If I weren't making documentary films, I suppose I'd be teaching.

I've been very lucky in my life to have some great teachers.

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.

Documentary filmmaking has all the challenges and hardships of narrative filmmaking without any of the infrastructure or support. That's both a blessing and a curse.

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.

I felt like any individual's recovery was more important than the film I was making. And I actually felt that my presence was a form of witness that communicated to the people I was following that their lives mattered.

I knew as a young boy that addiction and alcoholism afflict people - good, loving people - in profound ways, and that some people - usually from those rare "normal" families that I longed for as a child and as an adult wonder if they even exist - didn't understand this and sort of looked down their noses at people suffering with addiction.