I'm fascinated with people and motivation and character study. In another life I might have been a shrink. It's an intimate process of discovery. In a documentary, you're peeling apart someone who is real, why they have become who they are while trying to understand yourself through them at the same time. It's actually a mysterious process.

I've walked a little bit in the spotlight of the international stage with some big projects, so I understand what she gave up.

I'm really not placing a value on it. I watch that stuff it just that it's more entertainment than art and it's just not how I want to spend my time.

You can't be a snob either. Jurneymanship is important, as is survival. You have to decide where and when to pitch your battles. It's all choices. Look, I've gotten to a point in my life where I have to make a living because I have a family. I came to a crossroad where I realized I can either be a hard case where I can argue and fight over every little creative detail with everybody I ever work with, or I can make choices. I'm writing Warner Brothers movie right now that for Wolfgang Peterson. The people I'm working with are really smart. They've had as much success as anybody has in the last ten years. They know more about making successful movies than I do. So in that context, I am there to please them. I'm there to do the best job I can for them and I'm there to learn. That isn't to say that I'm not personalizing the work. I am. But I'm listening very carefully to what they say. It's not about me; it's about being part of an ensemble.

I'm just as fulfilled doing these smaller projects. When I listen to an audience respond to a poignant moment its just as satisfying as hearing them 'ooh' and 'aha' over the pyrotechnics of a big commercial movie. It's even better, you know, because I'm making them feel something with so few resources.

It's exhausting. I'd be doing three, four interviews a day and I would have to go away in between interviews and not talk to anybody because it was so intense. To be that present with somebody, 18 inches away from their face, trying to stay with them, not letting them fall off the track, and trying to anticipate where they're going, so I can lead them but not manipulate them. Being connected to their emotion, to the moments when I know they're uncomfortable, and somehow having to keep them there.

So the reason that I do documentaries is that the risk is low enough that I'm comfortable following my impulses. If you handed me 100 million and said, 'Hey Todd, go do your thing,' I'd be terrified, because I'm not ready to do that. There's so much at risk.

You don't know how this is going to come together. So you have to find a structure that hopefully is not too linear, and not too much of a time line to tell the story. At least, that's always a challenge to me because I always want to try to tell the story in a more interesting way, and then start putting the pieces together, so you have a beginning a middle and an end. I still believe that there's a three-act structure that you have to have a dramatic spine, a thematic spine to counterpoint it. You have to know who your antagonist is, what the tension is, and you have to go for act breaks, because you have to keep people interested. Making a documentary film is a lot like writing a screenplay because you're starting with general ideas, but there's no structure before you, you have to create it to make it work. When you make a feature film, a bunch of people have already agreed on the blueprint, and as Hitchcock said, once he was making the film, it was over for him. Why? For him photo graphing it was just an exercise in committing what had already been accomplished in his mind to film. (I'm sure the actors loved that)

On another level, I want them to understand the motivation of this woman. Why would a woman go out to Death Valley, California, isolated by hundreds of miles from any real urban center, where she has no possible hope of achieving what she ever hopes to achieve. Why would anybody do that? Well, you have to understand that, and in order to understand that, you have to know what her life experience has been. It all goes back her childhood, and what shaped her. It goes back to the construction of a narcissist. Narcissists are very productive people, but they are also unsatisfied people because there is a hole in their lives that cannot be filled. And that is what is true about Marta.

The thing I love most Marta's story is am insight I slowly made about her. Marta talks throughout the film about the rapture of doing, the rapture of being present in the moment. Of course, that is what we all try to achieve as enlightened folk. I mean there's real wisdom in understanding that the past is past, the future is beyond our control, and the only thing we can really do to be satisfied is to live in the moment. And when you are writing or painting, or for me, flying an airplane, you find yourself present in the moment and free from the charges of the past, and the uncertainty of the future. That's a wonderful thing. What happens with Marta however is that it becomes her refuge. Instead of exploring herself and knowing herself better in her art, in her world, it becomes a place to escape to. And in the accomplishment, she is somehow hoping that it will bring approval. It's an impossible task, so my conclusion is that when she isn't working she is a woman in deep pain. Very productive, but in deep pain. It is no small irony that she is in the desert. It is an emotional desert for her. It is a place where she is completely isolated from interaction. This is what I get off on, it's just fascinating to have the privilege to go into somebody's life and really see what makes them tick. I couldn't possibly have known this at the beginning. The pain that she has in her life is something that everybody can relate to, because everybody has these unresolved issues in their life.

And everybody is motivated to succeed on some level because of his or her interactions in their childhood.