There is a cyclical theme of trust that courses throughout the film. How do you go about establishing trust with your subjects, particularly when the people portrayed have been often exploited?
Trust is important in every documentary film project that I make. Building that trust, establishing that trust from very early on in the process is essential to being able to tell an authentic story. In this particular case we worked hard to establish trust with our primary subject, Arlo Washington. He is somebody in his community who already has the trust of so many people, so that trust was initially extended to us by virtue of others trusting him.
We came to know people better and develop relationships, and then we strengthened and deepened those relationships. The interviews that you see in the film were actually one of the last things that we shot. We got to know people as we were moving along, and by the time we did those interviews people really understood the mission behind what we were trying to say with the film. This is not just one man's story, but it's a community's portrait.
You’re an alum of the Undergraduate Film & Television program, but before that you participated in Tisch’s Future Filmmakers Workshop as a high school student. What do you recall about that experience?
I did! Professor Amitanshu Das was actually the person who led the program, along with Sheril Antonio, and it was in broadcast documentary or journalism. There were some other filmmakers whom I'm still in touch with today, such as Matt Wolf and Elan Bogarin, two other documentary filmmakers who participated in the workshop when we were in high school. We subsequently went to Tisch together and remain in touch and share work with one another. That’s something I personally like to celebrate.
In your career to date, you’ve continued to work across fiction and nonfiction. For younger filmmakers, how vital is it to remain open to different approaches to storytelling?
I've actually been thinking about this a lot lately—how much looser of a filmmaker I think I am today than I was even 5 or 6 years ago. I really value the idea of improvisation and always trying to adapt and stay nimble and think about what serves the story first and foremost, as opposed to any conceptual ideas I might have.
Storytelling takes many different forms: some stories might be best told as documentary, and other stories might be better told as fiction pieces. But I think being able to oscillate between the two has allowed me to be a better filmmaker. It's also important to learn how to work on different projects at different budget levels. The industry is in a really difficult place right now, and so many of us are seeing our budgets shrink from what they were even just a few years ago. But it is still just as important to me now as it was before to tell those same stories. It's about figuring out how to tell them and then telling them—that’s the important part.
