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Sometimes films ignore other points of view because it's simpler to tell the story that way, but the more genuine and sympathetic you are to different points of view and situations, the more real the story is.

Despite the impression you may have from watching too much TV, movies are not about reproducing reality. They're about telling stories.

Films are very influential, and I especially feel a responsibility to tell stories that have been pushed aside. Being able to shed light on issues that need to be brought to the world.

In documentaries, there's a truth that unfolds unnaturally, and you get to chronicle it. In narratives, you have to create the situations so that the truth will come out.

There's a problem with narratives. Most that spring to mind are fictional.

I think that those are the things that you can uniquely do with film that are difficult to do anywhere else: they can bring a picture to life, give it a natural and historical context and make you feel that everything else is suddenly credible.

You really have to soak up the culture of the people to get it right. If you're making a fiction film, it's entertainment, but you want it to be as real as possible.

When you're doing a film, narrative is your most important tool, but it's a tool to create a cinematographic experience, to create those moments that are beyond narrative, that are almost an abstraction of that moment that hits your psyche.

With docs, there's often a very direct communication between the filmmaker and the audience. With narrative movies, we leave it a little bit more open.