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.

I think it would be really hypocritical of me to make the films I make, where I delve into people's lives, to say that my life can't be looked at or that I have to be this pristine, isolated figure.

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

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 think in many ways what my films are about is that search for my grandpa's dentures: for that humanizing narrative that bridges the gap between "us" and "them" to arrive at a "we."

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.

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.