For me, documentary filmmaking is a process of
discovery, an opportunity to wander along some unmarked shore with my
mind open and my senses alert. I love to be surprised. I begin each
project with a recognition of how little I know, and cultivate a state
of radical ignorance. What did I know about the brain before I began my research,
or Napoleon or the work of the Secretary General of the United Nations? Not much.
Tolerance for the disquieting limbo of
uncertainty in the midst of chaos is at the center of my creative
process. I’ve always done the initial research on my films myself
because I can’t explain to anyone else what I’m looking for. It’s only
later – when I start to write the script or I’m in the editing room,
trying to make sense of a shapeless jumble of information – that I begin
to understand where I might be going. Making documentaries requires
comfort with disorder – being at ease with what seems like an infinite
number of brute, meaningless facts and knowing that only the empathetic
imagination can infuse them with meaning.
It is the empathetic
imagination that feels its way into the thicket of facts to find hidden
in the welter of possibilities the shape of a story. I have no
argument with films that are essays, laying out ideas in an orderly,
point by point fashion. But I like to tell stories – because stories do
not simplify complex personalities and events; because stories embody
values without preaching them; because in stories, we learn how ideas
feel; because in stories there are no answers, only more questions,
pointing viewers, I hope, toward insights of their own.
