One thing people often forget when making a documentary is that, in a sense, you still have to cast, find a star, and it has all of those built-in challenges.

I think that most of us instinctively avoid people with mental illness.

The visual quality of the cameras now is such that you can shoot with available light, and if people are willing to mount a microphone on the camera and maybe even on the subject, then you're good to go.

In documentary you sometimes see the tyranny of the linear, but what I've noticed in the last ten years in narrative film is the tyranny of the non-linear.

I don't think that there is any hard and fast rule that says that documentary has to be linear at all.

It can be difficult to present mental illness in film without resorting to devices that, if not handled well, can seem heavy-handed or cliché.

If the subject is no longer living, the immediate question is do you have enough first-person material to really get that story across. You'd like to avoid it just being other people's memories and interpretations.