I was definitely an extroverted personality at a young age and theater was an outlet for me to channel that energy.

J.C. [Chandor] was the kind of energy we were looking for, so we decided to get behind it with all of our effort. That was the beginning of our relationship with first-time feature directors, and that's when it became really important to us, watching them thrive and grow in a creative environment in which you can do that was really key. Also his work checked all the boxes, because it was socially relevant and intellectually driven, and creatively exciting.

I found it was remarkable. It was so evocative. I feel like it captured the urgency and the chaos, but through the silence of it, through the slowness of it. That's what I loved the most about Citizenfour.

I remember having to hit a mark and having no idea how to do it, real childlike stuff, because Carnegie Mellon didn't do an extensive job preparing us for film and television. It was very much a theater program. That was my first job. It was cool. I was glad it was.

When I got out of school, it used to be that it was theater actors that ended up doing film and television, and you had to come from the theater to be taken seriously in that world.

The situation they [journalists and Edward Snowden] were in was incredibly heightened. The stakes were high. There was a lot of pressure, a lot of tension, a lot of sense of claustrophobic, clandestine energy that I think was exhilarating for us to explore and recreate. We were fortunate to shoot a fair amount of our stuff at the actual hotel where it all happened in Hong Kong. That added another element of very similitude to the situation, so I feel like it was exciting.

I think the next 50 years are going to present the human race with challenges that so far exceed the limitations of geopolitical boundaries or nationalist identity. We're going to be up against challenges that we can barely fathom at this point. So how we embrace them and deal with them will define a great many things about where we go, but, you know, it's hard to say. We're teetering on the edge, I would say.