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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.