CONVOS: James Kicklighter on New Documentary 'The American Question,' Our Political Divide, & More

Thanks for having me, Dario. I appreciate it.

When I was sixteen, I got wind of a documentary that a local college professor was making, and I convinced my mom that it was a great idea for me to work on this film. Growing up in a town of 123 people in south Georgia, not many people worked in the film business. A lot of people were farmers, teachers, insurance salesmen. That film exposed me to the world of filmmaking. I got to go to almost eighteen states. We interviewed people like Dixie Carter from Designing Women, John Mellencamp, all these interesting people who were not otherwise accessible to me, and I learned a lot about how the business works. I learned how to pitch things to agents, how to coordinate travel, how to produce things. And while that documentary was terrible, and none of us actually knew technically what we were doing, it was a really informative experience. Through that experience I kept making my own stuff, and over time other people let me make stuff with their money. That's how I got started in film.

Exactly, because I loved storytelling. Even as a kid I loved to write and I loved to read. Storytelling in a visual medium became the avenue to tell the stories I found interesting.

There are so many examples, but the film I love the most, still my favorite film to this day, is Network, the 1976 film by Sidney Lumet. And the film that really spoke to me as a teenager was Almost Famous, which reminded me a lot of my own journey. Not being a music journalist, but being a young kid who didn't know what he was doing, learning about himself on the road. That's always spoken to me because it's so personal. I see a lot of myself in William Miller.

And it really shows you the fake-it-till-you-make-it thing. William Miller is a young kid who doesn't know what he's doing, but he's being thrust into this world that's much bigger than he is, much scarier and more shark-like, and he's learning how to navigate it through the people he's with, some of whom have their lives together and some of whom do not. That film really spoke to me and still does.

Every project is its own journey. You don't know what you're making until you start making it. It doesn't matter if it's a scripted film, an ad or a documentary. All of those start from nothing. You're starting from scratch and trying to convince people that the vision you have is credible and is going to work out in the end, after all that money and time is spent. The older I've gotten, and the more films I've made, the more you learn that nobody knows anything. It's really just about trying to do the best you can, hoping it works out, and pushing and pushing. That's the process of making a career.

I've been very fortunate to do a wide variety of things, everything from scripted films to advertising to documentaries. Lately I've been doing more documentaries, because different topics have spoken to me more on a creative level. And in Hollywood over the last two or three years, between COVID and the strikes, it's been a little easier to make documentaries than independent films. But what speaks to me is really the story. What is something I want to spend years of my life making? That's something you don't always think about as a young filmmaker. When you commit to a feature film, a documentary, a television series, you are spending years of your life on that project. So it had better be something you're passionate about, because you're going to have to be there for the long haul.

In scripted work, you're starting with a screenplay. You have a road map for what you're going to do. That doesn't mean the script isn't going to change. You might evolve it through filming, do rewrites, do improvisations. But in a documentary you're starting with a concept. You're doing it in the inverse. You're saying, here's the idea we're starting with, and how are we going to build that script out? The processes are very complementary but also extremely opposite, all at the same time.

With documentaries, as I said, you start with a concept and build it out. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the film you think you're starting out to make is not the thing you end up with, because each interview presents something new. You might get new information that spins the story in a totally different direction. So you have to be a little more malleable about the story you're telling while still holding true to the vision you started with. In a screenplay, you're starting with the written word, and if it's not on the page, it's not going to be on the screen. It will not work if you do not have a good, effective script. So on a scripted film, it's making sure you've got it in the screenplay before you start shooting, because you cannot fix it in post and you cannot fix it while you're filming. On a documentary, it's being open enough and humble enough to say: this might be what I thought it was going to be at the beginning, but as I get new information, this is how the story is evolving, and this is how we need to follow it.

We started in 2016, and we filmed it on and off for eight years. It's not the only thing I've done over those eight years. I also directed a short film called Angel of Anywhere and a feature called The Sound of Identity. But this was like a little summer camp we kept coming back to. Or I should say winter camp, because the entire film is set in winter. We shot over eight years with different individuals, experts and cities. That process is very different, because you're shooting something over time to see how people, ideas and communities evolve when it comes to American polarization and the decline of trust in society. You have to be very patient to see how that unfolds.

When we first started, we thought it was going to be a two-year project. That turned into a four-year project, which turned into an eight-year project. It was really about convincing our investors that this needed to play out over a longer period, that we were going to pull it off, but that showing the trajectory of time and change in American culture really required that scope. At the beginning we knew there were certain things happening that could unfold in different ways. But the only thing you can do is let those things unfold and see what you're right about and what you're wrong about. That's the job of the curious director: to make sure the things you're following are genuine, and not something you're imposing.

The American Question is a feature documentary that explores how Americans' trust in each other eroded over time. Why is it that people who live in blue states or red states, conservative cities or liberal cities, don't trust each other anymore and can't talk to each other anymore? How is it that family members can't have discussions about things they disagree on, that friends fall off, that people get blocked on Facebook? How did this happen, not just over those eight years, but what were the conditions that led to that moment over a long period of time? We followed regular folks in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, in Erie, Pennsylvania, and in Detroit, Michigan, representing a small, a suburban and an urban community, to see how their feelings about various hot-button topics like economics, immigration, polarization and social decline would evolve over time, and how that influences the way we think about things today. We coupled those people with experts across the philosophical spectrum, people in history, politics and sociology, to explain how these things occurred over a long period of time and to give you, as a viewer, actionable steps to do something about it.

There are two things. First, I grew up in a town of 123 people in the South, and I live in Los Angeles today. One thing I was very interested in is why people who grew up where I grew up think that people who live in Los Angeles aren't real Americans. And why people in Los Angeles don't think the people I grew up with are intelligent, smart people who also have different viewpoints about the world based on their experience. I was very curious about that, because I have lived both ends of my life across that spectrum. There are lots of really smart people where I grew up, and lots of smart people where I live now. So why can't they trust each other? The second, of course, was that I worked on Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2016. I was directing ads for her, and I was in charge of the state of Virginia. After we lost the election, I was very upset and disappointed, and I wanted to find something to do about it. Fortunately, a producer friend of mine connected me with a guy named Guy Seemann, who had this idea to do a documentary about the decline of trust in society. A lot of the things we had both been thinking about were things we were really aligned on, so we set off on a journey together to go make that film.

Exactly. Guy spent his life in politics. He had never made a film before, so this was his first venture into that. He had a lot of ideas about why these things were happening, based on his research and on working in politics. I had a lot of ideas based on my experiences on the campaign, coupled with real-life experience. Together, what we were able to do was bring that blend of filmmaking experience and political operative knowledge and try to make something accessible for an audience.

One of the things I didn't fully understand at the beginning, especially in Pennsylvania, which is one of the places we highlight prominently in the film, is how angry people were. I knew people were upset and angry because of the election, but I didn't understand why. Going into those places and filming there, seeing the decline of industry and the decline of communities, helped me reconcile that understanding. This is why people feel the way they do. They feel left behind. They feel as though they've been forgotten. You can understand that when you go to those places, but until you go, you don't really see it. Even growing up where I did, I had a sense of that. There are things that happened in my childhood that I think about, like the local pharmacy closing and being replaced with a Walgreens. Things like that strip away local identity. And when your local identity is taken away, a bit of your own personal idea of yourself is taken away too. In those places, when all the industries and things that sustained the communities disappeared, so did that sense of worth and well-being. For me that was a huge takeaway.

We looked at demographic data, which is something Guy worked on before I formally came in to direct. Hazleton was a place that had a large population shift. It went from predominantly Caucasian, Italian and Polish to Hispanic immigrants from the Dominican Republic and places like that. Over about ten years that identity completely shifted, so there was a huge change for the population that had been there from the beginning. Erie was a town with a large decline in manufacturing. A lot of those jobs went overseas, and so did those industries. Places that used to employ 25,000 or 30,000 people now employ a thousand, and that created a lot of resentment in the community toward those companies. And then Detroit, which has had a lot of reinvention over time but is also grappling with gentrification and what that means for the people who have lived there a long time. To my mind, all three of those places represented things that could look like communities anywhere else in the country. That was really the goal: to say we're showing you places that are feeling this more drastically, but it could also look just like the community you live in.

No, this was my first time. I had not been to Hazleton or Erie. Growing up in the South and living in Los Angeles, I hadn't spent much time in that part of the country. Obviously that's changed since filming, but it was an area that was very new to me.

If you can understand why that happened, you can start contextualizing the anger those places feel. Then I think you're able to feel a little empathy for them and say, okay, this is why these people are frustrated, and what can we do to make this better? Because it's not just those three cities. There are lots of other places in America that look just like that. So the question becomes: what does opportunity mean for all Americans, not just people who are coastal elites?

The American dream is a concept. It's this idea that I think all Americans, to a certain extent, are raised on: if you are born and raised in America, you can do anything you want. You can make it. You can own a house, have a happy life, retire. When that becomes unavailable to you, when that vision meets the reality of how things actually are, there's a bit of cognitive dissonance. You start to have this friction. Oh, I can't buy a house. Oh, I may not be able to save for my retirement. Oh, Social Security might not exist. Then you start to have lots of feelings about the country itself, and you start to not trust the institutions. You don't trust government. You don't trust organizations. You don't trust banks. Those become problems, and when we don't have trust in our leaders and our institutions, that trickles down to everything else.

When it came to issues of capitalism writ large, that really wasn't what I wanted to tackle in this film, because there are other films that have tackled that topic much more elegantly. That's one of the challenges of making a film like this. You might watch it, or someone else might, and say, why didn't you talk about this, why didn't you talk about that? We certainly considered all those angles. But The Social Dilemma did a really good job of talking about the role of social media. There have been numerous documentaries about capitalism. So I thought the thing we really needed to focus on was the issue of trust, communal trust, and what that actually means, because that film I hadn't really seen. You're not wrong at all. That's just why we constrained it. We shot enough material to put together a miniseries, but I opted not to do that. I wanted to create a challenge for ourselves and compress it all down to ninety minutes, which I highly don't recommend when you've shot something over eight years. But I thought it was important. If you're going to make a film about the erosion of trust in communities and what we can do about it, I wanted to present it to you in ninety minutes, so you could sit down with the neighbor you disagree with, or the family member you disagree with, and have a discussion, instead of asking you to watch five episodes to come to a conclusion.

And not just a thirty-hour documentary. It lacks focus, because there are so many topics that have contributed to these erosions. I think we touch on a lot of them in the film. But as I pointed out to our team while we were making it, we've got all these experts and subjects, and some of these people have written books and books about this topic. How do you give people the CliffsNotes version, so that if they want to learn more, our film gives them the opportunity to do so?

With this film in particular, there are plenty of people in it I don't personally agree with, to be frank. There are some people I strongly agree with and some I strongly disagree with, among both the experts and the subjects. But I felt my role as the director was not to tip my hand either way. It was to ask: what does someone think about this topic? It doesn't matter if they're right, wrong, accurate or not. What matters is that this is how they feel, because for the people who feel a certain way about things, that is their reality. So my question would be: if this person feels this way about this topic, who is someone else we can interview who feels the exact opposite way? How can you have this push and pull between them throughout the film, without me explicitly putting my thumb on the scale to say this person's right and this person's wrong? We found experts across the spectrum, some more left-leaning, others more right-leaning, and contextualized that so you as a viewer can think about their thought process and hopefully come to some conclusions on your own.

Thank you. I have to say, that's the hardest thing I've done as a director. I've never done a film quite in this vein before, and I probably won't again, for the record. It's a hard thing to do. But we went into it with the intention of making something that doesn't feel like a propaganda piece or an agenda piece. That is a very big challenge right now, because American society is extremely polarized, and there's that lack of trust. When I sit here saying we're going to make a film for the left and the right and the center, and everyone can watch it together, I think most people laugh at you. They say, no, there's no way, you have a bias. So I'm really proud that when people have actually sat down to watch it, I've had people come to me who are really conservative and people who are really liberal, and both get things out of it. That's been really gratifying.

That became more apparent as we were shooting. It shouldn't be a secret to most people, but I think sometimes we don't think about it, because of social media, especially Facebook and Twitter. You'll see someone post something about a divisive topic. Someone starts commenting on it, an argument breaks out, and somebody starts trying to convince the other person why they're wrong. It doesn't work. It never works. It's a waste of everyone's time. The much better route, the thing I learned on this film, and one of our experts, Dr. Tania Israel, talks about this, is to ask people to elaborate. It takes a little more time, and a little more effort and curiosity. Instead of saying, "You're wrong about this," it's saying, "That's interesting. How did you come to that belief? What were the events in your life, the moments, the things that made you decide this is your reality?" When you do that, you may not agree with how they got there, but you start to contextualize why this person feels this way, and you can start to have a much more productive conversation about any given topic. I think it would do a lot of us some good to start reframing our conversations that way. If you want to change someone's mind, you have to start with trust. If that person doesn't trust you, because you just said they're an idiot who knows nothing, you're not going to get very far. But if you can say, now I understand your perspective, and this is what happened in my life to make me feel the way I do, you start having a back-and-forth conversation that might lead to someone changing their mind about something. Telling them they're stupid is not going to help you, I promise. I know that for a fact from Facebook arguments.

Tania also said this in the film. I'm citing her a lot because we talked to her extensively about this topic. She said something that stuck with me, which is that we reduce people to bumper stickers and slogans when they're on Facebook or Twitter or whatever platform. We hear someone say one phrase, and suddenly we associate them with all these other things. People are more complex than that. People are not a bumper-sticker slogan. When we spend a lot of time engaging on the internet, as opposed to in real life, in community groups or pickleball leagues or bowling leagues, whatever it is where we can find common interest around things that aren't about politics, we lose the chance to know people in different ways than we do online. That's one of the problems in our society. Over the last fifty to seventy-five years there's been a massive decline in community engagement and real-life participation, because we've chosen not to emphasize it anymore. I would argue, and so would some of our experts, that that is one reason we are so polarized. We just don't know each other anymore, because we're not engaging with each other in those ways.

The film would argue that this is not the most. It is a moment where it's been polarized. We can go back a hundred years and see very similar things in very similar ways. But do you know why we don't remember that? Because the people from a hundred years ago aren't alive anymore to tell you. So you have to start diving into history to explore some of these things. It's funny, because a lot of the issues people have right now around immigration, for example, are not happening for the first time. If we go back in history, we see the same sorts of rhetoric around Polish Americans and Italian Americans in the 1920s. The groups we're talking about change over time, because different groups assimilate, but it's the same repetition. A hundred years ago it was the Italian American grandmothers who didn't speak a word of English. Now the grandchildren of the people who came here a hundred years ago don't speak a word of Italian. We are in just as polarized a moment as we have been in other cycles of American history, but we don't think about it that way, because the groups that were once at the center of the polarization are now assimilated. It's the same thing.

There is a cognitive dissonance there, isn't there? It's interesting that you picked up on that. I agree, there is a definite bias there, and it's because we forget our own history. When we forget our own history, we sometimes don't have empathy for the history that's happening in the present.

Of course, and it will continue to. That was one thing I really enjoyed exploring in this film, because I didn't know a lot about those topics before I did it. That's one of the fun things about making any film. You learn a lot about a specific thing, and then you move on, make another film, and do the same thing. Learning about that repetition in American history was really fascinating. I hope that when people watch it, it helps them contextualize the present. That's one reason we tried to do that deep dive: what's happening now is not just about what's happening now. It's about what happened a hundred years ago.

There are a couple of things. One of the main problems, and we argue this in the film, is that there's been a nationalization of everything. That's somewhat because of the internet. I wouldn't even say just nationalization. Maybe an internationalization of everything. We now understand and know about specific things happening in the world and in the United States that we would never have heard about thirty years ago. That's not to say some of those things shouldn't be heard. Obviously there are voices and people who were marginalized for many years, who could not express themselves in those ways then and can now. That is a good thing. But I think what becomes a problem, and this is where we're experiencing a lot of this now, is that instead of understanding what's happening in our communities and with our neighbors, and building trust in those ways, we have become so focused on what's happening nationally and internationally, on things we literally have no control over. We become very angry about those things and very engaged with them. And you can't tell me a damn thing about what's happening with your local water commission when they're about to raise rates, because you've been so focused on this thing happening way up here instead of the things you actually can control, which are happening in your backyard. I think that has contributed to a lot of this, and it goes back to what I said earlier. It erodes trust, because now you don't know your neighbor and you don't know what's happening in your community. Everything else, which is way out of your control, becomes frantic and panicked, and that makes you more anxious about everything. One thing I would highly recommend: I think it's terrible to watch 24-hour news. Turn off your TV. Read things. One thing I do to keep myself sane, and this is not the point of view of the film, just my personal view, is that I read news instead of watching it, and I read it at the end of the day, when a story has finished breaking. One way to feel anxious about the world is to see a breaking-news headline when you don't have all the information. When you had newspapers, you would get two or three editions of the paper: a morning edition, an afternoon edition, an evening edition. A story would break in the morning, get more information in the afternoon, and final information in the evening. By reading something at the end of the day, when it's finished, you have all the details and all the context. That's much more helpful and informative than getting bits and pieces of information that may or may not be accurate. For me that's been a very helpful way to feel less anxious about everything.

And it repeats itself. Twenty-four-hour news is the same stories over and over, with little bits of new information as the day progresses, and lots of talking heads who are just giving opinions. The thing that changed in the late '80s was the fall of the Fairness Doctrine, which basically said that news programs must offer parity in what is being told. If you're doing fifty percent things that are more conservative, it must also be fifty percent things that are more liberal. So news was much more centrist and balanced. When people from another generation say the news used to be fair and balanced, that's because it was. It was forced to be by law. When that was repealed in the '80s, that's what caused the rise of cable news and opinion shows. And I would say this too. If you find a commentator on one of those platforms that you affiliate with, it's the same as following someone on X or Facebook. You're going to see the world through that entire prism, and I don't think that's very healthy either.

It's more profitable, to be clear. There's a reason it happens. It's much more engaging for you, as a subscriber to that content, to become dedicated to it than to "here's thirty minutes of the news, and we're just going to give you the facts of what happened today." That's not very exciting. The entertainment element of news has become very problematic, and it's something you as a consumer have to choose not to participate in. But that's up to you.

One of the nice things about filming a project over time is that you get to see those evolutions and trajectories. In Hazleton, for example, one of the places we filmed that had a lot of issues around immigration, they've found ways to integrate those communities better. There's the Hazleton Integration Project, which works with newcomers to the city on learning to speak English, entering the school system, after-school activities, even scholarships to college. There are things like the Hazleton Art Center, which says we need things that give people opportunities to come together in other ways. That's something the community has worked on. That's not to say all of their solutions have been found and it's nirvana. It's not. But community members recognized that there was a problem in their town and that it wasn't sustainable if things kept going that way. So that was one takeaway: you have to see the problem in your community first. What is it that's going on in our community that's not working, and what can we tangibly do as citizens to band together and make it better? Another piece was the way we talk about things. There were a couple of people, conservative and liberal, who changed their communication style. Initially their conversations were "all liberals are stupid" or "all conservatives are idiots." They started changing their diction to "I don't like what the national Democrats are doing" or "I don't like what the national Republicans are doing, but our local representative agrees with us on these things." That kind of change in dialogue makes someone feel like you're talking about those people, and not about them as an individual. If I'm a Democrat and you tell me you think I'm stupid because I'm a Democrat, then, like we said earlier, the entire conversation has been shut down, because you're insulting me. Having that open mind, and being able to have a constructive conversation while also maintaining what you stand for, matters. I'm not saying you should retreat from that. It's about changing the way you have dialogue with people to make it more about understanding and less about needing to win an argument. What do I need to understand about this person so that we might have a more constructive dialogue, and perhaps a better mode of persuasion to bring someone to my point of view? It's hard. It takes time. That's why we don't like doing it.

And that's the thing. We do give you tangible takeaways at the end of the film, which I believe are things you can actually do. That was one thing that frustrated me as a director over the last eight years. Similar films have come out. I'm not going to name names. Some of those films have given the answer of "well, just talk to people." That's not enough. "Talk to people" is a bit of a cop-out, in my opinion. What we need to do is say: what are the tangible actions I can personally take? The things the film recommends are, I think, things most people can actually do. But it does begin with you making that choice. I cannot make that choice for you. These are suggestions, obviously, not mandates. But understanding what you can tangibly do, and saying, hey, maybe this isn't working, is a really good step. I think most Americans can probably agree that the way things are right now isn't working very well, and that requires a change. Again, it's the adage that it begins with you. It's very true. One thing I find really amusing when people talk about national politics is that they say, "Well, Washington just doesn't work." Well, who makes up Washington? People that local communities send. If Washington isn't working, it's because something's not working locally, for you, at home. So it begins with you.

It's true, though. While there were people in the film who changed, there were also people who didn't, and I think that's true of real life. That's why we show it. Some people are going to change their point of view with time and experience, and some are not, and that's okay. Those are not necessarily people who are going to be engaged with how we make our communities better, and that's important to acknowledge. Some people don't want to change. Some people do not want to engage. So it's really a question of, if there are people like that out there, how many of us are there who can actually make a difference? You've got to be one of those difference-makers, if it's something you want to be engaged with.

That's been a huge piece of American history. It's a push and pull between the identity of the American individual, which, like the American dream, is also a concept, and the common good of the community. When that balance gets out of whack, you start seeing things push one way or the other. I would argue that right now the individual is a little more in the lead than the community is, and I think we've got to see more of a push back toward the common good of the community and of people. When we aren't serving that, it becomes really messy. If everybody's individual needs are about themselves, then we're forgetting about the other people who need community and need things from our community. That goes back to what we've been talking about throughout this conversation.

I've had a few people ask me whether I'm more or less optimistic than when I started eight years ago. I think this latest election shows that a lot of the issues we cover in our film are unresolved. If the election had gone a different way, I would have been talking about this film in the sense that some of the things we covered had clearly changed and evolved, and this is how we arrived at this moment. But because of how the election went, I think it's very clear that a lot of places in America are still feeling that resentment, still feeling left behind, and feel like those issues have not changed for them. Elections are where people express how they feel. Personally, I would say I'm more optimistic about the future than I was at the beginning, because I've seen these people and places change over time. I've been fortunate enough to see how people can evolve, how people can shift, and to be able to throw aside some of the nationalized rhetoric and say, this is not necessarily how regular folks feel. It's how very online folks feel. Regular folks are not quite as intense as most of the people we read about on the internet or see on television news. Most people just want to live their lives and have harmony. Being able to see those people and places more personally has helped me say, okay, this is something we can get through, if we can have more open discussion about it.

I don't trust a keyboard warrior. Somebody who's got a really strong opinion about something, on either the left or the right, is not generally indicative of most people. When we see those more extreme examples through online interactions, that again becomes the thing that makes us think all these people feel this way about this thing. That's not usually true, and it's one thing this film definitely helped me put in perspective.

The response has been really great. We have 100% on Rotten Tomatoes at the moment, which is nuts. And we've really heard from people across the spectrum. Even on a personal level, people I know from growing up where I did, who are much more conservative than I am, and people who are really liberal, who are my neighbors here in Los Angeles, are equally responding to the film. We've been hearing that across screenings in the United States and in different online venues. It's been really gratifying. But as I've been saying, at the end of the day it's great that people have that response, but making the changes is a choice the viewer has to make. So I'm curious to see whether the people who watch the film recontextualize how they think about these things and make a difference. That's not to say I think our film is suddenly going to create a kumbaya moment with everyone in America. But I do hope the people who watch it are able to ask: what role do I play in this, and what can I do to make it better? If we can do that, I will feel like we were very successful.

I don't know how I did either, honestly. It was a relief, for sure. I'm very proud of the work we did, and very pleased that we pulled it off. When you're making a film like that, it's very hard to see the end of the tunnel. Throughout production you're asking: are we filming this endlessly? Are we shooting in the dark? Where is this going to go? How is this story going to play out? So completing that challenge was a really gratifying moment in my career, to say we can do things like this. I also have no desire to do anything like it ever again. Never again. I've told my agents, my producers, everyone I work with that this was a one-time deal for me. But I'm really proud that we did it, because if we had tried to do something more contained, something shortened, you wouldn't get that trajectory of time and perspective, and I think that is extremely valuable. I'm really proud of everyone who worked on the film, Guy, our editors, our animation team, our [inaudible], everyone who helped bring it to life and stayed focused over that period of time. I think it's really remarkable work from all of them.

A very different film, because you would have missed all these other things. That's the problem with a current-events film: current events are happening every day. You have to come to a point where you understand, okay, this is it. I knew we were going to make this an eight-year film, so regardless, it was going to come out in 2024. But when the Trump assassination attempt happened in July and Biden dropped out, I said, that's it. This is the cutoff. It didn't matter what happened after. What mattered was that those two events were unprecedented in the modern era. They've happened in American history. There have been assassination attempts, and there have indeed been candidates who dropped out. It's not new, but it hadn't happened in a very long time. So I said, these unprecedented events are our cutoff, and that's why we cut it the way we did.

It didn't even matter, and that's what I realized from a creative standpoint. Mind you, I didn't have a choice, because my distributor had a cutoff date by which I had to deliver everything. It's not like I could keep going indefinitely. But creatively, I knew it made sense to stop there, because everything that comes after is a reaction to all the things that came before, which is what we'd been filming for eight years. So it doesn't date the film, and it doesn't make the film less relevant. I think you could probably watch it in a couple of years and it might feel just as relevant. It's about asking how we got to this point, and contextualizing that so you can understand what to do in the present.

I've been very gratified that the response from people who were in it has been pretty positive. A lot of the experts have loved it, and people who were in the film loved it as well. That's a great relief. It's always a challenge when you make a documentary, because the people who participate aren't sure whether you've pulled something out of context. That can be hard. So it's nice to hear that they felt well represented. That is the job you have as the documentary director.

It's available on demand on multiple platforms. You can watch on Apple, Amazon, YouTube, Google Play, Fandango at Home and Vimeo, or on DVD and Blu-ray if you prefer. If you just type "The American Question" into Google, pick your platform of choice and it will be available to you.

That's something I've absolutely shot down. A couple of people have asked, do you want to do a sequel for another eight years? I said absolutely not. If our distributor or financiers decide they'd like to do that, I will happily executive produce it, but I will not direct it. So that will not be the next thing I do. There's a new project I'm working on that I can't talk about quite yet. I'm very excited about it. It's an extremely different genre, and you should hear about it in the coming months. It's nice to move on to something very different that's also going to be an entirely new challenge for me as a director. So stay tuned.

Thank you, Dario. I appreciate that.