In the same way that we want to expand mental health service for people with mental illness, we also need to make sure that our police officers are getting the mental health help they need.
Mental health treatment is most likely available to the officers, but they may be reluctant to access it due to cultural beliefs within the force, fear of stigma, etc.
I felt like any individual's recovery was more important than the film I was making. And I actually felt that my presence was a form of witness that communicated to the people I was following that their lives mattered.
If the subject is no longer living, the immediate question is do you have enough first-person material to really get that story across. You'd like to avoid it just being other people's memories and interpretations.
One thing people often forget when making a documentary is that, in a sense, you still have to cast, find a star, and it has all of those built-in challenges.
Documentary filmmaking has all the challenges and hardships of narrative filmmaking without any of the infrastructure or support. That's both a blessing and a curse.
We don't see many films in which someone with schizophrenia is the main character.
With a living person you're always burdened with this idea of fair representation, treading this fine line between honoring the person, and yet you really look at the word "honor," it implies that you then have to address struggle and hardship and failure, and all these things that it means to be human, that you show the fullness of their life. If the person's living, they are able to interject.
We all use dishwashers every day and yet none of us would say that we're experts on dishwashers, but somehow we all think we're experts on movies.
You can just imagine the restrictions of shooting in a prison, but I just decided I'm going to embrace those restrictions sometimes when you don't have many choices you can make the best choices.
The visual quality of the cameras now is such that you can shoot with available light, and if people are willing to mount a microphone on the camera and maybe even on the subject, then you're good to go.
I don't think that there is any hard and fast rule that says that documentary has to be linear at all.
I think that every film should have its own structure, and that's the beauty of film language - is that we get to express that deeply individualistic side of ourselves.
It can be difficult to present mental illness in film without resorting to devices that, if not handled well, can seem heavy-handed or cliché.
My grandpa could go days, weeks, even months without a drink but if he took that first drink, he couldn't stop. Once, when I was twelve, my mom and I were driving and we saw my grandpa staggering drunk down the street. I asked if we should stop and help him. My mom sadly shook her head and kept driving.
I think in many ways what my films are about is that search for my grandpa's dentures: for that humanizing narrative that bridges the gap between "us" and "them" to arrive at a "we."
In documentary you sometimes see the tyranny of the linear, but what I've noticed in the last ten years in narrative film is the tyranny of the non-linear.
If you just think about the difficulty you'll never get anywhere.
I knew as a young boy that addiction and alcoholism afflict people - good, loving people - in profound ways, and that some people - usually from those rare "normal" families that I longed for as a child and as an adult wonder if they even exist - didn't understand this and sort of looked down their noses at people suffering with addiction.
I felt that if people understood the struggle of recovery, then some of the stigma of addiction might be reduced because the audience would understand in a palpable way that addiction is a disease that tells the afflicted, despite years or even decades of heartbreaking evidence to the contrary, that using will make things better.
I think that most of us instinctively avoid people with mental illness.
I've been very lucky in my life to have some great teachers.
If I weren't making documentary films, I suppose I'd be teaching.
I think it would be really hypocritical of me to make the films I make, where I delve into people's lives, to say that my life can't be looked at or that I have to be this pristine, isolated figure.
