Biography

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.