Language can be used to so many diverse ends. It can be used to clarify and, of course, it can be used to obfuscate, confuse, evade.

I used to work as a private detective years and years ago.

In the case of The Thin Blue Line, I was surprised actually by many things. I was shooting down in Texas where the actual killer David Harris lived and I interviewed the town cop. He described these guys as being David Harris' partners in crime and even though they had criminal records and had committed crimes, they sued me! More often than not, the insurance company that protects you against this type of lawsuit will settle it with cash and contest it in a court of law.

I like to think that one of things I've done with non-fiction since the very beginning is to find new ways of telling true stories.

The claim that everybody sees the world differently is not a claim that there's no reality. It's a different kind of claim.

Writing is a form of talking, although writing is such an odd thing in and of itself. People go about it in such different ways.

What's great about documentary genre, it seems to me, is that it can be experimental filmmaking. You have a license to do a lot of diverse things under the umbrella of "documentary."