I am a big believer in the power of journalism; it's a heroic pursuit.
The first night I met Yo-Yo Ma, I found him the most charming person I had ever met, and I was willing to follow him with the camera anywhere.
Everyone feels entitled to their own facts.
If we can't agree on objective truth, then how are we ever going to agree on opinions?
Non-fiction or documentaries can tell any kind of a story because they don't have to adhere to the rules of what's possible. When you're making something up, you have to say, 'Well, this is what would happen here,' but in reality, stuff happens that seems impossible.
If the Olympic Spirit is about overcoming every hurdle and accepting no limits, then I think Samsung is a great ambassador for these values.
I think, in the West, we often discount the arts as nice but not that important. Certainly in America when we cut funding for schools, the arts are the first programs to go. But the arts built the things we need more than anything else: collaboration and co-operation and creativity.
TV tends to laud the person with the perfect one-liner rather than the one with the better idea.
Now, you watch cable news, and you know what everybody's going to say before they open their mouth.
There are a handful of music docs I'd love to do, including David Bowie.
I wish I didn't care about what people thought as much as Keith Richards doesn't care.
Being a backup singer means being able to sing on a dime. Music is oozing out of their every pore.
In the late 1960s, English artists like the Rolling Stones and Joe Cocker began recording in the States, and at that point, they realised, 'We can get real African-American voices on our records; we don't have to pretend any more.'
You tend to put your rock stars on pedestals - they seem like they've been there for time immemorial. But you realize that the rock stars have their own rock stars. They were fans and kids once, too.
Docs, in general, are made in the edit bay, archival docs even more so.
How often do we make films just celebrating people that do a good job, work altruistically, and are in it just for the sake of the love and not the business?
Sometimes we have our perfect foils, or you can call them their bete noir: the person who brings out both the best and the worst in you because you disagree with them so completely. Yet, you understand and respect them enough to give it your all.
Maybe this is my left-wing conspiracy theory, but the right has re-branded itself as kind of the everyman party: Who's the person you'd rather have a beer with? The Republican Party, even though it's a party of incredible wealth and corporate interests, has hidden behind this everyman quality.
I could really sink my teeth into a David Bowie documentary.
I came up in left-wing political writing. My first job out of college was working as Gore Vidal's fact checker.
