Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering

00:00:00.000 | we would come up to these rafts and these boats

00:00:05.000 | that were in really dire shape,

00:00:07.640 | and people would be pushed off,

00:00:09.440 | and people would jump off,

00:00:10.920 | and people would fall into the water,

00:00:13.200 | and some of them couldn't swim.

00:00:17.440 | And so we found ourselves in this moment

00:00:21.200 | where we had a choice.

00:00:23.000 | We could film someone drowned in front of us,

00:00:26.240 | or we could put our cameras down

00:00:27.920 | and pull them out of the water.

00:00:30.480 | (air whooshing)

00:00:31.480 | - The following is a conversation with Sky Fitzgerald,

00:00:34.280 | a two-time Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker

00:00:37.240 | who made the films "Hunger Ward" about the war in Yemen,

00:00:41.040 | "Lifeboat" about the search and rescue operations

00:00:44.080 | off the coast of Libya,

00:00:45.680 | and "50 Feet from Syria" about the war in Syria.

00:00:50.320 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:00:53.160 | To support it, please check out our sponsors

00:00:55.280 | in the description.

00:00:56.480 | And now, dear friends, here's Sky Fitzgerald.

00:01:00.800 | Nearly 811 million people worldwide are hungry today,

00:01:05.520 | and 45 million people are on the edge of famine

00:01:08.440 | across 43 countries.

00:01:10.200 | How do you feel?

00:01:12.400 | How do you make sense of that many people suffering

00:01:14.680 | from hunger and famine in the world today?

00:01:17.320 | - I don't know if I can make sense of it, Lex.

00:01:20.080 | I mean, I think it's deeply disturbing to me

00:01:25.960 | that as a global community,

00:01:27.760 | we've allowed this number of people to go hungry

00:01:32.200 | when the food to feed them exists

00:01:34.800 | and the resources to feed them exist.

00:01:37.800 | I think the thing that disturbs me most about those figures

00:01:42.040 | is that many of those who are starving today

00:01:47.000 | or going hungry today are the net result of war

00:01:52.600 | and intentional acts by leaders

00:01:55.480 | to starve entire populations.

00:01:57.280 | And that's the most deeply disturbing part to me.

00:02:00.160 | You know your history, and we all know that

00:02:05.680 | deeply embedded in the Geneva Conventions post-World War II,

00:02:10.680 | the intent of one of those articles was to ban

00:02:14.000 | the use of starvation as a weapon of war

00:02:17.080 | because of what Hitler did during World War II.

00:02:20.760 | That's been reiterated multiple times over the years

00:02:24.040 | in international humanitarian law, including in 2018

00:02:27.720 | because of the Saudi blockade over Yemen.

00:02:30.480 | And yet to this day, starvation as a weapon of war

00:02:34.320 | continues to be used in Ethiopia,

00:02:36.840 | obviously in Ukraine right now,

00:02:39.000 | and in Yemen with the blockade over the country.

00:02:41.080 | And that disgusts me that the law is in place,

00:02:44.520 | but it won't be enforced by the international bodies

00:02:46.840 | and the nation states that make up

00:02:48.520 | the international community.

00:02:50.240 | - So the starvation is a result of human actions,

00:02:54.960 | human decisions that's especially painful to make sense of.

00:02:59.960 | - For me personally, yeah.

00:03:02.440 | I think that if you and I sitting here

00:03:05.000 | didn't eat for three days,

00:03:06.480 | and had to lay our head on the sidewalk for a couple nights,

00:03:12.560 | I think we would take hunger

00:03:16.200 | and homelessness a lot more seriously.

00:03:19.200 | And I think that's, for some reason that's missing

00:03:23.120 | at this moment in history, tragically.

00:03:25.560 | And I think until we can generate enough empathy

00:03:29.160 | that's immediate for all of us

00:03:31.680 | to understand what that means to go hungry,

00:03:34.120 | I'm not sure we're gonna sort of marshal

00:03:36.480 | the global community to solve it.

00:03:39.480 | - I did just that, by the way,

00:03:41.600 | fasted for three days recently.

00:03:44.640 | It's fundamentally different, I think,

00:03:47.400 | because the thing that would be terrifying to me

00:03:51.880 | is not the fasting, but the hopelessness

00:03:54.080 | at the end of the fast.

00:03:55.400 | Like, I wouldn't know when the next meal is coming.

00:03:58.720 | I always had the freedom to have the meal.

00:04:01.360 | The fear, not just your own ability to eat and survive,

00:04:06.360 | but your family's.

00:04:07.840 | If there's loved ones,

00:04:08.920 | that's the other thing I don't have.

00:04:10.440 | I'm single.

00:04:11.560 | So I feel like the worst suffering

00:04:14.840 | is watching somebody you love

00:04:17.560 | that you're supposed to be a caretaker of,

00:04:20.040 | and you can't take care of them.

00:04:21.720 | And if all of that is caused by leaders

00:04:27.200 | as a weapon of war, that is especially painful.

00:04:35.560 | So how can we help?

00:04:39.760 | What are the ways to help?

00:04:44.000 | How do we alleviate this suffering?

00:04:46.400 | - Well, I think on the humanitarian front,

00:04:52.720 | we have to be aggressive and attentive

00:04:56.440 | and intervene in significant ways.

00:04:59.160 | And I think on the political front,

00:05:01.640 | we have to hold players accountable for their actions.

00:05:06.520 | - So the leaders that start the war.

00:05:08.280 | So when you say we have to speak up about the decisions

00:05:12.240 | and the humans making those decisions.

00:05:13.800 | - Yeah.

00:05:14.640 | - That lead to this situation.

00:05:15.520 | - For example, let's make it concrete.

00:05:17.160 | So when I was, I don't wanna jump ahead,

00:05:20.200 | but when I was filming "Hunger Ward" in Yemen,

00:05:22.520 | I met a mother who, when she gave birth,

00:05:30.000 | weighed 70 pounds, the mother weighed 70 pounds.

00:05:34.440 | And so her daughter was starved in the womb.

00:05:42.440 | When she was born, she was born into a world

00:05:46.600 | with no breast milk, very little formula.

00:05:50.160 | So she was starved before birth.

00:05:52.360 | She was born into a world where she continued

00:05:54.800 | to be starved by a mother who herself was starved.

00:05:59.200 | I watched that child, her name is Asila,

00:06:03.080 | die in front of me.

00:06:04.280 | Asila had no chance for all those things we hope for,

00:06:10.720 | for a child in this world.

00:06:12.560 | She didn't have a chance to grow up.

00:06:14.400 | She didn't have a chance to discover love.

00:06:16.760 | She didn't have a chance to have a career.

00:06:19.040 | She was robbed of all of those things

00:06:22.200 | because of the insidious nature of hunger

00:06:24.440 | that she was born into.

00:06:26.320 | She didn't have to die.

00:06:27.800 | She was not starving.

00:06:32.640 | Her mother was being starved

00:06:34.840 | because of the blockade over the country.

00:06:37.040 | Now, who instituted that blockade?

00:06:39.760 | MBS in Saudi Arabia with the reinforcement

00:06:43.880 | and sort of tacit approval of the United States,

00:06:46.400 | our own government here.

00:06:48.560 | And so there are people who are responsible

00:06:51.400 | for the starvation of children,

00:06:52.840 | and I think we need to hold them accountable.

00:06:55.560 | Now, that's incredibly difficult to do,

00:06:58.560 | but just because it's difficult doesn't mean

00:07:00.680 | it ought not to be done.

00:07:02.480 | - And we'll talk about many cases like these

00:07:06.880 | throughout history and going on today.

00:07:09.000 | Let's talk about "Hunger Ward."

00:07:10.200 | - Yeah. - Let's dive in.

00:07:11.840 | You've been nominated for an Oscar twice.

00:07:14.880 | This is one of the times for a documentary.

00:07:19.440 | Can you please tell me what "Hunger Ward,

00:07:24.160 | The Last Hope Between War and Starvation" is about?

00:07:27.360 | - "Hunger Ward" is a short documentary

00:07:29.600 | that really is an attempt to illustrate

00:07:34.680 | the effects of the conflict on Yemen,

00:07:38.280 | specifically on civilians.

00:07:40.200 | And we document it in both the North

00:07:43.760 | and the South of the country

00:07:44.760 | because it's a bifurcated country.

00:07:46.720 | The South is held by the globally recognized government

00:07:50.240 | in the South, which up until last week

00:07:52.320 | was run by, at least on the surface,

00:07:56.280 | by President Hadi, hold up in Riyadh.

00:08:00.120 | He was essentially removed from office last week

00:08:05.200 | by, most people would agree, the Emiratis and the Saudis

00:08:10.200 | to put in place a presidential council.

00:08:12.720 | So we wanted to show that starvation was happening

00:08:16.480 | in very similar fashions, both in the South and the North.

00:08:19.520 | And we wanted to do this film

00:08:22.480 | because so few people in the West know anything

00:08:27.320 | about the conflict in Yemen, nor the US's complicity in it.

00:08:32.320 | And so my intent with the project

00:08:34.320 | was try to bring it to a larger Western audience

00:08:36.760 | as an attempt to intervene

00:08:38.400 | and change the political status quo,

00:08:40.160 | which allows the use of starvation in Yemen to continue.

00:08:44.600 | - So, US complicity, who are the bad guys?

00:08:49.200 | Now, the world, unfortunately, cannot be painted

00:08:53.520 | in black and white of good guys and bad guys.

00:08:56.680 | But for the purpose of conversation,

00:08:59.640 | who is causing suffering in the world in this situation?

00:09:04.640 | Who started the war, why?

00:09:08.200 | And then, of course, the roots of war go back in history.

00:09:14.520 | Let's start at the top.

00:09:17.600 | - Well, there are bad actors

00:09:18.720 | and there are less bad actors, right?

00:09:20.680 | I mean, I think that's always the case in war, probably.

00:09:22.920 | - And everybody loses in war.

00:09:24.560 | - Yeah, I concur with that statement.

00:09:28.080 | In the case of the status quo in Yemen right now,

00:09:33.080 | it's a completely asymmetrical war.

00:09:36.040 | And so the Saudi coalition,

00:09:38.120 | which is made up of primarily Saudi Arabia,

00:09:41.320 | the Emiratis, United States, France, Britain,

00:09:46.320 | supplying weapons, but it's really driven

00:09:48.760 | and catalyzed by Saudi Arabia.

00:09:51.440 | And it's asymmetrical to a great extent

00:09:54.960 | just because of the incredible firepower

00:09:57.720 | by air that the Saudis use continuously

00:10:02.080 | to pummel Northern Yemen.

00:10:03.880 | When I was there, the sheer volume

00:10:08.080 | of airstrikes is hard to describe.

00:10:10.760 | And we show the result of only one in the film, really.

00:10:14.900 | But it's an asymmetrical war.

00:10:16.280 | The de facto authorities of the North, Ansar Allah,

00:10:19.200 | also known as the Houthi rebel group,

00:10:21.040 | they don't have an air force, right?

00:10:25.160 | They have a drone force, but they don't have an air force.

00:10:27.680 | And so from a military standpoint,

00:10:29.880 | it's completely asymmetrical.

00:10:31.840 | The Saudis really don't commit troops to the ground.

00:10:34.620 | They use only proxies to fight on the ground.

00:10:37.160 | - What is the narrative they use to justify a war?

00:10:42.160 | So there's a story on every side in war.

00:10:46.320 | Some of it is grounded in truth.

00:10:49.040 | Some of it is not at all grounded in truth,

00:10:52.040 | also known as propaganda.

00:10:54.040 | What's the narrative used by the Saudis for this war?

00:10:57.560 | - The Saudi line is essentially that the Houthis

00:11:01.680 | are an illegitimate government,

00:11:03.200 | and that it's really a proxy war between Iran,

00:11:08.680 | who supports the Houthis nominally,

00:11:10.620 | and the rest of the world.

00:11:13.200 | That's the Saudi narrative.

00:11:14.900 | The reality is something altogether different.

00:11:17.280 | While the Houthis do receive support from Iran,

00:11:20.520 | this is a war started by and sustained by MBS

00:11:24.720 | in Saudi Arabia.

00:11:25.880 | - Who's MBS?

00:11:26.720 | - Mohammed bin Salman.

00:11:28.320 | - And who is he?

00:11:29.240 | - He is the son of the ruler of Saudi Arabia.

00:11:33.120 | - What's his power?

00:11:34.640 | I'm asking basic, dumb questions.

00:11:36.680 | - He's the de facto ruler.

00:11:38.240 | - Of the military and--

00:11:39.960 | - Yes, he seized control of the country several years ago,

00:11:43.840 | even though he, on the surface,

00:11:45.720 | is not the ruler of Saudi Arabia.

00:11:47.320 | He is, he's the crown prince.

00:11:48.640 | - And sorry to interrupt often, but who is he as a man?

00:11:53.640 | What's your sense of the man?

00:11:54.680 | - Yeah, so I've never met him,

00:11:56.640 | and I likely will never meet him, hopefully.

00:11:59.620 | But he is, I know a lot about him through his actions,

00:12:04.600 | sort of in the MENA region,

00:12:06.640 | Middle East and North Africa region.

00:12:08.920 | And he is one of three, in my view,

00:12:13.040 | as an American sitting here in the US,

00:12:15.400 | three people in the world that I think

00:12:19.000 | has caused such an incredible volume of misery

00:12:23.920 | and suffering and murder on this planet

00:12:27.680 | that I think if he weren't around,

00:12:32.680 | the world would be a lot better place.

00:12:35.920 | And I'm not a violent person by nature,

00:12:38.020 | but there are three human beings

00:12:39.640 | that I think the world would be better off without.

00:12:43.160 | - Do you mind, before I ask other questions,

00:12:45.880 | mentioning the three?

00:12:47.320 | - Oh yeah, Assad is one in Syria,

00:12:50.400 | and that comes out of an earlier project

00:12:52.280 | that I did in Syria and Turkey.

00:12:54.520 | And what I saw Assad as a ruler do to his own people.

00:12:59.520 | And Putin would be the third.

00:13:04.040 | Those three human beings are murderers on a scale

00:13:09.040 | beyond imagining.

00:13:11.620 | On MBS, are you able to think as a documentary filmmaker,

00:13:16.120 | as a human being, as a scholar, as a thinker,

00:13:19.060 | with an open mind about a man like that

00:13:22.080 | who does evil onto the world

00:13:23.800 | and what that must feel like

00:13:26.000 | to be inside the mind of that man?

00:13:28.040 | So basically, consider his worldview.

00:13:31.720 | With most evil people, with all people probably,

00:13:35.280 | but with people who do evil onto the world,

00:13:38.000 | they think they're doing good.

00:13:40.200 | - Yeah, they're the hero of their own story.

00:13:41.600 | - Right.

00:13:42.440 | And so to be able to place yourself,

00:13:45.160 | I feel like, for me, to understand a person,

00:13:47.880 | I have to literally, like the way actors

00:13:51.200 | kind of have to do,

00:13:52.240 | live inside the body of the person they're trying to study.

00:13:57.240 | - Inhabit the character.

00:13:58.160 | - Inhabit the person.

00:13:59.640 | So are you able to do that,

00:14:01.060 | or because you are also studying the people who suffer

00:14:06.060 | as a result, as a consequence of their actions,

00:14:10.060 | you just, you put them in a box

00:14:13.080 | and you say, "I hate the person in that box.

00:14:16.040 | "I'm going to move on."

00:14:17.880 | - This goes back to your black and white statement

00:14:19.720 | at the beginning, right?

00:14:20.740 | It's like, the world as a whole, of course,

00:14:24.320 | is every gradation of gray, right?

00:14:26.960 | My background is theater, Lex.

00:14:29.080 | And so I was trained long before I picked up a camera

00:14:32.440 | to inhabit other characters, right?

00:14:34.240 | I have two degrees in theater.

00:14:36.160 | And so that level of sort of like

00:14:38.560 | walking in other people's shoes

00:14:40.220 | and trying to understand and empathize

00:14:42.320 | with their worldview is fundamental

00:14:45.160 | to how I live my life and how I do my work.

00:14:48.000 | So in the case of those three that I named,

00:14:50.200 | Assad, MBS, and Putin, yeah, I can go there

00:14:53.540 | and think through how they came to be who they are, right?

00:14:57.800 | From afar, right?

00:14:59.360 | And after I go through that process,

00:15:01.880 | I still don't think there's any way

00:15:04.920 | that one can justify what they've done.

00:15:08.500 | - We're going to talk about each of those people, sure.

00:15:14.440 | - Well, I'm not an expert on any of them.

00:15:16.920 | - You're a human being, which makes you

00:15:18.920 | a partial expert on human nature,

00:15:23.280 | 'cause nobody's an expert.

00:15:24.400 | You're just as good as anyone else.

00:15:26.320 | Anybody who actually carries a camera

00:15:28.640 | and listens and observe others

00:15:31.600 | isn't especially an expert of human nature.

00:15:34.960 | Who's willing to take that leap

00:15:37.520 | and truly understand somebody of any level, not leaders.

00:15:41.280 | I feel like to understand a leader,

00:15:42.620 | you have to first understand humans.

00:15:45.000 | And to understand humans, you have to see humans

00:15:47.120 | at their worst and their best,

00:15:49.200 | which is something that you've definitely done.

00:15:52.240 | So let's stick on Hunger Ward.

00:15:54.400 | This lens that you've chosen to look at this

00:15:56.860 | is through a single, maybe you can speak to that.

00:16:00.520 | You've mentioned the starvation as a result of war.

00:16:05.520 | What is the documentary?

00:16:08.440 | Like, what is the lens you've chosen

00:16:09.960 | to give the world a peek at the results,

00:16:14.560 | at the suffering that's a result of this war?

00:16:16.960 | - People a lot of times will ask me

00:16:19.720 | after they've seen Hunger Ward,

00:16:21.360 | they ask where the hope is, right?

00:16:26.720 | You read the byline earlier, the lost hope.

00:16:30.700 | And what I try to focus on in many of my films,

00:16:37.280 | including Hunger Ward, is in the very difficult context

00:16:42.400 | of war as the case is in Hunger Ward in Yemen,

00:16:47.680 | I look for hope and I look for inspiration.

00:16:50.320 | And I do that through people who are doing incredible things

00:16:54.240 | under the most difficult circumstances.

00:16:56.680 | So when I set out to do a film about starvation in Yemen,

00:17:01.680 | I mean, just listen to that statement,

00:17:06.200 | where's the hope there, right?

00:17:08.000 | And yet what I found, what I discovered were human beings

00:17:12.520 | that we could tell the story through

00:17:14.280 | who are incredible, inspirational human beings

00:17:18.000 | doing amazing things every day.

00:17:20.960 | One of those is Makiya Maji, a nurse practitioner

00:17:24.840 | in the north of the country at a small rural clinic.

00:17:27.400 | And another is Dr. Ayed Al-Sadiq,

00:17:30.000 | who is a pediatrician in the south of the country.

00:17:33.000 | And so we chose to tell the story

00:17:34.680 | sort of through their experiences as caregivers,

00:17:38.280 | devoting their lives to try to save this entire cohort,

00:17:43.280 | this entire generation of children

00:17:45.700 | that has been born into starvation.

00:17:48.720 | And that's an incredible, difficult task,

00:17:52.000 | but equally inspirational to watch these human beings

00:17:56.440 | devote every minute of every day to save a child.

00:18:00.360 | I mean, in my view,

00:18:02.160 | nothing is more important than that action.

00:18:04.360 | - Maybe on that point real quick.

00:18:06.080 | So there's suffering at scale, starvation at scale.

00:18:11.400 | I mean, the numbers, maybe you can mention in Yemen,

00:18:17.040 | what are the numbers in terms of people in starvation,

00:18:19.400 | but from a perspective of a nurse practitioner or a doctor,

00:18:24.160 | you're treating one person in front of you.

00:18:26.820 | So how do you make sense of that calculus

00:18:31.320 | of like there's a huge number of people suffering,

00:18:35.000 | and then there's just the person in front of you?

00:18:37.440 | Is that all we can do as humans

00:18:43.120 | is just to help one person at a time?

00:18:45.400 | Is that the right way to think

00:18:48.000 | and to approach these problems,

00:18:49.440 | or can you actually make sense of the numbers?

00:18:52.720 | - Speaking just as a human being,

00:18:54.960 | I think the scale of suffering is so great in Yemen

00:18:58.480 | that I think I'd be overwhelmed, right,

00:19:04.720 | if I focused on that scale.

00:19:08.120 | You've probably heard that a child dies

00:19:11.440 | every 75 seconds in Yemen from hunger, right?

00:19:15.080 | So we've been sitting here, how long?

00:19:17.120 | You know, 35 minutes or so.

00:19:18.760 | That's a good handful of children

00:19:21.240 | that have already passed away.

00:19:23.400 | So to overcome sort of, I think,

00:19:25.440 | that danger of psychic numbing,

00:19:27.720 | which can happen when you think about suffering

00:19:30.280 | on such a large scale, as a filmmaker, as a human being,

00:19:35.120 | I have to focus in on the individuals,

00:19:36.960 | on those human beings in front of me.

00:19:39.120 | And I think that's exactly what Dr. El-Sadiq and Makiya do

00:19:42.120 | to keep going each day.

00:19:43.800 | And one of the amazing things

00:19:45.200 | about these two healthcare providers

00:19:48.200 | that we showcase in the film

00:19:49.440 | is that they treat anyone who shows up, right?

00:19:54.160 | They don't have to have money.

00:19:56.200 | They don't have to have any resources.

00:19:57.640 | They just have to get to the clinic or the hospital.

00:20:00.560 | And it's incredibly moving to see

00:20:04.440 | sort of the flexibility of their thinking

00:20:06.840 | in terms of how they make that work.

00:20:09.240 | Makiya, for example, I saw her in the north of the country.

00:20:12.680 | It's an incredibly rural clinic that she works at.

00:20:14.800 | And so it's like a magnet for all the cases

00:20:17.520 | in the north of the country.

00:20:18.920 | People come from hundreds of kilometers away sometimes

00:20:21.960 | for specialty treatment of pediatric malnutrition.

00:20:25.880 | And one time I saw a child come in

00:20:29.120 | and it was a male relative that brought this young girl in.

00:20:33.440 | And just because of sort of the gender dynamics in Yemen,

00:20:39.040 | there had to be a parent or a relative there

00:20:42.440 | to stay with the child while they're at the clinic.

00:20:44.320 | And it was a male relative.

00:20:45.920 | And so what many doctors in that instance would do

00:20:50.280 | would just turn them away.

00:20:51.760 | And instead what Makiya did

00:20:53.200 | is she walked into one of the rooms,

00:20:55.200 | talked to one of the other mothers

00:20:56.640 | and convinced them to become the temporary guardian,

00:20:59.400 | essentially, of this child

00:21:01.560 | until a female relative could arrive.

00:21:04.600 | So she's flexible.

00:21:06.160 | She finds solutions rather than allowing the problems

00:21:09.320 | to deter solutions.

00:21:11.000 | - One child at a time.

00:21:12.200 | - Yeah, yeah, one child at a time.

00:21:13.960 | - You mentioned that you saw a child die in front of you.

00:21:21.400 | So when you're filming this as a filmmaker,

00:21:25.180 | what's that like psychologically, philosophically,

00:21:33.520 | creatively as a filmmaker, as a storyteller?

00:21:36.600 | What do you do there as a human and as a filmmaker?

00:21:43.880 | Well, what's that whole experience like?

00:21:45.840 | Because you get to, like you said,

00:21:47.440 | you take it through the whole journey

00:21:49.680 | of a starving mother giving birth to a starving child.

00:21:52.640 | - It's not something I wanna film.

00:21:56.300 | It's not something that I certainly wanted to happen

00:22:01.760 | or seek out.

00:22:03.700 | But it happened.

00:22:05.060 | And the sad truth is that it happens

00:22:07.220 | every week at that hospital.

00:22:09.260 | And so when it happened in this instance,

00:22:13.020 | I felt an incredible responsibility

00:22:15.900 | to do justice to that reality,

00:22:18.960 | to acknowledge that a child had just died

00:22:22.260 | of starvation-related causes,

00:22:24.860 | and to find some way, if the parents wanted us to,

00:22:31.860 | to integrate that into this story

00:22:34.540 | we'd bring back to a Western audience.

00:22:39.420 | And I've filmed many difficult things over the years,

00:22:44.420 | and usually I really love filming.

00:22:54.340 | And I didn't love filming "Hunger Ward."

00:22:56.460 | It was not a process that I enjoyed

00:23:00.440 | on any way, shape, or form, sadly,

00:23:02.980 | because of the content.

00:23:04.260 | Because who wants to watch a child die in front of them?

00:23:06.940 | I don't.

00:23:08.300 | But I did, and I had to.

00:23:10.140 | And when that happened,

00:23:11.980 | I felt an incredible responsibility again to go deep,

00:23:16.980 | to go deep with that family,

00:23:19.220 | to tell the story of this hospital

00:23:22.060 | with every ounce of focus and talent

00:23:27.460 | that I could bring to the story,

00:23:28.820 | because people should know

00:23:31.300 | that children are dying of starvation right now

00:23:35.020 | as we sit here,

00:23:36.140 | and that that doesn't have to happen,

00:23:37.980 | and it is happening because of political dynamics

00:23:40.340 | that we can intervene on.

00:23:41.580 | - Is there times you wanted to walk away,

00:23:45.720 | quit the telling of the story,

00:23:48.660 | come back to the United States,

00:23:54.740 | where you can just appreciate

00:23:59.140 | the wonderful comfort you can have

00:24:04.300 | just sitting there and having food

00:24:06.220 | and freedom to do whatever you want,

00:24:11.220 | those kinds of things?

00:24:13.900 | Doesn't have to be United States.

00:24:15.420 | In a lot of places in the world.

00:24:17.620 | - Well, that dynamic of sort of like survivor's guilt

00:24:21.380 | on some level definitely exists.

00:24:23.900 | One of the hardest things,

00:24:24.900 | well, filming Hungerport actually was eating,

00:24:28.980 | because we were in these malnutrition clinics,

00:24:31.300 | they're called TFCs, therapeutic feeding centers,

00:24:34.460 | where over a long period of time,

00:24:37.460 | children lost the ability to eat normal food,

00:24:44.300 | and couldn't digest it,

00:24:47.100 | and just were literally starving,

00:24:49.660 | and the practitioners were trying to bring them back

00:24:53.300 | to a state of thriving,

00:24:55.780 | but to leave those clinics,

00:24:58.140 | and to go to our camp or to go to our hotel,

00:25:00.900 | and then to have access to food,

00:25:03.420 | 'cause we could buy food on the streets and in the hotels.

00:25:06.640 | I mean, it was a very intentional act

00:25:10.860 | throughout the course of the shoot

00:25:12.260 | to look at a piece of bread,

00:25:14.740 | or to look at a bowl of rice,

00:25:16.660 | and think about that child in the TFC,

00:25:20.300 | and think about how the privilege

00:25:22.900 | of having that bowl of rice that I could eat and digest.

00:25:26.500 | So it certainly, every day,

00:25:29.020 | helped me appreciate the privilege I had.

00:25:34.220 | - Every bite you take.

00:25:35.460 | - With every bite, absolutely.

00:25:37.620 | And so I wouldn't call it guilt,

00:25:39.660 | it wasn't exactly guilt,

00:25:40.820 | but it was definitely mindfulness.

00:25:43.140 | - Meditate on the suffering of people who can't.

00:25:48.280 | - That's right, exactly.

00:25:49.660 | So that knowledge, it was catalytic in some ways.

00:25:53.300 | It sort of moved us forward,

00:25:55.100 | really wanting to shape the most powerful story we could,

00:25:59.220 | because we were surrounded by so much suffering every day.

00:26:02.260 | - How did filming that movie change you as a man,

00:26:06.520 | as a human being?

00:26:08.860 | You filmed a few difficult documentaries.

00:26:12.300 | That one is a heavy one.

00:26:16.700 | When you think of the person you were before you filmed it,

00:26:20.040 | and now when you wake up every morning

00:26:21.560 | and look yourself in the mirror,

00:26:23.200 | how is that person different?

00:26:25.320 | - Every documentary I do changes me in a different way.

00:26:29.440 | I am not static in that sense, right?

00:26:32.720 | I'm preformed, it's like I change with every project

00:26:36.120 | because so many of them are difficult and challenging.

00:26:40.600 | So in order to do them,

00:26:43.080 | I have to allow myself to change and be changed by them.

00:26:46.320 | In the case of "Hunger Ward,"

00:26:47.920 | you may remember the girl Omaima,

00:26:51.920 | who's the 10-year-old girl who we showcase

00:26:54.720 | in Odden in the south of the country.

00:26:58.120 | We were there when she was admitted to the hospital.

00:27:03.800 | When she was admitted,

00:27:07.320 | this 10-year-old girl weighed 24 pounds,

00:27:10.800 | and she could barely stand up.

00:27:15.320 | We started, with the permission of the family,

00:27:17.920 | to start to document her treatment

00:27:21.520 | and to see what would happen with this young girl

00:27:24.920 | who was so severely malnourished.

00:27:27.720 | And we watched her be treated by the nurses and the doctors

00:27:32.600 | in Sadaka Hospital.

00:27:35.160 | And slowly, over the course of a couple weeks,

00:27:38.880 | we saw her change.

00:27:40.820 | We saw her start to sort of gain strength

00:27:44.200 | and start to recover.

00:27:45.880 | And she also watched the caregivers very carefully.

00:27:50.880 | And I watched her watch them.

00:27:54.280 | And I'll never forget,

00:27:58.280 | there was a moment where,

00:28:00.040 | about two and a half weeks, I think, into her treatment,

00:28:05.000 | we walked into a room,

00:28:06.720 | and I saw her offering a capful of water

00:28:10.960 | to another younger child who was also starving.

00:28:15.960 | The shot's actually in the film.

00:28:18.200 | And so to see Omeima, this child who's starving,

00:28:22.260 | giving sustenance to a younger, more vulnerable child

00:28:27.120 | who was also starving, moved me deeply.

00:28:30.640 | So I saw her learn from the caregivers around her.

00:28:36.960 | And as a human being, as a filmmaker,

00:28:40.840 | I was incredibly inspired by Omeima.

00:28:44.200 | - That capacity for compassion is there.

00:28:46.480 | - Even within a 10-year-old girl who's starving, right?

00:28:49.560 | And so you asked what changed me.

00:28:52.380 | That's one moment, right?

00:28:54.360 | Rather than being crushed by such heavy content,

00:28:57.080 | it was actually the opposite,

00:28:58.640 | where I came away inspired by a 10-year-old girl.

00:29:02.340 | And I didn't anticipate that.

00:29:05.200 | I didn't think that's what this content would do,

00:29:07.360 | but it's what it did.

00:29:09.280 | It reinforced for me this incredible capacity

00:29:13.040 | we all have as human beings to do good,

00:29:17.880 | to even within the most difficult of circumstances,

00:29:20.880 | to choose who we become and what we do.

00:29:25.000 | And a 10-year-old girl taught me that

00:29:27.360 | or reinforced that for me.

00:29:29.180 | - Were you able to feel the culture of the people,

00:29:34.180 | so the language barrier,

00:29:37.360 | were you able to break through the language barrier,

00:29:39.240 | the culture barrier, to understand the people?

00:29:42.400 | 'Cause even suffering has a language of sorts,

00:29:48.980 | depending on where you are.

00:29:50.640 | The way people joke about things, the way they cry,

00:29:54.480 | the way, this is an interesting thing

00:29:56.680 | I actually wanna ask you.

00:29:57.600 | Sorry, I'm asking a million questions.

00:29:59.500 | I find that the people,

00:30:02.720 | I've been talking to people in Ukraine and Russia,

00:30:06.040 | but in general, I've gotten a chance to talk to people

00:30:09.480 | who've been through trauma in their life.

00:30:12.120 | And there's a humor they have about trauma and hard times.

00:30:18.080 | It depends on the culture, of course.

00:30:24.960 | Certainly Russian-speaking folk.

00:30:27.340 | I mean, the more suffering you've experienced,

00:30:31.360 | for some reason, the more they joke about it.

00:30:33.680 | It's almost like they're able to see something deep

00:30:37.000 | about humanity now that they have suffered,

00:30:40.560 | and they're able to laugh at the absurdity,

00:30:42.480 | the injustice of it all.

00:30:44.280 | And you could also say it's a way for them to deal with it.

00:30:47.840 | But that humor has a kind of profound

00:30:52.120 | understanding within it

00:30:56.000 | about what it means to be human.

00:31:01.440 | To really understand it, you have to know the language.

00:31:04.840 | I guess I'm asking, were you able to really feel

00:31:08.360 | the humans and the other side of the language?

00:31:11.720 | - I'd like to think so.

00:31:12.960 | I mean, as you noted, there are universals in life

00:31:16.720 | that transcend language, right?

00:31:19.440 | I mean, suffering is suffering.

00:31:21.860 | Love is love.

00:31:23.240 | Compassion doesn't take place only through language.

00:31:27.640 | It's through actions.

00:31:29.400 | And so was there a language barrier?

00:31:31.600 | Absolutely, right?

00:31:33.280 | Did we try to bridge that through other means

00:31:36.960 | and sort of universal emotions and experiences?

00:31:41.280 | Absolutely.

00:31:42.120 | That's one of the things I always think about

00:31:44.080 | when I'm filming is how do we distill down to universals?

00:31:48.240 | Through imagery, through the vocabulary of cinema,

00:31:54.640 | 'cause I believe so deeply that

00:31:56.440 | that vocabulary should be visual.

00:31:58.560 | - So the words, what's the most powerful way

00:32:01.360 | to express the universal?

00:32:03.260 | Is it visual or is it language words?

00:32:07.920 | - I think it's visual.

00:32:09.880 | - And we're talking about the human face

00:32:11.680 | or human face, human body, everything.

00:32:14.320 | - Through actions as well.

00:32:15.600 | - Actions, so dynamic.

00:32:16.960 | - I'm thinking about a woman named Salha in the film

00:32:20.120 | who isn't named, but you see her multiple times

00:32:25.120 | throughout the film, and she's basically

00:32:27.000 | the matron of the ward in this house.

00:32:29.440 | And she's the gatekeeper for the ward,

00:32:31.600 | so no one enters that ward without her permission.

00:32:34.040 | She's literally the gatekeeper at the door.

00:32:36.080 | So no one comes in unless Salha allows them to come in.

00:32:40.040 | But then she also is sort of like

00:32:42.160 | the first point of contact for compassion in the ward.

00:32:47.920 | So when mothers and families are admitted,

00:32:51.560 | she forms relationships between the moms

00:32:55.560 | and the grandmothers, for example,

00:32:57.560 | who are admitted and who are living there on the ward.

00:33:00.240 | And she does it through hugging, right?

00:33:03.680 | She does it through bringing them food, right?

00:33:07.400 | And she forms these really rather quickly

00:33:11.280 | deep relationships of compassion with the families.

00:33:15.760 | And so it's amazing to watch,

00:33:19.200 | and no language is needed to bear witness to this.

00:33:23.080 | And she also suffers because of that, right?

00:33:27.080 | And so near the end of the film, if you recall,

00:33:30.340 | when another child dies and the mother is wailing,

00:33:35.960 | we actually cut away to Salha, who's in the hallway,

00:33:39.080 | who walks into another room and begins sobbing.

00:33:43.100 | She's not a family member, but she has a deep relationship

00:33:47.280 | with that family that she forged

00:33:49.380 | as soon as they stepped into the ward.

00:33:51.480 | So that's universal, right?

00:33:53.440 | To see a woman weep because a child has died,

00:33:58.440 | even if they're not related to that,

00:34:00.560 | that's a universal sort of emotion,

00:34:03.080 | experience we can all relate to.

00:34:04.680 | So that's what I mean by visual vocabulary.

00:34:07.560 | - And it's especially powerful

00:34:08.920 | because she has seen much of this kind of suffering,

00:34:12.480 | and she's still, maybe she has built up some callus

00:34:17.080 | to be able to work day to day,

00:34:20.080 | but there's still an ocean underneath the ice.

00:34:25.080 | - She's kept her heart open,

00:34:26.680 | despite all the pain that she sees and feels every day.

00:34:30.080 | Somehow she's a human being who's able to do that,

00:34:33.040 | which is a very difficult thing to do, right?

00:34:35.400 | She still allows herself to be vulnerable,

00:34:38.120 | and maybe that's why she can do what she does.

00:34:41.500 | - What lessons do you draw from other famines in history?

00:34:45.980 | So for me personally, one that's touched my family

00:34:50.540 | and one of the great famines in history is in Ukraine,

00:34:54.120 | Holodomor in the '30s.

00:34:56.260 | - '32, '33, right?

00:34:57.580 | - '32, '33 with Stalin.

00:34:59.820 | Maybe you could speak to the universals

00:35:01.780 | of the suffering here.

00:35:03.100 | What lessons do you draw from those other famines,

00:35:09.860 | if you've looked at them, or in general about famine

00:35:13.260 | that are manufactured by the decisions of,

00:35:17.260 | let's say, authoritarian leaders?

00:35:19.300 | - Famine doesn't have to exist,

00:35:29.740 | or the bulk of famines on this planet, I believe,

00:35:32.340 | don't have to exist, and most of them,

00:35:34.940 | or at least a good number of them,

00:35:36.540 | are manufactured by the leaders

00:35:40.220 | that choose to use famine as a weapon,

00:35:44.100 | and Ukraine is one of the obvious examples right now

00:35:49.100 | with siege tactics that are happening

00:35:51.580 | in different parts of the country.

00:35:53.280 | We built international humanitarian law for a reason,

00:36:02.000 | many years ago, and it continues to be written to this day,

00:36:06.540 | and it's there to prevent what's happening

00:36:10.220 | in Ukraine right now.

00:36:11.580 | It's there to prevent what's been happening

00:36:14.220 | in Yemen for seven years,

00:36:16.420 | and yet there hasn't been any teeth behind it,

00:36:19.900 | and that's what disturbs me,

00:36:22.340 | is that we can see how these famines are being used

00:36:27.340 | as weapons in war, and yet we aren't using

00:36:32.960 | the levers of power that exist

00:36:36.220 | in order to, I think, to call out,

00:36:39.940 | in important and powerful ways,

00:36:42.540 | those who are causing them,

00:36:44.020 | and to make sure that we hold them accountable

00:36:46.820 | on the global stage.

00:36:47.660 | Now, to some extent, that seems to be happening in Ukraine

00:36:51.820 | in a way that hasn't happened for a long time,

00:36:54.340 | and that gives me hope, right?

00:36:56.940 | And yet, I don't believe we've done enough,

00:36:59.440 | and I think the international community

00:37:02.140 | needs to do far more than we are,

00:37:03.700 | both in Yemen, in Ethiopia, and in Ukraine right now.

00:37:08.000 | - There are certain kinds of things

00:37:10.700 | that captivate the global attention,

00:37:14.140 | and it seems like starvation is not always one of them.

00:37:17.040 | For some reason, murder and destruction

00:37:21.780 | gets people attention more.

00:37:25.260 | The death, of course, is easy to enumerate,

00:37:28.480 | but it's the suffering that's the problem.

00:37:30.660 | - Yeah, yeah, you know, when we went to film "Hunger Ward,"

00:37:34.420 | that was one of the creative questions

00:37:36.700 | that I was really concerned about,

00:37:38.340 | because starvation, it's not a quick action, right?

00:37:43.340 | It's a long, slow, insidious process,

00:37:47.380 | just like hunger, right?

00:37:49.540 | And yet, when you're hungry,

00:37:51.740 | it takes you over.

00:37:55.380 | It becomes the most important thing, right?

00:37:58.020 | It's just absolutely fundamental to life.

00:38:00.620 | It's like drawing breath.

00:38:02.220 | And so I really, before I filmed "Hunger Ward,"

00:38:06.500 | I struggled to sort of answer

00:38:09.200 | how we could creatively approach that,

00:38:11.240 | because someone sitting in a clinic, right,

00:38:14.860 | starving, or being treated for starvation,

00:38:18.100 | that's a pretty static scene, right?

00:38:20.580 | And what we found was that because of the volume of cases,

00:38:25.700 | and because of the nature of sort of how quickly

00:38:30.340 | people were coming and going,

00:38:32.220 | is that it was more dynamic than we anticipated.

00:38:34.660 | - And there's something also about starvation.

00:38:38.980 | You get tired.

00:38:40.420 | It's almost like it's a quiet suffering.

00:38:43.660 | - Yeah.

00:38:44.660 | - Like, and by the way, there's something about,

00:38:48.260 | when I think about dark times,

00:38:50.140 | I mean, you'll hear me chuckle, for example.

00:38:53.300 | I don't know what that is.

00:38:54.620 | (Lex laughing)

00:38:55.540 | That's almost like,

00:38:58.780 | it's almost like you have to kind of laugh at,

00:39:02.280 | you can't help but laugh at the injustice

00:39:07.700 | and the cruelty in the world somehow

00:39:09.100 | that helps your mind deal with it.

00:39:10.820 | I mean, I see this all the time.

00:39:13.220 | Like, when you're struggling, you can't feed your family,

00:39:16.420 | you lost your home, the last thing you have is jokes about--

00:39:21.420 | - It's humor.

00:39:22.460 | - Yeah, it's humor.

00:39:23.300 | It's like, ah, the fucking man fucked me over again.

00:39:27.540 | (Lex laughing)

00:39:28.380 | And there's jokes all around that.

00:39:29.980 | - Yeah.

00:39:30.820 | - And then you laugh and you drink vodka and you play music.

00:39:35.820 | I don't know what that is.

00:39:37.260 | I don't know what that is.

00:39:38.260 | - It's gallows humor, right?

00:39:39.540 | It's a way of, I think, simultaneously acknowledging

00:39:44.340 | and allowing yourself to move forward, right?

00:39:46.780 | Beyond the pain and the suffering.

00:39:49.820 | - So you mentioned Ukraine and you mentioned Putin.

00:39:52.780 | What are your thoughts about the humanitarian crisis

00:39:58.340 | and generally the suffering that's resulting

00:40:00.700 | from the war in Ukraine?

00:40:02.420 | - Well, first off, I think the conflict

00:40:03.980 | is just gonna exacerbate the global challenge we have

00:40:08.980 | with displacement.

00:40:12.940 | The last entire trilogy I did was about displacement

00:40:17.560 | to a great extent due to war.

00:40:19.540 | And this is a huge displacement of human beings,

00:40:23.060 | regardless of the cause.

00:40:24.780 | And that is gonna sort of have a ripple effect

00:40:29.260 | across the globe for many, many years to come,

00:40:32.020 | regardless of even if the conflict ended today.

00:40:34.980 | So there's that, that's gonna set up a whole nother strain

00:40:38.060 | on sort of the global sort of resources

00:40:42.580 | that come into play to deal with refugees.

00:40:47.780 | You know, there were 79 million displaced people

00:40:50.860 | on this globe prior to the Ukrainian conflict, right?

00:40:54.780 | You probably know the numbers better than I do

00:40:56.580 | in terms of what the current estimates are

00:40:59.340 | for displacement from Ukraine.

00:41:00.820 | - It's four to six million.

00:41:01.940 | - So what are we up to now?

00:41:03.220 | 73, 74 million individuals on this planet now

00:41:07.060 | who are displaced?

00:41:09.260 | That's a significant bump.

00:41:10.820 | I wish that the levers of power were used differently

00:41:16.220 | in situations like Ukraine and Syria, for example.

00:41:19.640 | - So what are the levers of power?

00:41:23.380 | - Well, military might, let's take that for one, right?

00:41:26.780 | So I have always felt after working in Syria and Turkey

00:41:31.780 | that we completely missed our opportunity

00:41:39.500 | as a player on the global stage with military capability

00:41:44.420 | to prevent the killing of hundreds of thousands

00:41:48.740 | of civilians in Syria.

00:41:50.900 | We had the ability and we didn't leverage that ability.

00:41:54.700 | You know, the fact that I talked with so many Syrians

00:41:59.700 | during the course of doing that project

00:42:02.060 | who told me their stories of living in their house, right?

00:42:07.060 | And having a Syrian helicopter fly over their house

00:42:12.500 | and drop a 55-gallon drum full of explosives and shrapnel

00:42:19.300 | in their neighborhood over and over and over again.

00:42:24.100 | Not focused on any military targets,

00:42:27.620 | only meant to kill and sow fear, right?

00:42:31.540 | And early in the conflict, we could have stopped that.

00:42:35.540 | Before Russia got involved, we could have intervened

00:42:39.060 | and created a no-fly zone.

00:42:40.820 | - We, the United States.

00:42:41.940 | - We, the United States, or a coalition

00:42:43.820 | that we were a part of, yeah.

00:42:45.340 | And we didn't do it.

00:42:46.600 | And we could have, and I think that's an example

00:42:48.620 | where we have the military capability to actually do good

00:42:52.220 | in a situation like that.

00:42:53.460 | And we don't usually use it for those purposes.

00:42:55.740 | And I think that's what a military ought to be used for

00:42:58.700 | beyond just defending our borders,

00:43:00.100 | is to save others with the privilege

00:43:03.380 | that that power affords.

00:43:04.900 | - What do you think about the power of the military

00:43:07.500 | versus the power of sanctions

00:43:09.220 | versus the power of conversation?

00:43:11.240 | - They're all different tools, right?

00:43:13.980 | To be used at different moments.

00:43:15.500 | But if words fail, if sanctions fail, right?

00:43:20.500 | I think there are moments in history

00:43:24.140 | where power is justified, right?

00:43:26.380 | And I think Syria was one of them.

00:43:28.180 | I think when barrel bombs were dropping

00:43:31.940 | on civilian neighborhoods for months and months and months

00:43:34.760 | with no intent to do anything

00:43:37.420 | other than kill Syrian civilians,

00:43:40.100 | that's an instance, I think, where might is justified

00:43:43.580 | to shoot those helicopters out of the sky.

00:43:45.380 | - Here's the difficult thing.

00:43:46.700 | We talked about Yemen.

00:43:48.500 | Where's the line between good and evil

00:43:53.140 | for US intervention in different countries

00:43:56.860 | and conflicts in the world?

00:43:58.580 | It's easy to look back 10, 20, 30 years

00:44:02.340 | to know what was and wasn't a quote unquote just war.

00:44:05.760 | In the moment, how do we know?

00:44:08.860 | - I think it's incredibly difficult to answer that, right?

00:44:12.300 | And I think that's why leaders make the wrong choices

00:44:15.820 | so often, right, is they second guess themselves.

00:44:18.380 | I think you take all the data at your fingertips,

00:44:22.420 | all the intelligence that you have, right?

00:44:24.380 | And you look at it all very carefully

00:44:26.740 | and you make a decision, right?

00:44:28.780 | There are some instances, though,

00:44:31.160 | where it's very clear what's happening, right?

00:44:34.780 | And leaders still don't act, right?

00:44:37.140 | In Yemen right now, for example,

00:44:39.380 | it's very clear what's happening, right?

00:44:41.620 | Children are being starved because of a blockade.

00:44:44.280 | All the US would have to do is ensure that blockade,

00:44:49.020 | now there's a two-month ceasefire in place now,

00:44:50.980 | but remains lifted beyond the ceasefire

00:44:54.700 | and children will stop starving.

00:44:56.980 | That's pretty simple.

00:44:58.540 | You can trace, it's a direct connection.

00:45:00.940 | And we haven't had the sort of the moral wherewithal

00:45:05.020 | to make that decision because we're too interested

00:45:08.100 | in maintaining positive ties with Saudi Arabia

00:45:10.960 | where oil flows from and so much influence,

00:45:14.460 | because Saudi Arabia has so much influence

00:45:17.700 | throughout the MENA region,

00:45:19.940 | we want to keep that relationship tight

00:45:22.180 | despite sort of the moral wounds that come from that.

00:45:26.380 | - About half the world is under authoritarian regimes.

00:45:30.620 | Everybody operates under narratives.

00:45:33.420 | And there's a narrative in the United States

00:45:35.820 | that freedom is good, democracy is good.

00:45:40.220 | I have fallen victim to this narrative.

00:45:43.560 | I believe in it.

00:45:44.680 | I'm saying this jokingly, but not really.

00:45:48.600 | Because who knows the truth of anything in this world?

00:45:53.080 | I eat meat, factory farm meat,

00:45:57.020 | and I seem to not be intellectually

00:45:59.760 | and philosophically tortured by this, and I should be.

00:46:02.580 | There's a lot of suffering there.

00:46:04.960 | What do we do to lessen the suffering

00:46:09.280 | of the people under authoritarian regimes?

00:46:11.580 | Again, the same question, military conflict,

00:46:16.280 | diplomacy, sanctions, all those kinds of things.

00:46:21.720 | Does that lessen suffering or increase the suffering

00:46:28.560 | from what you see in Yemen?

00:46:30.240 | Is it something that has to be healed across generations

00:46:36.260 | or can be healed on a scale of months and years?

00:46:39.240 | - I'm just a guy with a camera, Alex.

00:46:42.120 | But as a guy with a camera,

00:46:43.520 | I've seen a lot of things in a lot of places.

00:46:48.900 | And I've seen the effects these decisions made

00:46:54.340 | by authoritarian leaders have on their own citizens.

00:46:59.280 | And that's what drives my thinking on this.

00:47:02.520 | And that's what drives and motivates me each day

00:47:08.320 | to raise the red flag through my films and say,

00:47:12.440 | listen, Biden, you campaigned for president

00:47:17.440 | in part on a platform that said

00:47:23.480 | that we would regain our prominence

00:47:26.920 | on the moral stage of the world, right?

00:47:29.280 | And that we would prioritize, right?

00:47:33.920 | Sort of a moral paradigm over relationships

00:47:38.360 | with authoritarian regimes, Saudi Arabia being one, right?

00:47:42.480 | And yet when the CIA report came out

00:47:45.720 | that clearly articulated in detail

00:47:48.740 | that MBS was responsible for Khashoggi's murder

00:47:52.080 | and for cutting his body into pieces

00:47:54.240 | and probably burning it in the backyard of the embassy,

00:47:57.260 | what did Biden do?

00:47:59.260 | He didn't really make a pariah out of MBS

00:48:03.140 | like he said he was going to, right?

00:48:05.960 | What if he'd done something else

00:48:07.640 | and actually done what he said he was gonna do,

00:48:09.920 | which was make him,

00:48:10.760 | what if he had would remove the ability for MBS

00:48:14.360 | to fly to the United States, for example?

00:48:17.120 | Now that's a sanction, right?

00:48:18.760 | That's a sanction that's individual and concrete

00:48:22.440 | and would be hugely embarrassing for MBS.

00:48:25.840 | That would have been Biden saying,

00:48:28.040 | this is unacceptable behavior, right?

00:48:31.920 | This is something which because you executed

00:48:36.260 | such a horrendous act on someone living

00:48:39.340 | in the United States, right?

00:48:41.620 | We are not going to give you a stage here at least, right?

00:48:46.620 | Within the borders of our country.

00:48:49.660 | Those are the things that leaders can do

00:48:51.840 | that I don't think they do often enough.

00:48:53.780 | And certainly our leader right now isn't doing it

00:48:56.260 | in the way I wish he were.

00:48:57.780 | He certainly has taken a different stand on Ukraine.

00:49:01.860 | You know, and been very vocal,

00:49:03.580 | but there's so many instances we could talk about

00:49:05.900 | where I feel like the political gamemanship, right?

00:49:10.540 | Often falls into maintaining relationships

00:49:13.920 | like with MBS and Saudi Arabia,

00:49:15.660 | rather than doing the right thing.

00:49:17.340 | Rather than as a nation, a leader of a nation saying,

00:49:21.440 | this is unacceptable.

00:49:22.920 | We have a higher standard than this.

00:49:24.820 | 'Cause I think when leaders do that,

00:49:27.780 | it becomes aspirational, right?

00:49:31.060 | It becomes aspirational for other leaders

00:49:33.420 | in the progressive world at least.

00:49:36.620 | And also it rings the alarm bells

00:49:39.060 | for other authoritarian leaders and says,

00:49:42.140 | you know what, there are lines, right?

00:49:44.620 | There are things that can't be done

00:49:46.660 | or there will be significant consequences.

00:49:48.580 | Like you will not be able to fly into our airspace anymore.

00:49:51.660 | And sanctions I think need to be concrete

00:49:54.860 | and individual to some, in addition to the larger scope.

00:49:58.460 | But when they're concrete and individual,

00:50:00.820 | I think often they're felt in a different way.

00:50:04.860 | - You mean felt obviously by the individuals

00:50:07.260 | and so the ripple effects of that

00:50:09.860 | might have the power to steer the direction of nations.

00:50:17.060 | - Because of the nature of authoritarian regimes, right?

00:50:21.900 | - Individuals have so much power.

00:50:23.220 | - Exactly, right.

00:50:24.300 | So if Putin is put on trial in The Hague at some point

00:50:29.300 | or at least there's the threat of that, right?

00:50:32.580 | Now that's likely never to happen of course,

00:50:34.820 | because someone has to be in custody to go on trial, right?

00:50:37.660 | And he's never gonna allow that to happen.

00:50:39.740 | But just knowing that that danger exists

00:50:44.740 | is going to change his travel plans in the future, right?

00:50:49.380 | MBS not being able to fly to the US,

00:50:52.420 | he's gonna feel that and be embarrassed by that.

00:50:55.300 | So I think they have a special meaning and consequence

00:51:01.300 | in authoritarian regimes because of that.

00:51:04.020 | - So you said you're just a guy with a camera.

00:51:06.100 | - Yeah.

00:51:06.940 | - I would say you're a brilliant guy with a camera.

00:51:12.780 | I'm also a kind of guy with a camera.

00:51:15.980 | - You're a guy with a couple cameras.

00:51:17.020 | - A couple cameras.

00:51:17.860 | - And a couple mics too.

00:51:19.420 | (laughing)

00:51:20.420 | You got a couple mics, a couple cameras,

00:51:22.380 | a robot over here.

00:51:23.220 | - When you can't beat 'em with quality,

00:51:25.620 | you bring the quantity.

00:51:27.300 | - That's right.

00:51:28.500 | - So to me, that's also an interest,

00:51:31.380 | partially because I also speak Russian and a bit Ukrainian.

00:51:36.100 | I wanna study that part of the world.

00:51:39.900 | I wanna talk to a lot of people.

00:51:41.620 | I wanna talk to the leaders.

00:51:42.860 | I wanna talk to regular people.

00:51:44.540 | To be honest, and I would love to get your comments on this,

00:51:48.700 | the regular quote-unquote people

00:51:51.380 | are way more fascinating to me.

00:51:53.460 | As a filmmaker, how do you figure out

00:51:56.540 | how to tell this story?

00:51:58.340 | I'm sure a guy with a camera,

00:52:00.300 | you're looking at war in Ukraine,

00:52:02.420 | but also what's going on in Yemen, in Syria,

00:52:05.920 | and other places in the world.

00:52:07.140 | I mentioned North Korea.

00:52:08.380 | That's a super interesting one.

00:52:10.260 | Hard to bring cameras along.

00:52:11.740 | China, in Canada, the truckers,

00:52:16.580 | there's all kinds of fascinating things

00:52:18.460 | happening in the world.

00:52:19.780 | So you, as a scholar of human suffering

00:52:23.780 | and human flourishing,

00:52:25.020 | how do you choose how to tell the story?

00:52:28.300 | - How do I choose a story?

00:52:30.140 | How do I choose how to tell the story?

00:52:31.220 | - Both the story and how, I assume those are coupled.

00:52:34.440 | So how do you choose which story to tell,

00:52:38.100 | and how do you choose how to tell that story?

00:52:40.620 | - Well, in terms of how to choose which story,

00:52:46.200 | it's a bit of a mystery potion for me, frankly.

00:52:51.200 | I go off on instinct,

00:52:55.560 | but there's also a highly intentional

00:52:58.240 | piece of it for me as well.

00:53:00.160 | And the intentional piece is,

00:53:02.340 | I guess I'd call it the do I care threshold,

00:53:06.880 | or the so what threshold.

00:53:08.520 | - You personally, just something in your heart

00:53:11.280 | just kind of gets excited or hurts,

00:53:14.460 | or just feels something.

00:53:15.720 | - So one of the things that disturbs me

00:53:17.400 | about American culture, Lex,

00:53:18.760 | is that we seem to be a people

00:53:21.400 | that's fascinated by reality television, for example.

00:53:24.160 | Like look at how many of us here in America

00:53:27.680 | watch reality television, right?

00:53:31.200 | That deeply disturbs me.

00:53:32.560 | Not that I've never watched an episode,

00:53:34.260 | I've shot a whole season of it once to make a living, right?

00:53:36.920 | So it's like I know it, right?

00:53:39.440 | But I feel like the things we should be paying attention to

00:53:43.500 | are the things, personally,

00:53:45.680 | are the things I choose to film, right?

00:53:48.760 | As a human being, as a dad, as a filmmaker,

00:53:53.760 | I think we should be paying attention

00:53:56.760 | to the fact that children are being starved in Yemen.

00:53:59.480 | I think we should be paying attention

00:54:01.120 | to the fact that Ukrainians are being displaced

00:54:03.860 | by the millions.

00:54:05.200 | So there's this so what threshold that I use.

00:54:07.680 | And I feel like it has to be a topic

00:54:10.160 | that if we don't cover,

00:54:12.380 | and we don't put out in the world

00:54:14.720 | in the largest possible way,

00:54:16.800 | in the hope of intervening,

00:54:18.240 | in the hope of marshalling maximum resources

00:54:20.960 | and attention to solving the problem,

00:54:23.400 | that's what I'm dedicated to as a filmmaker.

00:54:26.480 | Because I didn't pick up a camera initially

00:54:29.860 | to film puppy dogs, right?

00:54:32.520 | To make people smile.

00:54:34.140 | I believe the camera is a tool for change.

00:54:37.120 | I believe the camera is a powerful tool

00:54:40.800 | that we can use to raise awareness

00:54:43.700 | and marshal resources and help people understand

00:54:46.920 | the impact that these geopolitical decisions have

00:54:50.740 | on real people's lives.

00:54:52.400 | And that's the intent I create each film with.

00:54:57.400 | Now, how I choose each story,

00:54:59.980 | that's the magic potion piece of it, right?

00:55:02.500 | And often one flows rather organically

00:55:05.460 | into another, frankly.

00:55:07.280 | - So you just kinda, like you said,

00:55:08.780 | you go with instinct a little bit.

00:55:10.540 | - To some extent, but oftentimes I choose the next project

00:55:13.540 | based on relationships I've developed in the last film.

00:55:17.580 | And so one often flows into another

00:55:21.180 | through relationships I develop,

00:55:22.460 | and then a colleague will share a detail

00:55:25.100 | about something that's happening in a certain place,

00:55:27.900 | and I'll go, "Hmm, really, I didn't know that."

00:55:31.340 | And usually it's before it's hit the world stage

00:55:34.380 | in a big way.

00:55:35.380 | And so I start to do due diligence,

00:55:37.300 | and often that, it reveals it to be a much bigger

00:55:39.860 | and more pressing topic that I wanna learn more about.

00:55:44.180 | - Before I talk to you about Syria and lifeboat,

00:55:50.660 | you mentioned a camera's the best weapon.

00:55:54.040 | Maybe just--

00:55:56.980 | - Well, it can't take out a tank,

00:55:59.260 | but it's a good weapon. - Second, top three.

00:56:01.700 | I love the humor throughout this.

00:56:04.620 | I really appreciate it.

00:56:06.660 | We're talking about such dark topics,

00:56:08.540 | but it resets the mind in a way that allows me to think.

00:56:13.540 | So thank you.

00:56:15.340 | As a filmmaker, I almost wanna talk

00:56:22.580 | about the technical details.

00:56:25.860 | - Uh-oh.

00:56:26.700 | - How do you choose to shoot stuff?

00:56:31.260 | Again, so maybe you can explain to me.

00:56:33.700 | I work with incredible folks

00:56:36.940 | that care about lenses and equipment and so on.

00:56:41.940 | I tend to be somebody that just wants to kinda

00:56:47.860 | go as like a guerrilla shooting,

00:56:52.740 | not plan too much, just go with gritty.

00:56:58.540 | I'm trying to come up with words that sound positive.

00:57:01.100 | (laughing)

00:57:02.220 | Do a positive spin on what I try to do,

00:57:04.060 | but gritty, don't over plan, use.

00:57:08.700 | We had a big discussion if you see this light.

00:57:11.020 | - Yeah.

00:57:12.660 | - It's on a stand that's a very ghetto stand.

00:57:15.740 | - Yeah, you need a sandbag on that, man.

00:57:17.460 | - Exactly, so no sandbag.

00:57:21.100 | And the stand is actually bending

00:57:23.860 | under the weight of that thing.

00:57:25.300 | - It could fall on us.

00:57:26.420 | - It could fall.

00:57:27.260 | - It probably won't reach us, but it could fall.

00:57:28.100 | - But the danger, live under that danger,

00:57:30.980 | embrace that danger, love it.

00:57:34.380 | Because that thing is easier to transport

00:57:36.500 | than a heavier one.

00:57:38.140 | Sandbag, that's extra weight.

00:57:40.300 | So if you keep, people tell me,

00:57:42.860 | there's the right way to do stuff.

00:57:44.660 | Like here's these giant cases with all kinds of padding

00:57:47.900 | for transporting stuff.

00:57:49.300 | I transport most of the equipment in a garbage bag.

00:57:52.460 | So that's just a preference because that's somehow,

00:57:56.220 | that chaos allows me to ignore all the stupidity

00:58:00.660 | of loving the equipment and focusing on the story.

00:58:04.780 | So that said, I've never shot anything worthwhile.

00:58:09.780 | (laughing)

00:58:13.820 | There is power to the visual, definitely.

00:58:17.700 | And so finding a certain angle, a certain light,

00:58:22.700 | whether it's natural light

00:58:24.380 | or additional artificial lighting,

00:58:27.300 | just capturing a tear, capturing,

00:58:30.060 | when the person forgets themselves for a moment

00:58:34.300 | and looks out into the distance,

00:58:36.060 | missing somebody, thinking about somebody.

00:58:38.820 | All of those moments you can capture,

00:58:41.340 | a lens, a camera can do magic with that.

00:58:45.260 | I don't even know the question I'm asking you,

00:58:46.780 | but how do, both technical and philosophical,

00:58:51.500 | how do you capture the visual power that you're after?

00:58:54.540 | - Yeah, so many of my films, I think,

00:58:59.300 | are built on the premise of access, right?

00:59:03.340 | Built on this notion that

00:59:05.060 | the biggest hurdle to the story is getting there,

00:59:12.620 | being there in the room or being there on the boat

00:59:17.620 | while a crisis is unfolding.

00:59:20.220 | And that access typically is really nuanced

00:59:23.540 | and difficult to gain.

00:59:26.380 | And then trust flows from that, right?

00:59:29.260 | 'Cause usually it takes a long time to gain that access.

00:59:32.180 | Because that access is so hard fought,

00:59:35.700 | it necessarily informs how we film, right?

00:59:42.340 | To be in a room at Sadaka Hospital in Southern Yemen,

00:59:47.700 | I can't have five people in that room, right?

00:59:51.100 | I can't have a boom mic over a scene.

00:59:54.500 | I want, creatively, the opposite of that as well.

00:59:59.580 | So it's not just a logistical question,

01:00:01.340 | it's also a creative question.

01:00:03.540 | To capture intimate moments where families are dealing

01:00:08.420 | with suffering children and dying children

01:00:10.740 | and caretaking is active and ongoing all the time,

01:00:14.660 | you don't wanna interrupt that moment.

01:00:16.660 | And so that informs how I do things.

01:00:18.740 | So we go fleet and nimble and small.

01:00:22.660 | - Those are all really good words for--

01:00:24.780 | (laughing)

01:00:26.420 | - So it's logistical on the one hand,

01:00:27.740 | but it's also a creative choice, right?

01:00:29.820 | So when we filmed "Hunger Ward,"

01:00:31.860 | it's two people were filming the entire film, right?

01:00:34.500 | Me and my director of photography.

01:00:36.580 | - Those are the two people in the room?

01:00:37.980 | - Two people in the room. - That's it.

01:00:39.040 | - Yeah, that's it, the whole film, right?

01:00:40.980 | We had a field producer as well

01:00:42.260 | and he's part of the country,

01:00:43.120 | but in terms of camera, it's just two people.

01:00:45.300 | And we're doing everything and we have lenses

01:00:49.260 | that are long enough that we don't have to move

01:00:52.740 | to capture the film.

01:00:53.660 | So we can tuck into a corner sometimes, right?

01:00:56.660 | - And so just what's long mean?

01:00:58.340 | That means they're standing farther away

01:00:59.980 | and they can-- - Zoom lens.

01:01:01.340 | It's not a prime lens, so it's not a fixed focal length,

01:01:03.860 | right, 'cause a fixed focal length,

01:01:04.940 | you have to move a lot more in order to capture action.

01:01:07.780 | With a zoom lens, maybe a 105 at the long end,

01:01:12.780 | I can tuck into a corner and just film from 15 feet away

01:01:16.880 | instead of having to get right up on someone, right?

01:01:19.020 | So you're less likely to interrupt the scene

01:01:22.000 | and you can kind of become the fly on the wall sometimes.

01:01:25.980 | So I'm very intentional about that piece of it

01:01:30.260 | so that we can capture those vulnerable moments

01:01:33.580 | and not interrupt them.

01:01:34.740 | - That's really fascinating too, 'cause the access,

01:01:39.740 | I don't often think about this,

01:01:42.940 | but that's probably true for me as well.

01:01:45.720 | Part of the storytelling is to be in the room.

01:01:50.720 | - And that's the hard part.

01:01:53.720 | For me, most of my films, that's the hardest part,

01:01:56.400 | actually, as hard as "Hunger Ward" and "Lifeboat"

01:01:58.960 | were to film and "50 Feet From Syria,"

01:02:01.400 | the getting there piece of it for the last two

01:02:04.760 | was much harder.

01:02:06.200 | - Yeah, and it's also, it's a creative act.

01:02:09.020 | I don't know if it is for you,

01:02:12.560 | but it's the kind of people you talk to.

01:02:14.560 | It's like how you live your life.

01:02:18.640 | Like the kind of people I talk to right now,

01:02:21.080 | they steer the direction of my life

01:02:22.760 | and steer the direction of things I'll film.

01:02:25.640 | So it's not just like you're trying to get access,

01:02:28.340 | it's everything.

01:02:30.760 | Like it builds and builds and builds and builds.

01:02:34.320 | - It builds on itself, yeah, yeah.

01:02:36.440 | - I mean, part of the thing, even saying,

01:02:38.820 | talking about some of these leaders

01:02:40.160 | and conversations with them,

01:02:41.860 | it's almost like steering your life

01:02:45.000 | into the direction of the difficult,

01:02:47.840 | of like taking the leap.

01:02:50.160 | And if you're a good human being,

01:02:54.840 | and a lot of people know who you are as a human,

01:03:00.480 | like not as a name, but as really who you are,

01:03:04.160 | that like putting that attention out there,

01:03:06.960 | it's somehow the world opens doors

01:03:11.000 | where the access becomes,

01:03:14.300 | the access that was once seemed impossible becomes possible.

01:03:18.580 | And then all of that is a creative journey

01:03:21.060 | to be in the room.

01:03:22.180 | I think it probably is,

01:03:23.620 | I mean, it's true even for fiction films probably,

01:03:26.620 | is like everything that led to that,

01:03:30.220 | like to be in the room,

01:03:31.860 | the journey to be in the room and to shoot the scene

01:03:35.060 | is maybe more important than the scene itself.

01:03:39.740 | And like really focus on the creative act of that.

01:03:42.840 | Yeah, that's really fascinating.

01:03:43.960 | And especially, I mean, with a documentary,

01:03:46.000 | you get one take.

01:03:47.720 | - Yeah, you can't say, "Hey, reset," right?

01:03:50.000 | Yeah, yeah, exactly.

01:03:51.120 | - God, that is so interesting.

01:03:53.160 | As you were in some of the most difficult parts of the world

01:03:57.000 | in the room with some of the most difficult stories

01:04:00.800 | to be told.

01:04:02.080 | - And yet, I think that's why I keep doing these stories.

01:04:05.800 | Because once you have that lived experience, for me,

01:04:10.040 | it's moving.

01:04:16.860 | It moves me to bear witness to these inspiring people

01:04:21.860 | under difficult circumstances.

01:04:26.780 | And I can't come back to the US afterwards

01:04:31.960 | and walk down the grocery aisle

01:04:35.860 | where there's 50 different choices for canned peas, right?

01:04:40.420 | And not sort of feel that lived tension, right?

01:04:45.300 | That lived tension of the privilege

01:04:47.500 | that I have here in the US.

01:04:49.420 | And then I have a choice about what to do

01:04:52.300 | with that privilege, right?

01:04:54.220 | And the last thing I wanna do is start

01:04:56.700 | doing stories about dandelions, right?

01:05:01.340 | There's far more important things to do

01:05:02.940 | on this very limited time that I have on the planet.

01:05:05.920 | And I think that's catalytic for me.

01:05:10.920 | I feel that mortality each day.

01:05:17.660 | And my goal is to tell as many of these stories

01:05:22.660 | before I'm gone.

01:05:27.780 | - Could you speak to the getting access?

01:05:30.980 | Is this just, is there interesting stories

01:05:36.180 | of how a weird or funny or profound ways

01:05:41.180 | that led you to get access to a room?

01:05:45.100 | - Each one is a different adventure.

01:05:46.860 | And it's definitely-- - It's an adventure.

01:05:48.060 | - Everyone's an adventure, yeah.

01:05:49.860 | Probably one of the easiest ones I ever had

01:05:51.820 | in the recent past was for "50 Feet From Syria,"

01:05:54.980 | where I literally broke my hand in a bicycle race.

01:05:59.980 | And after many months of trying to get an appointment

01:06:06.040 | with an orthopedic hand surgeon, a specialist,

01:06:09.180 | I finally did and he was Syrian American.

01:06:11.660 | And the Syrian conflict had just begun

01:06:14.820 | and we just started talking about it.

01:06:16.620 | And after he looked at my hand in the first five minutes,

01:06:21.060 | he's like, "Yeah, you need surgery."

01:06:22.460 | Right, and we're great.

01:06:23.300 | But then somehow we started talking about Syria.

01:06:25.900 | And like five minutes in, he just stood up

01:06:28.420 | and put the privacy curtain around us.

01:06:30.740 | Supposed to be a 15 minute appointment or so.

01:06:33.060 | And we talked for an hour, right?

01:06:35.380 | So those moments of sort of mysterious confluence happen.

01:06:40.380 | Right, and I think you have to be open to them

01:06:42.700 | when they do happen.

01:06:43.540 | Because I'm a storyteller, I'm always looking as well.

01:06:46.460 | Right, so because he then contacted me later and said,

01:06:50.420 | "Sky, I am going back to the Syrian border

01:06:52.820 | to volunteer as a surgeon.

01:06:55.220 | Do you want to come with me?"

01:06:56.500 | That was an easy one.

01:06:57.380 | That's probably the easiest one I could give you.

01:06:58.900 | But it came out of this interesting moment,

01:07:01.140 | very personal moment, right?

01:07:02.820 | Lifeboat and Hunger Ward were completely different.

01:07:05.720 | And I had to really work hard

01:07:10.360 | to gain access to those stories.

01:07:12.340 | - So you intentionally thought like,

01:07:14.140 | I want to get access to this story.

01:07:18.260 | And then what are the different ideas?

01:07:20.420 | And they often might involve a doctor or a dentist.

01:07:24.420 | Or just being maybe intentionally and aggressively open

01:07:29.420 | to experiences that lead you into the room.

01:07:34.260 | So it's funny you mentioned the doctor,

01:07:38.860 | 'cause I have similar experiences now.

01:07:41.680 | I've just gotten access to all kinds of fascinating people

01:07:47.660 | in the same way.

01:07:49.700 | - They're all around us.

01:07:50.780 | - They're all--

01:07:51.620 | - They're all around us.

01:07:52.440 | You just have to look, right?

01:07:53.280 | - Yeah, exactly.

01:07:54.100 | - It's like there's fascinating people everywhere

01:07:55.500 | who are doing incredible things.

01:07:57.220 | But we have to be open and keep our eyes open

01:07:59.460 | and realize that there are amazing human beings everywhere.

01:08:04.180 | - Yeah, there's networks that connect people

01:08:07.720 | just through life.

01:08:09.100 | You meet people, you share a beer or a drink,

01:08:12.540 | or just you fall in love,

01:08:14.460 | or you share trauma together,

01:08:18.600 | or you go through a hard time together.

01:08:19.940 | And those little sticky things connects us humans.

01:08:22.580 | And if you just keep yourself open

01:08:24.820 | and embrace the curiosity.

01:08:27.860 | And then also the persistence, I suppose.

01:08:30.020 | Like if you, like how long have you chased access?

01:08:35.020 | Does it take days, weeks, months, years?

01:08:39.620 | - Lex, I'm not the most talented filmmaker in the world.

01:08:43.060 | I'm not the smartest guy in the world.

01:08:46.140 | I think if there's qualities that have served me well

01:08:49.360 | in my career, it's persistence and tenacity.

01:08:53.200 | I've always been sort of a slow burn human being.

01:08:56.800 | I would never hit a home run, but I hit a first, right?

01:09:03.240 | A single to first, and then I'd hit another single to first.

01:09:06.560 | So I ran a marathon when I was 18,

01:09:09.460 | and I think that is illustrative

01:09:11.520 | of sort of how my career has been.

01:09:14.460 | I just keep going.

01:09:16.040 | And I believe in this notion of incremental evolution,

01:09:20.640 | that with each project, I try to learn from it

01:09:23.960 | and take away lessons learned and improve my craft, right?

01:09:28.160 | And improve how I leverage that craft

01:09:32.960 | and improve how I tell the story

01:09:35.280 | from a narrative standpoint each time.

01:09:37.860 | So that on the next project, it's a little bit better.

01:09:41.800 | And that's the arc of my career

01:09:43.720 | is learning, learning, evolving, evolving,

01:09:47.420 | so that I can make a little better film the next time.

01:09:50.500 | - How do you gain people's trust?

01:09:52.420 | Like for example, there's a line

01:09:55.500 | between journalists and documentary filmmakers.

01:09:58.520 | Nobody really trusts journalists.

01:10:00.340 | (laughing)

01:10:02.280 | - Yeah, right, exactly.

01:10:03.820 | - But a documentary filmmaker, of course,

01:10:07.020 | I'm joking, half joking.

01:10:09.500 | I don't know which percent is joking, but some truth.

01:10:12.180 | But documentary filmmaker is a kind of storyteller,

01:10:15.560 | an artist, and somehow that's more trustworthy

01:10:18.880 | because you're on the same side in some way.

01:10:22.560 | I don't know. - Maybe.

01:10:23.400 | - Maybe. - Maybe on the same side.

01:10:24.240 | - Maybe.

01:10:25.380 | Is there something to be said

01:10:26.540 | in how you gain the trust of people to gain access?

01:10:29.260 | Are you just trying to be a good human being?

01:10:32.820 | Is there something to be said there?

01:10:35.580 | - Well, so I do draw a distinction

01:10:37.380 | between journalism and filmmaking

01:10:40.120 | because I think you're right.

01:10:41.280 | They're different.

01:10:42.520 | And there are some filmmakers who do hew

01:10:44.600 | to sort of the journalistic tenets

01:10:47.880 | of who, what, where, when, why,

01:10:49.600 | fair and balanced on both sides, right?

01:10:51.400 | Make sure everyone has a voice.

01:10:52.760 | I don't.

01:10:53.600 | - If you say fair and balanced,

01:10:55.100 | you're rarely either fair or balanced.

01:10:58.320 | I've seen that with journalists.

01:10:59.680 | Journalists often, unfortunately, in my perspective,

01:11:02.800 | sorry to interrupt you rudely and go on a rant,

01:11:05.520 | but they seem to-- - Go on a rant, do it.

01:11:07.640 | - They seem to have an agenda

01:11:09.780 | as opposed to seeking to truly tell a story

01:11:12.160 | or to truly understand,

01:11:13.520 | especially when they're talking to people

01:11:18.040 | who have some degree of evil in them.

01:11:24.240 | - Well, we all have an agenda, right?

01:11:25.760 | I think in anything we do,

01:11:27.040 | whether it's like to seek truth

01:11:30.480 | or some larger principle.

01:11:32.720 | - Sure.

01:11:33.720 | - I always have an agenda.

01:11:36.000 | I chose to work with civilians and caretakers in Yemen

01:11:40.860 | on Hunger Ward rather than to go interview MBS, right?

01:11:44.680 | That's what I'm interested in

01:11:46.940 | is bringing that to the world, right?

01:11:49.280 | But in terms of building relationships and trust,

01:11:55.580 | it's really, I think, about transparency

01:11:59.140 | as much as anything else

01:12:00.740 | and going in in a collaborative sense.

01:12:03.380 | So I don't think of the people

01:12:08.380 | that I film with as subjects, for example.

01:12:12.600 | I think of them as collaborators.

01:12:14.360 | So it's a different mindset that I go into projects with.

01:12:17.720 | - That's beautiful.

01:12:18.560 | - And it's based on relationships, right?

01:12:19.880 | You have to build relationships with other human beings

01:12:22.280 | however you can, and that takes time,

01:12:24.920 | and it takes listening, and it's active.

01:12:28.680 | So I've talked about the notion of consent before,

01:12:32.960 | which is so important in nonfiction film.

01:12:36.680 | And I hew to this idea that

01:12:40.420 | you don't just slide a piece of paper in front of someone,

01:12:45.160 | a release form, and have them sign it, right?

01:12:47.240 | And then you're done.

01:12:48.560 | That's not the nature of true consent, in my mind.

01:12:51.460 | You have to work on a foundation of active consent

01:12:56.800 | every single day that you're working with someone.

01:12:59.360 | And that's based on relationship, right?

01:13:01.280 | And it's based on dialogue.

01:13:02.560 | So it's trust that I'm always aiming for.

01:13:05.880 | It's the building of relationships

01:13:07.840 | which I'm always aiming for,

01:13:08.680 | which is why yesterday I got a bunch of photos

01:13:13.240 | from Dr. Al-Sadiq in the south of Yemen,

01:13:15.400 | and she sends me photos all the time

01:13:17.440 | of the children that she's currently treating

01:13:20.000 | because we have an active relationship

01:13:21.800 | that continues on and probably will for many years to come.

01:13:26.240 | So it's going to continue, and that's the only way

01:13:29.280 | that I can do these kinds of films.

01:13:32.060 | - Let me ask you about silly little details of filming

01:13:36.720 | before we go to the big picture stories.

01:13:41.400 | Cameras, lenses, how much do those matter?

01:13:46.040 | You mentioned director of photography.

01:13:47.880 | What's your, how much do you love the feel,

01:13:52.880 | the smell of equipment that does the visual filming?

01:13:56.960 | You know, there's some people, they're just like,

01:13:59.160 | (sighs)

01:14:00.340 | they love lenses.

01:14:03.100 | How much do you love that,

01:14:04.740 | or versus how much do you focus on the story

01:14:07.260 | or the access and all those kinds of things?

01:14:09.020 | - I'm not a tech geek,

01:14:10.340 | but because during the bulk of my career,

01:14:15.360 | I've worked as a director of photography myself

01:14:19.100 | for other people in order to pay the bills over the years.

01:14:22.380 | You know, I know the technical side of it

01:14:25.660 | because I've had to know it,

01:14:27.300 | and I've had to train myself and learn it.

01:14:29.640 | So I see them as necessary tools.

01:14:33.720 | And again, because I believe film and cinema

01:14:38.720 | is and should be visually driven and not verbally driven,

01:14:45.320 | I want the best tools possible within my means, right?

01:14:49.480 | And within the logistical ability of the project

01:14:53.880 | because we have to go so small, right?

01:14:56.200 | I can't afford, nor can I bring a huge $100,000 lens.

01:15:00.860 | - So if I give you a trillion dollars.

01:15:02.820 | - A trillion dollars?

01:15:03.780 | - Yeah.

01:15:04.620 | - Wow.

01:15:05.440 | - Unlimited.

01:15:06.280 | - Yeah.

01:15:07.120 | - There's still huge constraints

01:15:08.060 | that have nothing to do with money, like you just said.

01:15:11.140 | So what cameras would you use?

01:15:13.820 | - You know what I'd do with a trillion dollars?

01:15:16.060 | I could do a lot with a trillion dollars.

01:15:16.900 | - You're not allowed.

01:15:17.720 | You're only allowed to fund the film

01:15:20.460 | and no corrupt stuff where you use the film

01:15:23.620 | to actually help children.

01:15:24.900 | - No, you're not allowed to do any of that.

01:15:26.420 | - What I would do with a trillion is I wouldn't invest in,

01:15:28.540 | well, I guess I would invest in,

01:15:29.860 | I would increase capacity to do more films.

01:15:33.320 | - I see.

01:15:34.160 | - What I would do.

01:15:34.980 | So I would buy basically the perfect little,

01:15:37.740 | you know, mini equipment set, right?

01:15:40.760 | But then I would train three teams maybe

01:15:43.980 | to do the same thing that I've been doing

01:15:45.960 | so we could multiply and scale up.

01:15:48.340 | - Collect more and more stories.

01:15:49.300 | - Yeah, that's what I would do with the money.

01:15:51.060 | - But the actual setup.

01:15:52.500 | - Would remain small and nimble, yeah.

01:15:55.140 | - And what about lighting?

01:15:59.820 | Do you usually use natural light?

01:16:01.780 | Do you ever do, I mean,

01:16:04.620 | sorry for the technical questions here,

01:16:06.300 | but highlighting the drama of the human face.

01:16:11.300 | - Yeah.

01:16:12.620 | - That's the visual, that's art.

01:16:15.580 | That's like to reveal reality.

01:16:18.820 | - Yeah.

01:16:20.860 | - At its deepest is art.

01:16:23.060 | And do you use lighting?

01:16:24.780 | Lighting is such a big part of that.

01:16:27.100 | Do you ever do artificial lighting?

01:16:28.460 | Do you try to do natural always?

01:16:30.100 | - You know the best lighting instrument in the world?

01:16:33.260 | - Is the sun.

01:16:34.740 | - At the right moment of the day.

01:16:37.020 | And so I predominantly use natural light

01:16:40.740 | at certain moments and just shape natural light

01:16:49.060 | during the course of these small human right stocks.

01:16:51.780 | That's not to say we don't bring instruments sometimes,

01:16:54.740 | but when we do, they're very small and again, compact.

01:16:59.740 | So for example, I have this small little tube kit.

01:17:05.060 | That's just three instruments, right?

01:17:07.060 | That you can charge with USB.

01:17:08.420 | 'Cause electricity is often a major issue where we go.

01:17:11.940 | So there's just three little tube lights

01:17:13.540 | with magnetic backs that if we find in a situation

01:17:16.860 | where we can't get enough exposure

01:17:19.300 | for a hallway or something,

01:17:20.940 | and we have the time to throw it up,

01:17:22.780 | we'll throw it up if people are walking,

01:17:24.260 | if collaborators are walking down that hallway a lot,

01:17:27.140 | for example, at night, just so we can see them, right?

01:17:29.980 | So it's instances like that.

01:17:31.500 | Or if we do do an interview, which we don't do very often,

01:17:35.580 | but if we do, just so we have a key light on the face, right?

01:17:40.580 | And always bring a reflector or two,

01:17:43.380 | just to shape natural light as well in ways.

01:17:46.820 | But it's about shaping rather than producing light for us.

01:17:51.820 | - Got it.

01:17:53.900 | As we sit surrounded by black curtains

01:17:55.860 | in complete natural light.

01:17:57.620 | So just so you know, this room is like a violation

01:18:02.620 | of the basic principles of using the sun.

01:18:08.460 | So behind the large curtains are giant windows.

01:18:13.100 | - Yeah.

01:18:13.940 | - So this whole--

01:18:14.940 | - Should I rip them open?

01:18:15.780 | - Yeah, exactly.

01:18:16.620 | - Rip open the curtains real quick.

01:18:17.460 | (laughing)

01:18:19.060 | - How much of the work is done in the edit?

01:18:21.380 | That's another question I'm curious about.

01:18:24.180 | And how much do you sort of anticipate that?

01:18:28.860 | Like when you're actually shooting,

01:18:30.700 | are you thinking of the final story as it appears on screen?

01:18:36.700 | Or are you just collecting as a human,

01:18:40.780 | collecting little bits of story here and there,

01:18:43.140 | and the edit is where most of the storytelling happens?

01:18:46.540 | - I've developed this sort of mental paradigm for myself

01:18:50.100 | over the years that speaks to that.

01:18:53.940 | And I call it the three creations, right?

01:18:56.740 | And so when I'm doing a film,

01:18:59.300 | the first creation for me is my preconception

01:19:04.300 | or visualization of what the film is going to be

01:19:08.020 | before I shoot it, right?

01:19:09.420 | So I have this entire vision of what a film's gonna be.

01:19:14.420 | And sometimes it can be pretty specific,

01:19:16.900 | like I'll think through the scenes,

01:19:18.620 | if I know the locations and everything,

01:19:20.700 | and I'll have this idea of what I'm gonna create, right?

01:19:24.420 | And then I'm there filming, right?

01:19:26.740 | And always, without fail,

01:19:29.780 | reality is something altogether different

01:19:32.540 | than what I thought it would be.

01:19:33.860 | - But it's still good to have the original idea.

01:19:35.460 | - Yeah, yeah, but if I tried to hold

01:19:37.180 | to that original vision, right?

01:19:38.820 | And to create a film out of that idea,

01:19:41.380 | they'd be crap, all the films would be crap.

01:19:43.420 | So I have to adapt, I have to evolve my approach,

01:19:46.140 | and then embrace what is actually occurring

01:19:49.860 | with the people who are actually doing it,

01:19:51.420 | and then re-envision.

01:19:53.060 | So that re-envision is very active

01:19:55.180 | during the entire filming process.

01:19:57.100 | And so that's the second creation.

01:19:58.940 | That's the rethinking and re-visualizing

01:20:02.860 | based on what we're actually experiencing and seeing,

01:20:05.700 | what this film is going to be.

01:20:07.980 | And then I finish filming, right?

01:20:11.380 | And we bring the hard drives back,

01:20:13.060 | and we plug in the hard drives in the Etabay.

01:20:16.620 | And oftentimes, because it's two of us filming

01:20:20.420 | most of the time, I haven't seen all the footage.

01:20:23.700 | 'Cause in the field, it's all about just filming, right?

01:20:26.900 | And then just transferring the footage

01:20:28.740 | and getting it on safely, you know,

01:20:30.380 | cloned to multiple drives.

01:20:31.860 | I don't have a chance to review everything.

01:20:33.580 | I can't do rushes like you do on a large feature.

01:20:36.380 | So because I'm filming half of it,

01:20:38.460 | I know what I've filmed, right?

01:20:40.780 | But I haven't seen everything

01:20:42.180 | the director of photography has filmed, right?

01:20:45.060 | So the next stage for me is reviewing

01:20:47.940 | every single frame of what's been filmed.

01:20:52.020 | And that's where discovery happens the third time, right?

01:20:56.140 | Or second time rather, is, wow,

01:20:58.620 | now I thought we'd filmed this,

01:21:01.660 | but actually there's this over here.

01:21:05.180 | And then I have to open up this second vision

01:21:07.460 | and turn and transform it into a third vision for the film

01:21:10.940 | based on what's actually on the hard drive.

01:21:12.980 | - So is this like a daily process?

01:21:15.700 | - So what I do, my process is that once,

01:21:19.340 | if it's a really difficult project,

01:21:21.020 | I'll take a break before I go through this.

01:21:23.380 | Just for healing, you know,

01:21:25.140 | and some space away and fresh eyes.

01:21:27.340 | And usually that's about a month.

01:21:29.060 | And then once I re-engage, I re-engage whole hog.

01:21:32.460 | I re-engage fully and I review every single frame.

01:21:37.100 | And as I do that, I create a spreadsheet.

01:21:40.540 | And for "Hunger War," that spreadsheet was,

01:21:43.220 | I don't know, 1,500 lines long or something,

01:21:45.860 | where it's basically log notes.

01:21:48.060 | And I watch every scene and I take notes

01:21:51.300 | and I know really what we have.

01:21:54.180 | And once I've gone through that process

01:21:55.860 | that takes about a month

01:21:57.300 | and I really know what we came back with,

01:21:59.820 | I create an outline for the film from that.

01:22:02.740 | And that's the third visioning, right?

01:22:04.740 | That's usually completely different

01:22:07.540 | than my original vision for the film, to some extent, right?

01:22:10.740 | But I have to stay open to that entire process

01:22:14.260 | or I'd be trying to create something

01:22:17.020 | that I can't really create.

01:22:19.580 | So I think those are the three creations for me.

01:22:22.620 | - That's so cool to know what we have,

01:22:27.460 | just to lay it all out and to load it into your mind.

01:22:31.940 | 'Cause this is the capture of reality we have.

01:22:35.780 | It's a very kind of scientific process too,

01:22:37.780 | 'cause in science, you collect a bunch of data

01:22:40.460 | about a phenomena and now you have to analyze that data.

01:22:43.660 | But now your phenomena's long gone.

01:22:46.020 | - Yeah, yeah, right, right.

01:22:46.940 | Now you just have the data.

01:22:47.780 | - Just the data and you have to write a paper about it,

01:22:51.380 | analyze the data.

01:22:52.220 | It's similar things.

01:22:53.980 | You have to load it all in.

01:22:55.380 | Where's the story?

01:22:56.860 | How do you, that last probably profound piece

01:23:01.860 | of doing the editing in your mind,

01:23:07.140 | how to lay those things out?

01:23:10.180 | - Well, it's almost like the scientific process.

01:23:12.180 | I have a hypothesis, a creative hypothesis, right?

01:23:15.300 | Not a scientific one.

01:23:16.980 | But then I'm testing the hypothesis

01:23:19.020 | during the course of filming, right?

01:23:20.900 | And I have to stay true to what the data tells me

01:23:24.220 | in the end, creatively.

01:23:25.700 | So it's very similar to the scientific process.

01:23:27.500 | I don't know what we should, we should probably coin that.

01:23:30.140 | - Yeah, that's pretty good.

01:23:30.980 | - Creative scientific process or something like that.

01:23:34.620 | - But then you actually do the edit and then you watch.

01:23:38.220 | That's also iterative in a sense,

01:23:41.260 | 'cause maybe when you have a film that's 20, 30, 40 minutes,

01:23:46.260 | or if it's feature length, do you ever have it

01:23:52.220 | where it sucks?

01:23:54.580 | Like it's not at all--

01:23:55.420 | - Or a stage where it sucks?

01:23:56.700 | - Like a stage where, right, right.

01:23:58.740 | Like it's where it's like, no, this is not,

01:24:01.380 | this is not what I was,

01:24:02.780 | like when it's all put together in this way,

01:24:04.620 | this doesn't, this is not working right.

01:24:07.020 | This is not right.

01:24:08.780 | Or do you, is it always like an incremental step

01:24:12.100 | towards better and better and better?

01:24:12.940 | - It's incremental.

01:24:13.940 | Yeah, it's incremental.

01:24:14.940 | Yeah, and there's always some moment

01:24:16.860 | in the editing process where there's a breakthrough,

01:24:19.980 | where suddenly I understand how it fits together more fully.

01:24:24.380 | - And you have to be, like you said, resilient.

01:24:26.100 | You have to be patient that that moment will come.

01:24:28.540 | - Yeah, exactly.

01:24:29.380 | - Are you ultra self-critical

01:24:31.420 | or are you generally optimistic and patient?

01:24:35.380 | - I don't think those are mutually exclusive.

01:24:38.500 | - Right, so you just oscillate.

01:24:40.260 | Or are there like dance partners or something?

01:24:42.460 | - There are dance partners, yeah.

01:24:43.900 | Yeah, definitely dance, you know,

01:24:45.020 | all the way through the process.

01:24:47.420 | - By way of advice, you know, to young filmmakers,

01:24:52.700 | how to film something that is recognized

01:24:57.700 | by the world in some way.

01:25:00.620 | - I would say, you know, first off, learn your craft, right?

01:25:05.380 | Because I think craft is incredibly foundational, right?

01:25:10.380 | To creating a powerful story.

01:25:14.460 | - And sorry to interrupt, but when you say craft,

01:25:16.580 | do you mean just the raw technical,

01:25:18.780 | the director of photography, like the filming aspect?

01:25:21.820 | Is it the storytelling, is it the access, the whole thing?

01:25:24.540 | - I think craft is more than just knowing

01:25:25.980 | how to push record on a camera or what lens to use, right?

01:25:28.780 | That's part of it, right?

01:25:30.540 | But I think, at least in nonfiction, you know,

01:25:35.540 | I'm a product to some extent

01:25:38.700 | of having to know how to do it all, right?

01:25:42.620 | Having to teach myself how to do it all.

01:25:44.780 | 'Cause I didn't go to film school, you know?

01:25:48.100 | But I became so enamored of telling stories through a camera.

01:25:53.100 | - What was the leap, by the way, from theater to storyteller?

01:25:58.020 | - Oh, I just needed an extra class in grad school.

01:26:00.980 | I was in a MFA directing class, and I needed an extra class,

01:26:05.060 | and I just sort of like talked my way

01:26:07.020 | into a television directing class and fell in love with it.

01:26:11.820 | - And the actor became the director.

01:26:14.260 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:26:16.060 | Yeah, I mean, I wasn't an actor, but I had to act,

01:26:19.980 | and I had to know the craft of acting

01:26:21.660 | because I was in the theater, you know, to work with actors.

01:26:23.500 | - Did you love it, though?

01:26:24.740 | Did you love acting? - The theater?

01:26:27.020 | - Yeah, theater. - The theater?

01:26:28.220 | The first, yeah, as an undergraduate, yeah.

01:26:30.860 | But then I learned pretty quickly

01:26:32.060 | that I was pretty bad at it, or at least not very good,

01:26:36.420 | and that my skills lay elsewhere

01:26:39.300 | in more sort of behind the scenes and shaping a story.

01:26:42.500 | - When you started taking a class,

01:26:45.580 | but also telling stories as a director,

01:26:48.780 | did you quickly realize that you're pretty good at this,

01:26:53.780 | or was it a grind?

01:26:55.100 | - That's a good question, Max.

01:26:58.660 | I think I definitely knew right away

01:27:02.260 | that it was more my wheelhouse, right?

01:27:05.460 | And I think part of that was because I grew up

01:27:10.420 | in sort of a world of imagination,

01:27:13.180 | and I think that act of imagination as a child

01:27:18.020 | really lent itself well to the skillset

01:27:21.100 | that a director needs, right?

01:27:23.940 | To shape story, to shape narrative, to shape performances.

01:27:26.780 | So I think it was a much more natural fit for me.

01:27:29.660 | Was I excellent at the beginning?

01:27:31.860 | Heck no, no.

01:27:33.260 | You know, I think few people are, but I learned.

01:27:36.020 | - Where was the biggest struggle for you?

01:27:37.940 | Is it, so your imagination clearly was something

01:27:41.620 | that you worked on for a lifetime.

01:27:43.620 | So I'm sure that was pretty strong.

01:27:46.500 | - Books, came from books.

01:27:47.900 | - Books.

01:27:49.340 | But the actual conversion of the imagination,

01:27:52.020 | you said shape the story.

01:27:53.980 | Where was the skill most lacking

01:27:56.860 | in the shaping of the story initially?

01:27:59.140 | - Technical side.

01:27:59.980 | - Just technical.

01:28:00.820 | - Yeah, like, you know, 'cause I taught myself everything.

01:28:03.860 | What kind of microphone should I use, right?

01:28:05.660 | What kind of camera?

01:28:06.500 | What does this lens do?

01:28:07.580 | What's that lens do?

01:28:08.740 | I didn't know any of that.

01:28:10.140 | And so I essentially was,

01:28:11.500 | I have been self-taught technically.

01:28:14.260 | - How do you get good technically,

01:28:15.620 | would you say, when you're self-taught?

01:28:16.900 | - Just doing it over and over again.

01:28:18.300 | - And what kind of stories were you telling?

01:28:20.140 | Like--

01:28:20.980 | - I began shooting local commercials for--

01:28:24.300 | - For money.

01:28:25.140 | - For money, yeah, yeah.

01:28:25.980 | - So you're doing professional projects.

01:28:27.860 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:28:28.700 | And so I kind of learned on the job as I did it.

01:28:31.260 | - How many hobby projects did you do?

01:28:32.860 | Just for the hell of it?

01:28:34.100 | Or were you trying to focus on the professional?

01:28:35.900 | - I was trying to make money, right?

01:28:37.300 | Right out of grad school, just to pay the rent.

01:28:39.380 | - And that's a forcing function to,

01:28:42.420 | I mean, I personally love having my back to the wall,

01:28:45.660 | or financially, you're screwed if you don't succeed.

01:28:48.900 | So that's nice.

01:28:50.460 | - I mean, I lived out of the trunk of my car

01:28:51.940 | for a couple of years after grad school, just freelancing.

01:28:54.900 | You know?

01:28:55.740 | Just like, but that couple years really helped me learn fast

01:29:00.340 | 'cause I had to learn fast, you know?

01:29:02.460 | So I did a couple voyages around the world

01:29:05.900 | for this group called Semester at Sea.

01:29:08.180 | That is a floating university

01:29:09.580 | that where they go out three and a half months at a time

01:29:11.900 | with about 500 college level students

01:29:15.100 | and about 35 professors.

01:29:16.540 | And so you're shooting every day for three and a half months

01:29:19.500 | in like nine different countries.

01:29:20.820 | And so that really was like instrumental to me

01:29:25.260 | becoming a pretty good camera person pretty quickly.

01:29:27.740 | - And you were doing most of the work yourself?

01:29:29.300 | - One man, one man band, yeah.

01:29:31.260 | The second voyage, I at least had an editor with me.

01:29:35.500 | Yeah, but I was shooting everything.

01:29:36.980 | - Yeah.

01:29:37.820 | What's the perfect team?

01:29:38.820 | Is it two people for nonfiction asking for a friend?

01:29:43.820 | I'm kind of interested in some storytelling,

01:29:45.860 | not of the level and the sophistication that you're doing,

01:29:50.060 | but more.

01:29:51.020 | - I think you have to allow the story to dictate

01:29:53.020 | what the size of the film should be.

01:29:54.280 | For these small human rights docs I do,

01:29:55.980 | I think two or three, you know,

01:29:57.860 | it means you work your butt off, right?

01:29:59.580 | 'Cause you're doing everything, right?

01:30:01.380 | But it allows you to tell intimate stories

01:30:03.660 | and have that access.

01:30:04.540 | I'm doing a film this summer that's a scripted piece

01:30:08.540 | where we'll probably have 25 crew people.

01:30:10.500 | - Oh, wow.

01:30:11.340 | - You know, so it's a completely different endeavor

01:30:13.660 | altogether.

01:30:14.540 | - But doing it yourself, what do you think about that?

01:30:18.580 | Even though you have that trillion dollars.

01:30:21.340 | - Oh, I have that trillion dollars again?

01:30:23.020 | Sweet, you can write that check before I leave, right?

01:30:25.140 | - Yeah, I will.

01:30:25.980 | - Great.

01:30:26.820 | (both laughing)

01:30:28.660 | I've never seen a check for that big.

01:30:30.260 | That's really interesting.

01:30:31.100 | How many zeros is that?

01:30:31.940 | - I write them so often.

01:30:32.940 | (Lex laughing)

01:30:34.740 | I've lost track.

01:30:36.180 | Or the United States government sure as heck

01:30:38.300 | writes them often.

01:30:39.380 | Okay, anyway, I mean, like, is there an argument?

01:30:42.260 | Can you steal man the case for a single person?

01:30:44.540 | - You know, not for me.

01:30:46.420 | Not for me, and here's why.

01:30:49.340 | What I've found is that by being a team of two filming

01:31:01.620 | with a field producer, by two people filming,

01:31:03.820 | it allows us to double our footage first off, right?

01:31:10.460 | So we have twice as much footage in the time we're filming

01:31:13.680 | to come back with as opposed to one person filming.

01:31:15.900 | - So you're each manning a camera?

01:31:18.420 | - Yeah, constantly.

01:31:19.860 | - And how much, sorry to keep interrupting,

01:31:22.820 | but how much interaction and interplay there is?

01:31:25.300 | - Sometimes the director of photography is in another room

01:31:28.180 | filming a different scene if it makes sense.

01:31:30.060 | Sometimes we're cross shooting in the same room, right?

01:31:32.780 | It just depends on the needs of the moment.

01:31:35.460 | So we come back with double the footage is one thing.

01:31:38.060 | But as a director, so that's, you know,

01:31:40.380 | and given how access is sometimes shaped by the events

01:31:45.240 | so that we can only, something, you know,

01:31:47.800 | in "Lifeboat" for example, you know,

01:31:49.680 | a rescue operation may only happen three days, right?

01:31:52.860 | So you want as much footage of that as you can.

01:31:55.000 | But the other piece of it that's really critical for me

01:31:57.340 | I found is that by having another human being

01:32:00.340 | I'm filming with who I'm co-shooting with,

01:32:02.740 | it frees me up as a director

01:32:05.040 | to not always have to be shooting either.

01:32:07.580 | I can do all the other work to build relationships, right?

01:32:11.580 | To have side conversations with people,

01:32:14.060 | to sort out the right way to tell a story, right?

01:32:18.700 | Or to transfer footage,

01:32:19.900 | knowing that the director of photography

01:32:21.940 | is still filming during all that.

01:32:23.380 | So it frees me up to think of as a director

01:32:26.460 | rather than just an image acquirer.

01:32:29.980 | - Yeah, 'cause there's also,

01:32:31.260 | I don't know how distracting is,

01:32:32.420 | you've obviously done it for years,

01:32:33.780 | but setting stuff up, it preoccupies your mind.

01:32:38.780 | Like pressing the record button

01:32:42.480 | and like framing stuff and all that,

01:32:43.940 | that still, that takes up some part of your mind

01:32:46.420 | where you can't think freely.

01:32:48.260 | - That's my choice, right?

01:32:49.500 | That's how I work best.

01:32:51.020 | That said, the caveat there would be

01:32:53.060 | that's not the only way to do it, obviously, right?

01:32:55.020 | Like one of my favorite documentaries of all time

01:32:58.980 | is a documentary called "A Woman Captured,"

01:33:02.900 | shot in Hungary by a single filmmaker

01:33:05.980 | with a single camera, with a single lens, right?

01:33:09.460 | And it's brilliant and powerful and moving

01:33:13.860 | and interventional.

01:33:16.060 | It's incredible filmmaking.

01:33:17.900 | And it was a single human being who created that film

01:33:20.580 | with a collaborator or a subject.

01:33:23.460 | So it can be done, it's just not how I work best.

01:33:26.820 | - Yeah, how much personally with the other person,

01:33:29.980 | how important is the relationship with them

01:33:34.180 | outside of the filming?

01:33:36.020 | - With the director of photography?

01:33:37.780 | - The director of photography, say.

01:33:39.500 | How much drinking, and if you don't drink,

01:33:44.500 | whatever the equivalent of that is,

01:33:46.060 | do you have to do together?

01:33:47.580 | How much soul searching?

01:33:48.940 | Or is it more like two surgeons getting together?

01:33:52.460 | Is it surgeons or is it a jazz band?

01:33:55.940 | - Well, it could be either, right?

01:33:57.980 | Hopefully not at the same time, though,

01:33:59.220 | because I don't think surgeons and jazz bands

01:34:01.020 | go well together, probably.

01:34:02.580 | - They're both good with fingers, I suppose.

01:34:05.780 | - Exactly, but I'd rather maybe not play in jazz

01:34:08.260 | while they operate on me.

01:34:09.900 | But I think, for me, I think there are moments of both,

01:34:14.900 | but usually not at the same time, right?

01:34:17.620 | There are surgical moments where the moment is so pressing,

01:34:20.860 | you really have to be that task-driven, right?

01:34:25.020 | To capture as thoroughly as possible

01:34:27.140 | whatever's unfolding, right?

01:34:29.340 | But I think there's other times where you do improvise

01:34:31.820 | like jazz, right?

01:34:32.900 | And where you have a lot of choices ahead of you,

01:34:35.980 | and you're doing maybe a dance

01:34:38.820 | with the other camera person, right?

01:34:41.100 | In order to capture a scene as creatively

01:34:43.220 | and fully as possible during a fixed duration.

01:34:47.460 | - How much, you said shaping, 'cause it is nonfiction,

01:34:51.380 | but I feel like there's so many ways

01:34:53.420 | to tell the same nonfiction,

01:34:55.460 | that it's bordering on fiction.

01:34:57.860 | - Yeah.

01:34:58.700 | - It's, well, it's storytelling.

01:35:01.140 | And how much shaping do you see yourself as doing?

01:35:08.100 | Like, how important is your role in how you tell the story?

01:35:11.780 | I suppose the question I'm asking is,

01:35:16.500 | how many ways can you really screw this up?

01:35:18.700 | - Every day you can screw it up.

01:35:22.060 | I mean, that's really the,

01:35:24.820 | well, I think what you're asking about

01:35:25.980 | is really the ethos of documentary filmmaking, right?

01:35:29.540 | I allow a lot of things to guide my choices.

01:35:32.580 | One of them being, am I being fair, right?

01:35:38.100 | Not balanced, right?

01:35:39.740 | But am I being fair to what I'm witnessing?

01:35:43.460 | - Does the camera capturing in a fair way

01:35:46.420 | the truth of the reality?

01:35:48.580 | Some fundamental truth of it.

01:35:49.420 | - And it also speaks to consent, right?

01:35:51.620 | Am I being fair in a sense of consent?

01:35:53.940 | Do I have active consent in this moment, right?

01:35:56.420 | Regardless of whether I have a signed piece of paper.

01:35:58.580 | I always find some way to document it,

01:36:00.260 | whether it's just direct address to camera

01:36:02.380 | or a translated release.

01:36:05.420 | - So there's, actually that's an interesting little,

01:36:07.700 | so they say something to the camera that they consent

01:36:10.580 | or they sign the thing.

01:36:12.020 | - Yeah, so for example,

01:36:14.020 | the large broadcast companies have this formalized process

01:36:18.260 | where they present a piece of paper, right?

01:36:21.020 | - Yes.

01:36:21.860 | - And the subject reads it and they sign it

01:36:25.140 | and then you have permission and that's irrevocable, right?

01:36:28.820 | So it'll hold up in court.

01:36:30.780 | That's not how I operate, right?

01:36:32.780 | And so it's just, for example,

01:36:37.540 | that doesn't work if someone's illiterate

01:36:39.660 | and can't read that piece of paper, right?

01:36:41.940 | What if they don't know how to sign their name, right?

01:36:44.220 | So instead you have to have a conversation,

01:36:46.340 | ask questions, have them ask questions,

01:36:49.340 | come to a complete understanding

01:36:51.500 | before you even know whether they understand

01:36:53.620 | what you're asking, right?

01:36:54.860 | And then in that case, if someone's illiterate,

01:36:57.140 | then you have that conversation,

01:36:58.780 | you just sit down and it takes a long time sometimes,

01:37:00.900 | but you have to do it.

01:37:01.740 | And then if they still wanna participate

01:37:04.340 | and they give you their consent,

01:37:06.460 | they can't sign a piece of paper, right?

01:37:08.500 | So then you just do in their native language, right?

01:37:11.700 | Direct consent to camera in their language.

01:37:14.180 | - Interesting, but also you're speaking to the consent

01:37:16.300 | that's just a human placing trust in you.

01:37:19.660 | - Yeah. - You make a connection

01:37:20.940 | like this. - That's the most

01:37:21.780 | important concern. - Right.

01:37:23.180 | I hate papers, I hate papers and lawyers

01:37:28.180 | because they, exactly for that reason.

01:37:31.380 | Yeah, okay, great, but you should be focusing

01:37:35.180 | on the human connection that leads to the trust,

01:37:38.700 | to the like real consent and consent day to day,

01:37:41.580 | minute to minute, 'cause that can change.

01:37:43.740 | - Absolutely, and it does change.

01:37:45.980 | - You mentioned a woman captured.

01:37:49.300 | What are the, this is, I'm sure you can't answer that,

01:37:52.620 | but I will force you.

01:37:54.060 | What are the top three documentaries of all time,

01:37:58.300 | short or feature length?

01:38:00.180 | - Oh boy. - This is not your opinion,

01:38:02.420 | this is objective truth.

01:38:04.180 | Maybe top one, what's the greatest?

01:38:09.260 | We got, let's see, March of the Penguins,

01:38:14.260 | that's probably number one for me.

01:38:15.820 | - Really? - No, I'm just kidding.

01:38:17.340 | I don't know, I do seem to, the metaphor of penguins

01:38:22.340 | huddling together in hard, cold,

01:38:28.140 | like in the harsh conditions of nature,

01:38:32.420 | that's something that's kind of beautiful.

01:38:34.900 | I don't love all nature documentaries,

01:38:37.100 | but like something about March of the Penguins,

01:38:40.340 | I think Morgan Freeman.

01:38:42.420 | - Yeah, he narrated it. - Narrates it.

01:38:44.100 | So maybe everything, just any documentary

01:38:46.380 | with Morgan Freeman, I'm a sucker for that.

01:38:49.140 | Werner Herzog, Life in the Taiga, The Simple People.

01:38:54.140 | - I love Grizzly Man. - Grizzly Man.

01:38:56.060 | - I love Grizzly Man, I think that's one of his best works.

01:38:58.980 | - Yes, I think that's Joe Rogan's favorite documentary.

01:39:03.140 | It's both comedy and, I mean, it's--

01:39:06.820 | - Tragicomedy. - Tragicomedy, yeah.

01:39:09.860 | Is there something that stands out to you?

01:39:11.700 | I mean, I'm joking about like best,

01:39:13.860 | something that was impactful to you?

01:39:15.700 | - Just to put it out there, I don't think there's any way

01:39:18.700 | to say that there are objectively the best three

01:39:21.900 | documentaries of all time, but for me,

01:39:23.620 | and you may find this interesting given your background,

01:39:25.620 | is that I think my top three are all

01:39:30.620 | from the Eastern Bloc, actually.

01:39:35.500 | So Aquarela by Kosakowski, Viktor Kosakowski

01:39:40.500 | is one of my favorite, and it's a couple years old now,

01:39:43.780 | which is sort of a meditation on the place water has

01:39:47.420 | on our planet and in our lives.

01:39:49.060 | I think A Woman Captured that I mentioned,

01:39:53.340 | which was shot in Hungary.

01:39:54.540 | - Is it a feature-length one?

01:39:56.260 | - Both are feature-lengths, yeah.

01:39:58.460 | It is just brilliant, and it, I think,

01:40:01.660 | has yet to find distribution here in the US, you know?

01:40:05.340 | But it's a perfect example of what they call,

01:40:07.820 | you know, vérité, or direct nonfiction filmmaking.

01:40:12.820 | - A European woman, this is the synopsis,

01:40:15.620 | a European woman has been kept by family

01:40:17.620 | as a domestic slave for 10 years,

01:40:20.100 | drawing courage from the filmmaker's presence.

01:40:23.540 | She decides to escape the unbearable oppression

01:40:27.260 | and become a free person.

01:40:28.580 | Wow, so the filmmaker is part of the story.

01:40:32.500 | - Part of the story, it didn't start that way,

01:40:34.700 | but during the course of the story,

01:40:36.300 | the filmmaker comes to understand

01:40:39.500 | that this is actually modern-day slavery.

01:40:41.900 | And rather than just allow it to be,

01:40:45.340 | actually enables and assists this woman

01:40:48.380 | to free herself from slavery and become a free woman.

01:40:50.980 | - I wonder, sorry, on a small tangent,

01:40:52.620 | before we get to number three,

01:40:53.620 | like Icarus is interesting too.

01:40:55.700 | How often do you become part of the story,

01:41:00.940 | or the story is different because of your presence?

01:41:04.700 | Like you changed the tide of history.

01:41:10.060 | - Yeah, well, back to just like one person at a time,

01:41:12.700 | that we keep talking, you know,

01:41:13.700 | we keep coming back to that theme on some level.

01:41:16.940 | So this could tie in interestingly

01:41:19.060 | into one of my favorite films, actually.

01:41:21.100 | So the last two films that I would mention

01:41:24.700 | from my top four list would be,

01:41:26.580 | the third Eastern Bloc one would be

01:41:28.500 | a film called "Immortal" in 2019,

01:41:31.860 | which was shot in Russia by a Russian woman

01:41:34.420 | that sort of examines the place of the state

01:41:39.340 | in shaping individuals to be vehicles for the state.

01:41:45.900 | I mean, that's my own synopsis,

01:41:47.140 | but that's one of my takeaways

01:41:49.020 | from the brilliant 60-minute doc or so.

01:41:52.100 | Again, Russian filmmaking, right?

01:41:54.260 | It's really quite good and powerful.

01:41:57.940 | The fourth one would be a Frederick Wiseman film,

01:42:00.580 | "Tidickett Follies,"

01:42:02.740 | which was filmed in the US decades ago

01:42:05.060 | inside basically the bowels of a insane asylum

01:42:09.940 | or a mental health institution.

01:42:11.980 | And I bring up Wiseman because, you know,

01:42:14.340 | he is really the godfather, so to speak,

01:42:18.820 | of direct cinema or cinema verite.

01:42:22.660 | And early in my career,

01:42:25.980 | I really believed in what he expressed

01:42:30.300 | as the place of the verite filmmaker,

01:42:33.540 | which is simply fly on the wall,

01:42:36.980 | which is only observational in nature, right?

01:42:41.700 | And I believe that that's how I should be

01:42:44.860 | as a nonfiction filmmaker,

01:42:46.180 | that I was there only to bear witness, to observe,

01:42:49.380 | and not to intervene in any way, shape, or form.

01:42:52.900 | And that was the sort of foundation

01:42:56.940 | for how I operated for many, many years.

01:42:59.980 | And then some things happened.

01:43:01.820 | So one of those things that happened was I filmed "Lifeboat."

01:43:06.820 | And during the course of filming "Lifeboat,"

01:43:10.940 | which covered rescue operations

01:43:14.380 | in the Mediterranean off the coast of Libya,

01:43:16.580 | in the first three days of that rescue mission,

01:43:22.620 | you know, we came upon over 3,000 people,

01:43:26.260 | asylum seekers, floating in flimsy rafts in the water.

01:43:30.100 | And we were on the Zodiacs, and we were filming.

01:43:35.700 | And within the first couple hours, you know,

01:43:39.500 | we would come up to these rafts and these boats

01:43:44.500 | that were in really dire shape,

01:43:47.180 | and people would be pushed off,

01:43:48.980 | and people would jump off,

01:43:50.460 | and people would fall into the water.

01:43:52.700 | And some of them couldn't swim.

01:43:56.940 | And so we found ourselves in this moment

01:44:00.700 | where we had a choice.

01:44:02.500 | We could film someone drowned in front of us,

01:44:05.700 | or we could put our cameras down

01:44:07.420 | and pull them out of the water.

01:44:09.220 | And so that's what we did.

01:44:10.940 | We put our cameras in the bottom of the Zodiac

01:44:14.140 | and just started pulling people out of the water.

01:44:16.740 | And, you know, if I was Wiseman, right,

01:44:21.060 | according to his paradigm,

01:44:23.460 | then we should have just filmed.

01:44:25.340 | And I didn't anticipate that moment beforehand.

01:44:29.900 | I had no sort of foreknowledge

01:44:31.780 | that I was gonna find myself faced

01:44:33.660 | with that dilemma of the moment as a documentarian.

01:44:37.660 | But there was no question in my mind

01:44:39.380 | that I had to put my camera down

01:44:40.700 | and pull that fellow human being out of the water.

01:44:43.180 | And I don't regret it at all.

01:44:44.820 | So I've come to a different place

01:44:46.260 | I've evolved to what I believe

01:44:48.500 | for the kind of film that I do is more appropriate, right?

01:44:51.700 | Like I can go to sleep at night knowing that,

01:44:56.100 | regardless of how the film would have been different

01:44:57.820 | if I hadn't made that choice,

01:45:00.140 | I made the right choice as a human being.

01:45:02.180 | So I think of it as being a human being first

01:45:04.780 | and a filmmaker second in moments like that.

01:45:07.740 | - That's beautifully, beautifully put.

01:45:09.340 | But I also think like you could be a human being

01:45:12.700 | in small ways too, like silly ways

01:45:17.380 | and put a little bit of yourself in documentaries.

01:45:20.940 | I tend to see that as really beautiful.

01:45:23.080 | - Like the meta piece of it?

01:45:26.180 | - Yeah, just put yourself into the movie a little bit

01:45:31.020 | because like break that third, fourth,

01:45:34.020 | whatever the wall is,

01:45:35.580 | is realize that there's a human behind the camera too.

01:45:38.820 | For some reason, me as a fan, as a viewer,

01:45:41.700 | that's enjoyable too.

01:45:42.940 | I think there's a real authenticity there

01:45:45.780 | behind the story, especially with these hard stories

01:45:49.220 | that you're doing that there's a human being struggling too,

01:45:53.060 | like observing the suffering

01:45:56.420 | and having to bear the burden

01:46:02.460 | that this kind of suffering exists in the world

01:46:05.180 | and you're behind that camera living that struggle.

01:46:09.100 | And there's small ways to show yourself in that way.

01:46:12.420 | - As you know, I don't do that in a big way.

01:46:16.540 | But I actually, there are subtle moments

01:46:18.980 | where I allow that presence to live just for a second.

01:46:23.220 | Like I hate belly button docs, that's what I call them.

01:46:26.620 | I don't know what-- - What's a belly button doc?

01:46:27.460 | - A belly button doc is navel gazing, right?

01:46:30.460 | Where sort of a narcissistic filmmaking

01:46:33.900 | where someone just studies their own place in the world.

01:46:38.940 | - I see, yeah.

01:46:39.780 | - I think my, I'm more concerned

01:46:44.780 | with how I can intervene, right?

01:46:49.020 | - Yeah, well, you're trying to really deeply empathize.

01:46:52.620 | - Yeah.

01:46:53.460 | - So if you deeply empathize, who am I?

01:46:55.980 | - I don't wanna center myself in these stories.

01:46:58.020 | It's not about me, right?

01:46:59.420 | I am so unimportant.

01:47:01.140 | What is important is what's happening,

01:47:03.700 | what's unfolding in the world that we need to act upon.

01:47:06.340 | And I think it's selfish and narcissistic

01:47:09.220 | to push myself into these stories unnecessarily.

01:47:13.420 | Now that said, I think there is some small value

01:47:16.220 | in what you're saying just to remind viewers

01:47:18.940 | that there's obviously a filmmaker at play.

01:47:21.060 | So sometimes the way that I do that

01:47:23.040 | is just like through a question on camera.

01:47:25.740 | I'd allow the audio to live of a question

01:47:28.700 | or during a conversation I'm having with someone

01:47:31.180 | so they can just hear how it's posed, for example.

01:47:34.580 | Right, and to me, that's enough.

01:47:37.180 | - Yeah, I do like moments when people

01:47:42.140 | recognize that you exist.

01:47:43.660 | They look at the filmmaker past the camera

01:47:47.260 | and, yeah, so you ask the question in an interview

01:47:49.620 | or something like that, and they respond to that.

01:47:52.580 | - Yeah.

01:47:53.420 | - Like they respond to this new perturbation

01:47:57.180 | into their reality that was created by this other human.

01:47:59.980 | - Yeah.

01:48:00.820 | - And I especially like when those questions

01:48:02.860 | or those perturbations are a little bit absurd

01:48:07.660 | and add something very novel to their situation

01:48:11.300 | and that novelty reveals something about them.

01:48:14.240 | So as opposed to capturing the day-to-day reality

01:48:18.300 | of their life, you do that plus the perturbations

01:48:21.660 | of something novel.

01:48:23.060 | - Yeah.

01:48:24.380 | - But of course, there's all kinds of ways to do this.

01:48:26.860 | Let me, what was number five, by the way?

01:48:29.700 | - Only, I only gave you four.

01:48:31.020 | - You just--

01:48:31.860 | - I'm sorry, it's day four.

01:48:33.540 | There's a short doc I like, I mentioned,

01:48:35.140 | they're called The Toxic Pigs of Fukushima.

01:48:38.540 | I know, I know.

01:48:39.380 | - Sorry, I apologize.

01:48:40.220 | - I know, I know.

01:48:41.060 | - It's dark.

01:48:42.260 | - It's a great title, though, right?

01:48:43.100 | - It's dark, it's a great title.

01:48:43.940 | - Yeah, great title.

01:48:45.300 | No one's seen it, but it's great.

01:48:47.820 | - It says what it sounds like.

01:48:49.420 | - Yeah, yeah, it's exactly what it sounds like,

01:48:51.420 | but really brilliantly executed.

01:48:53.780 | - Well, let me ask you about Lifeboat

01:48:56.460 | 'cause it's extremely, I don't,

01:49:01.980 | it's a really moving idea,

01:49:06.980 | just the fact that this exists in the world,

01:49:10.500 | that there's, as a metaphor, as a reality,

01:49:14.500 | that there is a set of people trying to flee desperately,

01:49:18.700 | is the desperation of it.

01:49:20.200 | And now there's refugees, the desperation of that,

01:49:25.020 | of trying to escape towards a world

01:49:28.340 | that's full of mystery, uncertainty, doubt,

01:49:32.460 | could be hopeless at times,

01:49:34.220 | and you're willing to do a lot for your own survival

01:49:38.060 | and for the survival of your family

01:49:39.740 | and all those kinds of things.

01:49:40.740 | That's kind of the human spirit,

01:49:42.820 | and you just capture it in Lifeboat.

01:49:47.420 | Can you tell me the story behind this film,

01:49:51.020 | as you started to already tell,

01:49:52.580 | can you tell me what is it about?

01:49:56.500 | - So Lifeboat really seeks to sort of lift up

01:50:01.500 | and showcase the asylum seeker crisis in the Mediterranean

01:50:08.500 | when it was at its height in 2016.

01:50:15.100 | And it came to be for many reasons,

01:50:19.060 | but one of those reasons is colleagues in the NGO community

01:50:25.400 | really shared with me that when the borders

01:50:28.520 | between Greece and Turkey were shut down,

01:50:30.560 | that the flow of Syrian asylum seekers

01:50:35.560 | that was initially going across from Turkey to Greece

01:50:39.720 | was going to shift westward across the Mediterranean.

01:50:42.600 | So I started to research that

01:50:43.920 | and discovered that was exactly the case.

01:50:46.720 | And then further stumbled upon the fact

01:50:49.520 | that nation states hadn't really stepped up to address it

01:50:54.440 | and that there were hundreds of asylum seekers

01:50:57.520 | often drowning in these flimsy crafts

01:50:59.480 | that were pushed off from the shores of Libya

01:51:01.880 | because the EU wasn't doing its duty

01:51:06.160 | to patrol those waters from a humanitarian standpoint.

01:51:09.640 | And so the net result of that was that this whole

01:51:13.240 | sort of like humanitarian community sprung up

01:51:16.520 | and it was civil society based

01:51:18.920 | that tried to meet the needs of those asylum seekers

01:51:22.200 | to just ensure that fellow human beings weren't drowning,

01:51:26.800 | simply put.

01:51:27.640 | And one of those was this small little NGO called Sea Watch,

01:51:31.080 | which when they discovered what was happening,

01:51:33.400 | just cobbled together a coalition of volunteers,

01:51:38.400 | bought a research vessel, retrofitted it,

01:51:41.840 | and motored down off the coast of Libya

01:51:44.480 | to start pulling people out of the water.

01:51:46.080 | And again, I found that inspiring.

01:51:48.600 | I found that inspiring that this group of volunteers

01:51:52.400 | was doing something that our leaders wouldn't.

01:51:55.560 | And it was something as basic and simple

01:51:59.640 | as saving human beings.

01:52:01.600 | And I thought there was an inspiring story there.

01:52:06.320 | And as it turned out, there was.

01:52:08.480 | - Have you ever saved someone's life

01:52:11.280 | as part of making these documentaries directly?

01:52:17.560 | And directly, I think you probably have countless lives,

01:52:22.080 | but directly.

01:52:23.280 | Were you put in that position?

01:52:25.000 | - I don't wanna.

01:52:26.840 | I mean, I certainly poured people out of the water

01:52:29.840 | who couldn't swim.

01:52:30.720 | I did that.

01:52:33.520 | - And that's again, speaking to the basic humanity.

01:52:35.680 | Put down the camera, help.

01:52:37.600 | Yeah.

01:52:40.560 | So this is people coming from Libya,

01:52:43.520 | trying to make it across the Mediterranean Sea.

01:52:46.240 | On a crappy, tiny boat.

01:52:48.920 | From a filmmaker perspective, how do you film that?

01:52:51.400 | Was there decisions to capture the desperation?

01:52:55.880 | - Well, we were going back to this idea of access

01:53:00.880 | and how that's so fundamental to my approach.

01:53:03.360 | We were bound by the strictures of the rescue operation

01:53:10.040 | on this Sea-Watch vessel, which was 30 meters long.

01:53:12.880 | And we were two of a crew of 15.

01:53:16.720 | So we had to multitask all the time

01:53:18.680 | because the only reason we were on that boat

01:53:21.680 | was by agreeing that if needed,

01:53:25.400 | we would do whatever necessary to help.

01:53:29.840 | And so it was very active on multiple levels.

01:53:33.360 | And we were making decisions each and every day

01:53:38.000 | that were not only filmmaking and creative decisions,

01:53:42.160 | but also decisions about how to live that duality, right?

01:53:47.160 | Of being a humanitarian and a filmmaker simultaneously.

01:53:56.920 | And the greatest example I can share of that was,

01:54:01.920 | well, with my director of photography on that project,

01:54:04.440 | Kenny Allen.

01:54:05.360 | Kenny's a big guy.

01:54:09.840 | He's got arms like tree trunks.

01:54:12.040 | And because he was so physically able and strong,

01:54:18.240 | the head of mission really tasked him to be on the Zodiacs

01:54:23.240 | to pull people out of the water.

01:54:24.800 | 'Cause he could literally with one arm reach down

01:54:27.040 | and just oftentimes pull someone out, right?

01:54:30.400 | Whereas usually it would take two or three people for it.

01:54:32.840 | And so when we were at the height of triage

01:54:37.000 | and there were people in the water all over

01:54:39.320 | and rafts were sinking,

01:54:41.720 | Kenny was out pulling people out of the water.

01:54:43.680 | And this went on for like 24 hours, right?

01:54:46.320 | And at the end of that first day,

01:54:48.320 | I remember like looking over on the deck

01:54:51.200 | and seeing Kenny like help people up from the ladders

01:54:54.320 | to walk them back, right?

01:54:56.200 | And his camera was nowhere to be seen.

01:54:58.880 | And so I walked over to him

01:55:01.240 | and I just grabbed him by the shoulders and said,

01:55:03.680 | "Kenny, where's your camera?"

01:55:07.080 | And he didn't know.

01:55:08.840 | He had no idea where his camera was, right?

01:55:11.160 | And so I just said, "Kenny,

01:55:13.240 | "we're here to do what you're doing,

01:55:17.480 | "but we're also here to film it, right?

01:55:21.920 | "To make sure that we document

01:55:24.200 | "what is unfolding in front of us

01:55:26.080 | "so that we have a record of it, right?

01:55:28.120 | "So we can bring it to a larger audience.

01:55:30.720 | "So you need to go find your camera

01:55:32.400 | "so we can also document it."

01:55:34.920 | And that kind of pulled him out

01:55:36.520 | and he went and got his camera and started filming again.

01:55:38.440 | But that gives you a sense of sort of this world

01:55:40.960 | that we had to live in in order to get the story done.

01:55:43.960 | - But I think to be a great director of photography,

01:55:47.320 | to be a great director,

01:55:48.960 | you have to lose yourself like that in the story too.

01:55:53.880 | - But usually with a camera in your hand, right?

01:55:55.920 | - But sometimes you forget the camera.

01:55:58.120 | I mean, there's a,

01:56:00.600 | I feel like if you're obsessed with the camera

01:56:04.680 | too much, you can lose the humanity of it.

01:56:08.040 | You get obsessed with the film and the story.

01:56:10.200 | - It can become clinical.

01:56:11.440 | - Yes, it can become clinical.

01:56:12.280 | - Yeah, absolutely.

01:56:13.120 | And it's, you know, yeah, absolutely.

01:56:15.640 | And we don't wanna become,

01:56:17.000 | I don't wanna become clinical in my film, certainly.

01:56:19.360 | - Let me ask you a strange and perhaps edgy question.

01:56:23.440 | So some filmmakers believe it's justified

01:56:26.120 | to break the rules in order to tell a powerful story.

01:56:30.760 | Werner Herzog, I read this somewhere,

01:56:35.760 | teaches young filmmakers to pick locks

01:56:37.880 | and forge documents and so on.

01:56:39.560 | - Oh, I didn't know that, interesting.

01:56:41.360 | - What do you think about that?

01:56:42.480 | Bending the rules in service of telling a story.

01:56:45.060 | You would, of course, never break the law,

01:56:48.200 | but is there, does that,

01:56:52.640 | just generally speaking,

01:56:55.920 | bending the rules and so on,

01:56:59.080 | just to elaborate on this question, perhaps,

01:57:02.200 | I'm distinctly aware that there's parts in the world

01:57:04.840 | where the rule of law is not,

01:57:08.440 | like, enforced as cleanly as it is in the United States,

01:57:14.560 | as fairly as it is in the United States,

01:57:17.400 | that there's a kind of, there's a lot of bribery,

01:57:20.920 | there's a lot of, like, you don't really know to trust,

01:57:24.520 | you don't know if you can trust the cops

01:57:27.600 | or basically anybody,

01:57:30.320 | so, like, the rules are a very hazy kind of concept,

01:57:34.680 | and a lot of them, especially, like, it's funny,

01:57:36.520 | but authoritarian regimes often have

01:57:38.160 | a giant bureaucracy buildup that's full of rules.

01:57:40.840 | There's more rules than you know what to deal with,

01:57:43.000 | and you can't actually live life

01:57:44.480 | unless you break the rules.

01:57:45.960 | Anyway, laying that all out on the table,

01:57:49.160 | do you ever contend with that

01:57:53.000 | on what are the rules I can break or should break

01:57:58.000 | to keep to the spirit of the story?

01:58:00.880 | - I think you have to ask yourself,

01:58:01.720 | are the rules just, and why are they in place, right?

01:58:05.080 | So, for example, coming into the airport

01:58:07.360 | in southern Yemen, right?

01:58:09.180 | If I just tried to walk through the airport

01:58:11.880 | with all my equipment,

01:58:13.040 | even with all the permissions beforehand, like we had,

01:58:16.000 | without having a fixer at the airport beforehand

01:58:19.840 | to make sure we didn't go through the standard line, right?

01:58:23.180 | We would have been caught up for three hours at least

01:58:28.260 | negotiating over our equipment

01:58:30.040 | and eventually paying a bribe to get it through, right?

01:58:33.480 | That's just reality in a place like Yemen.

01:58:36.640 | And so, of course, knowing that, right,

01:58:39.680 | having talked to colleagues

01:58:40.800 | who had taken that path previously,

01:58:43.360 | I took a different path, right?

01:58:45.160 | Well, we hire a fixer beforehand

01:58:47.380 | to sort it out beforehand, right?

01:58:50.080 | Rather than spending three hours of our time

01:58:52.260 | and paying a series of bribes, right?

01:58:54.240 | Instead, we're going to get it fixed beforehand

01:58:57.000 | so that we can walk through a different line

01:58:59.200 | and have no one look at any of our equipment.

01:59:02.160 | That's a pretty good trade-off in my mind.

01:59:06.400 | - What about security when you're traveling in these places?

01:59:09.280 | Do you ever have bodyguards?

01:59:10.800 | Well, several questions around that.

01:59:14.640 | Are you ever afraid for your life

01:59:16.800 | when you're filming in a war zone?

01:59:18.680 | Is there any way to lessen the probability of death?

01:59:24.600 | - I don't have a death wish.

01:59:28.400 | I try to mitigate risk however I can, however I can.

01:59:32.000 | But one of the ways I can't do it in a conflict zone

01:59:35.120 | is by having armed security with me.

01:59:37.480 | And the reason for that is because,

01:59:39.300 | especially in a place like Yemen, right,

01:59:41.760 | if you have armed security, you become a target

01:59:44.300 | in a way that if you're operating under

01:59:47.180 | sort of the auspices of international humanitarian law,

01:59:52.060 | I actually have more protection.

01:59:53.600 | So I don't bring security.

01:59:55.460 | If you're working in Northern Yemen, for example,

01:59:58.740 | you're going to have someone from the de facto authorities

02:00:03.740 | with you anyway the entire time you're there.

02:00:06.780 | So the authorities are with you in form anyway.

02:00:12.420 | Regarding fear, yeah, of course.

02:00:17.420 | I mean, fear is a natural human emotion, right?

02:00:21.900 | And I think we have a weird mindset,

02:00:25.300 | this sort of heroic mindset surrounding fear in the US,

02:00:31.100 | which I don't pay tribute to.

02:00:34.220 | I believe as a natural human emotion,

02:00:38.900 | it's an alarm bell that I need to pay attention to, right?

02:00:41.740 | And I think rather than pretending to be brave, right,

02:00:46.740 | I think you have to just acknowledge that fear has a place

02:00:52.620 | to keep you alive.

02:00:55.400 | And I think it's a matter of not letting the fear arrest you

02:01:00.400 | and allowing the fear to live and then acting anyway.

02:01:05.580 | - Don't you think as a documentary filmmaker,

02:01:08.400 | the fear is a really good signal

02:01:10.540 | for potentially a good thing to do

02:01:12.860 | because there's a story there?

02:01:14.940 | So is fear an indicator that you shouldn't do it

02:01:17.380 | or is it an indicator that you should do it?

02:01:19.260 | - It's probably an indication you should do it, right?

02:01:23.020 | And strangely, I think that's why,

02:01:26.720 | I think if there's something unusual

02:01:30.500 | about the work I do in some part,

02:01:32.260 | it's because of these types of stories, right?

02:01:35.180 | They're hard to access,

02:01:36.760 | but you also have to have a threshold of willingness

02:01:41.760 | to do them when you can't,

02:01:45.440 | there is no guarantee of physical safety, right?

02:01:50.200 | And maybe that's why you should do them.

02:01:52.880 | - I'm very much motivated by the things that scare me.

02:01:56.240 | They seem to direct the things that are worth doing

02:02:00.280 | in this all too short life.

02:02:01.960 | How often do you interact with our friendly friends

02:02:05.100 | at the police departments of various locations?

02:02:07.600 | (Lex laughing)

02:02:08.480 | Like because of the humanitarian nature of your work,

02:02:12.880 | are you able to avoid all such friendly conversations

02:02:17.000 | or are you often making friends with her?

02:02:21.600 | - I try to avoid the friendly police people

02:02:25.200 | all over the world as much as possible.

02:02:27.160 | But in some instances, it's important to be proactive,

02:02:33.520 | right, and make sure that they know what you're doing

02:02:36.340 | before you do it.

02:02:37.500 | So it's all about the context and the situation.

02:02:40.620 | For example, working in Northern Yemen,

02:02:43.540 | you couldn't film for five minutes

02:02:45.540 | if you didn't have paperwork,

02:02:47.180 | 'cause you'd be taken away.

02:02:48.620 | So you have to make sure you have all those permissions

02:02:50.680 | ahead of time.

02:02:51.520 | - 50 Feet From Syria,

02:02:55.060 | I would love to talk at least a little bit about this film.

02:03:02.300 | First, can you high level,

02:03:03.560 | can you tell what this documentary is about?

02:03:05.480 | - Yeah, it was early in the Syrian uprising.

02:03:09.240 | We returned to the Syrian-Turkish border

02:03:15.800 | with a Syrian-American orthopedic surgeon

02:03:18.880 | who was volunteering, operating on refugees

02:03:21.520 | as they flowed across the border from Syria to Turkey.

02:03:24.520 | And it was an attempt at the time,

02:03:27.740 | before a lot of films had come out about the conflict,

02:03:30.680 | to really show again,

02:03:34.520 | the effects of the war on civilians.

02:03:38.760 | You've heard me echo that sentiment multiple times now,

02:03:41.920 | but people knew there was a major conflict in Syria,

02:03:46.920 | but didn't really understand the form that that was taking

02:03:50.160 | and the impact it was having.

02:03:51.880 | And so we embedded into,

02:03:55.520 | at the time it was the only clinic in Turkey

02:03:58.760 | that was sanctioned by the Turkish government

02:04:02.160 | to treat Syrian refugees.

02:04:05.040 | And so we filmed there with surgeons

02:04:08.320 | as they operated on war victims.

02:04:11.160 | And we also went into Syria, into some of the camps as well.

02:04:14.160 | - So in this film,

02:04:16.200 | there's a man who crosses the border every day

02:04:18.240 | to retrieve the wounded and fare them safety and care.

02:04:21.680 | And you also mentioned about heroism in the United States.

02:04:27.040 | Can you tell me about this man and just people like him?

02:04:29.960 | Like what's the heroic action

02:04:31.760 | in some of these places that you've visited?

02:04:35.840 | - So in that instance,

02:04:37.560 | I thought of him as the Turkish Schindler, right?

02:04:41.120 | Because he was human being who,

02:04:44.040 | of his own volition,

02:04:46.200 | no one was paying him to do this,

02:04:48.840 | but he was spending much of his time,

02:04:53.600 | he was just a local businessman

02:04:55.560 | who really saw the need in the camps

02:04:57.800 | right across the border, 10K away.

02:05:00.320 | And he saw the medical need in particular

02:05:04.280 | and how hard it was to get people

02:05:07.400 | in desperate medical conditions across the border

02:05:11.240 | where there was a clinic just right across the border,

02:05:13.760 | but because of the security and the layers of security,

02:05:17.960 | they couldn't get out by themselves.

02:05:20.080 | So he took it upon himself as a Turkish person

02:05:24.080 | to build relationships with the Turkish guards,

02:05:26.960 | which was relatively easy.

02:05:28.960 | And then he built relationships

02:05:31.360 | with sort of the guards in the no man's land

02:05:34.480 | between the Syrian guards

02:05:36.240 | and sort of those who lived in the middle area.

02:05:38.480 | And then also with the Syrian guards at the camp.

02:05:41.280 | And he would drive out there daily and bring them food.

02:05:44.360 | Talk them up and build relationships.

02:05:47.680 | And so every day he would bring these guards food

02:05:49.960 | and build relationships with them.

02:05:51.560 | And what that meant was eventually, right?

02:05:54.440 | He had this avenue of access to and from the camps.

02:05:58.920 | And so he started using it.

02:06:00.560 | And he would drive this avenue of access

02:06:05.160 | through the three layers of guards each day.

02:06:08.080 | And then they would open the gates for him

02:06:10.480 | because he had made himself trustworthy in their eyes.

02:06:14.040 | And he would receive the most desperate medical cases

02:06:18.480 | that were coming from all over Northern Syria, right?

02:06:21.920 | To receive medical treatment.

02:06:23.520 | And he would, as you see in the film,

02:06:25.440 | he would ferry them into the back of his car, right?

02:06:29.200 | And then drive them to the hospital

02:06:31.720 | where they would receive operations.

02:06:33.560 | And then he would bring them back if they wanted

02:06:36.640 | after they'd healed and recovered back to Syria,

02:06:39.480 | if they wanted to return out post-recovery.

02:06:41.920 | And he didn't get paid for that.

02:06:44.080 | He was spending his own money to do it

02:06:46.600 | because he saw other human beings in need.

02:06:49.600 | And it's like we were talking about earlier.

02:06:52.840 | That's heroic, right?

02:06:54.640 | That's selfless.

02:06:55.960 | That's aspirational for me, right?

02:06:59.960 | Here's someone who is spending their time on the planet

02:07:03.960 | doing something of value and good to other human beings.

02:07:06.760 | - I mean, if you draw parallels to Schindler,

02:07:09.400 | I feel like the fascinating thing about Schindler

02:07:13.640 | is that he's kind of a flawed human

02:07:18.240 | and is not the kind of human that does these things usually.

02:07:21.640 | But he just can't help it.

02:07:23.480 | And that's like the basic humanity.

02:07:25.040 | Despite who you are, the basic humanity shines through.

02:07:30.040 | - I think that the whims of war

02:07:33.040 | test people in those ways, right?

02:07:35.200 | They ask of you things that you may not even know

02:07:39.600 | were going to be asked of you.

02:07:41.200 | And then it speaks to who you are

02:07:43.160 | fundamentally as a human being.

02:07:44.960 | - They reveal who you are as a human being,

02:07:47.800 | just as you said.

02:07:48.840 | Let me ask a kind of stupid technical question

02:07:55.160 | about publications of movies and so on.

02:07:58.160 | I've been recently becoming good friends with Thomas Tall,

02:08:02.320 | who was the producer.

02:08:04.200 | His company, Legendary, funded some of the big

02:08:06.320 | sort of blockbuster films and so on.

02:08:08.520 | And so obviously money is part of filmmaking.

02:08:10.840 | It's interesting.

02:08:11.680 | But also the release of movies.

02:08:13.840 | And me as a consumer, with Netflix, with YouTube,

02:08:18.840 | that's one of the reasons I'm a huge fan of YouTube

02:08:23.720 | is it's like out in the open.

02:08:26.880 | Access, especially historical access.

02:08:30.360 | Like over time, you can look back years later.

02:08:33.920 | If you pay some money,

02:08:35.160 | you can watch some of the great films ever made.

02:08:38.360 | YouTube, Hulu, Netflix.

02:08:40.320 | I don't know what other services there are.

02:08:41.920 | HBO, Paramount.

02:08:44.120 | - Paramount Plus.

02:08:44.960 | - Paramount Plus.

02:08:46.040 | Anyway, there's all these platforms.

02:08:50.160 | Spotify now.

02:08:52.800 | I understand they wanna create paywalls and so on.

02:08:59.040 | It makes sense.

02:09:00.600 | But I'm a huge fan of openness

02:09:02.560 | and I'm really kind of torn by this whole thing.

02:09:04.680 | Anyway, that's a discussion for perhaps another time.

02:09:07.360 | But the short question is,

02:09:10.000 | why is it so hard to watch your documentaries

02:09:14.040 | and other films, other incredible films on the internet?

02:09:18.960 | If I want to pay unlimited amount of money,

02:09:23.120 | I wanna pay a lot of money to watch it.

02:09:26.440 | Why is it so hard?

02:09:27.960 | - Well, "Lifeboat" is streaming free on the New Yorker.

02:09:30.800 | - Yes, I saw that.

02:09:33.360 | But it's still, which is interesting.

02:09:35.440 | That doesn't make any sense.

02:09:37.360 | And then also "Hunger War" is on Paramount Plus,

02:09:41.680 | but also-- - Pluto TV.

02:09:43.120 | - It's also streaming free.

02:09:45.680 | - So you can either go through a paywall

02:09:48.000 | or you can watch it with ads with Big Macs interspersed.

02:09:52.240 | - Big Macs.

02:09:53.080 | - Sometimes.

02:09:53.920 | - Yeah, the contrast.

02:09:55.720 | - It's tough.

02:09:57.040 | - Well, no, it really reveals the power of the documentary.

02:10:00.440 | No, but it's still not, even those platforms,

02:10:04.440 | I mean, they're not as easily accessible

02:10:07.800 | 'cause you have to think.

02:10:10.560 | And you have to chase a particular--

02:10:13.320 | - You have to chase it, yeah, yeah.

02:10:15.200 | I guess from an economic standpoint,

02:10:17.040 | the answer to that is pretty clear, right?

02:10:19.440 | It may not be what people wanna watch.

02:10:21.680 | Maybe people wanna watch reality.

02:10:25.560 | Maybe people wanna watch animal rescue shows,

02:10:30.560 | here in the US.

02:10:33.640 | Which is exactly why, in part,

02:10:36.280 | I think it's so vital that we continue to do

02:10:39.280 | stories on things that aren't about

02:10:42.000 | flowers and puppy dogs, right?

02:10:44.280 | - I would push back on that.

02:10:45.280 | So, there's TikTok.

02:10:49.240 | And you could say, well, look,

02:10:51.960 | humans just wanna watch really short content

02:10:55.880 | because they seem to be addicted to that kind of thing.

02:10:58.280 | That's partially true.

02:11:00.120 | But they also watch two, three, four, five-hour podcasts.

02:11:04.200 | - On TikTok?

02:11:07.360 | - No, there's different platforms for that.

02:11:09.680 | There's a place called YouTube,

02:11:11.040 | I'll teach you about it some time.

02:11:12.040 | - Okay, yeah, I've never heard of it.

02:11:14.320 | - It's a good place to publish documentaries, I think.

02:11:16.960 | Humans are interested in a lot of things.

02:11:21.840 | And I've seen, many times,

02:11:24.960 | a thing that you think is a niche thing

02:11:26.840 | become a very big thing.

02:11:29.040 | But for them to become mainstream,

02:11:30.960 | they have to have a platform that

02:11:33.040 | allows for the mainstream to happen.

02:11:35.080 | - The access.

02:11:35.920 | - The access, the dumb, simple, frictionless access.

02:11:39.920 | The frictionless access is a really important thing.

02:11:43.560 | Paywalls create friction.

02:11:46.840 | And not just because of the money.

02:11:48.540 | It can be free, but if you have to click on a thing,

02:11:52.120 | or maybe sign up, or put your email,

02:11:56.920 | it's just not, it creates a,

02:11:59.320 | it prevents you to enjoy the thing you would really enjoy,

02:12:05.000 | and you know you would enjoy,

02:12:06.680 | but your baser human nature prevents you from enjoying,

02:12:10.800 | 'cause you can just open up TikTok and keep scrolling.

02:12:14.240 | So that's just something to say about platforms,

02:12:17.000 | because I think the things that need platforms the most

02:12:21.640 | are things like your films.

02:12:23.960 | The things that I think a lot of people would love watching.

02:12:27.280 | They're very important, and they can have viral impact

02:12:30.480 | on the world that is fundamentally positive.

02:12:32.680 | It makes me sad that there's not a machine

02:12:38.480 | for celebrating those films.

02:12:41.920 | - There are lots of machines to celebrate them,

02:12:44.180 | but they're just not as always accessible as YouTube, right?

02:12:47.520 | I mean, as soon as you write me that check

02:12:49.080 | for a trillion dollars when I walk out of here,

02:12:51.360 | then I'm gonna put all my films on YouTube,

02:12:53.360 | 'cause then I won't have to worry about selling them

02:12:56.640 | so I can make the next film,

02:12:58.040 | because film is not just an art.

02:13:00.920 | It's also an industry, right?

02:13:03.000 | And that tension between the two is a constant interplay

02:13:06.560 | that is a reality for me.

02:13:08.760 | So I always have to think about

02:13:10.520 | how can I access the largest audience,

02:13:14.840 | but also go out and shoot the next film, right?

02:13:19.340 | So that longevity question is also an issue,

02:13:22.360 | and the finances are part of that sort of equation

02:13:26.840 | that I constantly have to rewrite over and over again.

02:13:29.560 | - How often as a creative mind do you feel the constraints,

02:13:34.160 | the financial constraints?

02:13:35.600 | - I wish I could do a lot more films

02:13:41.180 | that I can't always because of financial constraints.

02:13:44.840 | - So it's the number of films.

02:13:46.200 | - Yeah, yeah.

02:13:47.040 | - And is a film that you do currently,

02:13:51.560 | is a film that you do at any one time

02:13:53.920 | as you're filming it already funded,

02:13:56.480 | or is it the funding from previous stuff

02:13:59.080 | that you're trying to use?

02:14:01.160 | - Before "Hunger Ward,"

02:14:02.840 | I would just take a flyer on my films, right?

02:14:08.240 | Where I would just say, "This meets the So What threshold.

02:14:12.880 | "This is a story that has to be told,

02:14:14.940 | "and I want to tell it."

02:14:17.580 | And then I could just go shoot it.

02:14:19.640 | And usually on credit, usually on a credit card.

02:14:22.040 | So based on a belief that,

02:14:26.120 | "Lifeboat" was done that way.

02:14:27.520 | - Yes.

02:14:28.520 | - "50 Feet from Syria" was done that way.

02:14:29.840 | - So you're on a boat, broke.

02:14:32.240 | - Yeah, yeah, but it's free food, right?

02:14:34.920 | And free lodging 'cause there's a bunk on the boat.

02:14:37.400 | But I do that not intending to stay broke, right?

02:14:41.960 | But based on a foundational belief that

02:14:45.880 | if I bring to bear all of my sort of

02:14:50.480 | quiver of creative arrows to it, right?

02:14:53.040 | That I can create something of value, right?

02:14:56.680 | In the world, but hopefully also financially,

02:15:00.280 | that then I can sell to someone.

02:15:02.000 | And you know, every time I've done that, Lex,

02:15:05.040 | I've gotten into the black.

02:15:07.000 | So it's a risk, and I have to have

02:15:09.920 | a certain risk threshold financially to do that,

02:15:12.420 | but I believe so deeply in these stories

02:15:14.440 | that I'm willing to do that.

02:15:15.680 | I didn't have to do that with "Hunger War."

02:15:17.160 | Luckily I had funders for that film.

02:15:20.020 | - Yeah, yeah, take risks in this life.

02:15:24.400 | It's gonna pay off.

02:15:25.700 | Which reminds me of, let me ask you,

02:15:28.360 | I already asked you for advice for a filmmaker

02:15:32.360 | how to win an Oscar.

02:15:34.280 | - Well, I haven't won an Oscar.

02:15:35.760 | - How to get nominated for an Oscar, that's true.

02:15:38.160 | (both laughing)

02:15:39.520 | Or just how to make great documentaries,

02:15:42.080 | how to make great film.

02:15:42.920 | But let me ask, even zoom out bigger,

02:15:45.920 | you mentioned some of these things,

02:15:48.240 | doing the things that you think matters.

02:15:50.440 | What advice would you give to young people,

02:15:52.960 | high school, college,

02:15:54.560 | dreaming of living a life worth living?

02:16:01.040 | What advice would you give them about career

02:16:03.800 | or maybe just life in general?

02:16:06.000 | How to have a life they can be proud of?

02:16:08.000 | - Yeah, I don't know how you're gonna react to this

02:16:11.240 | given sort of your expertise,

02:16:13.040 | but I would say put down the smartphone,

02:16:17.320 | step away from the monitor,

02:16:19.480 | because real life is not a screen.

02:16:22.800 | I believe that sort of the foundational skills

02:16:27.040 | which are conducive and important to success

02:16:30.400 | aren't necessarily those technical skills

02:16:34.800 | which we're going to learn in trade schools or university.

02:16:39.440 | I think they're more foundational than that.

02:16:43.280 | They're learning how to interact and listen.

02:16:48.160 | - With humans?

02:16:49.000 | - With humans, yeah, to really see and listen, right?

02:16:53.920 | - And observe.

02:16:55.680 | - And observe, right?

02:16:57.720 | And how to step out of your door

02:17:00.600 | and if the electricity goes out, right,

02:17:03.040 | and you're five miles away from your house,

02:17:05.040 | you don't need a smartphone to get home

02:17:07.320 | because you've set visual markers for yourself

02:17:10.200 | on how to get back to where you live, right?

02:17:12.480 | I think we're in danger right now

02:17:15.040 | of living in a world where

02:17:18.800 | if the satellites stop functioning, right,

02:17:21.440 | then a whole lot of people

02:17:23.480 | have become completely dysfunctional, right,

02:17:27.760 | 'cause we're so reliant upon the screens in our lives.

02:17:30.920 | So I think there's a lot of foundational skills

02:17:33.200 | that have nothing to do with technology

02:17:34.800 | that we need to learn that,

02:17:36.200 | and everything rests upon those.

02:17:38.000 | So I would say learn those foundational,

02:17:39.160 | learn how to write well, read a lot, right?

02:17:43.360 | It's a different kind of knowledge and wisdom

02:17:45.640 | that comes out of that.

02:17:47.400 | - So reading is kind of the equivalent of listening

02:17:49.520 | and observing, and writing is

02:17:51.040 | kind of integration of all of that

02:17:57.040 | that you've observed and listened to

02:17:58.480 | and tried to express something with that.

02:18:00.280 | - So I think my training in the theater

02:18:02.600 | has served me so well in the documentary world, right?

02:18:06.720 | 'Cause it's all about interaction

02:18:08.960 | and listening and talking and dialogue, right?

02:18:11.920 | And that's what I do in documentaries, right, is I listen.

02:18:15.840 | - Yeah, I, yeah, we mentioned fear.

02:18:19.120 | Being an introvert, I'm very afraid of people,

02:18:22.640 | but I'm drawn to them and fascinated by them

02:18:25.840 | because of that.

02:18:26.680 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - Enjoy listening to them.

02:18:28.240 | - Totally. - And observing them.

02:18:31.960 | And you mentioned reading, you mentioned books

02:18:34.280 | as a catalyst, as a stimulator of your imagination.

02:18:37.960 | Is there books in your life, a couple, one, two, three,

02:18:42.360 | that kind of left an impact

02:18:46.240 | or a little bit of spark of inspiration early on in life

02:18:51.240 | that stand out from your memory?

02:18:54.400 | - I was given "The Prophet" by Kahlil Gibran

02:18:58.320 | as a graduation present from my high school

02:19:01.840 | English teacher, and I still have that book

02:19:04.920 | in a special place in my bookshelf

02:19:07.160 | 'cause I think it speaks to the nature of human experience,

02:19:11.560 | right, and I return to it all the time

02:19:13.840 | 'cause there's wisdom there, you know?

02:19:15.720 | But there's many, many books, so--

02:19:18.240 | - Fiction or nonfiction, what connects with you usually?

02:19:21.760 | In the past, for the imagination.

02:19:23.280 | - I read mostly nonfiction most of the time.

02:19:26.400 | "Ten Points" is a book I love a lot.

02:19:28.920 | - What is "Ten Points"?

02:19:30.480 | - "Ten Points" is, I think his name is Bill Strickland.

02:19:34.120 | He was the editor of, I think, "Bicycle" magazine,

02:19:36.840 | or I think it was, and it's sort of his personal memoir

02:19:40.200 | of his experience growing up with a lot of abuse

02:19:44.080 | and how that transformed him as a human being.

02:19:46.680 | You know, one instrumental book for me

02:19:49.240 | that I bumped into in my early 20s,

02:19:51.960 | boy, these are all nonfiction,

02:19:54.160 | except for "The Princess Bride."

02:19:55.760 | (Lyle laughs)

02:19:56.960 | Have to mention, it's an outlier.

02:19:59.160 | No, no, "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People."

02:20:02.400 | - Yes.

02:20:03.280 | - I read that in my early 20s,

02:20:05.440 | and I found so many of the principles in that book.

02:20:10.440 | - What are the habits from that one?

02:20:13.260 | - Seek first to understand,

02:20:15.880 | then to be understood is one of them, you know?

02:20:18.760 | The notion of proactivity is one of them.

02:20:21.180 | And so I've held on to some of those principles

02:20:25.040 | through my life as well, for sure.

02:20:27.920 | - What have been, you've observed

02:20:32.360 | suffering, darker aspects of human nature

02:20:37.080 | in your own personal life,

02:20:38.880 | what has been some of the darkest moments in your life,

02:20:42.960 | darkest times in your life?

02:20:45.120 | Is there something that you went through,

02:20:49.400 | and then perhaps you carry it through your work?

02:20:53.000 | - Yeah.

02:20:53.840 | Probably one of the darkest moments

02:20:56.520 | was an experience that I had, again, in my early 20s.

02:21:00.840 | And I was living in Southern California,

02:21:03.280 | and I, you know, the Pacific Coast Highway

02:21:08.760 | that goes north and south along the beach,

02:21:10.600 | and there's that little concrete path

02:21:13.980 | that people jog and ride their bikes,

02:21:15.440 | and I was riding my bike on the PCH,

02:21:18.080 | and I was coming up to a corner on it,

02:21:21.960 | and I heard this tremendous crash.

02:21:26.660 | And it was really loud.

02:21:28.900 | And I came around the corner,

02:21:31.520 | and it was a car accident, a car crash.

02:21:34.660 | It was a multiple vehicle crash.

02:21:37.980 | And what had happened is that a Volvo had hit another car,

02:21:42.980 | and then when it hit it, it went over the top of the car

02:21:48.020 | and hit a Volkswagen van,

02:21:50.220 | and it peeled away the top of the Volkswagen van

02:21:52.740 | when it hit it and then landed.

02:21:55.060 | So three vehicles, and it had just happened.

02:21:58.660 | And lying in the middle of the road

02:22:04.140 | was a body decapitated,

02:22:07.380 | and there was another person from one of the cars

02:22:12.460 | lying in the middle of the road, still alive.

02:22:15.380 | And then on the hood of the Volvo

02:22:17.920 | was this woman who had come through the windshield,

02:22:22.340 | just a mess, blood everywhere, moaning back and forth.

02:22:27.340 | And a bystander ran into the middle of the road

02:22:33.900 | and started administering first aid

02:22:35.940 | to the person lying in the road.

02:22:38.240 | And I stood there watching this scene,

02:22:43.240 | and every fiber of my being

02:22:48.100 | wanted to run to the woman on the hood of the Volvo

02:22:53.020 | and do something, anything, right?

02:22:55.980 | Just to be there.

02:22:56.940 | And it was obvious to me that she was gonna die.

02:23:00.580 | But I felt like at least if I ran there,

02:23:04.020 | I could offer some comfort for her last moment.

02:23:08.180 | And right then, the siren started to blare,

02:23:12.100 | and I knew that there'd be paramedics there within minutes,

02:23:16.660 | that people would come to help.

02:23:18.960 | And I froze, and I was scared,

02:23:23.540 | and I didn't do anything.

02:23:27.040 | And I watched while this woman died

02:23:31.180 | on the hood of the Volvo.

02:23:33.620 | And that experience is sort of seared into my consciousness.

02:23:40.780 | The fact that I watched and didn't act,

02:23:45.740 | I feel is one of the great failures of my life,

02:23:49.860 | that I wasn't able to act in a moment of need,

02:23:52.620 | no matter how small.

02:23:53.900 | And from that, I made a decision out of that experience

02:23:59.900 | that if I ever found myself in a situation

02:24:03.980 | where I had the ability to act,

02:24:05.780 | and I could act to help another human being in such need,

02:24:10.500 | that I would act, that I wouldn't let fear freeze me.

02:24:16.100 | Instead, I would allow that fear to catalyze me into action

02:24:21.100 | and do something and intervene in whatever way I could,

02:24:25.340 | even if I didn't have the skillset.

02:24:27.140 | - And in some ways, all of that echoes in your documentaries.

02:24:33.260 | You're not gonna let fear stop you from trying to help.

02:24:37.140 | - I think that experience, that experience of failure,

02:24:40.780 | what I framed as just human failure on my part,

02:24:45.180 | is foundational, probably, to my work.

02:24:49.300 | Like, I don't want that to happen again, Lex.

02:24:51.540 | Like, I don't want to be that person who watches.

02:24:54.900 | I want to do what I can when I can.

02:24:57.180 | - If we zoom out, you were just one human

02:25:02.660 | that witnessed that, that trauma.

02:25:05.060 | You're one human that witnessed so much suffering

02:25:09.620 | in different parts of the world.

02:25:11.500 | And as we zoom out across space and time and look at Earth,

02:25:15.700 | why do you think we're here on this Earth?

02:25:20.700 | What's the meaning of human civilization?

02:25:24.820 | What's the meaning of your life, of individual human life?

02:25:29.820 | And broadly speaking, what is the meaning of life?

02:25:33.940 | (Lex laughing)

02:25:34.780 | Sky Fitzgerald.

02:25:35.820 | - Oh boy, yeah.

02:25:37.300 | (Lex sighing)

02:25:39.800 | For me, I can speak personally on that only.

02:25:44.980 | And that's that I believe that the meaning of my life

02:25:49.100 | is to try to make the world a little bit better before I go.

02:25:52.740 | You know, I,

02:25:55.180 | when I was in theater in grad school,

02:26:00.260 | I directed a play called "Shadowlands" by C.S. Lewis.

02:26:07.320 | And there's a quote from that.

02:26:08.720 | It goes like this.

02:26:10.120 | "We are like blocks of stone

02:26:12.120 | out of which the sculptor carves the forms of men.

02:26:16.240 | The blows of his chisel, which hurt us so much,

02:26:20.160 | are what make us perfect."

02:26:21.760 | Now, I would take away the perfect part, right?

02:26:26.560 | But I think I've remembered that quote for so many years

02:26:30.640 | because I believe in the underlying notion

02:26:33.920 | that the blows of the chisel,

02:26:36.560 | which are the experiences that we go through,

02:26:38.960 | shape us, right?

02:26:40.320 | Necessarily so.

02:26:42.080 | And hopefully shape us into a better human being.

02:26:45.680 | And in my case, a human being that I hope

02:26:48.800 | can make the world a little better, you know,

02:26:51.920 | through those blows.

02:26:53.600 | - Before it's over.

02:26:54.760 | - Yeah, before it's over.

02:26:56.800 | - Before you go, as you said.

02:26:58.480 | Do you think about that?

02:27:00.000 | You think about the going part?

02:27:03.480 | Your mortality?

02:27:05.120 | You ever think about that?

02:27:06.160 | You said you don't have a death wish.

02:27:07.600 | You try to minimize risk.

02:27:09.480 | But eventually it's gonna be over.

02:27:10.840 | - Yeah, for all of us.

02:27:12.400 | Absolutely.

02:27:13.240 | - Well, speak for yourself.

02:27:14.560 | (Lex laughing)

02:27:15.600 | - Well, you've got other plans to sound like.

02:27:16.800 | - I intend to merge.

02:27:18.280 | I'm going to merge with robots.

02:27:20.400 | I mean, embody.

02:27:21.320 | - Nice.

02:27:22.480 | - Not at all.

02:27:23.400 | Yes, for all of us, unfortunately or fortunately,

02:27:26.480 | or who the heck knows.

02:27:28.480 | But do you ponder your mortality?

02:27:33.280 | Are you afraid of it?

02:27:34.480 | - I live with my mortality,

02:27:37.560 | knowing that it's fleeting,

02:27:39.880 | that my life is fleeting,

02:27:41.160 | and that I'm gonna go into the ground,

02:27:44.200 | just like everyone else,

02:27:45.200 | or maybe as ashes, you know?

02:27:47.160 | So I live with that knowledge every day,

02:27:50.320 | but I don't allow it to stop me or hold me up.

02:27:54.400 | Rather, I really, it drives me.

02:27:57.880 | Right, it drives me to try to get as much done as I can

02:28:00.680 | before I go, right?

02:28:03.000 | - Yeah, so the knowledge of your death

02:28:05.720 | is a kind of dance partner,

02:28:07.760 | and you try to dance beautifully.

02:28:09.520 | Sky, you're an incredible human,

02:28:13.120 | incredible artist and filmmaker,

02:28:15.120 | and it's a huge honor that you would sit

02:28:18.040 | and spend your really valuable time with me today.

02:28:20.920 | I really, really enjoyed this conversation.

02:28:22.400 | - I did too. - Thank you so much.

02:28:23.240 | - Thanks for having me, Lex,

02:28:24.080 | and thanks for doing what you do.

02:28:25.960 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

02:28:27.480 | with Sky Fitzgerald.

02:28:29.080 | To support this podcast,

02:28:30.440 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

02:28:33.200 | And now, let me leave you with some words from Elie Wiesel.

02:28:36.400 | The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.

02:28:41.640 | The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference.

02:28:45.800 | The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference.

02:28:49.800 | And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.

02:28:54.800 | Thank you for listening,

02:28:57.240 | and I hope to see you next time.

02:28:59.320 | (upbeat music)

02:29:01.920 | (upbeat music)

02:29:04.520 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering | Lex Fridman Podcast #278

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