A Quote by Chelsea Handler
I think when I envisioned my documentaries, what I wanted to do when I left, I had no business doing those documentaries. I didn't know what I was doing. I was delving into an arena that I had no experience in, and Netflix paired me up with two documentarians that really executed my vision perfectly. That was great, to see that. All of a sudden I'm at Sundance, and those are premiering. I just thought, "Wow, they were four ideas I pitched one day, and now it's coming to fruition on this scale."
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I never really had any intention of getting involved in documentaries until the opportunity came around. I always thought much more in classic fiction cinema terms and I think I tried to apply those ideas to documentaries and not vice versa.
I'm not one of those people who sees documentaries as a stepping stone to doing fiction. I love documentaries and watch tons of documentaries. But, I like fiction films a lot, too.
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.
One day I decided to move towards documentaries or to move to more directing in documentaries at this point in my career. Why documentaries? I also love fiction. I would love to direct a fiction movie as well. But I think where I come from, reality is so interesting and has in it so many good stories to tell, this is why I'm doing that. I'm enjoying that.
If I could make a decent living doing documentaries, I would. I don't really care about [the other] stuff so much. But you can't make a living doing documentaries. Although it has affected my work, at least in that I think I make fairly realistic-looking pictures.
The luxury that I have is I'm not career-minded, I just live from one film to the next. For a time, I was making documentaries, and all my documentaries were winning awards and stuff, and then I lost interest in documentaries.
When I left 'American Morning' in 2007, I'd focused on doing documentaries. But I thought 'Starting Point' was a great opportunity to be involved in the zeitgeist.
The documentaries I made were never normal documentaries. They were about subjects I was obsessed with, and I suppose I thought I could sculpt them. What I think I do with my fiction is the same.
From a young age, I wanted to play in the NBA. Oh well... It was when I was a senior in college that I fell for film, but even then, it wasn't documentaries. It wasn't until I ended up in graduate school at Southern Illinois University that I really discovered documentaries and thought that maybe that would be my calling.
There's no other way to learn about it, except through documentaries. I encourage documentarians to continue telling stories about World War II. I think documentaries are the greatest way to educate an entire generation that doesn't often look back to learn anything about the history that provided a safe haven for so many of us today. Documentaries are the first line of education, and the second line of education is dramatization, such as The Pacific.
In the 1980s, I had a lot of films, documentaries for television, which were about why the trade unions had failed to organize resistance to Margaret Thatcher's plans. And they were banned. I had to fight for those films.
I judge movies on how much fun I had while I was doing them. I had a great time on 'The Right Stuff.' Doing that was fantastic. And there was the year I did 'The Rookie' and 'Far From Heaven,' which was amazing because those two different roles were just so far apart.
I wanted to do serious movies. I had a certain idea of what good acting was. That's since changed, and I love doing comedies now. I don't like a lot of those movies now, but I thought those were movies that I could do real, serious performances in.
I had seen some films made about the underground music world in Tehran, and most of them were short documentaries about 30 or 40 minutes long. And I always wondered why they weren't publicized more. Really, their only flaw was they were short documentaries.
With God's help, I've not had a drink in nine and a half years. That's my whole story right there. And because of that, I'm doing this. I'm making records, I'm touring. I was so involved in just getting brain damaged, I wasn't doing anything. I had great ideas, many notebooks filled with notes, some of them I can read and some of them I just can't read, but I really didn't do anything constructive, it was all just good ideas. Now I'm trying to lead a constructive life a day at a time.
If I were retired I wouldn't know what to do because I'd have to think, well, now what is it I want to do? And what I want to do is what I'm doing. I enjoy coming up with new ideas, which if I'm lucky they might be good ideas. I enjoy seeing them take shape. And I'm having fun doing it. So I wouldn't know why I'd want to retire.
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