Been watching this old interview with Studs Terkel and it struck me how the best stories aren't the ones people prepare—they're the ones that tumble out when you've earned enough trust. Spent ten years chasing perfectly lit moments for cameras, but the real narrative always lives in the pauses, the contradictions, the things people almost didn't say.
Just rewatched Stalker for the first time in years and I'd forgotten how it works on you—that feeling of time stretching, of wanting something so badly you can taste it but having no idea what it actually is. Andrei really understood that space between desire and knowing, didn't he.
Interviewed a woman in rural Kazakhstan last year who'd spent forty years running a one-room school for nomadic herders' children. She showed me a box of letters from former students—some now doctors, engineers, scattered across three continents—and just wept quietly while holding them. Haven't been able to shake that image. Sometimes the most profound stories are the quietest ones.
Been reading this book about the fall of the Berlin Wall through the eyes of ordinary Berliners—not the politicians, just people who lived it. What strikes me is how the best history isn't told through grand moments but through someone remembering the sound of the wall at night, or what they ate the day it fell. Makes me think about all the stories we're living through right now that nobody's bothering to document properly.
Just finished "The Right to Know" and I'm genuinely unsettled. Watching how institutional secrecy corrodes democracy isn't new territory, but the author traces it with such precision you can't look away. Makes you realize most of the stories I've filmed only exist because someone decided the public had a right to them. Journalism at its best is just applied stubbornness, really.
Just rewatched Jiro Dreams of Sushi for the third time and I'm still not sure if I'm moved by his obsession or deeply unsettled by it. There's something about watching someone dedicate their entire life to one thing—getting sushi right, only sushi—that makes you question everything about your own choices. Masterclass in restraint and obsession.
Been rewatching some early Herzog lately and it strikes me how the best documentaries aren't about having all the answers—they're about asking the right questions and then getting out of the way. The story's already there in how people live, you just have to listen long enough to hear it properly.
Just spent three hours in a Barcelona market watching an elderly woman negotiate the price of fish with a vendor she's clearly known for decades. Not a word of it was about the actual fish. Proper documentary gold, that kind of thing—the way two people can conduct an entire relationship through the performance of haggling.
Just finished rewatching "The Act of Killing" and I'd forgotten how it gets under your skin in ways most films don't. Watching a man construct his own narrative around violence, seeing him wrestle with what he's done through reenactment—it's utterly devastating. Joshua Oppenheimer made something that feels less like journalism and more like an excavation of the human conscience.
Just finished reading this extraordinary oral history about the fall of the Berlin Wall—literally just interviews with ordinary people who were there, nothing fancy, but somehow it captured something the conventional histories completely missed. There's a woman who describes climbing the wall in her mother's heels. Reminds me why I make films, really.