I always just followed what I was excited by, and bouncing between documentary and fiction filmmaking has suited me. 

There’s a price to pay for that. I might have had a “better” career, if you know what I mean, if I’d stuck to one thing; if you think about some of the great filmmakers, whether it’s Ken Loach, Woody Allen, even Michael Mann, what they’ve been doing is doing the same thing again and again, sort of polishing the rock, and I think that possibly makes them the greats. But boy, have I had an interesting life. 

All the way into my mid-thirties I used to say, “Oh God, I’ve never had a proper job, all I want is a proper job, if someone offered me a proper job with holidays and pay and this, I’d give up this filmmaking lark”. I used to say it like some weird mantra, and there I was, a Hollywood director – it’s the best gig in town! Then New York University asked me to be the director of their graduate programme: it was a job, it had holidays, they offered me a flat, it was New York… I said, “No”. I’ve always needed to move on, move on, move on, and I’m happy with the way it ended up. 

When interviewing for documentary, there are some rules of engagement. The first is, don’t ask people things that you wouldn’t be prepared to answer yourself. I make a list of questions, because that helps me imagine what might be interesting, but once I’ve made my list I never refer to it, I just have a chat. Often when we go to the cutting room, there are endless bits of me rabbiting on, and the editor will ask me, “What were you thinking?”, and I say, “Well I wasn’t really thinking, I was just having a conversation”. The quality of the interviews and the revelations that people have are because I really wanted to know what they thought, and they could feel that. I’ve done many interviews which didn’t land up like that, but for the most part, people do want to talk, they do want to be witnessed and they do want to say their truth. 

Then you have to take it away and make sure you don’t mess with that truth; in editing you inevitably curtail someone’s thinking and simplify and so on, but you have to make sure that it is an illumination of what they meant, not just what they said. That’s the responsibility you have as a filmmaker. 

My biggest piece of advice for young filmmakers is you’ve got to have something to say, and if you have something to say, in the end you’ll find a way to say it. I’ve been frustrated by young people saying to me, “I kind of fancy being a film director”. Why would you put yourself through all this heartache and raising money and getting it right and rainy days and people not showing up if you’re not quite sure?

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