Artists trained their lenses on fellow artists in notable 2017 documentaries that explore the challenges of turning creativity into a career, the tightrope between art and commerce, and the squishy line between genius and crazy.
For a few, that meant telling the story of their own relatives, as was the case with both Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold and Arthur Miller: Writer. “I felt like I should shoot him in his natural habitat, being himself, or no one ever would know what he was like,” says director Rebecca Miller, who pulled together interviews she did with her father decades ago. Actor Griffin Dunne says of Didion, his aunt: “I felt horrible for making her relive some of the worst moments of her life, but she’s a journalist, and she probably would have lost respect for me if I didn’t.”
