With a living person you're always burdened with this idea of fair representation, treading this fine line between honoring the person, and yet you really look at the word "honor," it implies that you then have to address struggle and hardship and failure, and all these things that it means to be human, that you show the fullness of their life. If the person's living, they are able to interject.

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.

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

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.

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.

My grandpa could go days, weeks, even months without a drink but if he took that first drink, he couldn't stop. Once, when I was twelve, my mom and I were driving and we saw my grandpa staggering drunk down the street. I asked if we should stop and help him. My mom sadly shook her head and kept driving.