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Meet the woman behind Netflix's growing influence in documentaries and comedies

Earlier this year, amid all the gorgeousness floating around on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival, a debate was heating up. Should Netflix films compete with ones that have theatrical releases? The online streaming giant had two of its films - Okja and The Meyerowitz Stories - competing for the prestigious Palme d'Or. As the French exhibitors mounted their outrage, the Festival decreed that, starting next year, only those films that are released in French theatres will be eligible to compete for awards.
Outside of Cannes, Netflix has had good luck with its dramas as far as awards are concerned. But one segment where its influence has only strengthened is the documentary. This year, Ava DuVernay's 13th was nominated in the Best Documentary Feature category at the Oscars. Increasingly, there is talk of the streaming site backing some of the most ambitious documentaries and making them more accessible to discerning viewers. The woman championing this trend is Lisa Nishimura, Netflix's vice president of original documentaries and comedy. Seen as a global influencer who is changing the way non-fiction is made, Lisa tells WKND about the challenging aspects of her job (ones she also thrives on), and why cultural diversity is important to tell universal stories.
How did your professional journey start?
My journey began in the music business during the 1990s. I was working at a record label called Six Degrees Records in San Francisco, and we won a production and distribution deal with Chris Blackwell, who had started a company called Island Records. You'd recognise them because he signed Bob Marley, Grace Jones and U2. Island Films was part of Island Records, and we worked together here for a good number of years before Blackwell sold Island to Polygram. He then started another independent company called Palm Pictures, which was a film, music and publishing company and asked me to join him.
I worked with him for about eight years as his general manager. We produced many independent movies back then, including American films, foreign films and documentaries. While I was in New York making these films, I met Ted Sarandos (chief content officer of Netflix) and Cindy Holland (vice president for Original Content at Netflix), who, at the time, were buying DVDs for the US Netflix. We got to know each other during this time. I always enjoyed working with them, as not only were they incredibly bright but they were also huge fans of cinema.
I got offered a job 10 years ago at Netflix. Around that time, the role was to oversee the relationship with about 400 independent studios and producers of all non-major studio content. The opportunity came at a time when the goal was to make the company complete, to buy anything and everything that was created on a DVD so that we could make it available to our American customer base. This meant that I was buying animation from Japan, Scandinavian horror shows, French drama, on top of incredible stand-up comedies and documentaries, and, of course, American independent cinema. This was my first experience of understanding the American appetite for content from all over the world.
How did coming from a different cultural background inform your sensibilities?
I believe it matters a lot who gets to tell the story. Being a woman - especially a woman of colour - you just have a different perspective. I was very sensitive to it, and the notion of who gets authorship was very important to me. When telling great global stories, it doesn't really matter if it's not in your native language. What is really important is that the story is well-told and has a deep human resonance, one that people will connect with. One of our first documentaries, as part of our Netflix Original Documentary initiative, was The Square (based on the Egyptian revolution of 2011 and its consequences). It's in Arabic; however, it resonated with our customers in different territories. It's important to understand that the person who has really experienced the particular subject matter or that world is the one most equipped to tell the story in a way that will resonate with viewers.
What is your creative process while choosing a subject for a documentary for Netflix? What is your brief to the filmmakers?
One of the key things for Original Documentaries [an initiative she started in 2014] is to partner with the best documentary makers from across the world.
When I first meet them, I ask lots of questions about the story that they seek to tell, and try to find out what is motivating them to tell the story. Documentarians, in particular, are in it because they have incredible stories. So, really understanding what makes these storytellers tick is a wonderful place to start. Often, I ask a filmmaker, "Why haven't you told this story before?", and it's because there are a lot more traditional limitations around that storytelling. For example, let's take Making A Murderer (an American documentary about wrongful conviction of sexual assault and attempted murder that had a man spending nearly 18 years in prison). When I met the filmmakers (Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos) in 2014, they had been working on this project for years and had been constantly told to make it into a feature film. If you have had the opportunity to watch Making A Murderer, you will know that it's an ten-part series and that it needed all of those episodes to tell the story.
We give the storyteller the real estate to tell their story completely. For instance, we don't have commercial breaks, which means they don't have to think about altering the cadence of their creative story, and they can also assume an intelligent audience. So, instead of having to spend 20 per cent of episode two recapping the story of episode one, they can assume that the viewer has just finished watching episode one or at least has the ability and access to do so. This allows for an incredible amount of creative freedom for our documentary makers.
In the comedies segment, what, according to you, does Netflix get right? And what does it get wrong?
The thing I love about stand-up comedy - and this is just my personal opinion - is that stand-up comics are the most amazing cultural arbiters of our times. They're able to really look at the world around us, and synthesise it in a way that makes sense to the audience. The relationship between viewers and stand-up comics is deeply personal. The key is to ensure that we are working with stand-up comics who represent a broad sense of taste. That's not to suggest that every comic is going to appeal to all 104 million subscribers from around the world. The key is that each and every comedy fan across the globe will have their favourite comic.
Documentaries and comedies are two very different genres. How do you juggle between the two?
Personally, these are my two favourite categories. I find the best comedians and documentarians are actually the most intelligent people I have met. They're also similar because both are extremely observant of human conditions, cultures and the world around us. They take the world around us and focus on certain things that they believe really crystallise the sentiment of that particular moment.
For documentarians, it can be a specialised subject or a specialised world, that opens the viewer to a particular point of view. In the hands of a great comic, I think topics that can honestly scare us, that can feel intimidating - whether it's politics, racial issues, marriage, adolescence - be turned into something we can embrace and joyfully engage with. Usually, the best of them plant seeds in our minds for future thought.
What documentaries can we hope to watch out for in the coming months on Netflix?
There are lots of exciting documentaries and comedies on the horizon. An interesting one is Icarus: a story by director Bryan Fogel, who is a gifted amateur cyclist. The story goes that he was a lifetime fan of Lance Armstrong and was crestfallen when he found out that he'd been doping for years before his fellow teammates testified against him. In Icarus, Fogel aims to investigate substance abuse in sports by trying it himself to observe the changes in his performance, and see if he could evade detection.
TOP FIVE DOCUMENTARIES ON NETFLIX
1. Making A Murderer: Revolves around a man wrongly implicated in a sexual assault and attempted murder case
2. The Keepers: A seven-part series on the unsolved murder of a Baltimore nun
3. 13th: A sharp examination of racial politics and discrimination in America
4. Amanda Knox: Based on the life of an American exchange student convicted for the 2007 death of another student
5. Chef's Table: Inside the lives, and kitchens, of some of the greatest culinary geniuses of our times
TOP FIVE COMEDIES ON NETFLIX
1. Dave Chappelle: The iconic comedian takes clever digs on prevalent social phenomena
2. Amy Schumer: The Leather Special: The award-winning comedienne spots humour in her everyday life
3. Jon Mulaney: The Comeback Kid: The stand-up comic looks back at his formative years with a grin
4. Aziz Ansari: Buried Alive: Marriage, parenting, love. Ansari's hilarious digs will leave you in splits
5. Jen Kirkman: Just Keep Livin'?: An incisive take on being an independent woman and managing relationships

anamika@khaleejtimes.com