- Teaches filmmaking at Harvard University's Visual and Environmental Studies Department. [2005]
- Graduated from University of California at Berkeley.
- Went to graduate school at MIT.
- Lived in New York City in 1974.
- The truth is, we should do that for every point in our lives that we're at -- we shouldn't be looking forward to our "real life" once we get married, or once we find jobs, or once something else happens. People today in their 20s, I think, have often given up their present for something intangible in the future.
- The question I'd like to ask is, how come a little film like mine is on the screen? Five years ago, I don't think it would be. I think this "real-story" thing does signal something. I think what's happening now is that people seem to want the experience seeing nonfiction film on the screen in a collective way, in an experience like that we all crave with fiction. I don't really like seeing films at home on my VCR; I can't see anything that way I really care about, unless I'm studying it. Earlier, documentaries were seen on TV exclusively; except for the very occasional documentary, you couldn't go to the movies and see them. Now you can; at any time there's like two to five documentaries on the screen now in most cities. I don't think I've ever seen that before.
- Our multicultural society, which I'm all for, has produced a series of ripples about our sense of what's real, what's important, how we define ourselves, what's our identity, what's actuality. And the battleground for all this, in a way, is in nonfiction filmmaking; nonfiction filmmaking is the front-line for this engagement with actuality. Whether people are aware of this or not, there's a way in which seeing that engagement on the screen collectively and discussing it afterward helps us think about the world around us.
- I think this insight that documentaries are in some way serving a similar purpose to foreign films in the 60s and 70s -- I think that's really good. That they're more corporeal, they're closer to the vest, they're more personal as well, they speak to the moment in a way that Hollywood has kind of lost track of. Hollywood's not always lost track of the moment; sometimes there are periods in Hollywood that are very much in the Zeitgeist. But you're saying documentaries are doing something of that now, doing something about it--maybe something about our bodies that European films seemed to do in the 70s, presenting our bodies in different kinds of ways. That's pretty interesting and may be a good way to think about it.
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