Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering | Lex Fridman Podcast #278
we would come up to these rafts and these boats that were in really dire shape and people would be pushed off and people would jump off and people would fall into the water and um some of them couldn't swim and so we found ourselves in this moment where we had a choice we could film someone drown in front of us or we could put our cameras down and pull them out of the water the following is a conversation with skye fitzgerald a two-time oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker who made the film's hunger ward about the war in yemen lifeboat about the search and rescue operations off the coast of libya and 50 feet from syria about the war in syria this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's skye fitzgerald nearly 811 million people worldwide are hungry today and 45 million people are on the edge of famine across 43 countries how do you feel how do you make sense of that many people suffering from hunger and famine in the world today i don't know if i can make sense of it lex i mean i think um it's deeply disturbing to me that as a global community we've allowed this number of people to go hungry when the food to feed them exists and the resources to feed them exists i think the thing that disturbs me most about those figures is that many of those who are starving today or going hungry today are the net result of war and intentional acts by leaders to starve entire populations and that's the most deeply disturbing part to me um you know your history um and we all know that you know deeply embedded in the geneva conventions post world war ii the intent of one of those articles was to ban the use of starvation as a weapon of war because of what hitler did during world war ii that's been reiterated multiple times over the years in international humanitarian law including in 2018 because of the saudi blockade over yemen and yet to this day starvation as a weapon of war continues to be used in ethiopia obviously in ukraine right now and in yemen with the blockade over the country and that that disgusts me that the law is in place but it won't be enforced by the international bodies and the nation-states that are that make up the international community so when the starvation is a result of human actions human decisions that's especially painful to make sense of for me personally yeah i think that if you and i sitting here didn't eat for three days um and had to you know lay our head on the sidewalk for a couple nights i think we would take you know hunger and homelessness a lot more seriously and i think that's for some reason that's missing at this moment in history tragically and i think until that we can generate enough empathy um that's immediate for all of us to understand what that means to go hungry i'm not sure we're gonna sort of marshal the the global community to solve it i did just that by the way uh faster for three days uh recently it's fundamentally different i think because the thing that would be terrifying to me is not the fasting but the hopelessness at the end of the fast like uh i wouldn't know when the next meal is coming yeah i always had the freedom to have the meal yeah the fear for not just your own ability to eat and survive but your families if there's loved ones that's the other thing i don't have i'm single so i feel like the worst suffering is watching somebody you love that you're supposed to be a caretaker of and you can't take care of them and if all of that is caused by leaders in in um as as a weapon of war that is especially painful so how can we um how can we help what are the ways to help how do we alleviate this the suffering well i think on the you know i think on the humanitarian front we have to be aggressive um and attentive and intervene in significant ways and i think on the political front we have to hold uh players accountable for their actions so the leaders that start the war so you when you say we have to speak up about the the decisions and the humans making those decisions yeah that lead to the stuff for example let's make it concrete so you know when i was i don't want to jump ahead but when i was filming hunger ward in yemen um you know i met a mother who when she gave birth weighed 70 pounds the mother weighed 70 pounds and so her daughter was starved in the womb right when she was born um there was she was born into a world with no breast milk very little formula right so she was starved before birth she was born into a world where she continued to be starved right by a mother who herself was starved i watched that child her name is sila die in front of me right asula had no chance for all those things we hoped for for a child in this world she she didn't have a chance to grow up she didn't have a chance to discover love she didn't have a chance to have a career she was robbed of all of those things because of the insidious nature of hunger that she was born into she didn't have to die she she you know she was not starving she her mother was being starved right because of the blockade over the country now who instituted that blockade mbs in saudi arabia with the reinforcement and sort of tacit approval of the united states our own government here and so there are people who are responsible for the starvation of children and i think we need to hold them accountable now that's incredibly difficult to do but just because it's difficult doesn't mean it not it ought not to be done and we'll talk about many cases like these throughout history and going on today let's talk about hunger award yeah let's dive in that you are you've been nominated for an oscar twice this is one of the times for a documentary can you please tell me what hunger ward the last hope between war and starvation is about hunger ward is a short documentary that really is an attempt to illustrate the effects of uh the conflict on yemen specifically on civilians and we document it in in both the north and the south of the country because it's a bifurcated country the south is held by the globally recognized government in the south which up until last week was run by at least on the surface by president hadi hold up in riyadh he was essentially removed from office last week by most people would agree the emiratis and the saudis to put in place a presidential council so we wanted to show that starvation was happening in very similar fashions both in the south and the north so and we wanted to do this film because um so few people in the west know anything about the conflict in yemen nor the us's complicity in it and so my intent with the project was try to bring it to a larger western audience as an attempt to intervene and change the political status quo which allows the use of starvation in yemen to continue so us complicity who are the bad guys now the world unfortunately cannot be painted in black and white of good guys and bad guys but for the purpose of conversation who is um doing causing suffering in the world in this situation who started the war why and then of course the roots of war go back in history yeah but let's start at the at the top well there are bad actors and there are less bad actors right i mean i think that's always the case in war probably and everybody loses in war yeah i concur with that statement um in the case of the sort of the status quo in yemen right now um it's a completely asymmetrical war and so the saudi coalition which is made up of primarily saudi arabia the emiratis united states france britain supplying weapons but it's really driven and catalyzed by saudi arabia and it's asymmetrical to a great extent just because of the incredible firepower by air that the saudis use continuously to pummel northern yemen um when i was there uh the the sheer volume of air strikes is is hard to describe and we show the result of only one in the film really but it's an asymmetrical war the de facto authorities of the north um ansar allah also known as the houthi rebel group you know they um they don't have an air force right they have a drone force but they don't have an air force and so it's a from a military standpoint it's completely asymmetrical the saudis really don't commit troops to the ground they use only proxies to fight on the ground what is the narrative they use to justify war so there's a story on every side in war some of it is grounded in truth some of it is not at all grounded in truth also known as propaganda what's the narrative used by the saudis for this war the saudi line is essentially that the houthis are an illegitimate government um and that that it's really a proxy rule war between iran who supports the houthis nominally um and the rest of the world that's the saudi narrative the reality is something altogether different while the houthis do receive support from iran this is a war started by and sustained by mbs in saudi arabia who's mbs muhammad and who is he he is the son of the ruler of saudi arabia what's his power i'm asking basic dumb questions he's the de facto ruler of the military and uh yes he sees the control of the country several years ago even though he on the surface you know is not the rule of saudi arabia he is he's the crown prince and sorry to interrupt often but who is he as a man what's your sense of yeah so you know i've never met him and i i likely will never meet him hopefully um but he is i know a lot about him through his actions sort of in the mena region the middle east and north africa region and um he is one of three in my view as an american sitting here in the u.s three people in the world that i think has caused such an incredible volume of misery and suffering and murder on this planet that um i think if if he weren't around the world would be a lot better place and i'm not a violent person by nature but there are three human beings that i think um the world would be better off without do you mind before i ask other questions mentioning the three oh yeah assad is one in syria and that comes out of an earlier project that i did in syria and turkey um and and what i saw assad as a as a ruler do to his own people um and putin would be the third those three human beings are uh murderers on a scale beyond imagining on mbs are you able to think as a documentary filmmaker as a human being as a scholar as a thinker with an open mind about a man like that who does evil onto the world and what that must feel like to be in inside the mind of that man so basically consider his world view with most evil people with all people probably but with people who do evil onto the world they think they're doing good yeah they're the hero of their own story right yeah and so to be able to place yourself i feel like for me to understand a person i have to literally like the way actors kind of have to do um you know live inside the body of the person they're trying to study inhabit the character inhabit the person yeah are you able to do that or because you uh are also studying the people who suffer as a result as a consequence of their actions you just you put put them in a box and you say i hate the person in that box that's going to move on this goes back to your black and white statement at the beginning right it's like the world as a whole of course you know is every gradation of gray right my background is theater likes and so i was trained long before i picked up a camera to inhabit other characters right i have two degrees in theater and so that level of sort of like walking in other people's shoes and trying to understand and empathize with their world view is fundamental to how i live my life and how i do my work so in the case of those three that i named assad mbs and putin yeah i can i can go there and think through how they came to be who they are right from afar right and and after i go through that process i still don't think there's any way that one can justify what they've done we're going to talk about each of those people for sure well i'm not an expert on well any of them you're a human being which makes you a uh partial expert on human nature because nobody's an expert you're as good as anyone else anybody who actually cares a camera and listens and observe others isn't especially an expert of human nature um who's willing to take that leap and truly understand somebody of any level not leaders i feel like to understand a leader you have to first understand humans and to understand humans you have to see humans that they're worse than their best which is something that you've definitely done so let's let's stick on hunger ward this lens that you've chosen to look at this is through a single maybe maybe you can speak to that you've mentioned the starvation as a result of war what is the documentary like what is the lens you've chosen to give the world a peek at the results at the suffering that's a result of this war people a lot of times will ask me if they've seen hunger ward you know um they asked where the hope is right you you read the byline earlier the last hope and what i try to focus on in in many of my films including hunger ward is in in the very difficult context of war as the cases in hunger ward in yemen i i look for hope and i look for inspiration and i do that through people who are doing incredible things under the most difficult circumstances so when i set out to do a film about starvation in yemen right i mean i mean just listen to that statement where's the hope there right and yet what i found what i discovered were human beings that we could tell the story through who are incredible inspirational human beings doing amazing things every day one of those is makia maji a nurse practitioner in the north of the country at a small rural clinic and another is dr aida al-sadiq who is a pediatrician in the south of the country and so we chose to tell the story sort of through their experiences as caregivers devoting their lives to try to save this entire cohort this entire generation of children that has been born into starvation and that's an incredible difficult task but equally inspirational to watch these human beings devote every minute of every day to save a child i mean in my view nothing is more important than that action maybe on that point real quick so there is suffering at scale starvation at scale there's i mean the numbers um maybe you can mention in yemen what are the numbers in terms of people and starvation but from a perspective of a nurse practitioner or a doctor you always have you're treating one person in front of you so how do you make sense of that calculus of like there's a huge number of people suffering and then there's just the person in front of you is that all we can do as humans is just to help one person at a time is that the right way to think and to approach these problems or can you actually make sense of the numbers speaking just as a human being i think the scale of suffering is so great in yemen that um i i think i'd be overwhelmed right if i focused on that scale you know you've probably heard that you know a child dies every 75 seconds in yemen from hunger right so we've been sitting here how long you know 35 minutes or so that's a good handful of children that have already passed away so to overcome sort of i think that danger of psychic numbing which can happen when you think about suffering on such a large scale as a filmmaker as a human being i have to focus in on the individuals on those those human beings in front of me and i think that's exactly what dr al-sadiq and makia do to keep going each day and one of the amazing things about these two health care providers that we showcase in the film is that they treat anyone who shows up right they don't have to have money they don't have to have any resources they just have to get to the clinic or the hospital and it's incredibly moving to see sort of the flexibility of their thinking in terms of how they make that work makia for example i saw her in the north of the country it's an incredibly rural clinic that she works at so so it's like a magnet for all the cases in the north of the country people come from hundreds of kilometers away sometimes for specialty treatment of of pediatric malnutrition and i one time i saw a child come in and it was a male relative that brought this young girl in and you know just because of sort of the gender dynamics in yemen you know there had to be a parent or a relative there to stay with the child while they're at the clinic and it was a male relative and so you know what many doctors in that instance would do would just turn them away and instead what makia did is she walked into one of the rooms talked to one of the other mothers and convinced them to become the temporary guardian essentially of this child until a female relative could could arrive so you know she's flexible she she finds solutions rather than allowing the problems to deter solutions one child at a time yeah yeah one shot at a time you mentioned that you saw a child die in front of you so when you're filming this as a filmmaker um what's that like psychologically philosophically creatively as a filmmaker as a storyteller what what do you do there as a human and as a filmmaker oh what's that whole experience like because you get to like you said you take it through the whole journey of a starving mother giving birth to a starving child um it's not something i want to film it's not something that i certainly wanted to happen or seek out um but it happened and the sad truth is that it happens every week at that hospital and so when it happened in this instance i felt an incredible responsibility to do justice to that reality to acknowledge that a child had just died of starvation related causes um and and to find some way if the parents wanted us to to integrate that into this story we'd bring back to uh a western audience and and you know i i i've filmed many difficult things over the years and um usually i really love filming and i didn't love filming hunker ward it was not a a process that i enjoyed on any way she'll perform sadly because of the content because you know who wants to watch a child die in front of them i don't but i did and i had to and and when that happened i felt an incredible responsibility again to go deep right to go deep with that family to to tell the story of this hospital with every sort of ounce of focus and and talent that i could bring to the story because people should know that um children are dying of starvation right now as we sit here and that that doesn't have to happen and it is happening because of political dynamics that we can intervene on is there times you wanted to walk away quit the telling of the story come back to the united states where you can be just appreciate the wonderful comfort you can have just sitting there and having food and and uh freedom to do whatever you want those kinds of things doesn't have to be united states yeah in a lot of places in the world well that dynamic of sort of like survivor's guilt you know on some level definitely exists one of the hardest things about filming hunger forward actually was eating right because we were in these malnutrition clinics they're called tfc's therapeutic feeding centers where you know over a long period of time children lost the ability to eat normal food right and couldn't digest it and just you know were literally starving and the the practitioners were trying to bring them back to a state of of thriving but to leave those clinics right and to go to our camp or to go to our hotel and then to have access to food right because we could buy food on the streets and in the hotels um i mean it was a very intentional act throughout the course of the shoot to look at a piece of bread right or to look at a bowl of rice and and think about that child in the tfc and think about how the privilege of having that bowl of rice that i could eat and digest so it certainly every day um helped me appreciate right the privilege i had every bite you take with everybody uh absolutely and so so i wouldn't call it guilt it wasn't exactly guilt but it was definitely mindfulness right about meditate on on the suffering of people who yeah who can't that's right exactly so that knowledge sort of it was it was catalytic in some ways it sort of moved us forward really wanting to shape the most powerful story we could because we were surrounded by so much suffering every day how did that film in that movie change you as a man as a human being you've filmed a few difficult documentaries that one is a heavy one when you think of the person you wore before you filmed it and now when you wake up every morning you look yourself in the mirror how's that person different every documentary i do changes me in a different way like i am not static in that sense right and preformed it's just like i change with every project because so many of them are difficult and challenging right and so in order to do them i have to allow myself to change and be changed by them in the case of hunger ward you may remember the girl omama um who's the the 10 year old girl who we showcase in in audin in the south of the country and um you know we we were there when she was admitted to the hospital and when she was admitted you know this 10 year old girl weighed 24 pounds and she could barely stand up and um we started you know with the permission of the family to start to document her treatment and to see what would happen with this young girl who is so severely malnourished and we watched her be treated by the nurses and the doctors in sadaka hospital and slowly over the course of a couple weeks we saw her change we start her start to sort of gain strength and start to recover and she also watched the caregivers very carefully and i watched her watch them and um i'll never forget there was a moment where um about two and a half weeks i think into her treatment we walked into a room and i saw her offering a cap full of water to another younger child who was also starving right this the shot's actually in the film and and so to see omama this child who's starving giving sustenance to a younger more vulnerable child who is also starving me deeply right so i saw her learn from the caregivers around her right and as a human being as a filmmaker i was incredibly inspired by omama that capacity for compassion is there even within a ten-year-old girl who's starving right and so so you asked what changed me um that's one moment right i i rather than being crushed by such heavy content it was actually the opposite where i came away inspired by a ten-year-old girl and you know i didn't anticipate that i didn't think that's what this content would do but it's what it did it it it reinforced for me sort of this incredible capacity we all have as human beings right to do good right to even within the most difficult circumstances to choose who we become and what we do and and and a 10 year old girl taught me that to reinforce that for me were you able to feel the culture of the people so the the language barrier be able to break through the language barrier or the culture barrier you know to understand the people you know um because even even suffering has a language of of sorts depending on where you are the way people joke about things the way they cry the way this is an interesting thing i actually want to ask you sorry i'm asking a million questions i find that the people you know i've been talking to people in ukraine and russia but in general i've gotten a chance to talk to people who've been through trauma in their life and there's a humor they have about trauma and hard times yeah um it depends on the culture of course uh certainly russian speaking folk i mean the more suffering you've experienced for some reason the more they joke about it it's almost like they're able to see something deep about humanity now that they have suffered and they're able to laugh at the absurdity the injustice of it all and you know you could also say it's a way for them to deal with it but that that humor has a kind of profound like um understanding within it about what it means to be human that i just and and then you to really understand it you have to know the language so i guess i'm asking were you able to really feel the humans on the other side of the language i'd like to think so i mean i mean as you noted you know there there are universals in life that that transcend language right i mean suffering is suffering love is love compassion doesn't take place only through language right it's through actions and so was there a language prayer absolutely right did we try to bridge that through through other means in in in sort of universal emotions and experiences absolutely that's one of the things i always think about when i'm filming is is how do we distill down to universals right um through through imagery right through um through the vocabulary of cinema right because i believe so deeply that that vocabulary should be visual right so the words what's the most powerful way to express the universal is it visual or is it language words i think it's visual and we're talking about the human face or human face human body everything through actions as well actions the dynamic i'm thinking about a woman named salha in the film who isn't named but she's you see her multiple times throughout the film and she's basically the matron of the ward in this house and she she's the gatekeeper for the ward so no one enters that ward without her she's literally the gatekeeper at the door so no one comes in unless salha allows them to come in right but then she also is sort of like the the first point of contact for compassion in the ward so when when mothers and families are admitted she forms relationships between the moms and the grandmothers for example who are admitted and who are living there on the ward and she does it through hugging right she does it through bringing them food right and she forms these really rather quickly deep relationships um of compassion with the families and so it's amazing to watch and no language is needed right to bear witness to this and and she also suffers because of that right and so at the near the end of the film if you recall um when when another child dies and the mother is wailing we actually cut away to salha who's in the hallway who walks into another room and begins sobbing she's not a family member but she has a deep relationship with that family that she forged as soon as they stepped into the ward so that's universal right to see a woman weep because a child has died even if they're not related to that that's a universal sort of emotional experience we can all relate to so that's what i mean by a visual vocabulary and it's especially powerful because she has seen much of this kind of suffering and she's still maybe she has built up some callous to be able to work day to day but it's still there's still an ocean underneath the ice she's kept her heart open despite all the pain that she sees and feels every day somehow she's a human being who's able to do that which is a very difficult thing to do right she still allows herself to be vulnerable um and maybe that's why she can do what she does what lessons do you draw from other famines in history so uh for me personally one that touched my family and one of the great families in history's uh in ukraine holly moore in the 30s 32 33 right with stalin maybe you could speak to the universals of the suffering here what lessons do you draw from those other famines if you've looked at them or in general about famine that are manufactured by the decisions of let's say authoritarian leaders famine doesn't have to exist or the bulk of fandoms famines on this planet i believe don't have to exist and and most of them uh or at least a good number of them are manufactured by the leaders um that choose to use famine as a weapon right and and ukraine is the one of the obvious examples right now you know with siege tactics that are happening in different parts of the country and um you know we built international humanitarian law for a reason right many years ago and it continues to be written to this day and it's there to prevent what's happening in ukraine right now it's there to prevent what's been happening in yemen for seven years and yet there hasn't been any teeth behind it and that's what disturbs me is that we can see how these famines are being used as weapons in war and yet we aren't sort of using the levers of power that exist um in order to i think to call out in important and powerful ways those who are causing them and to make sure that we hold them accountable on the global stage now to some extent that seems to be happening in ukraine in a way that hasn't happened for a long time and that that gives me hope right and yet i don't believe we've done enough um and i think the the national community needs to do far more than we are both in yemen in ethiopia um and in ukraine right now there are certain kinds of things that captivate the global attention and it seems like starvation is not always one of them for some reason murder and destruction gets people attention more it's the death of course is easy to enumerate but it's the suffering that's the problem yeah yeah you know when we went to film hunger ward that was one of the creative questions that i was really concerned about because starvation you know it's not a quick action right it's a long slow insidious process right just like hunger right and yet when you're hungry right um it takes you over it becomes the most important thing right it's just absolutely fundamental to to life it's like drying breath and so i i really before i filmed hunger ward i i struggled to sort of answer how we could creatively approach that because you know someone sitting in a clinic right starving or being treated for starvation you know that's a pretty static scene right um and what we found was that because of the volume of cases and because of the nature of sort of how quickly um people were coming and going is that it was more dynamic than we anticipated and there's something also about starvation you get tired it's almost like uh it's a quiet suffering yeah like uh and by the way there's something about when i think about dark times i mean you you you'll hear me chuckle for example i don't know what that is that's almost like it's almost like you you have to kind of laugh at uh you can't help but laugh at like uh the injustice and the cruelty in the world somehow that helps your mind deal with it i mean i see this all the time like when you're struggling you can't feed your family you lost your home the last thing you have is jokes about humor yes humans it's like the fucking man fucked me over again and there's jokes all around that yeah and and then and then you laugh and you drink vodka and you play music i don't know what that is i don't know what that is it's gallows humor right it's it's it's a way of a way of i think simultaneously acknowledging and allowing yourself to move forward right beyond the pain and the suffering so you mentioned ukraine and you mentioned putin uh what are your thoughts about the humanitarian crisis and generally the suffering that's resulting from the war in ukraine well first off i think the conflict is just going to exacerbate you know sort of the global challenge we have um with displacement right my the last entire trilogy i did was about displacement to a great extent due to war and you know this is a huge displacement of human beings regardless of the cause and that is gonna sort of have a ripple effect um across the globe for many many years to come regardless of even if the conflict ended today so there's that that's gonna set up a whole nother strain on sort of the the global sort of resources that that come into play to deal with refugees you know there were 79 million displaced people on this globe prior to the ukrainian conflict right you probably know the numbers better than i do in terms of what the current estimates are for displacement from ukraine four to six million so what are we up to now 73 74 million individuals on this planet now who are displaced that's a significant bump i wish that the levers of power were used differently in situations like ukraine and syria for example like so in what are the levers of power well military might let's take that for one right so um i i have always felt after working in syrian turkey that we completely missed our opportunity as as a player on the global stage with military capability to prevent the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians in syria we had the ability and we didn't we didn't leverage that ability you know the fact that i i talked with so many syrians during the course of doing that project who told me their stories of living in their house right and having a syrian helicopter fly over their house and drop a 55-gallon drum full of explosives and shrapnel on in their neighborhood over and over and over again not focused on any so you know military targets only meant to kill and so fear right and early in the conflict we could have stopped that right before russia got involved we could have intervened and created a no-fly zone that we the united states we the united states or coalition that we were a part of yeah and we didn't do it and we could have and i think that's an example where we have the military capability to actually do good in a situation like that and we don't usually use it for those purposes and that i think that's what a military ought to be used for beyond just defending our borders is to is to save others with the privilege that that power affords what do you think about the power of the military versus the power of sanctions versus the power of conversation they're all different tools right to be used at different moments but if if words fail if sanctions fail right i think there are moments in history where power is justified right and i think syria was one of them i think when barrow bombs were dr were you know dropping on civilian neighborhoods for months and months and months with no intent to do anything other than kill syrian civilians that's an instance i think where might is justified to shoot those helicopters out of the sky here's the difficult thing we've talked about yemen where's the line between good and evil for us intervention in different countries and conflicts in the world it's easy to look back 10 20 30 years to know what was and wasn't a quote unquote just war in the moment how do we know i think it's incredibly difficult to answer that right and i think that's why leaders make the wrong choices so often right is they second guess themselves um i i think you take all the data at your fingertips all the intelligence that you have right and you look at it all very carefully and you make a decision right there are some instances though where it's very clear what's happening right and leaders still don't act right in yemen right now for example it's very clear what's happening right children are being starved because of a blockade all the us would have to do is ensure that blockade now there's a two-month ceasefire in place now but remains lifted beyond the ceasefire and children will stop starving that's pretty simple you can trace it's a direct connection and we haven't had the sort of the moral wherewithal to make that decision because we're too too interested in maintaining positive ties with saudi arabia where oil flows from and so much influence um because saudi arabia has so much influence throughout the mena region um we want to keep that relationship tight despite sort of the the moral wounds that that come from that about half the world is under authoritarian regimes everybody operates under narratives and there's a narrative in the united states that freedom is good yeah democracy is good i have fallen victim to this narrative i believe in it um i'm saying this jokingly but not really because who knows the truth of anything in this world uh i eat meat factory farm meat and i seem to not be intellectually philosophically tortured by this and i should be there's a lot of suffering there what do we do to lessen the suffering of the people under authoritarian regimes again the same question military conflict diplomacy sanctions all those kinds of things uh is does that lessen suffering or increase the suffering from what you see in yemen is it is it something that has to be healed across generations or can be healed on a scale of months and years i'm just a guy with camera yeah lex you know but as a guy with a camera i've seen uh a lot a lot of things in a lot of places and um and i've seen the effects these decisions made by authoritarian leaders have on their own citizens and that's what drives my thinking on this um and and that's what drives and motivates me each day to raise the red flag through my films and say listen biden you um campaigned for president in part on a platform that said that we would regain our prominence on the moral stage of the world right and that we would prioritize right um sort of a moral paradigm over relationships with authoritarian regimes saudi arabia being one right and yet when the cia report came out that clearly articulated in detail that mbs was responsible for khashoggi's murder and for cutting his body into pieces and probably burning in the backyard of the of the embassy um what did biden do he didn't really make a pariah out of mbs like he said he was going to right what if he'd done something else and actually done what he said he was going to do which was making viet what if he had would remove the ability for mbs to fly to the united states for example now that's a sanction right that's a sanction that's individual and concrete and would be hugely embarrassing for mbs that would have been biden saying this is unacceptable behavior right this is something which because you executed such a horrendous act on someone living in the united states right we are not going to um give you a stage here at least right within the borders of our country those are the things that leaders can do that i don't think they do often enough and certainly our leader right now isn't doing it in the way i wish you were he certainly has taken a different stand on ukraine um you know and been very vocal but there's so many instances we could talk about where i feel like um the the political gamemanship right often falls into maintaining relationships like with mbs and saudi arabia rather than doing the right thing rather than then as a nation a leader of a nation saying this is unacceptable we have a higher standard than this because i think when leaders do that it becomes aspirational right it becomes aspirational for other leaders um uh in the progressive world at least and also it rings the alarm bells for other authoritarian leaders and says you know what there are lines right there are things that can't be done or there will be significant consequences like you will not be able to fly into our airspace anymore um and sanctions i think need to be concrete and individual to some in addition to the sort of the larger scope but when they're concrete and individual uh i think often they're felt in a different way you mean felt obviously by the individuals and so the the ripple effects of that uh it might have um the power to steer the direction of nations because of the nature of authoritarian regimes yes right there there are individuals have so much power exactly right so you know um you know if putin is is you know put on trial in the hague at some point or at least there's the threat of that right now that's likely never to happen of course because someone has to be in custody to go on trial right and he's never gonna allow that to happen but but just knowing that that's an you know that danger exists is going to change his travel plans in the future right um mbs not being able to fly to the u.s he's going to feel that and be embarrassed by that so i think they have a special meaning and consequence in authoritarian regimes because of that so you said you're just a guy with a camera yeah i would say you're a brilliant guy with the camera i'm also a kind of guy with the camera you got a couple cameras a couple cameras i have a couple mic you got a couple mice a couple cameras uh robot over here when you can't when you can't beat them with quality you bring the quantity that's right um so to me that's also an interest partially because i also speak uh russian yeah uh and a bit ukrainian i want to study that part of the world i want to talk to a lot of people i want to talk to the leaders i want to talk to regular people to be honest and i'd love to get your comments on this the regular quote-unquote people are way more fascinating to me as a filmmaker how do you figure out how to tell this story i'm sure a guy with a camera you're looking at war in ukraine but also what's going on in yemen in syria and other places in the world i mentioned north korea that's a super interesting one hard to bring cameras along china you know uh like in canada the truckers there's all kinds of fascinating things happening in the world yeah so you as a as a scholar of human suffering and human flourishing um how do you choose how to tell the story how do i choose a story how do i choose i assume those are coupled uh so how do you choose which story to tell yeah and how do you choose how to tell that story yeah well in terms of how to how to choose which story um you know it's it's a bit of a mystery potion for me frankly um i i go often on instinct but there's also a highly intentional piece of it for me as well and the intentional piece is i guess i'd call it the do i care threshold you know or the so what threshold you personally just something in your heart just kind of gets excited or hurt or just feels something so one of the things that disturbs me about american culture lex is is that you know we seem to be a people that's fascinated by reality television for example like like look at how many of us here in america watch reality television right that deeply disturbs me not that i've never watched an episode i've shot a whole season of it once to make a living right so it's like i i know it right but i feel like the things we should be paying attention to are the things personally are the things i choose to film right as a human being as a dad as a filmmaker i think we should be paying attention to the fact that children are being starved in yemen i think we should be paying attention to the fact that ukrainians are being displaced by the millions so there's this so what threshold that i use and i feel like it has to be a topic that if we don't cover and we don't put out in the world in the largest possible way in the hope of intervening in the hope of marshaling maximum resources and attention to solving the problem that's what i'm dedicated to as a filmmaker because i didn't pick up a camera initially to film puppy dogs right to make people smile i believe the camera is a tool for change i believe the camera is a powerful tool that we can use to raise awareness and martial resources and help people understand the impact that these geopolitical decisions have on real people's lives and that's the that that's the intent i create each film with now how i choose each story that's the the magic potion piece of it right and and um often one flows rather organically into another frankly so you just kind of like you said you go with instinct a little bit to some extent but oftentimes i choose the next project based on relationships i've developed yeah in the last film right and so one often flows into another through relationships i develop and then a colleague will share a detail about something that's happening in a certain place and i'll go hmm really i didn't know that right and it usually it's before it's hit the world stage in a big way and so i start to do due diligence and often that it reveals it to be a much bigger and more pressing topic that um that i want to learn more about before i talk to you about syria and lifeboat you mentioned a camera is the best weapon maybe just well you can't take out a tank right but it's a good second top top three yeah i love the humor throughout this i really i really appreciate it it's making we're talking about such dark topics it resets the mind in a way that allows me to think so thank you as a as as a filmmaker i almost want to talk about the technical details how do you choose to shoot stuff again so maybe you can explain to me i work with incredible folks that care about lenses and equipment and so on i tend to be somebody um that just wants to kind of go as like a gorilla shooting like a um not not plan too much just go with uh gritty i'm trying to come up with words that sound positive do a positive spin on what i try to do but like gritty don't over plan uh use like we had a big discussion if you see this light yeah um it's it's on a stand that's a very ghetto stand yeah you need a sandbag on that man exactly so no no see no sandbag and and like the the stand is actually bending under the weight of that thing it could fall on us it could fall it probably won't reach us but it could but the danger live under that danger embrace that danger love it yeah because that thing is easier to transport than a heavier one yeah sandbag that's extra weight so if you keep like uh p people tell me there's the right way to do stuff like here's these giant cases with all kinds of padding for transporting stuff i transport most of the equipment in a garbage bag yeah so i i that's just a preference because that's somehow that chaos allows me to sit to ignore all the stupidity of uh loving the equipment and focusing on the story so that said i've never shot anything like worthwhile like uh there is power to the visual yeah yeah like definitely and so finding a certain angle a certain light whether it's natural light or additional artificial lighting just capturing a tear capturing when the person forgets themselves for a moment and looks out into the distance missing somebody thinking about somebody all of those like moments you can capture a lens a camera can do magic with that um i don't even know the question i'm asking you but how do both technical and philosophical how do you capture the visual power that you're after yeah so so many of my films i think are built on the premise of access right build on this notion that um the the biggest hurdle to the story is getting there being there in the room or being there on the boat while a crisis is unfolding and that access typically is really nuanced and difficult to gain and and then trust flows from that right because usually it takes a long time to gain that access because that access is so hard fought it necessarily informs how we film right to be in a room at sadaka hospital in southern yemen i can't have five people in that room right i can't have a boom mic over a scene i want creatively the opposite of that as well so it's not just a logistical question it's also a creative question to capture intimate moments where families are dealing with suffering children and dying children and and caretaking is is active and ongoing all the time you don't want to interrupt that moment and so that informs how i do things so we go fleet and nimble and small those are all really good words for but but but so it's logistical on the one hand but it's also a creative choice right so when we filmed hunger ward two people were filming the entire film right me and my director of photography that was the two people in the room two people in the room yeah wow that's it the whole film right we had a field producer as well and he's part of the country but in terms of cam it's just two people and we're doing everything and we have lenses um that you know are long enough that we don't have to move to capture the film so we can tuck into a corner sometimes right and so just what's long mean that means they're standing farther away and they can zoom lens it's not a prime lens so it's not a fixed focal length right because a fixed focal length you have to move a lot more in order to capture action with with a zoom lens um you know maybe a 105 at the long end you know i can tuck into a corner and just film from 15 feet away instead of having to get right up on someone right so you you're less likely to interrupt the scene and and you can kind of become the fly on the wall sometimes so so you know i'm very intentional about that piece of it so that we can we can capture those vulnerable moments and not interrupt them that's really fascinating too because the access i don't often think about this but that's probably true for me as well um part of the storytelling is to be in the room and that's the hard part yeah for me most of my films that's the hardest part actually as hard as hunger award and lifeboat were to film and 50 feet from syria the getting their piece of it for the last two was much harder yeah and it's also it's a it's a creative act it's it's like i don't know if it is for you but it's the kind of people you talk to it's uh it's like how you live your life like the kind of people i talk to right now they steer the direction of my life and steer the direction of things that i'll film so like it's not just like you're trying to get access it's like it's everything it's like it builds it builds and builds and builds and builds on itself yeah yeah i mean part of the thing even saying you know talking about some of these leaders and conversations with them it's almost like staring your life into the direction of the difficult of like taking the leap and uh if you're a good human being and a lot of people know who you are as a human like not not as a name but as really who you are yeah that like putting that attention out there it's somehow the world opens doors where the access becomes the access that was once seemed impossible becomes possible and then all of that is a creative journey to be in the room i think that probably is i mean it's true even for fiction films probably is like everything that led to that like uh to be in the room the journey to be in the room and to shoot the scene is maybe more important than the scene itself and like really focus on the creative act of that yeah that's really fascinating and especially i mean with a documentary you get one take yeah you can't say hey we reset right yeah yeah exactly ah that is so interesting as you were in some of the most difficult parts of the world in the room with some of the most difficult stories to be told and yet i think that's why i keep doing these stories right because it's it's once you have that lived experience for me um it's moving it it moves me to bear witness to these um these these inspiring people under difficult circumstances and and it you know i can't come back to the us afterwards and you know walk down the grocery aisle where there's 50 different choices for canned peas right and not sort of feel that lived tension right that live tension of the privilege that i have here in the u.s and then i have a choice about what to do with that privilege right and the last thing i want to do is start you know doing stories about dandelions right there's far more important things to do on this very limited time that i have on the planet and you know i think that that um that's catalytic for me like i feel that mortality each day and my goal is to is to tell as many of these stories um before i'm gone could you speak to the getting access is this just you know is there interesting stories of how um a weird or funny or profound ways that led you to get access to a room each one is a different adventure and it's just an adventure everyone's an adventure yeah though probably one of the easiest ones i ever had in the recent past was for 50 feet from syria where um you know i literally broke my hand in a bicycle race and after many months of trying to get um an appointment with an orthopedic hand surgeon you know a specialist i finally did and he was syrian american and the syrian conflict had just begun and we started talking about it and yeah um after you know he looked at my hand in the first five minutes he's like yeah you need surgery right now great but then somehow we started talking about syria and like five minutes in he just stood up and like put the privacy curtain around us supposed to be a 15 minute appointment or so and we talk for an hour right so you know those moments of sort of mysterious confluence happen right and i think you have to be open to them when they do happen because i'm a storyteller i'm always looking as well right so so because he then contacted me later and said sky i am going back to the syrian border to volunteer as a surgeon do you want to come with me that was an easy one that's probably the easiest one i could give you but it came out of this interesting moment very personal moment right lifeboat and hunger ward were completely different um and i had to really work hard to gain access to those stories so you intentionally thought like what uh i want to get access to the story yeah and then what are the different ideas and they often might involve a doctor or a dentist or just be being maybe intentionally and aggressively open to experiences that lead you into the room so be like uh it is it's funny you mentioned the doctor because i have similar experiences now i've just gotten access to all kinds of fascinating people yeah in the same in the same way you're all around us they're all they're all around us you just have to look yeah exactly it's like there's fascinating people everywhere who are doing incredible things yeah but we have to be open and keep our eyes open and realize that there are amazing human beings everywhere yeah there's networks that connect people just through life you meet people you share a beer or a drink or just you fall in love or you um or you should share trauma together you go through a hard time together those little sticky things connects us humans and if you just keep yourself open and um embrace the curiosity and then also the persistence i suppose like if you like how long does have you chased access does it take days weeks months years lex i'm not the most talented filmmaker in the world i'm not the smartest guy in the world i think if there's there's qualities that have served me well in my career it's persistence and tenacity right i'm always been sort of a slow burn human being like i i i i would never hit a home run but i hit a first right a single to first and then i'd hit another single to first and then so you know i ran a marathon when i was 18 and i think that is illustrative of sort of how my career has been yeah i i just keep going and and i believe in this notion of incremental evolution that with each project i try to learn from it and take away lessons learned and improve my craft right and improve how i how i leverage that craft and improve how i tell the story from a narrative standpoint each time so that on the next project it's a little bit better and that's the arc of my career is learning learning evolving evolving so that i can i can make a little better film the next time how do you gain people's trust like for example there's a line between journalists and documentary filmmakers nobody really trusts journalists but a documentary filmmaker of course i'm joking half joking i don't know which percent is joking but some truth but documented filmmaker is a kind of storyteller an artist yeah and somehow that's more trustworthy because you're on the same side in some way i don't maybe maybe maybe the same side yeah maybe is there something to be said how you gain the trust of people to gain access you just are you just try to be a good human being um is there something to be said there well so i do draw a distinction between journalism and filmmaking because i think you're right they're different and there are some filmmakers who do hue to um sort of the journalistic tenets of who what where where and why fair and balanced on both sides right make sure everyone has a voice i don't if you say fair and balanced you're rarely either fair or balanced yeah i've seen that with journalists journalists often unfortunately in my perspective sorry to interrupt you rudely and go on a rant but they want to do it they seem to have an agenda yeah as opposed to seeking to truly tell a story or to truly understand especially when they're talking to people uh who have some degree of evil in them well we all have an agenda right i think in anything we do whether it's like um to seek truth or you know some some larger principle sure um i i always have an agenda um like i chose to work with civilians and and caretakers in yemen on hunger ward rather than to go interview mbs right um that's what i'm interested in is bringing that to the world right um but in terms of in terms of building relationships and trust it's it's really i think about transparency as much as anything else and going in in a collaborative sense so i don't i don't i don't think of of the people that i film with as subjects for example i think of them as collaborators so it's a different mindset that i go into projects with and that's beautiful and it's based on relationships right you have to build relationships with other human beings however you can and that takes time um and it takes listening and it's active so it's it's i've talked about the notion of consent before which which you know is so important in non-fiction film and you know i hew to this idea that um you know you don't just slide a piece of paper in from someone a release form and have them sign it right and then you're done you know that's not the nature of true consent in my mind it's you have to you have to work on a foundation of active consent every single day that you're working with someone and that's based on relationship right and it's based on dialogue so so it's trust that i'm always aiming for it's it's the building of relationships which i'm only aiming for which is why you know yesterday i got um a bunch of photos from dr al-sadiq in the south of yemen and she sends me photos all the time of the children that she's currently treating because we have an active relationship that's continues on and probably will for many years to come you know so that it's it's it's it's going to continue and that's the only way that i can do these kinds of films let me ask you about silly little details of filming before before we go to the big big picture stories um cameras lenses yeah do those how much do those matter you mentioned director of photography what what's your how much do you love the the feel the smell of equipment that does the visual filming you know there's some people they're just like ah they they they love lenses how much do you love that and or versus how much do you focus on the story or access and all this kind of stuff i'm not a tech geek um but because during the bulk of my career i um i've worked as a director of photography myself for other people in order to pay the bills over the years um you know i know the technical side of it because i i've had to know it and i've had to train myself and learn it so i see them as necessary tools and again because i believe you know film and cinema ish is and should be visually driven and not verbally driven um i want the best tools possible within my means right and within the the logistical ability of the project because we have to go so small right i can't i can't afford nor can i bring a huge hundred thousand dollar lens so if i give you a trillion dollars a trillion dollars yeah wow unlimited yes there's still huge constraints that have nothing to do with money yeah like you just said yeah so what what cameras would you use you know what i do with the trillion dollars i could do a lot of things you're only allowed to fund the film and no corrupt stuff where you like use the film to actually help children no you're not allowed to do any of that what i would do with the children is i wouldn't invest in a well i guess i would invest in chrome i would i would increase capacity to do more films what i would do so i would buy basically the perfect little you know mini equipment set right but then i would train three teams maybe to do the same thing that i've been doing so we could multiply and scale up more and more stories yeah that's what i would do with them but the actual setup would remain small and nimble yeah and uh what about lighting do you usually use natural light do you ever do i mean sorry for the technical questions here but um highlighting the drama of the human face yeah uh that's the visual that's art that's like to reveal reality yeah at its deepest is art and uh do you use lighting lighting's such a big part of that you use do you ever do artificial lighting do you try to do natural always you know the best lighting instrument in the world is the sun at the right moment of the day and so i predominantly use natural light um at certain moments and just shape natural light during the course of these small human right stocks that's not to say we don't bring instruments sometimes but when we do they're very small and again compact so for example i have this small little um tube kit that's just three instruments right that you can charge with the usb because electricity is often a major issue where we go so there's just three little tube lights with magnetic backs that if we find in a situation where you know we can't get enough exposure for a hallway or something and we have the time to throw it up we'll throw it up if people are walking if if collaborators are walking down that hallway a lot for example at night just so we can see them right so it's instances like that or if we do do an interview which we don't do very often but if we do just so we have a key light on the face right and i always bring in a reflector or two you know just to shape natural light as well in ways but it's um it's about shaping rather than producing light for us got it as we sit surrounded by black curtains in complete natural life so just just so you know this room uh is is like a violation of the basic principles of of using the sun so behind the large curtains are giant windows yeah so this whole should i rip them open [Laughter] how much of the work is done in the edit that's another question i'm curious about yeah and how much do you uh sort of anticipate that like when you're actually shooting are you thinking of the final story as it appears on screen or are you just collecting as a human collecting little bits of story here and there and in the edit is where most of the storytelling happens i've developed this sort of mental paradigm for myself over the years um that speaks to that and and i call it the three creations right and so when i'm doing a film the first creation for me is you know my preconception or visualization of what the film is going to be before i shoot it right so i have this this entire vision of of what a film is gonna be um and and sometimes it could be pretty specific like i'll i'll think through the scenes if i if i know the locations and everything and i'll have this idea of what i'm going to create right and then i'm there filming right and always without fail reality is something altogether different than what i thought it would be but it's still good to have the original idea yeah yeah but if i tried to hold to that original vision right and to create a film out of that idea they'd be crap all the films would be so we i have to adapt i have to evolve my approach and then embrace what is actually occurring with the people actually doing it and then re-envision so that re-envisioning is very active during the entire filming process and so that's the second creation that's the the rethinking and re-visualizing based on what we're actually experiencing and seeing what this film is going to be and then i finish filming right and we bring the hard drives back and we plug in the hard drives um in the edit bay and oftentimes you know because it's two of us filming most of the time i haven't seen all the footage because in the field it's all about just filming right and then just transferring the footage and getting on safely you know clone to multiple drives i don't have a chance to review everything i can't do rushes like you do on a large feature so because i'm filming half of it i know what i've filmed right but i haven't seen everything the director photography has filmed right so the next stage for me is reviewing every single frame of what's been filmed and that's where discovery happens the third time right or second time rather is is wow now i thought we'd film this but actually um there's this over here and then i have to open up this second vision and turn in and transform it into a third vision for the film based on what's actually on the hard drive so you're is this like a daily process so what i do the fruit my process is that once if it's a really difficult project i'll take a break before i go through this yeah just just for healing you know and some space away and fresh eyes and usually that's about a month and then once i re-engage i re-engage whole hog i re-engage fully and it and i review every single frame and as i do that i create a spreadsheet and for hunger war that spreadsheet was i don't know 1500 lines long or something where it's basically log notes and i and i watch every scene and i take notes and i i know really what we have and once i've gone through that process that takes about a month and i really know what we came back with i create an outline for the film from that and that's the third visioning right that's usually completely different than my original vision for the film to some extent right but i have to stay open to that entire process um or or i'd be trying to create something that i can't really create so i think that's those are the three creations for me that's so cool to to know what we have uh just to lay it all out and to load it in into your mind yeah because like this is the capture of reality we have it's a very kind of scientific process too because um you know in science you collect a bunch of data about a phenomena yeah and now you have to like analyze that data but now your phenomena is long gone yeah yeah right right now you just have the data just the data and you have to uh write a paper about it like analyze the data it's the similar things you have to like load it all in where's the story how how how do you that last probably profound piece of doing the editing like in your mind like what uh how to lay those things out well it's almost like the scientific process right i have a hypothesis a creative hypothesis right not a scientific one yes and but then i'm testing the hypothesis during the course of filming right and i have to stay true to what the data tells me in the end creatively so it's very similar to the scientific processes i don't know what we should we should probably coin that yeah creative scientific process or something like that but then you actually do the edit and you watch that's also uh iterative in a sense because maybe uh when you have a film that's 20 30 40 minutes or if it's feature line uh like in it do you ever have it where it sucks like it's not is there a stage where it sucks like a stage where you're right right it like is where he's like no this is not this is not what i was like when it's all put together in this way this doesn't this is not working right this is not right or do you is it always like an incremental step towards better and better it's incremental yeah it's incremental yeah and there's always some moment in the editing process where there's a breakthrough where suddenly i understand how it fits together more fully and you have to be like you said resilient you have to be patient that that moment will come yeah exactly are you ultra self-critical or are you generally optimistic and patient i don't think those are mutually exclusive right so you just oscillate or you or they're like dance partners or something they're dance partners yeah yeah definitely dancing all the way through the process by way of advice you know to young filmmakers how to film something that is recognized by the world in some way i would say you know first off learn your craft right um because i i think craft is incredibly foundational right to creating a powerful story and sorry to interrupt but when you say craft do you mean just the raw technical the director of photography like the filming aspect is it the storytelling is the acts is the whole thing i think craft is more than just knowing how to push record on a camera or what lens to use right that's part of it right but i i think um at least in non-fiction you know i'm i'm a product to some extent of having to know how to do it all right having to teach myself how to do it all because i didn't go to film school you know but i became so enamored of telling stories through a camera what was the leap by the way from theater to storyteller oh i just had needed an extra class in grad school i was in a mfa directing class and i needed an extra class and i just sort of like talked my way into a television directing class and fell in love with it and the actor became the director yeah yeah well yeah i mean i wasn't an actor but but i i had to act i had to know the craft of acting because i was in the theater you know today did you love it though did you love did you love the theater yeah um the first yeah the as an undergraduate yeah but then i learned pretty quickly that i was pretty bad at it um or at least not very good um and that my skills lay elsewhere uh in more sort of behind the scenes and shaping a story when you started you know taking a class but also telling stories as a director did you quickly realize that you're pretty good at this or was it a grind that's a good question max um i think i definitely knew right away that it was more my wheelhouse right and and i think part of that was because i um i i grew up in sort of a world of imagination um and i think that active imagination as a child really lent itself well to the skill set that a director needs right to shape story to shape narrative to shape performances so i think it was a much more natural fit for me was i excellent at the beginning heck no no you know i think few people are but i learned where was the biggest struggle for you is it so your imagination clearly was uh something that you worked on for a lifetime so i'm sure that was pretty strong books came from books books but the actual conversion of the amount you said shape the story where was the skill most lacking in the shaping of the story initially technical side just technically yeah i'd like you know because i taught myself everything right what kind of microphone should i use right what kind of camera what does this lens do what's that lens do i didn't know any of that and so i essentially was i have been self-taught technically how do you get good technically would you say when you're self-taught doing it over and over again and what kind of stories were you telling like like i began shooting local commercials um for for for money for money yeah yeah actually doing professional projects yeah yeah and so i kind of learned on the job as i did it how many hobby projects did you do just for the hell of it were you trying to focus on the professional i was trying to make money right right out of grad school just to pay the rent and that that you know that's a forcing function to i mean i i personally love having my back to the wall or financially you're screwed to succeed so that's nice uh i mean i lived out of the trunk of my car for a couple years after grad school just freelancing you know just like but but that couple years really helped me learn fast because i had to learn fast you know so i did a couple i did a couple voyages around the world for this group called semester at sea that has a floating university that where they go out three and a half months at a time with the with about 500 college level students and about 35 professors and so you're shooting every day for three and a half months in like nine different countries and so that really was like instrumental to me becoming a pretty good camera person pretty quickly and you're doing most of the work yourself one man one man bad yeah the second the second uh voyage i at least had an editor with me yeah but i was shooting everything yeah what's the perfect team is it two people for the for non-fiction asking for a friend yeah i'm kind of interested in some storytelling not of the level and the sophistication that you're doing but more i think you have to allow the story to dictate what the size of the film should be for these small human rights dogs i do i think two or three you know it means you work your butt off right because you're doing everything right but it allows you to tell intimate stories and have that access i i'm doing a film this summer that's a that's a scripted piece where we'll probably have 25 crew people oh wow you know so it's a completely different different endeavor altogether but doing it yourself what do you think about that even though you i you have that trillion dollars oh i have that trillion dollars against write that check before i leave yeah i will okay great uh i've never seen a check for that because it'll be interesting how many zeros is that i write them so often i i've lost track or the united states government sure as heck writes them often okay anyway um i mean like is there an argument can you steal man the case for a single person you know not for me um not for me and and here's why um what i found is that um by by being a team of two filming with a field producer but two people filming um it allows us to double our footage first off right so we have twice as much footage in the time we're filming to come back with as opposed to one person filming so you're each manning a camera yeah constantly and how much how much uh sorry do you keep interrupting how much interaction interplay there sometimes the director of photography is in another room filming a different scene if it makes sense sometimes we're cross-shooting in the same room yeah right it just depends on the needs of the moment um so so we come back with double footage it's one thing but as a director so that's you know and given how access is some sometimes shaped by the events so that we can only something you know in lifeboat for example you know a rescue operation may only happen three three days right so you want as much footage as you can but the other piece of it that's really critical for me i found is that by having another human being i'm filming with who i'm co-shooting with it frees me up as a director to not always have to be shooting either i can do all the other work to build relationships right to have side conversations with people to to sort out the right way to tell a story right or to transfer footage knowing that the director of photography is still filming during all that so it frees me up to think of a as a director rather than just an image acquirer yeah because there's also i don't know how distracting is you've obviously done it for years but setting stuff up it uh pre-act it it preoccupies your mind like pressing the record button yeah and like framing stuff and all that that's still that takes up some part of your mind where you can't think freely that's my choice right that's how i work best that said the caveat there would be that's not the only way to do it obviously right like one of my favorite documentary time documentaries of all time um is a documentary called a woman captured shot in hungary uh by a single filmmaker with a single camera with a single lens right and it's brilliant and powerful and moving and interventional it's it's incredible filmmaking and it was a single human being who created that film with with um with a collaborator or subject so it can be done it's just not how i work best yeah how much personally with the other person how important is the relationship with them outside of the filming like uh with the director of photography the director photographers say like how much drinking and if you don't drink whatever the equivalent of that is do you have to do together how much soul-searching or is it more like two surgeons getting together is it is it surgeons or is it a jazz band well it could be either right hopefully not the same time though because i don't think surgeons and jesus fans go well together probably they're they're both good with fingers exactly but i'd rather maybe not play in jazz while they operate on me yeah um but but i think um for me um i think there are moments of both but usually not at the same time right there are surgical moments where the moment is so pressing you really have to be that task driven right to capture as thoroughly as possible whatever's unfolding right but i think there's other times where you do improvise like jazz right and where where you have a lot of choices ahead of you and and you're doing it maybe a dance with the other camera person right in order to capture a scene as creatively and fully as possible during a fixed duration how much you said shaping because it is non-fiction but i feel like there's so many ways to tell the same non-fiction that it's borderline on fiction yeah this is well it's storytelling and how much shaping do you see yourself as as doing like how important is your role how you tell the story um i suppose the question i'm asking is how many ways can you really screw this up every day you can screw it up um i mean that's really the what i think what you ask your basically the ethos of documentary filmmaking right i allow a lot of things to guide my choices um one of them being am i being fair right not balanced right but i am i being fair to what i'm witnessing does the camera capturing in a fair way the truth of the reality some some fundamentals and it also speaks to consent right um am i being fair in a sense of con do i have active consent in this moment right regardless of whether i have a signed piece of paper i always find some way to document it whether it's just direct address to camera or you know um a translated release so there's actually that's an interesting little so they say something to the camera that they consent or they sign the thing yeah so for example you know i think the large you know broadcast companies have this formalized process where they present a piece of paper right yes and the subject reads it and they sign it and then you have permission and that's irrevocable right so it'll hold up in court that's not how i operate right and so um it's it's just for example that doesn't work if someone's illiterate and can't read that piece of paper right right what if they don't know how to sign their name right so instead you have to have a conversation ask questions have them ask questions come to a complete understanding before you even know whether they understand what you're asking right and then in that case if someone's illiterate then you have that conversation you sit down and it takes a long time sometimes but you have to do it and then if they still want to participate and they give you their consent you know they can't sign a piece of paper right so then you just do in their native language right direct consent to camera in their language interesting but also you're speaking to the consent that's just a human placing trust in you yeah you make a connection like this that's the most important concern right yeah i hate papers i hate papers and lawyers because they they exactly for that reason yeah okay great but you should be focusing on on the human connection that leads to the trust to the like real consent and consent day-to-day minute to minute because that can change absolutely and it does change you mentioned uh a woman captured what the this is i'm sure you can't answer that but i will force you uh what are the top three documentaries of all time short or feature length to you not this is not your opinion this is objective truth uh maybe top one what's what's the greatest we got um let's see much of the penguins that's probably number one for me really no i'm just kidding i don't know i i do seem to the the metaphor of penguins huddling together in uh hard cold like in the harsh conditions of nature that that's something that's kind of beautiful yeah i don't love all nature documentaries but like something about march of the penguins i i think morgan freeman yeah he narrated it narrates it so maybe everything just everything you documented with morgan freeman i'm a sucker for that uh warner herzog life in the taiga the simple people i love grizzly man i love that's one of his best works you know yes i think that's uh joe rogan's favorite uh uh favorite documentary yeah it's both comedy and and i mean it's tragic comedy tragic comedy yeah yeah is there something that stands out to you i mean i'm joking about like best something that was impactful to you just to put it out there i don't think there's any any way to say that they're objectively you know the best fee documentaries all the time but for me and you may find this interesting given your background is that i think my top three are all from the eastern bloc actually so so aquarella by kosokovsky victor kosovki is one of my favorite and it's a couple years old now which is sort of a meditation on the place water has on our planet and in our lives um i i think a woman captured that i mentioned which was shot in hungary there's a feature-length one both both are feature links yeah um it is just brilliant and it i think has yet to find distribution here in the u.s you know but it's the perfect example of what they call you know verite or direct non-fiction filmmaking a european woman this is the synopsis the european woman has been kept by family as a domestic slave for 10 years drawing courage from the filmmaker's presence she decides to escape the unbearable oppression and become a free person wow so the filmmaker is part of the story part of the story becomes didn't start that way but during the course of the story the filmmaker under becomes comes to understand that this is actually modern day slavery and rather than just allow it to be actually enables and assists this woman to to free yourself from slavery and become a free woman i wonder sorry on a small tangent before we get to number three like icarus is interesting too how often do you become part of the story or the story is different because of your presence but like uh like you you changed the tide of history yeah well back to like one person at a time that we keep talking you know we keep coming back to that theme on some level so so this could tie in interesting to one of my one of my favorite films actually so um the last two films that i would mention from my top four list would be the third eastern block one would be a film called immortal in 2019. which was shot in russia by a russian woman um that sort of you know examines uh the place of the state in um in shaping individuals to be vehicles for the state i mean that's my own synopsis but that's one of my takeaways from the brilliant 60-minute dock or so um again russian filmmaking is really quite quite good and powerful the fourth one would be a frederick wiseman film titica follies um which was filmed in the u.s decades ago uh inside basically the bowels of an insane asylum or a mental health institution and and i bring up wiseman because you know he is really the the godfather so to speak of of direct cinema or cinema verite and i when early in my career i really believed in what he expressed as the place of the verite filmmaker which is simply fly on the wall which is only observational nature right and and i believe that that's how i should be as a non-fiction filmmaker that i was there only to bear witness to observe and not to intervene in any way shape or form and and that was the sort of foundation for how i operated for many many years and then some things happened so one of those things that happened was i i filmed lifeboat and during the course of filming lifeboat which you know covered rescue operations in the mediterranean off the coast of libya in the first three days of that rescue mission um you know we came upon over 3 000 people asylum seekers floating in flimsy rafts in the water and we were on the zodiacs and um we were filming and within the first couple hours you know we would come up to these rafts and these boats that were in really dire shape and people would be pushed off and people would jump off and people would fall into the water and some of them couldn't swim and so we found ourselves in this moment where we had a choice we could film someone drowned in front of us or we could put our cameras down and pull them out of the water and so that's what we did we put our cameras in the bottom of the zodiac and just started pulling people out of the water and um you know if i was wise men right according to his paradigm then we should have just filmed and um i didn't anticipate that moment beforehand i had no sort of foreknowledge that i was going to find myself faced with that dilemma of the moment as a documentarian but there was no question in my mind that i had to put my camera down and pull that fellow human being out of the water and i don't regret it at all so i've come to a different place i've evolved to what i believe for the kind of film that i do is more appropriate right like i can go to sleep at night knowing that regardless of how the film would have been different if i hadn't made that choice i made the right choice as a human being so i i think of it as being a human being first in a filmmaker second in moments like that that's beautifully beautifully put but i also think like you could be a human being in small ways too like silly ways and put a little bit of yourself in in documentaries i i tend to see that as really beautiful like when like the meta piece of it like yeah like yeah just just put yourself into the into the movie a little bit because uh like break that third fourth whatever the wall is is realize that there's a human behind the camera too for some reason me as a fan as a viewer that's enjoyable too i think there's a real authenticity there behind the straw especially with these hard stories that you're doing that there's a human being struggling to like uh observing the suffering and having to bear the burden that this kind of suffering exists in the world and you're behind that camera living that struggle and there's small ways to show yourself in that way as you know i i don't do that in a big way but you know i actually there are subtle moments where i allow that presence to live just for a second like i hate belly button docs that's what i call them i don't know what it's about belly button doc is navel gazing right where this is sort of a narcissistic filmmaking where someone just studies their own place in the world right i think i see yeah yeah i think my you know or i i'm more concerned with how i can intervene right yeah um well you're trying to really deeply empathize yeah so like if you do emphasize i don't want to center myself in these stories it's not about me right i am so unimportant what is important is what's happening what's unfolding in the world that we need to act upon and right and i think it's selfish and narcissistic to to you know push myself into these stories unnecessarily now that said i think there is some small value in what you're saying just to remind viewers that there's obviously a filmmaker at play so sometimes the way that i do that is just like through a question on camera i'd allow the audio to live of a question or during a conversation i'm having with someone so they can they can just hear how it's posed for example right and to me that's enough yeah i i do like moments when people recognize that you exist they they look at the filmmaker past the camera and that yes you ask the question in an interview or something like that and they respond to that yeah uh like they respond to this like new perturbation into their reality that was created by this other human yeah and i especially like when those questions are those perturbations are like a little bit absurd and like add something very novel to their situation and that novelty reveals something about them so as opposed to capturing the day-to-day reality of their life you do that plus the perturbations of like something novel yeah that and but of course there's there's there's all kinds of ways to do this let me um what was number five by the way only i only gave you four get you just stay at four there's a short dock i like i mentioned they're called the toxic pigs of fukushima i know i know i apologize it's dark it's a great title though right it's a great title it's it's no one's seen it but it's great it's it says what it sounds like yeah yeah it's exactly what it sounds like but really brilliantly executed well let me ask you about lifeboat because it's extremely i i don't um it's a really moving um idea just just the fact that this exists in the world that there's uh as a metaphor as a reality that there is a set of people trying to flee desperately is the desperation of it and now with his refugees the desperation of that of of trying to escape towards a world that full of mystery uncertainty uh doubt could be hopeless at times and you're willing to do a lot for your own survival of the survival of your family and all those kinds of things that's kind of the human spirit and you just capture it um in lifeboat can you tell me this the story behind this film as you started to already tell um can you tell me what is it about so lifeboat um [Music] really seeks to sort of lift up and showcase the asylum seeker crisis in the mediterranean when it was at its height um in 2016. and um it came to be for many reasons but but one of those reasons is is um colleagues in the ngo community really shared with me that um when the borders between greece and turkey were shut down that the the flow of a syrian asylum seekers that was initially going across from turkey to greece was going to shift westward across the mediterranean so i started to research that and discovered that was exactly the case and then further stumbled upon the fact that nation states hadn't really stepped up to address it and that there were hundreds of asylum seekers often drowning in these flimsy crafts that were pushed off from the shores of libya because the eu wasn't doing its duty to um patrol those waters from a humanitarian standpoint and so the net result of that was that this whole sort of like humanitarian community sprung up um and it was civil society based that that tried to meet the needs of those asylum seekers to to just ensure that fellow human beings weren't drowning simply put and one of those was this small little ngo called sea watch which when they discovered what was happening just cobbled together a coalition of volunteers bought a research vessel retrofitted it and motored down off the coast of libya to start pulling people out of the water and again i found that inspiring right i found that inspiring that this group of volunteers was doing something that our leaders wouldn't right and it was something as basic and simple as saving human beings and um i thought there was an inspiring story there and as it turned out there was have you ever saved someone's life as as a part of making these documentaries directly and directly i think you probably have countless lives but directly were you put in that position i i don't i don't i don't wanna i mean i certainly poured people out the water who couldn't swim i did that and that's again speaking to the basic humanity put down the camera and help yeah uh so this is people coming from libya yeah trying to make it across the mediterranean sea on a crappy tiny boat from a filmmaker perspective how do you film that was there decisions to capture the desperation well we were you know we were going back to this idea of access and how that's so fundamental to my approach um you know we we were bound by the strictures of the rescue operation on this sea watch vessel which was 30 meters long and we were two of a crew of 15 right so we had to multitask all the time because the only reason we were on that boat was by agreeing that if needed we would do whatever necessary right to um to help right and so it's very active on multiple levels and and um we were making decisions each and every day that were um not only filmmaking and creative decisions but also just decisions about how how to live that duality right of being a humanitarian and a filmmaker simultaneously and the the greatest example i can share of that was with my director of photography in that project kenny allen he um kenny's a big guy it's like he's got like arms like tree trunks and um and he because he was so physically able and strong the head of mission um just really tasked him to be on the zodiac to pull people out of the water because he could literally with one arm reach down and just oftentimes pull someone out right um whereas usually it would take two or three people for it and so when we were at the height of triage and there were people in the water all over and rafts were sinking um kenny was out pulling people out of the water and this went on for like 24 hours right and at the end of that first day i remember like looking over on the deck and seeing kenny like help people up from the ladders to walk them back right and his camera was nowhere to be seen yeah right and so i walked over to him and i just grabbed him by the shoulders and said kenny where is your camera and he didn't know he had no idea where his camera was right and so i just said kenny we're here to do what you're doing but we're also here to film it right to make sure that we document what is unfolding in front of us so we have a record of it right so we can bring it to a larger audience so you need to go find your camera so we can also document it yeah and that kind of pulled him out and he went and got his camera and started filming again but but that gives you a sense of sort of this world that we had to live in in order to get the story done but i think to be a great director of photography to be a great director you have to lose yourself like that in the story too but usually with a camera in your hand right but sometimes you forget the camera i mean like there's uh i feel like if you're obsessed with the camera too much you can lose the humanity of it you get obsessed with the film and the story it can become clinical yes yeah absolutely and it's it's you know i yeah absolutely and and we don't want to become we i don't want to become clinical in my films certainly let me ask you uh a strange and perhaps edgy question so some filmmakers believe is justified to break the rules in order to tell a powerful story warner herzog um i read this somewhere teaches young filmmakers to pick locks and forge documents and so on i didn't know that interesting what do you think about that bending the rules in service of telling a story uh you would of course never break the law but is there does that uh just generally speaking bending the rules and so on you know just to elaborate on this question perhaps i'm distinctly aware that there's parts in the world where the rule of law is not like uh enforced as cleanly as it is in the united states as fairly as it is in the united states that there's a kind of there's a lot of bribery there's a lot of like you don't really know to trust you can you don't know if you can trust the cops or basically anybody so like the rules are very hazy kind of concept and a lot of them especially like it's funny but authoritarian regimes often have a giant bureaucracy build up that's full of rules there's more rules and you know what to deal with and you can't actually live life unless you break the rules anyway laying that all out on the table do you ever ever contend with that on what are the rules i can break or should break to keep to the spirit of the story i think you have to ask yourself are the rules just and why are there in place right so for example coming into the airport in southern yemen right if i just tried to walk through the airport with all my equipment even with all the permissions beforehand like we had without having a fixer at the airport beforehand to make sure we didn't go through the standard line right um we would have been caught up for three hours at least negotiating over our equipment and eventually paying a bribe to get it through yes right that's just reality yeah in a place like yemen and so of course knowing that right having talked to colleagues who had taken that path previously i took a different path right well we hire a fixer beforehand to sort it out beforehand right rather than spending three hours of our time and paying a series of bribes yes instead we're going to get it fixed beforehand so that we can walk through a different line and have no one look at any of our equipment that's a pretty good trade-off in my mind what about security when you're traveling in these places do you ever have bodyguards uh well several questions around that are you ever afraid for your life when you're filming in a war zone is there any way to lessen the probability of death i don't have a death wish i try to mitigate risk however i can however i can but one of the ways i can't do it in a conflict zone is by having armed security with me and the reason for that is because especially in a place like yemen right if you have armed security you become a target in a way that if you're operating under sort of the auspices of international humanitarian law i actually have more protection so i don't bring security if you're working in northern yemen for example um you're going to have someone from the de facto authorities with you anyway the entire time you're there so the authorities are with you in form anyway um regarding fear um yeah of course i mean fear is a natural human emotion right and i i think we have a weird mindset this sort of heroic mindset surrounding fear in the u.s which i don't pay tribute to i believe as a natural human emotion it's an alarm bell that i need to pay attention to right and and i think rather than pretending to be brave right i think you have to just acknowledge that fear has a place to keep you alive and i think it's a matter of not letting the fear arrest you right and allowing the fear to live and then acting anyway don't you think as a documentary filmmaker the fear is a really good signal for potentially a good thing to do because there's a story there so is fear is an indicator that you shouldn't do it or is it an indicator you should do it it's probably in the case you should do it right um and you know and strangely that i think that's why i think that's if there's something unusual about the work i do in some part it's it's because of these types of stories right they're hard to access but you also have to have a threshold of willingness to do them when you can't um you know there is no guarantee of physical safety right and maybe that's why you should do them i'm very much motivated by the things that scare me that they seem to direct um the things that are worth doing in this all too short life how often do you interact with our friendly friends at the police departments of various locations like uh because of the humanitarian nature of your work are you able to avoid um all such friendly conversations or are you often in making friends with are i try to avoid the friendly police people all over the world as much as possible um but in in some instances it's important to be proactive right and make sure that they know what you're doing before you do it so it's all about the context and the situation for example working in northern yemen you couldn't film for five minutes if if you didn't have paperwork because you'd be taken away so you have to make sure you have all those permissions ahead of time 50 feet from syria i i would love to talk at least a little bit about this film first can you high level can you tell what this documentary is about yeah it was early in the syrian uprising and we returned to the syrian turkish border with a syrian american orthopedic surgeon who is volunteering operating on refugees as they float across the border from syria to turkey and it was an attempt at the time before a lot of films had come out about the conflict to um really show again um the effects of the war on civilians you've heard me echo that sentiment multiple times now but it it you know people knew there was there was a a major conflict in syria but didn't really understand the form that that was taken and the impact it was having and so we we embedded into the at the time it was the only clinic in turkey that was sanctioned by the turkish government um to treat uh syrian refugees and so we filmed there with surgeons as they operated on war victims and we also went into syria into some of the camps as well so in this film there's a man who crosses the border every day to retrieve the wounded and fair them safety and care and you also mentioned about heroism in the united states um can you tell me about this man and just people like him like what's the heroic action in some of these places that you've visited so in that instance you know i thought of him as the turkish schindler right because he was human being who of his own volition volition no one was paying him to do this but he was spending much of his time he was just a local businessman who really saw the need in the camps right across the border 10k away and and and he saw the medical need in particular and how hard it was to get people in desperate medical conditions across the border where there was a clinic just right across the border but because of the security and the layers of security they couldn't get out by themselves so he took it upon himself as a turkish person to build relationships with the turkish guards which was relatively easy and then he built relationships with sort of the the guards in the no man's land between the syrian guards and sort of those who lived in the the middle area and then also with the syrian guards at the camp and he would drive out there daily and bring them food right talk them up and build relationships and if so every day he would bring these guards food and build relationships with them and and what that meant was eventually right he had this avenue of access to and from the camps and so he started using it and he would drive this avenue of access through the three layers of guards each day and then they would open the gates for him because he had made himself trustworthy in their eyes and he would receive the most desperate medical cases that were coming from all over um northern syria right to receive medical treatment and he would as you see in the film he would ferry them into the back of his car right and then drive them to the hospital where they would receive operations and then he would bring them back if they wanted after they'd healed and recovered back to syria if they wanted to return out post recovery and you know he didn't get paid for that he was spending his own money to do it because he saw other human beings in need and it's like we were talking about earlier that's heroic right that's selfless that's that's aspirational for me right here's here's someone who is spending their time on the planet doing something of value and good to other human beings i mean if you draw parallels to schindler i feel like the fascinating thing about uh schindler is that he's kind of a flawed human and he's not the kind of human that does these things usually yeah but you just can't help it yeah and that's like the basic humanity despite who you are the basic humanity shines through i think the you know the whims of war test people in those ways right they ask of you things that you may not even know we're going to be asked of you and then it speaks to who who you are fundamentally as a human being they reveal who you are as a human being just as you said um let me ask a kind of the stupid technical question about publications and movies and so on i've been um recently becoming good friends with thomas tall who was the producer his company legendary funded some of the big sort of blockbuster films and so on and so obviously money is part of filmmaking that's interesting but also the release of movies and me as a consumer you know uh with netflix with youtube you know that's one of the reasons i'm a huge fan of youtube is it's like out in the open yeah access or especially historical access like over time you can look back years later if you pay some money you can watch some of the great films ever made um youtube hulu netflix i don't know what other services there are hbo paramount permit plus paramount plus um anyway there's all these platforms uh spotify now it's uh i understand they want to create paywalls and so on and make sense but i'm a huge fan of openness and i'm really kind of torn by this whole thing anyway that's the discussion for perhaps another time but the the short question is why is it so hard to watch your documentaries and other films other incredible films on the internet if i want to pay unlimited amount of money i want to pay a lot of money yeah to watch it why is it so hard well lifeboat is streaming free on the new yorker uh yes i saw that but it's still which is interesting that doesn't make any sense and then also hunger ward is on paramount plus but also pluto tv it's which is free streaming free yeah so you can either go through a pay wall or you can watch it with ads yeah with big macs interspersed big macs sometimes yeah the contrast well no it really reveals the power of the documentary yeah no but like it's still not even those platforms are i mean they're not they're not as easily accessible because you have to like yeah you have to use you have to think and you have to chase a particular you have to chase it yeah yeah yeah i i guess from an economic standpoint the answer that is pretty clear right it may not be what people want to watch maybe people want to watch reality maybe people want to watch animal rescue shows right here in the u.s which is exactly why in part i think it's so vital that we continue to do stories on things that aren't about flowers and puppy dogs right i would push back on that so there's tick tock and you could say well look humans just want to watch really short content because they seem to be addicted to that kind of thing that's partially true but they also watch two three four five hour podcasts and on tick tock no there's different platforms for that this is a place called youtube i'll teach you about it okay yeah i've never heard of it it's a good place to publish documentaries i think i you know humans are interested in a lot of things and i've seen many times a thing that you think is a niche thing become a very big thing but for them to become mainstream they have to have a platform that allows for the mainstream to happen access the access the the dumb simple frictionless access the frictional frictionless access is a really important thing um you know pay walls create friction and not just because of the money it can be free but if you have to click on a thing or maybe sign up uh or put your email but it's it's just not it creates a it it it prevents you to enjoy the thing you would really enjoy and you know you would enjoy but your baser human nature prevents you from enjoying because you can just open up tech talk and keep scrolling so it that that's just something to say about platforms because i think the things that need platforms the most are things like your films the things that i think a lot of people would love watching they're very important and they can have viral impact on the world that is fundamentally positive you know it's just it it makes me sad that there's not a machine for for celebrating those films there are lots of machines to celebrate them but they're just not as always accessible as youtube right i mean as soon as you write me that check for a trillion dollars when i walk out of here yeah then i'm gonna put all my films on youtube because then i won't have to worry about you know selling them you know so i can make the next film because you know film is not just an art it's also an industry yes right and that tension between the two is a constant interplay that that is a reality for me so i always have to think about um how can i access the largest audience but also right go out and shoot the next film yes right so that longevity question is also an issue and and the finances are part of that sort of equation that i constantly have to rewrite over and over again how often as a creative mind do you feel the constraints the financial constraints i wish i could do a lot more films that i can't always because of financial constraints so it's the number of films yeah and are you is a is a film that you do currently is a film that you do at any one time as you're filming it already funded or is it the funding from previous stuff that you're trying to use before hunger ward um i would just take a flyer on my films right where i would just say this this meets the so wet threshold this is a story that has to be told and and i want i want to tell it um and then i could just go shoot it and usually on credit usually on a credit card right so so based on a belief that that a lifeboat was done that way yes right 50 feet from syria was done that so you're on a boat broke yeah yeah but it's free food right and free lodging because there's a bunk on the boat but i do that i do that not intending to stay broke right but but based on a foundational belief that if i if i bring to bear all of my sort of you know quiver of creative arrows to it right that i i can create something of value right in the world but hopefully also um financially that then i can sell to someone and you know every time i've done that lex i've gotten into the black so it's a risk and i have to have a certain risk threshold financially to do that but i believe so deeply in these stories that i'm willing to do that i didn't have to do that with hunger ward luckily i had funders um for that film yeah yeah take risks in this life it's gonna pay off which reminds me of let me ask you i already asked you for advice about for a filmmaker how to win an oscar well i haven't won an oscar how to get nominated for an oscar that's true or just how to make great documentaries how to make great film but let me ask even zuma bigger yeah you mentioned some of these things doing the things that you think matters what advice would you give to young people high school college dreaming of uh living a life worth living what advice would you give them about career or maybe just life in general kind of a life they can be proud of yeah i don't know how you're going to react to this given given sort of your expertise but i i would say um oh put down the smartphone yes step away from the monitor right because real life is not a screen right i believe that sort of the foundational skills which are which are conducive and important to success um aren't necessarily those technical skills which we're going to l learn in trade schools or or university i think the they're more foundational than that they're learning how to interact um and listen with humans with humans yeah to really see and listen right um and observe and observe right um and how to step out of your door and if the electricity goes out right and you're five miles away from your house you don't need a smartphone to get home because you've set visual markers for yourself on how to get back to where you live right i think we're in danger right now of living in a world where if the satellites stop functioning right um then a whole lot of people become completely dysfunctional right because we're so reliant upon the screens in our lives so i think there's a lot of foundational skills that have nothing to do with technology that we need to learn that that and everything rests upon those so i would say learn those foundations learn how to write well read a lot right it's a different kind of knowledge and wisdom that comes out of that so reading is kind of the equivalent of listening and observing and writing is kind of integration of all of that that you've observed and listened to and tried to express something with that so i think my training in the theater has served me so well in the documentary world right because it's all about interaction and listening and talking and dialogue right and that's what i do in documentaries right is i listen yeah i yeah um we mentioned fear i'm being an introvert i'm very afraid of people but i'm drawn to them i've been fascinated by them because of that yeah enjoy them totally and um observing them and you mentioned reading you mentioned books as a catalyst as a stimulator of your imagination is there books in your life a couple one two three that kind of left an impact or or a little bit of spark of inspiration early on in life that stand out from your memory i i was given um the prophet by kilio de braun when i as a graduation president from my eighth from my high school english teacher and i still have that book in a special place on my bookshelf because i think it speaks to the nature of human experience right and i return to it all the time because there's wisdom there you know but but there's uh many many books so fiction or non-fiction what what connects with you usually in the past when the i read mostly non-fiction most of the time um ten points is a book i love a lot what is it what is ten points ten points is um i think his name is bill strickland he was the editor of i think bicycle magazine and it's sort of his personal memoir of um his experience growing up with a lot of abuse and how that transformed him as a human being you know one instrumental book for me that i bumped into in my early 20s boy these are all non-fiction except for the princess bride um i have to mention it's an outlier no no the seven habits of highly effective people yes um i read that in my early twenties yeah and i found so many of um the principles in that book what are what are the habits from that one uh seek first to understand than to be understood is one of them you know the notion of proactivity is one of them um it's it's really and so i've held on to some of those principles through my life as well for sure what have been you've observed suffering darker aspects of human nature in your own personal life what has been some of the darkest moments in your life darkest times in your life is there something that you went through and then perhaps you carry it through your work yeah probably one of the darkest moments was an experience that i had again in my early 20s and i was living in southern california and i you know the pacific coast highway that goes north and south along the beach and there's that little uh concrete path that people jog and ride their bikes and i was riding my bike on the on the pch and um i was coming up to a corner on it and i heard this tremendous crash and it was really loud and i came across the corn around the corner and it was a car accident a car crash it was a multiple multiple vehicle crash and what had happened is that um a volvo had um hit another car and then when it hit it it went over the top of the car and hit a volkswagen van and it peeled away the top of the volkswagen van when it hit it and then landed so three vehicles and it just happened and um lying in the middle of the road was a body decapitated and there was another person from one of the cars lying in the middle of the road still alive and then on the hood of the volvo was this woman who had come through the windshield just a mess blood everywhere moaning back and forth and a bystander ran into the middle of the road and started administering first aid to the person lying in the road and i stood there watching the scene and every fiber of my being wanted to run to the woman on the hood of the volvo and do something anything right just to be there and it was obvious to me that she was she was gonna die but i felt like at least if i ran there i could offer some comfort for her last moment and right then the sirens started to blare and i knew that there'd be paramedics there within minutes that that people would come to help and i froze and i was scared and i didn't do anything and i watched while this woman died on the hood of the volvo and that experience is sort of seared into my consciousness um the fact that i watched and didn't act i i feel is one of the great failures of my life that i wasn't able to act in a moment of need no matter how small and from that i made a decision out of that experience that if i ever found myself in a situation where i had the ability to act and i could act to help another human being in such need that i would act that i wouldn't let fear freeze me instead i would allow that fear to catalyze me into action and do something and intervene in whatever way i could even if i didn't have the skill set and in some ways all of that echoes in your documentaries you're not going to let fear stop you from trying to help i think that experience that that experience of failure what i s what i framed as just human failure on my part um is is foundational probably for my work like i don't want that to happen again legs like like i i don't want to be that person who watches i want to do what i can when i can if we zoom out you were just one human that witnessed that that trauma you you one human that witnessed so much suffering in different parts of the world and as we zoom out across space and time and look at earth why do you think we're here on this earth what's the meaning of human civilization was the meaning of your life of individual human life and broadly speaking what is the meaning of life skye fitzgerald no boy yeah uh for me per i can speak personally on that only and that's that i believe that the meaning of my life is to try to make the world a little bit better before i go you know i when i was in theater and grad school i directed a play called shadowlands by c.s lewis and there's a quote from that it goes like this we are like blocks of stone out of which the sculptor carves the forms of men the blows of his chisel which hurt us so much are what make us perfect now i would take away the perfect part right but i think i've remembered that quote for so many years because i believe in the underlying notion that the blows of the chisel which are the experiences that we go through shape us right necessarily so and hopefully shape us into a better human being and in my case a human being that i hope can make the world a little better you know through those blows before it's over yeah before it's over before you go as you said you think about that you think about the the going part your mortality you ever think about that you said you don't have a death wish you tried to minimize risk but eventually it's going to be over yeah for all of us absolutely well speak for yourself well you've got other plans to sell tend to merge i'm going to merge with robots embody not at all yes for all of us unfortunately or fortunately or who who the heck knows um but do you um ponder your mortality are you afraid of it i live with my my mortality knowing that that it's fleeting that my life is fleeting and that that i'm gonna go into the ground uh just like everyone else or maybe as ashes you know um so i live with that knowledge every day but i don't allow it to stop me or hold me up rather i really it drives me alright it drives me to try to get as much done as i can before i go right yeah so the knowledge of your death uh is a kind of dance partner and you try to dance beautifully this guy you're an incredible human um incredible artist and filmmaker and it's a huge honor that you would sit and spend your really valuable time with me today i really really enjoyed this conversation thanks for having me lex and thanks for doing what you do thanks for listening to this conversation with skye fitzgerald to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from ellie wiesel the opposite of love is not hate it's indifference the opposite of art is not ugliness it's indifference the opposite of faith is not heresy it's indifference and the opposite of life is not death it's indifference thank you for listening i hope to see you next time