-depth conversations about how documentaries get funded, made, and seen. Hosted by Christian Taylor — award-winning director of The Girl Who Wore Freedom (25+ international awards, distributed through Virgil Films, Swank, and Canal+) — the show draws on 270+ interviews with documentary filmmakers, editors, producers, distributors, and composers across HBO, Netflix, PBS, and the independent doc world. Past guests include Ken Burns, PBS American Masters creator Susan Lacy, Emmy and Peabody Award-winning editor Charles Olivier (HBO's The Jinx, The Redeem Team), and Emmy-nominated director Nick Bruckman (Netflix's Minted). Every week, Documentary First delivers two formats in one feed. The main show features long-form interviews exploring how filmmakers approach their craft, navigate dist
Documentary First | Christian Taylor hosts Documentary First, a tv show with 294 episodes published.
What if the disappointment you didn't choose was the only door to the life you were meant to live? Three generations of one family chased professional baseball, and all three lost it to a career-ending injury. Each one f
He Could Become Anyone on Stage. What Was He Hiding Offstage? Danny Gans was the Man of Many Voices, the highest-paid headliner on the Las Vegas Strip, and the first performer to sell a $100 ticket on the Strip. He could
When does refusing to repeat a lie become complicity in it? The hardest question in documentary filmmaking is not how to find the truth. It is how to handle a lie. When a false story is already loose in the world, you ha
Was the Poltergeist curse real, or did the world get Heather O'Rourke's story wrong for 38 Years? On February 1, 1988, Heather O'Rourke died at twelve years old. For nearly four decades the world has filled that silence
What is the difference between solitude and loneliness, and why does every creative person need to understand it? There are two kinds of being alone in creative work, and they are not the same thing. One makes the work g
Adapt or die. What does that actually look like for a working filmmaker? Chicago documentary filmmaker Armin Korsos has a working filmmaker's answer to the question every documentarian is wrestling with right now. If you
What does a $1.5 billion AI lawsuit have in common with your unwritten will? In September 2025, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle the largest copyright lawsuit in U.S. history. The reason was simple. They bu
How much does the average documentary filmmaker's biggest licensing mistake cost? A 30-second Jackson 5 clip can run a documentary $50,000 to $70,000 in licensing fees. Veteran ARC Producer Teddy Cannon has spent a decad
What if the documentaries no streaming platform will buy are the ones that could save your kid's life? Today's children may be the first generation in American history to live shorter lives than their parents. That's the
Why do documentary subjects freeze for a professional camera - but open up to an iPhone? Robin Canfield shares why he films with iPhones, how he teaches documentary in twenty countries, and the communication skill he say
Someone tried to harvest Christian's voice for AI training. The pitch was polished, the project sounded real. But when she responded with ten professional questions, the conversation ended. Permanently. In this Deep Dive
Even with Ken Burns and Don Henley attached, funding a PBS documentary is brutal. So what hope do the rest of us have? Erik and Christopher Ewers get real about PBS funding, AI’s impact on filmmaking, and how they landed
He edited nearly every Ken Burns film since The Civil War. He still didn't know who he was. Henry David Thoreau wrote that most people lead lives of “quiet desperation.” But what did he actually mean - and what does it l
He's edited nearly every Ken Burns film ever made. But he couldn't edit himself. What does it take to build a filmmaking career inside Ken Burns's world — and what happens when the hardest part isn't the craft, but learn
In Bridgerton Season 4, Francesca Bridgerton stands in the middle of her husband’s funeral and says something no one expects: “I want to feel joy.” Eighty years earlier and four thousand miles away, a D-Day veteran stood
He sang the national anthem for the Colorado Avalanche a thousand times, coached 4,000 inner-city kids, lost it all, and rebuilt on the beaches of Normandy — where a WWII veteran watched children playing on Utah Beach an
What if failure isn’t the enemy—but the training ground? That’s the question Christian Taylor explores in this episode of Documentary First: The Deep Dive, sparked by her conversation with filmmaker Quinnolyn Benson-Yate
Award-winning filmmaker Quinnolyn Benson-Yates made her first feature documentary before film school—and its seven-year journey from short film concept to PBS distribution holds lessons every indie filmmaker needs to hea
How do you know if you’ve found a Joe Amodei—or a predatory film distributor? That’s the question Christian Taylor explores in this episode of Documentary First: The Deep Dive, after her conversation with Joe Amodei—film
Virgil Films founder Joe Amodei shares the hard truth: $250K is your budget ceiling, traditional marketing no longer is effective, and you must build your own audience. Joe has distributed films from the VHS era through
Zahi Hawass
world-famous archaeologist & Egyptologist · The Man With The Hat
1 appearance on this show
Jessica Levin
1 appearance on this show
Josh Roush
CEO · Movetic
1 appearance on this show
Corey Johnson
Speaker · New York City Council
4 appearances on this show
Steve Cohen
The Millionaire’s Magician · Pollock | Cohen LLP
1 appearance on this show
Eric Gardner
Director of ”Confessions of a CEO”
1 appearance on this show
Alex Harz
1 appearance on this show
Jake Taylor
former professional hockey player / high school hockey coach · In Hearts Wake
1 appearance on this show
Brian Skerry
film producer/director and photojournalist specializing in marine wildlife · National Geographic
1 appearance on this show
David Paterson
Ontario's Representative in Washington, D.C. · The Girl Who Wore Freedom
2 appearances on this show
Ken Burns
documentary filmmaker · Dream Team
1 appearance on this show
Andrew Cohen
board-certified dentist and sleep medicine specialist · Moosylvania
2 appearances on this show
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Documentary First is hosted by Documentary First | Christian Taylor. The show is categorised under tv (film) and has published 294 episodes.
Documentary First has published 294 episodes.
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