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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.