Is it going to be hard to separate from them eventually? You'll have other projects and you're not going to be involved with these four people for much longer.
"Yeah, but you know I always stay friends with people from my movies. I mean, we don't talk on a daily basis after that but we continue to stay friends and stay in touch. I'm still in touch with Robert Evans. I'm going to go see him in LA - you know, the guy who was in my film The Kid Stays in the Picture. I'm still in touch with the trainer from my first film On the Ropes. So they really are friendships that don't go away."
Hannah expressed an interest in becoming a filmmaker. Are you helping her with that?
"She's in film school right now, just outside of New York City so I get to see her a lot. And I certainly helped her pick a school. I suggested that as one of her choices. At this point, she doesn't really need a lot of help from me because once people saw the movie at Sundance and it got around in Los Angeles, she's gotten more job offers than I ever had. They are entry level but yeah, she's going to have a great internship this summer.
I did help her last summer. I showed the film to a gentleman who sponsors a program for kids who don't have a lot of money to do an internship program in LA and it pays their way to do that. She got to do that last summer before the film was even out there to the public and had a great time."
Good for her. How do you decide where you're going to turn your camera next? All your projects thus far have been so different. How do you choose? Is it just a subject that affects you personally?
"Yes. They're all personal to me, either semantically or on the surface even, like this one is obviously something I went through myself. And I take my time between them. It's not something I just jump into. I do television or commercials in between because I know that it's going to take three years and the budgets are not small. I don't want to ever disappoint myself or anyone else that's financing me and make sure that it's something I feel I can do a really good job at, so it has to be something that I really care a lot about. So I don't know which film I'm going to do next. I might actually do a fiction film next."
What do you think about the current state of documentary films?
"I think it's exciting, you know, with the exception of this past year. Last year, films that were in the movie theaters did not do very well. But other than that, for the last five years there's been some incredible successes. I think people are used to at least seeing one or two films that they know they will be moved and entertained by in a movie theater, as opposed to just on TV - like March of the Penguins or Michael Moore's films - so that's exciting."
Why are you stepping outside the world of documentaries for your next film?
"Well you know I feel like each of the documentaries I've made has been a bigger and bigger challenge, and now I just want a new challenge. I spend a lot of time making documentaries feel like fiction films, not that I don't want them to feel extremely real and raw at moments or throughout. It's just that I want them to feel like there's dramatic structure and there's character development and there's theme, and all of that you can do with depicting very real people and not make it feel stagy or fake. If anything, it's just adding dimension to it. What it does is it allows people to watch it and be moved and entertained by it. So I thought I would try it from the other way next time."
Do you have a project in mind?
"I have a few different ones that I'm developing. Again, I think, like the documentaries, it's going to take a while to figure out what's the right film to pursue."
