Telling Human Stories: Oklahoma filmmaker Amy Scott’s embrace of documentaries
Filmmaker Amy Scott behind the lens while shooting the documentary Sheryl
When Amy Scott first met Melissa Etheridge, she didn’t know much about the rock star’s history. Despite Scott’s intense passion for music, Etheridge was still a relative unknown to her.
However, the award-winning film director was not drawn to Etheridge because of her songs; it was the story she wanted to tell that got Scott interested.
“Melissa’s team came to us with this idea that she did not want to do a biopic. She did not want to do a ‘cover all my records’ story—which we could have done, because she has a fascinating life. She is an icon,” Scott says. “But she wanted to make a film that had a deeper meaning to it. She had recently lost her son to opioid addiction at the beginning of the pandemic lockdown. She was, I think, in the process of grieving, and she wanted to better understand the cycle of addiction.”
Scott and co-director Brian Morrow transformed what could have been a basic documentary about the life of a musical star into a deep dive into the ravages of opioid addiction and the prison industrial complex when they directed and produced Melissa Etheridge: I’m Not Broken.
The documentary, which is currently streaming on the Paramount Network, takes viewers into a prison as Etheridge sits down and talks to women who have been imprisoned because of opioids.
“She wanted to go to a women’s prison in Kansas to not just play music for them, but also to talk to them about substance abuse and try to understand what the hell is going on in our country, because we are sick,” Scott says. “We were totally game. That was such an original idea and pitch. The funny thing is we then pitched it all around Hollywood—it wasn’t an initial sell, but MTV and Paramount could see the gold in there. It was just going to be one film. And they loved the idea so much that they made it a two-part episodic series.”
Not settling for the easy story has been a mainstay in the 48-year-old Scott’s career. The Oklahoma native has discovered that creating her own path has allowed her to make films that highlight her love of storytelling.
“I think my style is to tell authentic human stories,” Scott says.
When Scott initially graduated from Lawton High School and accepted a scholarship to the University of Oklahoma, she planned to study journalism. But, after taking a film class, she saw that documentaries merged her journalism background with an interest in cinematography and telling stories about real people.
“I loved movies, and I’d seen documentaries, but I thought filmmaking was something that happened in Hollywood on a sound stage, and I wasn’t aware that it was even an option to make documentaries,” Scott says. “So, it went from there.”
After graduation and a move to Chicago, Scott took a job with a record label while she taught herself how to actually make films instead of just studying them. She got a job at the University of Chicago as a cinematographer, even though she didn’t know how to work a camera.
After an accident on an icy sidewalk that caused her to break an arm, Scott had to teach herself how to edit film so she could still work. That turned into a 15-year career as an editor.
Amy Scott on set while directing the documentary Sheryl
Filming Melissa Etheridge: I’m Not Broken outside a women’s prison in Kansas
“It was the best school for me to learn because I edited lots of documentaries,” says Scott. “I worked for the university, but I did a lot of PBS-type documentaries, edited them—and it teaches you how to craft a story, the three-act structure, and see what’s missing.”
During that time, Scott started working for famed author and radio host Studs Terkel. She was his last digital archivist and assistant before he died in 2008.
“That was incredible, because he’s the master of the interview. And my job was to listen to his interviews on the Studer, which is a two-inch analog reel, and then digitize that,” Scott says. “He interviewed everybody. It’s like Mahalia Jackson, Pete Seeger and everybody in early American history. So I would just listen: How did he ask them questions? How did he volley back? It was the best school. It all started to come together for me. I was just a bit of a late bloomer.”
Even though Scott had vowed she would never move to Los Angeles, she knew that’s where she needed to be in order to get into filmmaking. Then after reading a book about filmmaker Hal Ashby and seeing they had similar career inceptions, she looked for any films that had been put out about him.
Scott discovered there weren’t any. Ultimately, she decided to make one.
“I don’t have any secret desire to write the Great American screenplay; I just want to keep telling these human stories.”
Photograph by Micheal Kinney
“I just loved his story. So that was the first film that I made, and it’s done well for me,” Scott says. “It was a passion project, because there’s no money in documentary films. You have to raise the money, which I’m not good at. I fortunately partnered up with these exceptional producers who have since become like my partners in all these film projects. We didn’t know what we were doing the first time around—nobody knew what we were doing—but it was like, ‘Your passion will drive the car.’ Hopefully not off a cliff.”
Scott’s directorial debut, Hal, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018. It was named one of the 10 best documentaries of the year by Rolling Stone and was nominated for a Producers Guild Award for Outstanding Producer of Documentary Motion Pictures.
“Hal is a love letter to cinema,” Scott says of the film’s success. “It’s [Ashby’s] story, but the underscore is that it speaks to filmmakers. We wanted to celebrate his films, but also sort of tell this larger story about how hard it is and also how gratifying it is to make films. Now I’m like, ‘I can’t believe all the mistakes I made.’ It’s hard to watch. I’m proud of it.”
Even though Hal had put Scott’s name on the industry map, it would take another four years before she directed her second film, Sheryl, which is a portrait of musician Sheryl Crow. According to Scott, Netflix had changed the rules of the content game and it took independent filmmakers like herself some time to figure out their place in the streaming world. Scott, who is currently living in L.A. with her two daughters, sees a similar disruption currently taking place with Artificial Intelligence.
Yet, even as the industry changes around her, Scott said good storytelling will continue to be important for at least a few more years. She just finished up a project for Bill Simmons’ Music Box series on HBO, and is currently working on a new project about Oklahoma’s educational system.
“I’d love to keep growing and elevating my craft and innovating,” Scott says. “I don’t have any secret desire to write the Great American Screenplay; I just want to keep telling these human stories. There’s an infinite amount of inspiring stories about humans doing exceptional things. If I’m lucky, in 10 years, then I will have a lot more little film babies that I can look back on.”