I'm fascinated by failure, and I'm fascinated by finality. Shakespeare's historical plays are more universal than his comedies because they relate to the finality of life. Without finality, life would not be beautiful.
I think that narrative, fiction filmmaking is the culmination of several art forms: theater, art history, architecture. Whereas doc filmmaking is more pure cinema, like cinema verite is film in its purest form.
There's something unique about the United States, a sense of individual rights and freedoms, and a sense of social and civic responsibility that we contributed to so much of the world. We lost that mission in the 1980s and 1990s, when we entered a gilded age, and the culture of individualism became a culture of avarice.
I was very inspired by Les Blank's film 'Burden of Dreams.' I think what's unique about his film and the two I've made is that they're close examinations of filmmakers and how their own emotional experiences reflect in the material they're rendering, and vice versa - how that material sometimes colors their own lives.
