My main trick is to work with amazing people. It's a long and twisty journey and you need people that really are amazing and have this rare gift of honesty and courage and really open up.

I can ask someone to let me into all aspects of their life for several years, but people have got to have that gift: that courage and that talent for opening their lives to the camera. Being candid is a gift, and that's what the audience responds to. Part of it is me asking, and part of it is just their inherent talent, which is what you are looking for when you make documentaries - people that are really going to let you in on what they are going through.

With portable cameras and affordable data and non-linear digital editing, I think this is a golden age of documentary filmmaking. These new technologies mean we can make complicated, beautifully crafted and cinematic films about real-life stories.

The world of extreme sports is also one of the big businesses. Kids might think that snowboarding is the ultimate freedom, but this freedom is being marketed to them by commercial sponsors.

I don't believe in objectivity. I observe the observer's paradox every moment I'm filming. Your presence is changing everything; there's no mistaking it. And you have a responsibility.

I love making fiction films as well as nonfiction ones, and hope to keep challenging myself to make better and better work.

I don't know if people realize how hard I work, because sometimes people ask me for my secret. The truth is that I don't have any secrets apart from the fact that I've been directing theater and film for twenty years and trying at every stage to make my work better.