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John Muir, the famous naturalist, wrote in his journal that you should never go to Alaska as a young man because you'll never be satisfied with any other place as long as you live. And there's a lot of truth to that.

It's not like Alaska isn't wilderness - it mostly is. But most Alaskans don't live in the wild. They live on the edge of the wild in towns with schools and cable TV and stores and dentists and roller rinks sometimes. It's just like anyplace else, only with mountains and moose.

I was astounded to learn that Alaskan caves might be hiding secrets about the earliest people ever to enter the Americas. That's when I began to picture a story that would start with kayaking and lead into the caves.

To the lover of wilderness, Alaska is one of the most wonderful countries in the world.

'Looking For Alaska' by John Green is a very great book. I feel like every teenage girl says John Green's 'Fault In Our Stars,' but 'Looking For Alaska' is better.

Great storytellers in the past would go to an unknown land and return to tell the stories they've found. Those were also journeys into their inner psyches and that's still true today. An actor, a writer, does that as if saying, 'Here's what I've discovered about myself and about the world I'm in. I would like to share this with you.'

I went to Alaska as a young man just looking for adventure. And like so many of us in the '70s, we found it.

The subject matter of the stories on the surface... there seem to be a number of stories about travel.

I chose to document the lives of people living in a remote village in Alaska called Shishmaref because there we can literally see how climate change is affecting their homes, livelihoods and ultimately their lives.