I've been very lucky in my life to have some great teachers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

If you just think about the difficulty you'll never get anywhere.

I don't think that there is any hard and fast rule that says that documentary has to be linear at all.

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.

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.

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.