Documenting Risk - an overview

There's no doubt that many of the most astonishing, enthralling, and terrifying documentaries released in recent years have depicted human beings in situations of extreme risk. Whether it is high-wire walking between the Twin Towers (Man on Wire, 2008), attempting to live with grizzly bears in the wilds of Alaska (Grizzly Man, 2005), or facing catastrophe in trying to scale the Peruvian Andes (Touching the Void, 2003), documentary cinema has offered us captivating stories of exceptional individuals pushed to the edge - and over - in inhospitable and unforgiving environments as alien to us as the urge to explore them. The appeal of such documentaries lies as much in trying to get inside the heads of the people who would take such risks – what makes them do it? – as it does in documenting the activities themselves. After a thrilling couple of hours gripped by the tale of a disastrous attempt to circumnavigate the globe in a jerry-built yacht (Deep Water, 2006), we can return to our own lives, reassured by our own relative safety and good sense.

But what about everyday risk, the kind that most of encounter as we go about our daily lives?  Whether to walk home alone in the dark, to have our children inoculated with the MMR vaccine, to select a ready meal in the midst of a horse meat scare, or to take to the stage in our first amateur dramatic performance?  These kinds of run-of-the-mill risks, which millions of us contemplate each and every day, can be the cause of a great deal of anxiety and concern, nagging away at us much longer, and with more potential consequence, that a vicarious fall from a mountain peak. Feature documentary has a challenge to deal with risk understood in such terms, which often lacks the requisite dramatic scale and opportunities for heroic (or tragic) action needed for the big-screen. Even when dealing with an issue we can readily identify with - whether or not to eat fast food - feature documentary seeks, perhaps needs, to shape it around extreme behavior, as demonstrated, to great effect, by Morgan Spurlock's 30-day McDonald's diet in Super Size Me (2004).

The challenge we have set ourselves in making our documentary, The Risk Taker’s Survival Guide, is to engage an audience with everyday risk, and in ways that avoid the pitfalls, (entertaining as they may be) of creating artificial stunts of this kind. Our objective is to make an audience reflect on their risk taking, and the decision-making that accompanies it, to understand risk taking as not only undertaken by atypical individuals in strange environments, but something that shapes their everyday encounters, and in ways they may not readily perceive. And in order to do so, we are experimenting with documentary form, employing interactive elements to elicit audience engagement. The hope is to make something as engrossing as the best extreme risk documentaries, but which leaves us thinking, and hopefully making some positive changes to, the risks we all face much closer to home.