Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Nathaniel Kahn: The Cosmos, Filmmaking, Art, Humanity, Transcendence

Episode Date: April 18, 2024

Nathaniel Kahn joins Theories of Everything to discuss his artistic journey and the existential insights sparked by his filmmaking, exploring themes of human connection to the universe, the emotional impact of his work, and the intricate relationship between life, art, and the cosmos. Please consider signing up for TOEmail at https://www.curtjaimungal.org  Support TOE: - Patreon: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal (early access to ad-free audio episodes!) - Crypto: https://tinyurl.com/cryptoTOE - PayPal: https://tinyurl.com/paypalTOE - TOE Merch: https://tinyurl.com/TOEmerch  Follow TOE: - *NEW* Get my 'Top 10 TOEs' PDF + Weekly Personal Updates: https://www.curtjaimungal.org - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theoriesofeverythingpod - TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theoriesofeverything_ - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/better-left-unsaid-with-curt-jaimungal/id1521758802 - Pandora: https://pdora.co/33b9lfP - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Subreddit r/TheoriesOfEverything: https://reddit.com/r/theoriesofeverything  

Nathaniel, there's a quote in the beginning of your film, Deep Sky, which follows the launch of the James Webb Telescope. The quote, well, I'll paraphrase it. It's something like this telescope tells us about the bigger picture of who we are and how we came to be. So I ask you, Nathaniel, who are you? And artistically speaking, yes, how did you come to be? It's a fantastic question.

Well, that's, it's way too existential for a Sunday morning. It's too tough. All that I know is... It's an existential day. It's Easter. It's the beginning of the renewal. Well, so it's spring. I think of it that way.

It's spring and everything is starting again. And I guess I would say that one of the things about the film that makes me feel somehow better about everything is to know that we're all made of stardust. So how I came to be, how we all came to be is that we are of the stars and the material that is in us, the material that makes us, the calcium in our bones and the nitrogen in our blood and the nitrogen in our blood and the oxygen that we breathe, all of these things,

the iron in our blood, all of these things came from stars. So somehow when I look up at the night sky, and I hope that people get a little of that from the film, that when you look up at the night sky and you see this beautiful sort of mysterious show of lights in the sky, you realize that we're from there. We're part of this. We're not separate from it.

So I think for me, astronomy has always been something that rather than feeling sort of alienating and distant and somehow too vast, you know, I mean, it is enormously vast and really too vast for You know, I mean, it is enormously vast and really too vast for us to comprehend in many ways, but somehow I find it also comforting to know that I am from there. We all are.

Everyone on this planet is from the stars. We're all one. And maybe that sounds Pollyanna or it sounds like Pablum, but it's not, because it's true. It's not just an emotional thing. It's a scientific fact that we are from the stars. So I guess what I would say is that, I mean, for me making this film, it was a chance to reconnect with some things that I felt as a child.

I became fascinated by astronomy when I looked through a neighbor's telescope and saw the moon and saw the rings of Saturn and that they were really there. It wasn't just a photograph. I was actually seeing it. The light from Saturn and the rings was actually coming to me through this instrument and it was hitting the back of my eye and that was real. So I was captivated by that. I'm also captivated by birds, by bird watching, by the things of nature.

And somehow being able to make a film now about these things sort of brings me full circle in a way to the wonder that I had as a child. Yeah, okay, because your interests are quite expansive. So you had a film called My Architect, which is about architecture and neurological disorder with two hands, and then Deep Sky, which is about astronomy. Those two were nominated for Academy Awards, by the way. So it's not as if this is a newfound interest of yours. You've had it since

you were a child. That's right. And just to be clear, My Architect, as much as it's about architecture, it's really about my search for my father. The fact that it's about architecture, I always find that with films, the films that I most gravitate towards are the films that aren't, it's not what it's about that is most captivating. It's somehow what is buried beneath. My architect, of course, is about architecture and is

about an architect who happened to be my father. But really, in the end, it's a search for a parent. All of us have, I think, in one way or another, all of us at one time in our life or other, want to know more about a parent, whether the parent is there or absent. In my case, my father died when I was 11 years old,

actually 50 years ago, just a few days ago, which is a very long time ago. But the film explores my journey to get to know him. Now, he was an architect, so architecture plays a large part in the film. But it's not really about architecture, it's about the search.

I would say on a certain level, deep sky as much as it's about astronomy, it's also about our desire to understand, the human desire to understand the universe and our place within it. So it's not a sort of procession of facts that I think, for the films that I like, the films that I like are not sort of stringing facts

together, you can get that in another form. I love films which are really about filmmaking, about cinema, that use the techniques of filmmaking to get at things that only films can get at, the kinds of emotions that only films can get at. So I think part of that is where you suddenly feel this sort of, you know, spine tingling feeling in a film that, gee, that's me. Or you feel this spine tingling feeling that says, wow, I feel it with the stars. Okay, you know, I feel it that we come from the stars. Not just someone's telling me that, but I feel it.

So one wants to use the techniques of filmmaking to evoke, to try to evoke anyway. I mean, that's, you know, my job is to try to evoke those things. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we don't. But the hope with Deep Sky was to use the images to evoke those kind of feelings that one realizes that this vast sort of, you know, the vast universe that's out there is really there. It's not science fiction. It actually exists out there and we can see it if we bother to go find out.

And that sort of gets at this deep piece of humanity which you as a scientist immediately of course identify with which is that we want to know. We're mystified, and we don't want to just receive the knowledge and say, oh, here's how it is. We want to go find out for ourselves. So to me, documenting the telescope being built is very much about documenting this human desire to understand the universe and our place within it. Was documenting it in IMAX important? Very, very, very much so.

Very much so. So explain to me this, because you used the word cinema earlier, and that to me is a word that people use when they valorize film. And I mean film for people who are listening. There's film in the sense that you go to watch a movie, quote unquote, but then there's film like the actual chemical film that is filmed on versus video and people like Paul T. Anderson and Quentin Tarantino and Nolan, they lament the death of film.

I want you to speak on the necessity for IMAX and then your broader thoughts on the death of film. Well, I don't think, I don't think there's any danger that there'll be a death of film. I, you know, the death of the, of the particular chemical medium, I don't think there's any danger that there'll be a death of film. The death of the particular chemical medium, I don't think there will be the death of that either. And I'm absolutely with the marvelous filmmakers that you named. I think there is a quality to film which is utterly unique.

It's ineffable. There's something about it that has the aura of something that you can't quite put your finger on, but it has a feel. And part of it is also even just the colors. When you look at, say, an old Super 8 film, and that film, much of it is so-called reversal film, right? So there is no negative. The film is the final product is the film.

You film it and the colors are the colors. There is a vibrancy to them. There's also a translation. It's not exactly reality. We have this kind of obsession now with everything being real, with the reality of everything. But any kind of film, whatever it is, it's always some kind of, there's some kind of artifice there, there's some creation there. It's not reality. It

is an interpretation of reality, a representation of reality, the same way a painter represents reality. So I think part of what we respond to in film is that there is, we're aware somewhere, it's very fundamentally aware that we're seeing a representation of reality. And there's something that, a beautiful translation that happens in there, where we're supplying details maybe that are missing. Or we're somehow doing this calculus in our head when you see a black and white film, for instance. Well, reality isn't black and white for us, it's color. Yet you see it and it has this kind of feeling that something is happening in your mind where you're translating

what you're seeing in black and white into a reality. But it's like the reality of dreams. It's somehow heightened. At its best, film becomes art. So it has the same quality that other works of art have. So I think that the filmmakers you've mentioned, they're all artists. They see film as a medium, like paint is for a painter. Try taking a certain kind of blue away for a painter. They're gonna be upset. So I think this is,

so when you talk about the death of film, I think we'll always have film as one of the great, it is a great medium. And so many, there are other mediums. We filmed, for instance, the IMAX, my IMAX film was filmed digitally. It was not filmed in IMAX film. Christopher Nolan filmed, you know,

magnificently, beautifully, Oppenheimer in IMAX film. I dream to be able to do that someday. I hope I'll be able to. But, you know, my film was done digitally. And in terms of the resolution, the resolution is there in digital medium to be able to blow it up to IMAX size. I would argue that it does miss a little bit of that really wonderful sort of mysterious transformation that happens with film. So I'm a film stock aficionado as well. But the importance for making Deep Sky in IMAX is somewhat different from the actual sort of whether it's celluloid or whether it's digital.

The part that is essential is the scale. So IMAX allows you to create, you know, to create sort of experiences that are very different from certainly very fundamentally different from how most of us experience things today, which is the way you and I are doing it right now. I mean, I'm on a smartphone and I feel that I'm there with you and we're together, but when you, and it's fine for this kind of interaction, it's good. But when you talk about trying to represent

or somehow experience the feeling of these vast cosmic spaces, to put that on a smartphone of these vast cosmic spaces, to put that on a smartphone, is you're robbing audiences of this kind of awe-inspiring wonderment. And also, I would argue, getting closer to the actual experience of what's really out there, it has to be big. So the IMAX format, it does something really interesting, which is it's big enough that you, the audience member, can choose where to look on the screen.

So you're not just focused right dead ahead. So much of filmmaking is, we use shots, whether it's a wide shot or a close shot or a medium shot or a panning shot or a push-in, whatever it is, to somehow focus the audience's attention at something very specific. Someone's eyes and emotion, some little squiver of the lips, which is, you know, that's the soul of cinema.

Look at Ingmar Bergman's films. It's all about, I mean, a lot of it's about the human face. But for something like, you know, a vast nebula in the middle of space or a vast galaxy, it's actually better to have it be so big on the screen that you can choose where to look. Your eyes are actually not being focused on one thing. You're actually surrounded by it. So it envelops you. And that doesn't work for a lot of things. It wouldn't work for intimate sort of cinema of sort of very tight emotional things between human beings, which is the soul of a lot of great cinema.

But in this case, it made much more sense to create an immersive experience where you could look around and kind of feel it. It does something else too, which is that the images that have come back from the telescope are so extraordinary and the resolution of them is so, you know, is really incredible. You can blow them up really big and they don't pixelate. But there aren't that many of them. You want to honor them. They're like, you know, great cosmic tapestries. And we had, I mean, there will be more and more of them as time goes by, but when we made the film there weren't that many of them. So we sort of created the story around these sort of iconic hero images if you will and we were able

to because of IMAX linger on them longer than you would in you know a film that was say made strictly for television in which people expect faster cutting and they get bored, they can't look at something for a long time. We can't because you can't look around so much. It's like, okay, next, next. But with an IMAX thing, you can sit on an image and you see people in the theater exploring it.

Right. There's one image, but it's so large, it's as if there's several different focal points. That's it exactly. And you don't want to say there's one focal point. There are moments when we draw attention when somebody says look at this, you know John Mathers says look at this little hook here in the cosmic cliffs image. That's super interesting and I never thought about it like that before.

I watched Dune recently, I watched it in 70 millimeters. Yeah, sure. I had not a great seat. It was quite close up. That's another problem, yeah. Right, so for the first 10 minutes or so, it's a bit jarring, but afterward, it's like you're watching four different images

because you can only capture a quarter of the screen at any point, and so it had its advantages. No, that's wonderful. That's one of the few advantages of having a bad seat is sometimes it can't. If it's a big format film, if it's a small format film, bad seats are just bad seats. But with a big format film, suddenly you're seeing different things. There's another huge... Go ahead. Yeah, tell me about a film that you watched recently that many people wouldn't know about, but it struck a chord with you.

Oh my gosh. Let's see something I've watched recently. Well I rewatched. I mean, are old films okay with this? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Igmar Bergman? Yeah, another Bergman film.

Yeah, yeah, yes. Well I watched Versona again recently, and I've seen the film many times. But I'm just astonished by how he's able to create this incredible sense of tension and foreboding, and this feeling that something is going to happen with just two people on an island. It's so fundamental, so simple,

and there's a sequence in it which involves a broken piece of glass. And the sequence is, B.B. Anderson is waiting for, Liv Ullman has decided she's made a decision not to speak. And B.B. Anderson is her nurse. And the nurse, of course, they have this kind of relationship that is constantly sort of

shifting who's in charge, who has the power. And Liv Ullman, this silent actress who was famous, you know, and is being taken care of by this nurse on a remote island, you feel she's in charge, she has power. And this becomes something that is very upsetting to B.B. Anderson. She feels manipulated and used. And at one point, Liv Ullman reads a letter that B.B. Anderson has written, and there's this kind of, or I think it's a diary, and there's this kind of confessional feeling. And then Liv Ullman is written about the nurse.

And so the nurse feels very compromised, suddenly like she's being seen in a way and judged by this famous person. And there's a broken piece of glass, a glass breaks and there's a broken piece of glass on the patio. And B.B. Anderson just sits there, it's a sunny day, she has a hat on,

and she just watches as Lee Volman walks back and forth and almost hits the glass. And the tension, you feel like, when is she going to step on this glass? And she steps on the glass and she finally makes a sound. She makes a sound. And suddenly the power starts to shift in this scene. So you watch something like that and you realize well, okay, that's cinema That's in yeah, that's cinema

It's also difficult to write the scene with plenty of tension when there's not much going on So it's easy when there's action or the threat of violence Well, that's about to say it's a counterexample to what I was about to say is that in Inglorious Basterds the opening ten minutes or so That's one of the most tense opening 10 minutes or so, that's one of the most tense pieces of cinema or of film that I've ever seen. But there is the threat of violence though. Oh, absolutely. Well, Tarantino, of course, I mean, you know, part of what I love so much about his filmmaking

is he makes films within films, and they're very, very long sequences. You know, he's willing to commit to a long sequence like that. I mean, I think it's at least 10 minutes, right? It's at least 10 minutes, maybe even more. But you have the farmer there and he's got his three daughters and you begin to realize that there are people in the basement hiding, Jews that are hiding underneath the floorboards. And Christoph Waltz is just, you know, the tension between the farmer and the hunter, Christoph Waltz, is so, you're absolutely right, the tension is so palpable and so somehow

in tragedy you can't look away. You don't want the scene to keep going, but you can't look away. And so that's, you know, in fact, they're related. What happens in that scene and what happens in the scene in persona are profoundly related. And that's something that I mean, I think that, you know, great artists are able to create this, this kind of trance in the audience where you are, you are somehow you're stuck in this narrative inexorable movement of time. And that's something that, I mean, to me, you know, the best cinema is cinema that gives you the experience of time, what time is actually sort of made of, human time in any way.

And in a great film, you know, you have the feeling, you look at, you know, Seven Samurai or something like that, you know, it's a long film. Three and a half hours nearly, nearly four hours. But when you finish watching it, you feel like you've lived, you know, months with these people and you come on, you say, how did that happen? How did, how did, how did Kurosawa do that? How did he give me the feeling, right? That I've lived for months, even though it's been four hours.

Yeah, it's much easier to do that in television, but it's extremely difficult to do that in film. Well, I agree with you in a way, but I think that one of the things that's happened in television that's kind of, it's both wonderful and also maybe sometimes a little deceptive, is that it's true that long-form television allows us to create much more nuanced relationships and to slow things down,

and to have more of the cliffhangers and all those things, and they're wonderful. But then I also feel a lot of times things are extended artificially, and it's manipulative in a way that actually is like, it almost becomes like real time. So you're just kind of waiting for it to happen. Whereas I feel in a great film, it does something else, which is, and I think this is very important, which is that a cinema, the theater itself,

and that's the thing that will never die. Mediums will change, but the cinema, the place we go to, which to me is a temple, it is a sacred space when we go to a cinema, even the ones that are designed poorly. I mean, I'm an architect's son, so I like beautifully designed spaces or things that I consider to be beautifully designed. But you go to the cinema and you're sitting there with other human beings and we're collectively experiencing a dream.

We're agreeing to collectively go through and experience together with people we don't know. Maybe you go with somebody you know, but there are lots of people around you you don't know. And these collective experiences, that's like a fundamental, we're fundamentally touching our humaneness when we're sitting in the dark watching dreams play out on the screen. That is something absolutely, there's something very, very deep about that. And

I do think that part of what a great film does for you is that you feel you've gone through something together with these other people. Not by yourself in the room, you know? But there's a collective experience, a collective gasp. You know, when you first see the shark in Jaws, or, you know, I mean, of course it happens in movies like that, but there's a collective gasp when Liv Oman steps on the piece of glass.

People gasp. There's a collective gasp when you realize that Christoph Waltz knows that there are people under the floorboards. Just suspects it enough to ask the right questions. You know, those experiences that happen together, you don't get by yourself sitting with your surround, you know, theater and as much as we think that's just the height of luxury and the height of, you know, whatever it is,

there's something that the humanness of it, it can often be lacking. And I think that's also in the longer form television things that are very extended. I, you know, I, for me, there's nothing like a movie. In which you go in and you're going to be inexorably, you can't turn it off. You can't stop the process of time. You can't stop the process of time.

And in that sense it's like the universe. We can't stop the earth from spinning. We can't stop the earth from orbiting. We'll never be able to do that. So I'm a horrible person to watch TV or movies with at home, because I pause all the time. Why did that person say that? Wait, who is that person? Sure, sure, sure.

And my wife, she cannot stand it. But I love pausing it. I love discussing it. But in the cinema, it's in the theater, it's a different experience. You have to stay focused. Yes, you must stay focused and you must also, you're absolutely right, and you must stay focused but you must also accept that time goes on and that you can't stop it. And I think that that's one of the things about great films that, not manipulative ones,

that just kind of play with you for two hours and then let you go. You just feel wrung out at the end, but you don't really get any sort of transformation. But a really great film when you watch it, you feel you've been through something, that you know, you feel like you're changed when you come out. And part of that is that you can't stop it. That it is inexorably, even if you know what's gonna happen, even if you know that the character is doomed, somehow going through it, I mean, it's the Greek idea of catharsis, right? That we need to experience these things together. The Greeks know perfectly well how the play Medea ends.

It's not good. It's not good. Right. We know how Titanic ends. Exactly. We know how Titanic ends. Exactly. We know how Titanic ends. The ship's going to go down. But that's, but, but going through that, there is a, there is a catharsis. Part of that experience is like, and that's why you want to watch the film again and again. You know what's going to happen, yet going through it is something that you crave repeatedly. That's interesting.

It's remarkable that the theaters have survived COVID. Now they've shrunk and like many have closed, but it's remarkable that there are any at all. And they're suffering though. Barbenheimer was great for them. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. No, I mean, but I think that just goes to show people crave that collective experience.

We need that collective experience. We can't do without it. You know, we've got to have it. And I think that so that will never die. I mean, it goes back to Plato's myth of the cave. I don't know if you've read that, but you know, right. So, I mean, it's sort of this idea that people are together watching these shadows on the wall and it's entrancing. We can't, you know, We can't get enough of it. So I think that, and as in the myth of the cave, the relationship between those shadows on the wall and reality is very interesting.

It reminds us that there's a difference between representation and reality. And those two things, and those are things I wanted to play with in deep sky, in the sense that here are these images that come back from the telescope that are of these vast cosmic places that we truly can't comprehend. But we're able to get a little feeling of them from these images and somehow when you get that feeling, it's something that, you know, it tingles your spine a little bit

and you know you're just grasping a tiny piece of it, but you feel like you're onto something and it makes you wanna go back again and see them again or somehow go out under the night sky and realize the way it changes your consciousness that now we know that every single star in the sky, virtually every star, has at least one planet around it. That's not something we knew 20 years ago.

So when I was growing up, you know, the idea that we knew that we knew that at that point nine planets in our solar system, now there are only eight because they demoted Pluto, but you know, eight planets in our solar system, those were are only eight because they demoted Pluto. But, you know, eight planets in our solar system, those were the only planets that we knew existed in the entire universe. People postulated that there must be other planets around stars, but we didn't know. Only through building telescopes, like the Kepler Space Telescope

and now JWST, the Hubble Space Telescope, and ground-based telescopes too, we've actually found that there their planets surround virtually every star. So when you go out at night, think about that. When you look up at the stars, every one of those stars is another star system. You know, it really, it makes you sort of feel both our uniqueness, but also that we're not so special, right? So our solar system is like many other solar systems.

So why would it be then that looking at the stars provides significance? Because it seems like in some ways it can provide significance, but in order for us to feel like there's something consequential about us being made of star dust, we would have to first value the stars. It's not clear to me why we would value the stars. Outside of it's just a holdover from our religious ancestors, outside of some explanation like that. Like rationally speaking, why should we value the stars?

So that's one question. And then second, why would it be that rather than imbuing us with something that makes us larger than life, it makes us smaller? Because there's so many of them. Why doesn't it makes us smaller, because there's so many of them. Why doesn't it make us feel insignificant? Well, it's sort of a combination, isn't it? Because the idea that every star has other planets around it could tend to make you feel

insignificant. You're right. Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that we now know that there are planets around virtually every star, we still only know of one place in the entire universe where there's life. So there is a great significance to that. It's hugely significant. It's everything that we know. So it's this kind of duality of significance, insignificance that I think, you know, hopefully a film like Deep

Sky begins to touch on. That we are everything and we're nothing. And, you know, how can those two things coexist? Well, I don't know, but they do. They do. They do coexist. And it's okay. As John Mather, the Nobel laureate who's in the film says, and he was the director for much of the mission, he actually won the Nobel Prize for proving that the Big Bang really happened. You know, it's a fascinating person. But when he says, we are recycled, you know, and then he says, it's okay. It's okay.

There's something extraordinarily moving about that for a scientist to recognize that the fact that, you know, dust to dust, that we are made of stardust and we return to stardust and you know, the earth forms and then eventually the sun engulfs the earth and you know, the earth is gone. Hopefully by that point, we've gotten our act together enough that maybe we'll be able to go to the stars. I don't know. But the idea somehow that we are from stardust and we return and we recycle and that it's okay.

And a scientist is understanding not just the facts of it, but also the emotional component of it. That he says it's okay. There's something to me that's very, very beautiful and very comforting about that. So we're both everything, we're both significant and insignificant in the universe. And I think that, you know, we live in a time

when sort of contradictions like that or dualities, you know, we tend not to like those things. We want everything to be good or bad or this way or that way. But so much of life is not like that at all. Most of life is, it's this and it's that. It's two things at once. You know, I mean, you look at Shakespeare, arguably, you know, the greatest writer in

the English language anyway. You know, all of his plays, the characters are continuously wrestling with what is and what isn't, and something could be this and it could be that. You know, to be or not to be. It's always this duality, nothing is, but what is not, he says, you know.

So there's always this sort of, you know, it has this kind of quality of, it's okay to have... The reality is multiple things. It's not just one thing. Could we say that it's okay, but then it's also it's not okay? Like, in playing with this duality. Sure, yeah. I think it's okay and it's not okay.

I think that's true. But it's okay, it's not okay, but in the end, that's okay. Yeah, your base has to be that's okay. But that's in order for you to have some inner peace, which may be an article of faith that I think needs to be there in order for you to keep yourself sane. Yeah, no, but I think we have a lot of trouble with that right now in our sort of current discourse. We have trouble with the idea of ambiguity, with something being complex.

And I'm not really sure why we have, that's an interesting thing, I'm not sure why we have that. But you look at politics, it's all one way or all the other way, but to get things done in the world, one constantly has to negotiate, one has to have a conversation. We have to be able to talk about things and disagree and then find some way to, you know,

that we can all coexist. Because the alternative is disaster, you know. I mean, one thing I love about science is scientists to be any good have to be willing to be wrong. They have to be willing to be wrong and they have to accept the idea that experiment and observation has shown them to be wrong and shown something else to be true. And that's essential for every scientist that you have to be able to say, look, I have ideas about things, I have notions about things, I think it might be this way,

but I must design an experiment which I can do, and I'll look at the data and see what the data says, and then other people have to be able to do the same experiment and get a similar result. Yeah. What would the filmmakers version of being wrong be? The filmmaker's version of being wrong? Oh gosh, that's... I mean, in art, it's very hard.

You know, rules are made to be broken in art. So I don't think that, I mean, I think that film isn't really, it doesn't feel to me that it's about right and wrong so much, but it is about inventiveness, innovation, freshness, newness. How about this? What would make Nathaniel feel like what you did was a success versus Nathaniel is in sorrow because of the failure.

I'm always seeing the way things fail. Always, always. The despair. I look at films I've done in the past and I see things I would have liked to have done differently, but that was then, you know, and I keep going. So I mean, I'm always thinking about the new thing. The failure would be not to keep going. The failure is not to start all over again.

The failure is to lose heart or to stop coming up with ideas. You know, I think that, I think that's the, you know, actually failure, to be honest, it's to have an idea that you really want to do and fight that you can't get enough money to do it. That's really upsetting. That's great, that's honest. I like that. I think most filmmakers out there would would agree that failure is not being able to move forward and filming film is as much as it's a to do certain things you do need

money there there are certainly films you can make without money and and and they're marvelous talk about that process how does one as a filmmaker go about raising money or acquiring funding well I mean lots of people have many people do it different ways I mean there you you can get grants, isn't it? I mean, there are people who work within a studio system. There are people who, you know, people who are able to continue to make movies because they have a certain level of reputation and people will bank on them. But even people at the top of their profession will tell you, finding the money is always

a one-off. It's always, how am I going to find the money this time? So I think- Even Charlie Kaufman. So Charlie Kaufman to me is one of the greatest writers. And he still has some struggles in that regard. Oh, absolutely. Major, major struggles.

But artists always do. He's, I mean, he's an original. His art is completely original and he's not gonna repeat himself. He wants to try something new. So, you know, in the film that I made, The Price of Everything, which is about the art world, one of the main people in it is an artist named Larry Poonz and Larry is still around, thank goodness,

and still making art in his own way. But in the film, we learn the story that in the 60s, he was very successful along with a number of other artists whose names you know very much, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, and a number of very popular artists. Larry was doing a particular kind of painting at the time, which was composed of a color field with dots on it.

And the dots were very carefully orchestrated there. Their organization wasn't random at all. They're very beautiful and they're mathematical. You would immediately appreciate their sort of order. There's an order to them, but you can't immediately see it. It's not like it's a simple pattern They're complex in order for you to see them. You have to step back Sort of both, you know, you you sort of step back and you perceive the hole But then you get closer and you see that there's some some some occasionally are patterns

But then they're not they just have a kind of a they vibrate There's like this vibrating quality of spatial is something in front of it. Is it behind there? They're quite they're're really entrancing. And they were very popular. He made quite a number of them. They sold well, they went to auction, everything else. And then he started to change his style. And to call it style isn't really fair.

He started exploring different forms. He kind of moved away from the dots. First they were sort of ovals, then he moved away from them dots. First they were sort of ovals, then he moved away from them entirely, became something different. And he was told by his dealer, you know, what are you doing? You're the guy who makes the dots. And he's like, well, no, I'm not the guy who makes the dots. I'm a painter. I'm a person. I'm evolving. I'm making something new. And so he actually, you know, spent,

I mean, he's always been part of the dialogue, but people wanted the dot paintings. And he started doing something different. Now he's sort of back with, you know, many, many years later with a whole new set of paintings, which are marvelous and beautiful. And we represent that in the film. But to see his story, that this,

he had to have enormous courage to say, I'm not doing those things I was doing before anymore. You may like them, that's great, I'm glad, but here's what I'm doing now. As an artist, you have to follow those things. And I think filmmakers who are artists are constantly wanting to explore something new. And that's scary for the marketplace

because the marketplace likes what worked last time. I mean, it's real simple. It's like marketing 101 versus art 101. Marketing 101 is if you find something that works, keep doing it. Art 101 is if you find something that works, do it for a while and then do something new Yes, yeah, because an artist has to evolve to survive

And that's an interesting thing and I think it's something that that Perhaps is misunderstood But that an artist I mean you look at you look at the films of any any, you know You look at Scorsese's movies, he's constantly trying something entirely new, not just new stories, new techniques, whole new ways of making films, you know, whole new ways of telling stories, right? So whether it's mixing up time

or it's using different kinds of effects or it's telling a story in a reverse order, or it's playing a story in a reverse order or it's playing around with the actual techniques of story, of filmic storytelling. Editorial techniques, cutting more quickly, cutting more slowly, those sorts of things. I used to be a huge fan of Wes Anderson. I've watched so many of his movies that I feel like he's become a character of himself in my opinion. It's the same exact style just doubled down on in each film. I'm a huge Wes Anderson fan. I love his movies and to me his

stylistic, his style, I think he's actually changing it all the time. Oh, okay. Quite a lot. Great, great. And, yeah, so I think you should see the latest one, his short that he just did. I don't know if you've seen it. Yeah, I haven't seen this last two. So maybe my opinion would change if I were to watch them. I'll give them another chance. No, he's a marvelous filmmaker.

Royal Tenenbaums is still one of my favorite films of all time. Yeah, and I like Bottle Rocket, it's the earliest one. Sure. It's fantastic. Now we're sounding like we're Larry Poonz with the dots. I love Bottle Rocket too, but this last film that he made I think is terrific. What was the one, Mr. Fantastic Fox or Fantastic Mr. Fox or something like that? That one was also great.

This is a filmmaker who's trying many different techniques, always experimenting with new ways of storytelling. And you see the great actors who wanna work with him. So, you know, a director is really special when great actors wanna work with them. There's a phrase that good artists copy, great artists steal. So let's speak about Nathaniel. What's a film?

Like, tell me about a film that you haven't stolen from, but you would like to because it's so great. There's something there that you want to take and incorporate into your next one? I wouldn't dare say the films that I aspire to because they're too great. So all that I can tell you is the directors that I return to again and again, you know, I return to Kurosawa again and again. I return to Bergman again and again.

You know, I- Explain to me how they've influenced your documentary filmmaking, because those are narrative films. Okay, I'll tell you. Well, let me be specific about Prousawa. So, there's a sequence in Seven Samurai where Toshiro Mifune, I know you know the film, but Toshiro Mifune who is, you know, he's not really a samurai. He wants to be a samurai, but everybody loves this guy. And then he sort of poses himself as a samurai,

but you don't really know his backstory. You really don't know who he is or where he came from. He's clearly not a great swordsman like some of them, but you couldn't live without him because he boosts the morale of everybody. He's, I mean, of course he's such a great actor, but you know, and Kurosawa uses him as the great actor that he is, you know, to great effect. But there's a sequence where they're defending the village, the village of farmers, from the bandits. And the bandits are

coming through and trying to steal the food, and the samurai have now taught the village of farmers from the bandits. And the bandits are coming through and trying to steal the food. And the samurai have now taught the village how to defend itself. And the village has defended and the bandits are coming and all of the farmers withdraw into the, you know, into the protected area of the village. And Mifune is there and the other samurai are there and they're getting the farmers to hold, you know, hold the line. and Mifune is there and the other samurai are there and they're getting the farmers to hold, you know, hold the line and the bandits set

an outlying house on fire and it's an outlying house of one of the farmers that they weren't able to protect because it was outside of the area that they could protect and Toshiro Mifune and the the bandits kind of ride away after setting this house on fire. Sort of it's a mill. And Mifune becomes extremely upset, sort of almost irrationally. And he runs outside the protected area to this hut that's burning. And one of the great, the sort of head samurai follows him

and is angry at him for leaving his post. And Mifune runs to this burning mill and they knew that there was an old man there and a mother and a father and a child. And Mifune runs towards this burning mill and the mother comes out holding the baby. The mother hands the baby to Mifune and then she collapses into the arms of the other samurai

who's followed Mifune angrily and they realize that she's been speared by the bandits. She's dead and Mifune is holding this child in his arms and The head samurai says come on. We got to go. Let's get back to the village We have to go and Mifune falls in the water, falls in the stream, holding this baby clutched to himself. And he says, this was me. This is my story. I was this little baby.

And you realize at that moment that he was a farmer's child. He's not a samurai. He wasn't born to this noble sort of tradition of the samurai. He's a farmer's child. And he was orphaned because the bandits were killing his village. In that moment, and that's all you get, wiped to another scene. But you realize in that moment who this person is. It's a revelation that happens in the midst of

this enormous epic of feudal period Japan. It's as great as any Western. Of course, Kurosawa learned a lot from John Ford. And then it bounces back from John Ford to Kurosawa, and Kurosawa goes back to George Lucas and Star Wars. But that's a moment that's so precise, Kurosawa doesn't make the whole film about Mifune's backstory. It's just that one moment.

So, not to compare them, they're not comparable, but there's a moment in my architect, there's a moment in my architect which resonates for me with a moment like that. I'm not equating them, but it resonates. And the resonance is there's a scene where I go to visit a guy on a boat. My father built one boat. It was a concert barge that pulls up the little towns and opens up and they play a concert.

And the guy who commissioned my dad to build the boat and also the conductor of the orchestra, I go to see him in the film. And he's the only person in the whole film that I was able to go without telling him that I was the architect's son. So he didn't know who I was. And we're filming it.

So we're filming it and he's being kind of a jerk to me. I mean, I'm like trying to talk to him about the architect. He's like, yeah, yeah, I got a concert kid. And he's really kind of blowing me off, right? And he blows the horn and it was too loud. There's a funny little sequence with me kind of running away from the horn. I didn't realize it was gonna get blown right in my ears.

And I mean, he's really treating me badly. And so then he says, listen, I gotta go to play this concert now. I can't talk to you anymore. And I say to him, well, do you know why I came today? And he's like, yeah, yeah, sure. You're making a movie about Louis Kahn, the architect, you know, and this is, he designed this boat

and you know, go around, film it, that's nice, you know. And I said, well, no, I'm here because I'm his son. And suddenly the guy just collapses and he bursts into tears. And he gives me a hug, you know, and he realizes sort of, and then he says, I saw you at the funeral when you were a little boy. And if, for those of you who've seen the film, my parents weren't married and I was kind of a hidden child, you know, so I was at my father's funeral, but I was very much not part of the proceedings. My mother and I were not part of it.

But this man saw me years ago when I was a little boy, and he remembered always that. And suddenly in that moment, his humanity, his compassion for me, for the little boy that was me, all comes out. And then he says, I gotta go play a concert and he walks away. I mean, it's like this moment of clarity

that then moves on. And we don't dwell on it. It's not some big maudlin discussion and all this stuff. It's just this moment of emotion and of revelation. And to me, that's the way life is. You don't get to endlessly sort of take the thing apart and somehow the movies that I admire most, like this moment in Kurosawa,

know how to give you the deep humanity in this kind of momentary shock that just blasts right to your soul. So I look for those moments, for the moments when someone, whether it's an actor or it's a person you're interviewing, where someone is talking about one thing and suddenly something else entirely burst through,

something that is deep within them comes out. So in the midst of all this action, which is life, suddenly the soul shines through. To me, those are the moments that just are transcendent in filmmaking and different from other arts. You know, I don't see that in painting so much or sculpture or something like that, but film, and you see it in the theater, of course, very much as well. But the way it reveals itself in the theater is often more verbal. It can be gesture, too, but in the cinema, in great films, many times it's gesture. It's a tiny shift in an eye or somebody somehow pauses and I can't explain it, but people

in the audience cry or they laugh. So those are these things that you can't really, in scripted cinema, you try to create those things. I mean, you do, absolutely, but they don't always work. And many times, you improvise something and it's better when you improvise it. It's better when you sort of creep up on it. Or it's amazing, amazing how you can film a scene and you think that,

and this happens in documentary films all the time, you film the conversation with somebody and you get back and you feel like, you know, nothing happened. This really was kind of boring, but they just weren't very interesting. Yeah, you're referring to your impression after you just filmed. Sure.

Like you're going now to look at the dailies. Yeah, now sometimes you know, sometimes you know, you're in the moment, you're like, oh my god, this is like home run. Like I knew at the end of my architect, the conversation I had with the man in Dhaka, Bangladesh, I knew this is like, this is, you know, transcendent. It's magnificent. And he brought everything together in his emotion and his words, everything, everything was right there. The end of the film was right there. I was so happy, you know. But there are other times when you film something and you really think, geez, I didn't get anything.

This was like not very revealing. And then you look on the editing table and if you have a good camera person that you're working with, that's essential. Oh, right, yeah, geez. That's completely, and I'm blessed with being able to work with. You don't want to miss a moment, yeah.

Yeah, with Bob Richmond, who's one of the very best and another cinematographer. I worked with, with Bob Richmond, who's one of the very best, and another cinematographer, I worked with Claudia Reschka, who's brilliant. And in working with Bob, I know that if something happened, he... He would have been attuned to it and picked it up. Chances are. Now sometimes, that's surprising too,

but then I also have a marvelous editor. I worked with the editor Sabina Kreimdahl many times in my films. And when we're looking together, we'll look at shots and we have a similar, suddenly we both have a tear in our eye and it was like, oh yeah, that's a good moment. And oftentimes it's something you didn't think you got. You did an interview and you didn't realize quite how much emotion was actually there. And then, of course, the job in a documentary film is to try to create a whole scene around that.

So, you know, when we're talking about something like, you know, Inglourious Basterds with that scene, it's highly orchestrated. I mean, each shot is clearly very worked out in those first 10 minutes. I would assume I never talked to Mr. Tarantino about it, but I'm assuming he had pretty clearly what shots he wanted. But, you know, so I think he knew exactly what he wanted to build. But in documentary filmmaking, so many times you'll find a moment where the, which is the emotional pivot of the scene. And then you cut everything somehow around that to, you know, to highlight that

and to make it land. So you might have to build a, you know, a significant ramp to get into it and then you might have to get out of it in a certain way to make it work. And it's not, it's really, it's like, well, it's panning for gold, you know, you know, you find a nugget and then you're like, Ooh, this is good, you know, and, and, uh, it's panning for gold, you know. You find a nugget and then you're like, ooh, this is good, you know. And what's the ratio between the footage that you filmed and then what actually gets released for some of your films? I mean, it changes.

Yeah, no, different films. I mean, with My Architect, it was 100 to 1. Wow. Holy moly. Yeah, it was a lot. For those people who are listening who don't know what we just said, 100 hours need to be filmed in order for there to be one hour of footage on screen. Yeah.

But that had even said, I do want to be sort of clear that there were things that I filmed that I was, you know, that I kind of knew as I was doing it that this won't work. But you never know. I mean, like, it most likely wouldn't work. Who knows what Sabrina or the editor would think. And yeah, so you have to still capture it anyhow. Exactly. And part of that, you see, because that was a journey film, and I wanted to sort of really cast a very wide net,

I wanted to film a lot more than I would use. Because I wanted to really kind of to film, you know, a lot, just a lot of things because part of it was my journey. I wanted to hear what people had to say, you know. So that was about 100 to one, but also we gathered a lot of material that had already been shot, you know, archival material and things like that.

So I'm counting that as well. I'm counting that as well as part of that. It wasn't just the filming ratio. With something like the price of everything, that's probably more like maybe 25 to one, something like that. Yeah, that sounds reasonable. With Deep Sky, much less, much less, much less, much less.

Why do you think that is? Well, the planning was better, or the writing was different. And also please explain, what does it mean to write a documentary? People will see you have a writing credit. How can that work? Sure. Well, you know, with a film like My Architect,

it's a lot of this material and then one is working for, you know, over a year, year and a half, I think we worked in the editing room, crafting that, creating it, creating it, making it. So there is narration that's written, that is over it, but I don't consider that film to be a written film. That's very much a film that is sort of discovered through the process of making it,

which is really what's so wonderful because so much of filmmaking is editing. I mean, editing is like, you know, it's... I don't want to say anything that's the soul of filmmaking, but on a certain level, it's the soul of filmmaking, because editing is like the great innovation in a way that you can understand that the car pulls up to the house and the next scene is in the house.

We understand that the person got out of the car, went to the door, knocked on the door, came in and sat down. We don't have to show all that. We can just cut it out. And so editing allows you to create these disjunctions in time that are extraordinary or disjunctions in point of view, you know, that we can go from a close up to something wide or, you know, that we, those things are you know that's phenomenal and so much of actual Documentary filmmaking in the verite style which is you know this so-called cinema verite this you know

It's direct cinema the the dream was you're capturing life And I don't believe that because it's it's always there's always an artifice associated with there's always a created reality It's not like it is reality, it's a created reality. But it's filmed without a script. You're not going saying, I want this person to say this or this sort of thing. And then you create, and you find the story to some degree. Something like Deep Sky was different because,

first of all, it's 40 minutes. So it needed to be a compressed experience. So it needed to find ways to compress itself, to tell a lot in a short period of time. Second of all, because of the IMAX world of it and realizing we wanted to present those images, that the images had to be the kind of the centerpiece of it. We wanted to create, it needed to tell a story with those images.

And really in order to do that, and I also wanted it to be a pretty broad story, to be as much of the story of kind of the universe, if you will, that we could put into 40 minutes, while still having a little bit about building this telescope. So building a telescope to set the stakes and then using the images. You know, part one, the stakes, the mission, how hard it was to build this thing.

Then there's the launch at about 11 minutes into the film. And then the back part of the film is the telescope unfolds and these images come back. And I wanted to use as many of those images as I could to kind of tell our universe story. To do that, I certainly interviewed great scientists and they have beautiful things to say about those images, but it needed an overarching sort of story, an overarching sort of sense of the grandeur of this endeavor and the humanity of it.

So I knew I needed a great actor to narrate it. And that's where, so I did write the story and then asked the great Michelle Williams to narrate it. And her narration is magnificent and tells the story in this incredibly, somehow emotional, accessible human way. She's not presenting it as a set of facts. Or so many times, especially in science films, one kind of gets this voice of God thing

where the narrator is telling you the facts and this is the way it is. We didn't want that so you know Michelle and I talked about how we wanted to have it be that the person who was narrating it was also experiencing it along with the audience not inform not informing the audience that's super interesting explain to the audience what would be the difference between directing it for the I'm telling you version versus the emotional, the voiceover artist is coming along with the journey, discovering it with you. Like, explain to me the difference in direction and then maybe you can articulate one.

Well, maybe. I mean, it's a little, okay. Let me try to do that. I mean, I think that the major, it's different in the way that it's written. So it isn't written as a sort of authoritative, it's not written in the authoritative voice. It's written in a voice of discovery. It's written in a voice of sort of finding it as it goes along, right? It's going, the voice is going along on the journey just as much as we are.

The voice doesn't, the person behind this voice doesn't know everything already, they're finding it too. They're experiencing the emotions of what is, um, you know, what is being discovered. So an example would be, and I love Michelle's reading of this line where she talks about that, that, you know, back to stardust, where she says that the stars are made of this material, the planets are made of this material, of stardust. And then she says, and us too are made of this stardust. The way she says us too, it has this quality of reaching through the screen and saying you, you, us, collectively, you know, me reading this, me telling you the story and you out

there, all of us, all of us. So that was a difference in her intonation and not a difference in script? I think it's combination. It's a combination, but very much it's about acting. It's about knowing how, I mean, when we say acting, it's about emotional connectedness to the material. That the actor is completely in sync with what they're saying. They're not saying words.

They're not using language to convey simply facts. They're using language, intonation, words, pauses to convey story and feelings. So it's what actors do. It's what a great actor does. They take you along on the journey, but they also know how to slow down so that it has, so that it, so things land. So they're not just, you know, because we can all take in facts pretty fast, but emotions take time. Yeah.

You have to allow something to land, you know? And now we're into, we're basically into music. We're into rhythm. We're into the idea that you have to allow something to sit. And now we're sort of back to IMAX. One of the great things about working at IMAX was we could linger on images immediately shift to something new. Because the format sort of, I mean, it not only allows it, it kind of demands it. Because your eyes simply, you can't take it in if it's shifting too quickly. You know, you need to slow down. So all of those things had to be in sync.

The rhythm of the narration, the rhythm of the cutting, that all of those things had to sort of work together to make it a story that worked. And to have the narration be part of the picture, not overlaid on top of it. It's in the picture. Yeah. In the story.

Tell me about another insight of yours that changed the way that you create film. So I'll give you an example from the physics side. There's a science writer named Amanda Gefter. She would say that, look, I have a philosophy background and I went to study physics afterward and there's so many disconnected facts, but something that crystallized it all for me early on that made the rest easier to learn was that something is only real if it's invariant in every reference frame. Okay, just carrying that in her pocket helped her contextualize other facts. Now, obviously in art, it's not the same as let me remember facts and recall them, restate them.

But tell me about an insight that you have or that you had that shaped the way that you create film. An insight. Tell me a little bit more about the insight that you were talking about. Give me an example, another example from like from from science or something like that. I'll explain for me for filmmaking. I found that the dialogue was much more easier to be natural. So in the fiction film that I made, the feature from fiction film, when it was just bullet pointed out rather than scripted out and the specific words or specific phrases could be scripted out, but rather we're improvising a bit off of an outline and it created much

more natural dialogue. Sure. So that's a small example, but you're a much more seasoned filmmaker. So I'm sure you have a more emotional or meaningful insight. No, no, I don't. I think your insight. I think, I think your insight is brilliant. I think you're absolutely right. Did some of the best, um, some of the very best films. I mean, you look at the films of, of, um, you know, the Italian near realist films. So here's another one. When you first, at least for me, when I first start filmmaking, you shoot everything.

You shoot someone walking for no reason. Like you mentioned earlier, they enter the door. That's like the standard student filmmaker mistake. Sure. Just the insight that every single shot needs to be there for a reason. Oh, especially the opening shot, especially the opening shot, but every single shot and even shot movement. Like I want to plan the movement.

This applies in the narrative case. In the documentary case, it's so much more fluid and the editor is much more involved. That stuck with me and I planned out what's going to be in frame. What's going to recede from the distance, from what side, the visuals of the film were there before I started filming. Each frame in I'm okay, my feature film was deliberate. If someone's on the left versus the right, it matters.

If a shot was a certain duration, it matters to the symbolism, character names, et cetera. And so that stuck with me. OK, so what about for you? What's something that you learned fairly early on? You're happy that you learned it because it helped you out so much, and it's not something that's obvious to everyone else. It's a great question and I won't pull something from narrative film, I'll pull something from

documentary filmmaking and it's something that Bob Richmond taught me, the cinematographer, like the very first day. And he said, learn to shut up. And I think it's the single most important in documentary filmmaking. People go in with their list of questions. I was supposed to ask you this and I'll ask you this and what about this? You see it in interviewing all the time, you see it in news shows, these hard-hitting whatever interviews of some picture of public figure. you know, in news shows, you know, these, these, these, you know, hard hitting, whatever interviews of some picture of public figure.

And they have a list of questions. And so many times I say, just be quiet. The person isn't done. They have more, they have more to say. If you just be comfortable with silence, they'll say what's really on their mind. Not, you know, answering questions. Documentary filmmaking is not about question and answer.

It's about truly observing the world, observing what's going on. In that sense, it's very much like narrative filmmaking in that you're there with another human being. Honor that human being by actually listening to them and looking at them and allowing them their space. So the difference in the material that I got back as a filmmaker, when I learned to sort of get a conversation going, and then, you know, when you have a conversation, you do have certain questions you start to ask, but then you allow the other person to take charge,

to take control, to... Ah, so you're following them, you're not leading them. Well, you lead them... I mean, it's like playing jazz, right? Sometimes they lead, sometimes you lead, but the idea that somebody sort of says something and then you leave the silence in general. I mean, look, we've been talking here this time. I've been talking so much.

The idea that just sitting with another person after they've said something and let the silence fall, let the discomfort in a way with sort of personal intimacy that happens when there's nothing to say. Let that be in the room. And then many times the person says something far deeper than what your question elicits. They let you know something about themselves.

They make a gesture. They look away. They say something else. They ask you something. So to me, sort of the greatest lesson was to allow silence. Wow. Silence. I was practicing some of that right now. It's much more effective in person because sometimes when, like even right now, we're

also not sure. Are you lagging? Right, right, right, right, right, right, right. Are we out of sync? You know, yeah. That's fantastic. Yeah, that's something I'll take with me. I appreciate that, man.

Thank you. It's a big one. And the other one, which is sort of in a way it's related, it's be willing to go back another time. So, you know, people can't always bring their best in one goal, you know, and so many of my films, I mean, there's an example in My Architect as well. There's one in The Price of Everything too, but in My Architect, you know, I interviewed my mother who recently passed away. And at 94, she lived quite a life and managed to write a book when she was 91 years old. You know, she lived quite a remarkable life and was a single mother and did a lot for

me. She's in the film, My Architect, and I went and interviewed her and I thought I got a really good interview with her. I thought she really revealed an awful lot about the struggles she had as a professional woman in a period that was not easy for women, and certainly not easy for women in her position, unmarried, you know, and working for my father as well. Very, very complicated circumstance. And I thought she was pretty terrific, you know. And I watched this interview with the editor, Sabina,

and she looks at me and she has this way of, she adjusts her glasses when she's not happy about something. And she looks at me and she adjusted her glasses like this. And she says, "'Yeah, it was good, but you didn't go far enough.'" And I knew she was right, that I hadn't gone far enough. So I went back a second time to my mother, almost six months later, and just me, I filmed it myself.

I didn't bring a camera person. I just filmed it myself, and I was able to get to the level of her being that transcended the sort of the first time she presented her story and she told it very well. But she was still presenting it. The second time she was living it. So both interviews are in the film. They're separated by about, you know, I don't know, half an hour, 35 minutes or so. But, you know, the return visit, certainly in documentary filmmaking, the return visit is essential. That if you find somebody that you really like and that you think there's more there,

don't just kind of move on and oh, let me get somebody else, you know, some other talking head. Return to the people who, where you feel that there's more. So that's, that's in a way that's related to this idea of listening and silence. Okay. You're on a roll. What's one more? One more film?

No, one more insight. Oh, one more insight. One more insight. What I'm wondering is in the last example, was it the case that, sure, it is also the second time you visited, but was it also the intimacy of you being there yourself only? Absolutely. I mean, you've given me the next one right there, which is that have the courage to use whatever technology is at hand to capture the moment. You know, these days, a smartphone is so good

that we worry ourselves so much about the technology and the perfection of the, I mean, here's one right here. Worry less about the background. Worry less about this thing called bokeh. Like this thing of how beautiful is your out of focus background? I mean, you want to scream sometimes, and people say, you know,

isn't the out of focus background, the bokeh so beautiful? And you're thinking, well, yeah, I mean, you want to scream sometimes and people say, isn't the out of focus background, the focus so beautiful? And you're thinking, well, yeah, I mean, it looks good. It's like an out of focus light. It's nice. That came with the territory. You watch taxi driver, you watch anything filmed in film where there's lower light and there's a good fall off because the depth of field isn't so great. These days with with video everything's in focus and it's kind of a problem, you know

But but with film things were often out of focus, but people were not I mean, yes Of course great cinematographers were always worried about how the background was falling in focus and I focus but they weren't turning They weren't fetishizing it and turning it into some like thing where you know We have to use only prime lenses and we wanna have this background. It's about the emotion. It's about what's happening on the screen that really matters, not the background.

So I guess that's the piece that goes along with it. If a moment is happening, don't worry desperately about if you have your new fancy handy-dandy thing that's the latest of the latest to film it, use the technology at hand so you don't lose the moment. You know, don't waste it. That's another one. All right. When you first go to talk to someone, be rolling from the beginning.

Don't do a pre-interview. Don't have a whole conversation on the phone where you, you know, I mean, if there's one thing I've learned, it's you only get one chance of, you know, first meeting someone. And one of the great thrills of documentary filmmaking is you get to meet these amazing people, but you only get to meet them the first time once,

and that's the first time. Yes. So you want that first time, once. And that's the first time. So you want that first time to have meaning. Not to be something where you sit down and you talk for three hours and they're talked out and then you say, okay, let's do that again. People don't work that way. They don't repeat themselves, you know, with the same cadences and the same emotions a second time. They just don't. You know, even actors, they'll tell you many times the first take is the one, because it's raw, it's new. Now sometimes, it's the 20th take, sure, but there's a freshness

that happens sometimes right off the bat that is very, very real. And with people, the characters in a, I mean, we call them characters, but people that are in your film. You only get to sort of be there with them the first time, the first time. So I think it's essential. I'm always, I like to be rolling from the very start. And many times, of course, you cut out the greeting, hey, how are you?

And that stuff, I mean, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the first, and sometimes you the greeting, hey, how are you? And that stuff. I mean, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the first, the first, and sometimes you use that. Sure, once in a while, once in a great while, maybe once in a movie you use that. But it's those first reactions. Somebody says something maybe about you, you know, oh, what's that thing on your shirt? You know, there's some human, there's some human response. Or, you know, like the first time that I saw Larry Poonz in the same film, The Price of

Everything. We drove up. I talked to him on the phone a little bit, just, but I said, look, I don't want to, I don't want to tell you what I'm going to ask you. Let's just, we'll show up. And we showed up and he came out on the porch and I saw him and I'm like, oh my gosh, just, I can tell you from a mile away, this is somebody we want in the movie because he had this wonderful shot of white hair, you know, and he was kind of a, he was we want in the movie because he had this wonderful shot with white hair,

you know, and he was kind of a, he was upstate New York but he had like this New York coffee cup and it was just, this is great, you know, and a motorcycle was there, you know, wonderful. So the cameraman, Bob Richman, and the sound man, Eddie O'Connor and I, you know, we've done this before, I just said, well, let's be rolling right away. So we were and

that first interview where he starts talking about the relationship between art and money was 30 seconds after we met literally I mean we met and it's like you know he starts saying well what are you making this movie you know what are you about and I was like well you know art and money and he just launched right into it and there's no way he would have done that a second time. Because there was like this, you see in his face, his skepticism, like, well, how could they, how could art and money be related?

He looks at me with this kind of like, what's wrong with you? Of course they're not related. It's not like baseball, where your batting average is your batting average. You know, either you hit the ball or you don't. Art isn't like that. You know, it's, it's got to do with all these other things.

Taste and the most expensive art isn't the best art. Of course it's not. Doesn't make any sense. So immediately he like encapsulated the theme of my entire movie within 30 seconds of meeting this person. If I hadn't been rolling, I wouldn't have had it, would have been gone. So I guess what we're coming back to is the preciousness of the moment when you're making a film.

There's a precious moment which is, it could be silence, it could be the first meeting, it could be silence, it could be the first meeting, it could be, you know, the second time you go back, but these are moments of time that won't repeat themselves. It's not information, it's emotion, it's life, humanity, time, all, you know, sort of all at once. And anyway, that's what I respond to in films, is where you feel like life is like this. This is the way things happen.

This is the way it happens. You know, life is composed of these things. Moments like this, you know, like that moment in Kurosawa when the Shoma-funi collapses, he's holding the baby and he says, this was me. This could have been me. It's just a moment, but it's like he managed to capture something that, you know, it felt at that moment like a documentary. It's not an actor anymore. It's a human being revealing their innermost thing.

It might as well be Mifune himself, not even the actor. So it has this weird sort of thing of like, he's an actor, but he's also a person. And it was so sort of real in that moment that you almost felt like, oh my god, I'm watching a documentary here. This is really real. Nathaniel Kahn's Deep Sky, which chronicles the James Webb Telescope, releases nationwide

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