John McKenna, co-founder and CEO of London-based sports documentary specialist Noah Media, discusses access, subject choice and the proliferation of buyers in one of television’s buzziest genres.
BBC2 football doc Finding Jack Charlton
Sports documentaries, once a niche occupied by select broadcasters like ESPN and its 30 For 30 strand, are proliferating. Amazon is pouring big money into its All Or Nothing access doc series and snapping up content in the genre on the acquisitions market, while projects like OJ: Made In America and The Last Dance are conquering the lucrative premium doc market.
But what makes a good sports doc? What conditions come with access, and is access alone enough to hang a project on? Is a proliferation of buyers and projects a double-edged sword, creating a lot of mediocre clutter to cut through to find anything worth watching?
John McKenna co-founded Noah Media in London with ITV Sport’s long-serving interviewer, Gabriel Clarke, and producer Torquil Jones in 2015 and has since worked on some of the genre’s outstanding examples. His credits include Bobby Robson: More Than a Manager (Netflix), Out of Their Skin (ITV), Finding Jack Charlton (BBC2) and the forthcoming Arsene Wenger: Invincible (Canal+). He spoke to C21 for the new C21Screenings Sports Television Themed Festival.
What attracts you to one sports doc idea or subject over another?
We ask ourselves a few questions. There is a big appetite for this content, which is great for us, and there are a load of different stories you could potentially tell, so we always look for certain ingredients behind any film we may potentially choose before we greenlight internally. The fundamentals are a good, dramatic sporting arc leading to a big moment of jeopardy, exhilaration or disappointment. But we also always look for a human story off the pitch that a wider audience than just a sport audience can relate to.
John McKenna
It’s important that the film is rooted in sport but it’s also a film about whatever that subject matter might be. The films we have done have a real human narrative that is as important in the film as the sport. Finding Jack Charlton had a couple of stories alongside his Ireland reign [as head of the national football team]: Jack and his brother Bobby; Jack and his family living with his dementia. We want more than just what happened in the sporting arena.
On top of that, are there more layers than just those two? Can you weave in narratives and keep people hooked in more than one way? Is there jeopardy? Are you bringing something new? What is your film breaking or revealing? What’s new for the audience here? It has to have all of that for it to be a good sports doc and if it’s missing any of that then I would argue it’s possibly not at the right level.
How do you go about getting access to sport’s big names, and what conditions come with that?
It has varied slightly from film to film for us so far, but we want to be really honest and transparent from the start. We go and meet the family or the subject face to face as soon as we can and have that conversation, “This is the film we want to make, we want it to be the definitive film about you or your life or career, this is why.” We also want to include the subject matter – the good and not so good – so it’s good to get that conversation out right at the start.
Every film we have made so far has been independent and we’ve maintained editorial control. Obviously there’s a big appeal for bigger brands or bigger subjects where people will forsake that editorial control to secure the access. I’m not saying we wouldn’t do it for a big subject but I would argue the story might never be as good if you do that. I do understand there are subjects everybody is interested in, so if you can get access it might be worth it. We’ve not had that yet but I’m not saying it wouldn’t happen in the future.
We want the subject to be happy with the film, which has happened every time so far and we’re proud of that. We’ll always show them the film before it is locked and listen to feedba
ck or comment, but we want to maintain ultimate control. It’s a film about them but it’s not their film.
Is access to a name personality or a big sports club or organisation enough on its own for a doc or series?
It depends what type of film you’re trying to make. Access can be enough to make a successful documentary series. All Or Nothing is purely access. You don’t know what the story will be over the season when you start, you know something will play out and you just go in with the access. We haven’t made films like that. Going back to our initial questions, the access is ingredient number one, but ingredient number two is the story. It comes back to breaking something new – what is it we’re showing that people don’t know? What’s your angle into it? What’s the story?
Why have you gone more into feature docs than the potentially more lucrative multi-part series?
It’s not deliberate. We’ve actually got a couple of series, one in production and one I hope about to go in. We did make three-parter Out of Their Skin for ITV.
I heard a good answer from a commissioner when I pitched a three-part series about a subject. They said to me, “We’ve just done a one-off feature doc on this incredible music star, a world name. If we can do that in 90 minutes how come we need three parts to tell your story?” I couldn’t really argue with that.
Forthcoming Canal+ doc Arsene Wenger: Invincible
We would love to tell multi-part series as well. We’ve got things in development that are multi-part, but it needs a lot of ingredients. It’s a story that needs to be longer, over a bigger period of time, with incredible archive and a lot of different narrative changes that sustain the multiple parts. So far, with the stories we have loved, done and told, it felt like a feature doc was the right home for them, but we have stories coming along that will fit better in a longer form.
You cannot move for sports docs at the moment, they’re everywhere. How do you see this genre evolving to stay fresh?
There are more and more docs around sport and as long as there are really good ones landing regularly the genre will stay relevant and keep growing. The danger is if there’s a proliferation of sports docs that are not as good then people might become tired of them. All we can do is make sure every one we make is of the right standard. The streamers are obviously having success with them, kicked off probably by Senna, which made people realise you can tell sports stories in a brilliant way, and then The Last Dance doing incredibly well. It’s not just the streamers, the BBC and its iPlayer and now Discovery+ coming in and Apple TV+. [There are] so many potential buyers for this the genre and hopefully that’s here to stay. We just have to make sure our contribution to it is at the top end.
Is having more buyers a double-edged sword, meaning there are more places to sell into but more competition and clutter to cut through?
It’s a good thing, first and foremost, for a production company in this area. There are more conversations and potential avenues for the stories you want to tell to be made. You also want the stories to be seen by as many people as possible. You have to make the right decision about the partners you go with. We’ve tried to bring a bit of early strategy to those conversations. If we have a film of a certain subject we’ll do an early assessment of who is the best partner. So you’re not going out begging people to take it, you’re going out specifically to people because you think it’s good for their audience. So there’s a good chance of the right people and the right audience seeing it.
Who is the audience for your films?
Every film we do we will identify the core audience and wider audience straight away. It’s really important we have a distribution side of the business, NoahX, forever pushing this to the creative side. You’re not making the film for yourself, you’re making it for a group of people you have pre-identified who will love this if you do it right. If it’s around football, fans of a certain club, then fans of football, then fans of documentary film – that’s the core audience. But there’s a wider audience there: people from that part of the world, people who have likes that relate to this. That’s where the second layer of story comes in. It’s not just what happened on the field, it’s about what happened around that, a human element that appeals to the wider second audience. We will identify that early on and then try to make a film that also targets that wider second audience.
