Documentary films have always been my passion, I have done documentaries.
People say to me, "You make fantastic films" and I say, "No, I make documentaries.
I started in documentaries, and that was a great help to me with improvisation, because with documentaries, you're handed a big lump of footage, and you have to shape it and make it into a story - which I love doing.
Documentaries have always inspired me in narrative filmmaking.
In documentary films, the most difficult thing to achieve is to make something complex appear simple.
Reality television hasn't killed documentaries, because there are so many great documentaries still being made, but it certainly has changed the landscape.
The camera cannot leave the man, but the man can leave the camera. It's in the style of documentary where you make an agreement between a camera and a man and say, "I'm going to film you now."
I did documentaries for maybe 10 years before I turned to fiction films.
I suppose making documentaries is like doing journalism on film.
The making of the documentary is an involving and collaborative process where you go deeper unlike in movies where you just borrow someone else's script.
There is a porous membrane between a documentary that doesn't use interviews and what you would call a neorealist hybrid film.
People still come to Baltimore and say, "I didn't realize you made documentaries."
