Director Interview

I was blown away by your comments. That was very, very kind.

I'm so glad it connected with you in that way. It's interesting that you bring up that moment of breaking the fourth wall, which was something I went back and forth on. Because of all the things you described, I was trying to create a very cinematic, almost narrative documentary. It's certainly a documentary film, but I wanted it to feel almost like a scripted movie, which you could probably tell watching it. In that moment when you break the wall, it reminds the viewer that they're watching a documentary. But from a pure storytelling perspective, I realized: this isn't going to work if I don't interject. If I don't interject, this moment does not work. So you have to do it. That's one of the great things about storytelling. It's about looking at things and saying, this may be the format I'm trying to tell the story in, but if I don't do this thing, that moment doesn't work either.

You walk into a documentary thinking about the thing on paper. The thing on paper is: trans singer makes history at Tulsa Opera. That's the logline. But that's not the story. The story is much deeper and more complicated. I saw all those different elements as a multi-layer cake, and you're hoping that each foundation you're laying, all the pieces of setup, work together to tell that singular story and converge in that moment you describe at the end, "I want them to feel." I felt that if I could successfully juggle each of those story threads, they would converge into one singular story by the time we get to the third act. That, for me, was a really challenging, perhaps risky, creative thing to do, and it took a lot of work in editing to make sure each of those stories did that. The nice thing, of course, is that when you have thirty days of contained filming with a specific end point, it does help you get there, because of the natural structure that's provided: you have thirty days to get ready for a show, and the show is the end point.

It was delicate. Now we're talking about the risks of storytelling. I staked the entire film on that moment. In a documentary, you don't have any guarantee that something's going to happen. You're unveiling things in order. We did not know definitively that her dad or sister would show up until the last day or two. We did not know definitively that we would be able to go back and film that moment. And I certainly didn't know how it was going to happen. When those three elements come into play, and I've said this before, I give my producers lots of credit for letting me make that decision. I'm sure I could have made a decent film without it. But I thought that was the emotional core of the story. The emotional core of the story is about reconciling the person you are with the person you want to be. I felt that her story, if you strip away everything else, if you take away the opera, her being trans, her thoughts about identity, being an artist, is really a story about someone who had this moment when they were twelve or thirteen years old, and how that totally changed the trajectory of their life. It's a universal story that I think a lot of people can relate to: having to deal with those traumas from your childhood and having a moment to reconcile. My dad died when I was twelve, so I related to it in a different way, but I still got that. I felt you had to treat it with the delicacy of the moment that it is. You don't want to over-direct it or over-shoot it. You want it to be natural, because it's going to be awkward, and it's also a real human moment. It's not just happening in a film. This is their life, and I have to be respectful of that.

I hope so. Two things you said there were so important to me. First of all, opera is perceived as a dead medium. You don't think of opera in a modern context. So I knew going into it that this was the first challenge: how do you make this accessible to an audience? How do you make it interesting, so that you might want to go to the opera, to see what's happening in a world that still exists but that we just don't talk about in pop culture? As I was observing in the first couple of days of filming, I realized this is a universal story. This is the story of an artist who might be at that moment in their career where they're going to make it. Maybe. That might happen, it might not, but this could be the moment they've worked their entire career for. This is where people become aware of her, after working and doing all the things you do to become an overnight success after ten years of work. I realized that if we tap into that, it doesn't matter if you like opera, or if you've ever seen a film about someone who's transgender. That's the story you're watching: a story about someone who might make it. I think that is a really powerful story for anyone who's an artist, whether you're an actor, a musician, a writer, a director, or even just somebody who likes to see an underdog win. And second, in many films about LGBTQ issues, they usually tackle one or two things in particular. It's usually about transition. I know I'm generalizing slightly, but think about it for a moment: of everything in pop culture that is about transgender people, very few of those representations are about much more than the transition process. They tackle transition, how I transitioned, the details of my transition. I'm not saying that's not important. It's important to tell your story, and it's important to have an identity. But I do think that if all we do as storytellers is tell stories about trans people in transition, then we are constantly otherizing folks and not giving them something else to root for. We're not giving the trans community hope, or a role model, or somebody to look up to, because all we're talking about is their transition. I felt it was so important to skip right past that and talk about who she is today and how she got there, and how her past affects her present, without even discussing the transition. Because that's not really what her story is about. Her story really is about what happened to her when she was a kid and her parents got divorced, and how that changed her life. That's a story I think a lot of people can relate to.

In some ways I think that is the easier way. I'm sure if you talk to ten different people, they'll direct something ten different ways. But in the same way that Denni Sayers says, "How am I making Don Giovanni the show and not the freak show?", I'm obviously thinking the exact same thing. That could be a meta-narrative within the film I'm making: how do I make this not about the thing? To me, successful storytelling in many ways is that too. As I said at the beginning, there's a logline, there's what should be on paper. But if you've done your job, it's usually not that thing.

I'm going to rewind a little bit. You mentioned Tobias Picker. I didn't know he was going to be as prominent in the story until the first week of filming. We shot that scene in the restaurant between Tobias and Lucia, and in that moment I turned around to the producers and said: one, I can make the film I want to make, and two, Tobias is going to be a huge part of it. Because it's this interplay between the two. It's the mentor and the mentee. It's the person at the beginning of their career and the person at the end of their career. It is yin and yang, and they work together in this beautiful way. I think we all have these mentors and mentees in our lives, people we relate to. But there comes a point in all our lives where we see less in front of us than behind, and it becomes about what we're going to leave behind. For Tobias, that's about advancing rights for people that he didn't have when he was her age, and I thought that was really powerful. Because throughout the process you're wondering: is this guy using her, or is he advancing her? That was the fascinating line I wanted to play with throughout the film, to leave the audience questioning his motivations too. Everyone has a point of view here, and everyone has a different agenda. So it's navigating through those agendas to stream it all into one singular story. And to your question, him choosing Don Giovanni is a fascinating choice to me, because that is also a multi-layered character who is very complex, especially within the modern dialogue, with Me Too and all the various social movements happening right now. I took the multi-layered approach of the documentary from the show itself, too, because Don Giovanni, I felt, was a character in the film just as much as Lucia was, just as much as Tobias was. It's about someone who presents themselves in society as one thing and is something else behind closed doors, and what that means. I thought that was essential to the storytelling. But I didn't know any of those things walking into this, because I didn't know the story of Don Giovanni. I did not know much about opera. So when the producers called me in 2019, asking if I was interested in doing this film, I told them, "Thank you, but no thank you, because I know nothing about opera. You should probably talk to someone else who knows more." On the third call they finally convinced me, because since I didn't know much, they felt I would bring a different approach to it. I'd look at it with fresh eyes and a different kind of curiosity than somebody who really knew that world. So I tried to be a quick study. The thing that drew me in initially, obviously, was the voice, because that notion of gender identity and vocal association was such an interesting topic to me. The idea that you have someone who presents as female but has a baritone voice: does it mean anything? Does it not mean anything? What does that mean in society, with gender roles and all these dialogues we're having right now about identity? When I interviewed Lucia on Skype in advance of filming, I knew instantly. I said, "I have to do this film. This is going to be really interesting." Using the voice as the starting point, everything else comes from there. That, for me, was the way in, and why I was convinced to do it. So to answer your question: I didn't actively pursue the film at first. They came to me, and I was unsure about it, and then I was taken with the concept and with Lucia, and then I did it. It's a good example of how sometimes you should take the risk. The thing that makes you nervous is usually the thing you should try to do.

It's the little things like that. I remember a note I got from somebody that said, "Cut the video games. It has nothing to do with anything." I disagree. I think the video games are essential, because again, it's something you don't expect. You think about the world of opera as this stuffy, dead medium, and here we have an opera singer playing video games in her off time to help her memorize things. I thought that was essential. When you have little moments like that, it humanizes folks, because the world we're talking about is so cloistered. I found out as well that it's extremely rare for documentaries, or films at all, to be made about living opera stars. A lot of the time they happen when they're dead, or when they're about to be. Not usually at the beginning. It is such a cloistered world. I wouldn't say hidden, but people really are protective of their identities in opera. They don't like people to come in and see process. So when I had a subject who was so willing to be open, and we could find that they do things like play video games, I just think it's very humanizing.

And obviously that's a question we explore in the film, because I was very interested in it. In the same cultural dialogue we're having about Me Too, there's obviously a lot of dialogue right now about being a gay filmmaker, or a female filmmaker, or a filmmaker of color. I think those are important conversations. To be clear again, I don't think that's a bad thing. What I was interested in is how we use that as currency, good, bad or ugly, because it is a currency. Her discussion and Tobias's discussion of this throughout the film, this dialogue about how we're using this identity to bring in an audience, whether that's good or bad, whether we're being exploitative: I thought that was a valid conversation, because I don't know that I've heard that conversation very much in media in the context of how we talk about identities and representation. Yes, we need representation. But is there a line past which you're using it, as opposed to using it for the right reasons? I thought that was an interesting question to look at.

You've got to bring it front and center, because when we're having all these discussions about representation, which are valid and much needed, I do think there's a dark side to it as well. Having that discussion on camera, I hope, sparks some new thoughts in the midst of that dialogue.

It's the business of it. This is why I hope it will connect with a lot of audiences, because it's a universal story. It's not just being on stage. It's not just making a film, or writing an album, or writing a screenplay or a book. It's about all that other stuff. In trying to figure out how to structure the film, I realized really quickly that it would be very boring to sit here and just watch rehearsals for ninety minutes. You've got to see the other elements. After that restaurant scene, I realized that was where I should focus. That was only six days into filming, and we were filming for about thirty days. In documentaries, different people have different approaches, but I walk in with a general idea about what I want to do, and then as we're going through the process, I try to follow the story as it's happening and say, this is the direction I think we should go. On day six, I knew the direction the film should go: that this is really about not just all those other things we've discussed, but also about the sales process, as simple as that sounds. How do we sell this opera? How do we put this on? How does that get affected by identity, how we're using identity, how we're marketing it? That opens the door to all kinds of discussions that start flowing in the same direction.

Exactly, and I'm very lucky in that. That's just the happenstance of the shooting process. As for how I did it, and Lucia would probably tell you this too: I just film until they forget they're being filmed. That's how you do this. It's a big challenge in the editing process. For example, that one scene was a two-and-a-half-hour dinner shoot, and you only see about five minutes of it in the film. There comes a point in filming projects like this where, one, you have to build the subject's trust. Otherwise they're not going to open up to you. And two, once you've built that trust, they have to forget they're being filmed. So we had cameras with very long lenses that were sharp, which enabled us to hide and do multi-camera work, and I would be on the headset taking notes over in the corner where they couldn't see me. You just keep shooting and shooting. Occasionally I'll call in and interject for things, but you want to avoid that, because if you let the subject talk, they will start talking genuinely. They stop performing for the camera, and they start giving you something that is truthful. Even though they know they're being filmed, they forget about it, and that is where you start finding those moments. Sometimes it takes two and a half or three hours of filming, but that's what you have to do. And you really have to stay on top of it as you're shooting, following the narrative. I take notes as we're filming: these are the things we talked about, this is what they said, this is what I need to get to go in this direction. That's very much part of the process. Follow the story, listen to the subject, and evolve it in real time as you go.

As a director, when you're making a film like this, it's a delicate balance. You want to get to the core of a character, but you don't want to get too close to the character, because then you're not objective. So I'm always asking myself during filming, and I think you can probably sense this in the film too: is Lucia always being authentic? Is this a truthful answer? Is this really what she means? Is she hiding something? That's not a criticism of her, by the way. It's just that you always have to question the character's motivation. Do I think there were moments when she had second thoughts about the filming process, or wasn't sure? I'm totally sure that happened at some point, because I know I would sometimes ask questions that were more provocative, or I'd be following something that might create a more dramatic moment, some of which I included in the film and some of which I did not. You're doing two things here. You're trying to create an authentic film, but you also want it to be an accurate representation of the person. If you have these big, blowout dramatic moments that you sometimes see in films, that's not necessarily true to the character, because you also have to remember that we are in a thirty-day pressure cooker, with a real opera happening that they're getting ready for, international press following that opera, and all these people there. So as you're filming, you're having to ask: is this moment authentic to who they are? And when you're editing: is this moment authentic to them, or was this a heated moment that is not fair to show? You're trying to negotiate all of those things and figure out what is truthful.

For sure. There were definitely a couple of moments in editing where I thought, I'm in over my head on this. Where are we? How am I going to cut this down? I think my first cut was about three hours, and I said, there's no way I can cut any of this. And then you start honing in on these moments and on what the core of the story is. You just keep asking yourself: what's the core of this story, and what's the way you want to tell it? The first challenge was in the way I shot it, which was structuring everything around constantly bigger stages. The first stage Lucia is on, in the first act, is the smallest. In the second act the stage is slightly bigger, and the third is the big stage. I structured each interview, and each line of questioning for her, in the hope that we would never go back to any of those stages, to emulate something about her career as a storytelling choice. I felt that was a life-imitating-art thing: we start out on a small stage, and if we're successful, it gets bigger and bigger. That was a risk I took in the filming process, because if I needed something from interview one or two in the third act, that would ruin the entire structure. So I had to make sure, in each of those sit-down interviews, that I got everything I needed for a first act, everything I needed for a second act, and everything I needed for a third act. That was an editing challenge for sure. I created that challenge for myself, so I have no one to blame but myself.

Maybe no one would know. But I can truthfully say that in the film I did successfully pull that off, and I'm really proud of that, from an editing and directing standpoint.

The biggest surprise for me is that there was no hellfire and brimstone. I was really expecting protests, people up in arms, because we were in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It's not like we were in New York or San Francisco or LA, where this would probably be a non-event. We talk about that in the film: if this happened in any other major city, people wouldn't necessarily pay the same attention to it. But because it's in Tulsa, it's a big event. It's an international news story. It's a headline. We really did think there was going to be some of that, and I'm glad it didn't happen. Lucky's not the right word. I'm glad, because I didn't want to show that in the film, frankly. I would have if we needed to. But I felt this is a story that's empowering. This is a story that shows that places like Tulsa are generalized as being one way or the other, when that's really not true. People talk so much about red states and blue states now. I'm in Georgia at the moment, and where I grew up versus Atlanta are very different places. I think sometimes we lump places and people together as one thing or the other, and that's not true. Something like this can occur in a place like Tulsa just as much as in New York or London or anywhere else. That was the biggest surprise for me: all of those preconceived notions, the protests and the picketers you were expecting, didn't happen.

That's the thing as an artist. I sometimes mentor younger filmmakers, although I'm not that old. Every once in a while somebody who's eighteen or twenty calls or emails me and asks for advice about how to get attention for their work. I always say: no one cares that you exist. I don't mean that in a demeaning way. No one cares about what you're making until someone cares about it. So you've got to be your own advocate. If you can't advocate for your own work, nobody else is going to do it, especially at the start of your career. You have to beg and plead and share and do all those things to get people to watch what you're doing. And then, hopefully, there comes a time in your career when The New York Times writes about you, or someone wants to talk about the work you made. That's what you really see with Lucia. Even though she's having this moment where there's going to be all this press, it doesn't matter if no one comes to the show in Tulsa. They've still got to show up in Tulsa, because if people don't show up in Tulsa, all that other stuff isn't going to matter.

So far, so good. We've gotten a couple of early reviews that have been good, which is always nice. As a filmmaker, a director, a writer, you get good reviews and you get bad reviews. That's part of the territory. If you don't want to deal with that, you shouldn't be in this business. Criticism is a very big part of it. But the reception so far seems to be generally positive, and we'll see what happens. I take the viewpoint that you do the best work you can, you put it out there, you hope somebody finds it, and then you do it again. That's how I've always tried to look at it. If you get stuck on something, or something takes too long and you never put it out, or you keep editing it to oblivion, you never move on. As an artist, you've got to have the discipline to say: this is the film I made, I made it, and now we move along. It took me about two and a half or three months to edit the film, and when I was done, I was happy with the edit. I watched it again the other day, just to remind myself of some things, and I felt generally good about it. Sometimes I'll go back and watch things and say, "Oh, I should have cut those five minutes," or "I should have cut that scene." I haven't had that feeling on this film yet. Maybe in five or ten years I will. But at the moment, I think it's okay as it is.

It's a different sort of relationship, isn't it? There are two things I think about. One, they are real people, which means the choices I make will affect real people in real life. That is different from a created character. So I have to be very cognizant of that. Is the representation I'm providing of this person fair to who they are? As I was saying earlier, there are moments when you're filming documentaries that can be very dramatic, that can be heated. Is that something I have to have in my narrative? Is it something that advances the narrative? Is it something that's true to the person? If I can't answer yes to all three of those questions, I don't need to put it in there, because this is a real person who has real-life consequences from the actions I take. And your relationship with them exists only in that film, because you are capturing thirty days of their life. Thirty days of my life, captured, or your life, captured, may be very different from what happened in the other eleven months of the year. So your relationship with them is built upon that moment in time. It's built upon who they were then. That doesn't mean it's the totality of who they are, or a complete representation of that person. Your relationship with them becomes that window. That's not to say that we don't talk. We certainly have talked afterward. But that's where the relationship lives, so it's a different sort of thing.

It's the same as making a film. On films, there are some people who come along on almost every project. My director of photography has shot almost every film of mine. We were college roommates. We go way back. Then you have people who work on one film and you never see them again. That's the nature of the business. You have the people you collect, and you have the people you work with once or twice and never hear from again. It's the same in opera.

I've learned not to hope too much. You always hope for the best, of course you do. But you know as well as I do that once you make something and put it out, there's so much, as a creative, that you don't have control over. I don't have control over distribution. I don't have control over marketing. I don't have control over whether someone decides to click on it on iTunes and buy it or rent it. Those are things I have zero control over. What I can do is make the best film I can make, hope people like it, and talk about it until everyone doesn't want to hear about it anymore, and hope that people watch it. I try to set those expectations for myself, so that if things don't go well, I can say I did the best I could, and someone might discover it later. If you set expectations too high, you never reach satisfaction. You'll never be happy. I think you have to learn to be happy with the work you make. If it is successful, of course that's good for you and your career. But if you're not making it for the right reasons, because you want to tell a good story or because you think these are interesting characters, I don't think you'll ever be satisfied. If you're doing it just for fame or notoriety, or for people to say nice things about you on the internet, you're never going to be happy.

I shouldn't do this, but I do like to comment on YouTube videos of interviews of mine, or on films that go online. I'll type little comments. I enjoy engaging with people like that, good, bad or ugly. I shouldn't do it. It's probably not good for my mental health, but I do.

Exactly. I'm so appreciative that you wanted to talk about this, because I'm pretty sure you've known me since I began, ten or fifteen years ago. My very first film was The Car Wash, which I think you had written or tweeted about years ago, when I was a student filmmaker. I did an interview earlier today with another publication, and we were talking about the Macon Film Festival, which has programmed my work every year since I was nineteen. I have audiences there, the mama, the grandmama, the child, everybody, and they have been there every year since I was nineteen. For over a decade I have watched these people grow up, get older, evolve, change, and every year they show up for that screening. It's really neat when you can engage with people like yourself, people like that, and see that over time.

I do too, so we definitely share that view. I am really proud of it, genuinely. I do think it's the best one I've ever made, for sure.

I think about this question a lot, believe it or not, because there are so many people I've worked with who don't work in film anymore, or people who wanted to and didn't. Some were super talented, way more talented than me, and just didn't make it for some reason. I don't know if you ever "make it," by the way, for the record. I think you're always scaling a new mountain, if you're worth your salt. It's what I said at the very beginning about this film: it was something that scared me, so I knew I needed to do it. It was a new mountain to climb. When you're eighteen and starting out in film, or forty and starting out in film, because people start at any time, you have this idea in your head that if I can only get to the top of this mountain, everything's going to be great. That's all I have to do. I need to make my first feature film, or my first short, and then I'm going to show it to everybody, and then I'm going to be wildly successful. That's what people tend to think. The thing I've learned is that it's not about getting to the top of that mountain. It's about getting to the top of that mountain and seeing that there's a whole chain ahead of you that you've got to get past. There isn't necessarily a firm destination for where your career is going to be. There is a series of events that will happen to you. You make work, you do things, you meet people. Some projects you make, some you don't. You develop things that don't go forward and things that do. And you just have to keep making it. If you stop trying, or you hit a wall and don't know how to get past it, you're going to fall out every time. I've made things that have gone well and things that haven't. Things that were in my control and things that were out of my control. Choices I made that were good, and choices I made that were bad. It was about learning from that collective experience and asking: what is it that I need to move forward? How am I going to take this good or bad experience and move to the next thing? Sometimes that's really hard to do, especially when you're starting out and not independently wealthy. I did not grow up rich. I did not come from money. I grew up in a town of 123 people in the rural South. We did not have money, so I didn't have some rich uncle I could call when I was broke. I had to figure out how to do it. That means sometimes you have to be resourceful. Sometimes you have to take jobs you don't want to take. Sometimes it means you have to edit, or do an ad, or do a corporate thing, or do some stupid video for someone online that you don't really care about and that doesn't even have your name on it. I have a lot of those. They paid the bills while I was trying to get the other thing to happen. It takes time to become a professional director or a professional writer, where people seek you out. I got this film because I was sought out for it. It takes time to get to that point. And if you are not finding ways to simultaneously advance the work you're doing, continue to make your work, and pay the bills, you're not going to get there. I think sometimes we can be too precious about the jobs we take because they're not the thing we want to do. Sometimes you need to take that job so you can do the thing you want to do. When people fall out, or leave the business they wanted to go into, it's usually because they're not willing to do that work. They're not willing to wait. They think it's taking too long. They don't want to take that job because it's not the job they want. Usually you have to do a series of things to get to the point where you can make the things you want to make. Because you can make the best film in the world, as Lucia says about opera, and if you're just doing it in your living room, nobody's going to know. So you've got to get out of your living room. And once you get past that living room, you have to recognize that sometimes it's going to be effective and sometimes it's not. This film could be an epic flop. I have no idea. But I did the best work I could, I put it out there, and I hope it's not. If it does well, I'll probably get new opportunities. If it doesn't do well, I'll probably have to figure out what to do next. That's just part of the business. You have to learn that skill: the constant ability to do it, move on, and try again. That's what I would tell my eighteen-year-old self.

And sometimes you don't even have control over that, but that is a topic for a whole other day. There are moments where you do not have control over your work. I was lucky with this film, where I did. Those are things you just have to learn how to live with and learn how to move past. I often say there's no wall around Hollywood. There isn't a big wall to scale. You just have to learn how to walk in. Sometimes that door opens really wide, and sometimes it's a little bit of a crack and you have to figure out how to push it a little bit harder. You just have to slowly push it until you get to a point where you start making the things you want to make. People always ask me, "Are you at the point now where you've done what you want to do?" The answer is always no, because there's always going to be something else, something new, some new challenge. We'll see what the future holds. I hope that I keep working. In the back of my head I always remind myself that any day someone could stop calling me, or maybe nobody wants me to work anymore. So I try to be cognizant of that. We are only as successful as our last project.

We would love that. We'd be happy to do it. In fact, I know Lucia would be more than happy to. She's ready to do anything, so let me know.

That's great. It's an important topic. That's another thing I talk about a lot. Failure's so important. People don't like to talk about failure, because they feel it's bad. But I think failure is great. The more you fail, the more you learn. Your work improves when you fail and learn from it. It's not about failing. It's about learning why you failed and how not to do that again. That's all it is. Failure is not bad. It's bad when you don't learn from your failure, when you keep repeating the same mistake over and over again. People don't stay in the business because they don't recognize what that mistake is, what that failure is, and why. So at the end of everything, I always try to do a kind of post-op, to understand why something went well or didn't, why a film came out the way I wanted or didn't, what mistake I made, how it wasn't edited right, or whether there was something beyond my control that I could do nothing about. Those are things you really have to analyze to understand how to move forward.

That's life. Failure is life. I had a moment like that in my career. There was a film I directed in 2014, in India, that I didn't have final cut on. The producer ran off with it for a few months and edited it the way they wanted, and I thought it was a terrible disaster. It was awful. I had a director's cut that I thought was much better. I know that's biased. It was twenty minutes shorter. I thought their version was too bloated, and it was a mess. That was my moment. I thought: this film will not go the way I wanted it to. I have the film I want to make, but I can't make it. It's out of my control. For me, that was the moment to say, okay, I'm going to have to start over again here. I thought this was going to be my moment where I make it, like Lucia has in this film. I thought that was going to be my moment, but it wasn't. So I said, if this isn't going to work, then what do I need to do to get to where I want to go? I spent those couple of years reinventing myself, thinking about the work I'd been making, asking: what am I doing well? What am I not doing well? What can I improve? Whose help do I need? I think that because of that, I'm able to make things now, like this, that are a fully formed thought, that have layers, and that hopefully connect with an audience in a special way. It's because I failed, and because I had to figure out how to improve my own work, for things that were in and not in my control.

And getting to those moments was very challenging, because it's a really delicate balance. As a director, and I guess I'll leave you with this, in a documentary you don't want to show your cards to the subject. If you show your cards to the subject, they're going to perform for the film they think you're making. They can't know at any moment what film I'm trying to make. That has to be something I've kept from them, because I don't want them to perform for me. I want them to react. That's the difference between directing non-actors and actors, and fortunately I have experience with both, because I've done narrative films and documentaries. So it's particularly tricky when you're directing, in a documentary, a performer who knows how to act, and trying to get them to be authentic without revealing the film you're going to make. Those moments where she breaks down are all in the third act, and it's because I structured the film intentionally around that. That, of course, is me shaping the story, for sure. But I knew that the film's emotional climax was the story of her and her father, which meant I had to build up that narrative throughout the film but wait until the third act to get her to break down about it, because I felt she was still holding it, guarding it. I knew that if I went for it before the very last moments, I would have tipped my hand to her as to what film I was making. So those moments where she breaks down at the end of the film are literally from the last ten minutes of filming her interview: the very last interview, at the very end. I structured the entire line of questioning for all three interviews to get to that point, and I was very fortunate to draw that out of her without her knowing what film I was trying to make.

I banked on that. Anytime you're doing a documentary, some of it is fortuitous circumstance, but these things I planned on. I planned on her being tired. I planned on all of that. It's not me being manipulative. It's me trying to get something that's honest, because I know that when you have a performer in a documentary, it's very easy for them to perform for the documentary. So I wanted to get her to a place where, A, she trusted me, and B, I could get to those moments that would hopefully be impactful for the viewer.

It was something I learned. You learn something new on every project, and I had never attempted anything like that before. That strategy worked. And now that I've revealed that strategy, I can never do it again, because someone will see this interview and know what I'm up to.

Exactly. But I'm ready to go back to doing a scripted film, as lovely as it's been. I love making docs. I love making narrative films.

I don't have a preference. It's always about the story. The story is the most important thing. But after doing two documentaries back to back, I'm ready to do a narrative film, because you learn so much in each process. And The Sound of Identity kind of feels like a narrative film. It's a hybrid between the two in some ways. But you want to do something different, or at least I do. Jonathan Demme and Sidney Lumet, two of my favorite directors, successfully went back and forth between narrative films and docs, and I hope to continue to emulate that.

I think so too. There's a script I want to do a little later this year. Now that the pandemic is seemingly improving in the United States, I think there's a better shot than not that we might be able to film that project, and I'm really excited about that. It's a great script. It's a Garden State kind of coming-of-age movie, a thirty-something coming-of-age story, about when you realize for the first time that your parents are getting older, and what that means for you. It's a wonderful script, and I'm excited to do it.

I knew that at twelve. So, for better or worse, I had to develop emotionally in a very different way, and I've always been drawn to those types of stories. The Sound of Identity certainly fits in that pantheon.

Thank you for asking me. I can't wait to see what you write.