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.

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

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

We all use dishwashers every day and yet none of us would say that we're experts on dishwashers, but somehow we all think we're experts on movies.

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 that if people understood the struggle of recovery, then some of the stigma of addiction might be reduced because the audience would understand in a palpable way that addiction is a disease that tells the afflicted, despite years or even decades of heartbreaking evidence to the contrary, that using will make things better.

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.