People create the illusion of acting natural, which is what I think most documentarians do in part because of the direct cinema orthodoxies that came into play really in the '60s. That moment of performance is a tremendous opportunity to make visible something hitherto invisible, which is how people want to be seen. How do they see themselves? What are the scripts, fantasies, genres by which they imagine themselves? How is storytelling part of what we are as human beings? We wouldn't kill each other en masse if it weren't for storytelling. We wouldn't be able to live with ourselves.

In a fiction film, we know at some level we've suspended disbelief. In a documentary, we know that we're watching a drama unfold in the world because of the movie we're watching that is real. That has enormous stakes for the whole society, and we, by the act of watching, complete the story.

When you approach someone as a human being, truly and try to be as open as safety allows, some of the bigger reenactments with a whole army of paramilitary people participating, I couldn't say my feelings openly in front of everybody, without it being dangerous for my crew.

I believe every time you film anybody, you create reality with that person - whether it's fiction or nonfiction. If you acknowledge that filming is an occasion where people express things they might not otherwise express, that offers a much more insightful analysis of why documentaries - even of the fly-on-the-wall variety - are powerful. I think that our task as filmmakers is to create the most insightful reality given the most pressing questions.

I need to trust myself and go where my instincts tell me, and to be as wild and free as possible in my creative decisions.

Performance is always oriented towards a spectator, towards an imagined audience and I was thinking who is their imagined audience?

I don't believe you can make an honest film about another person in all their complexities from a place of distance. You can make a journalistic report, you can judge someone from a distance, but you can't really get to know them.