There are days when either filmmaking feels like an insurmountable practice - here's a lot of obstacles in the way to make it happen - or you think, "What does this all add up to?" You don't know what to do with the footage, and you've asked a lot of people for their time and a lot of people to be patient with you. And then you lose faith that you can actually make a worthwhile story out of this.

I think when you practice photography or observation, you're on high alert. You polish up your antenna and stick up your head, and you're out there. You're receptive, appreciative of details. It heightens reality. You're trying to step into your alertness.

Sometimes a rural life - without agricultural culture, community, or land - it means that you're a very long drive from everything. It's a big cultural isolation in terms of any kind of schooling where you could get exposed to things that might push the positive buttons. The geography of where people find themselves situated, both in metropolises and in the heartland, really starts to matter.

My first decade of living in a metropolis was like, I was a people watcher. It meant the world to me to talk to strangers. I got excited about the fifth time I'd see the same person in the same bodega. I loved getting to know a certain clerk or barista. It took on a whole big meaning for me because of that atomization that suburban people do start to feel.

With material wealth and in a culture where many of us defines our self-worth by what we have and what we own and what we achieve, it's very hard to comprehend that there are enclaves all over our big country in which people are very purposefully choosing to maintain different values.

We all have to acknowledge the life and the path we were born into. And the things that define us, they're often somewhat narrow: our class, our race, our gender, where we grew up, what geography we were exposed to. The curiosity and wonderment of, "What it's like on your path?" - that's when you go into high alert.

Sometimes I wonder about the people who can do very reflective work about their own ethnic group or their own families, or comedies that take place in the life that they've grown up in. That's a very special fortitude. Other brains have a curiosity for what they don't know - the life they're not leading.