This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeartRadio. What could doctor Ruth, Serena Williams and Pamela Anderson possibly have in common? They are all subjects of My Guest Today. Documentary filmmaker Ryan White, The Emmy nominated director, takes on a dizzyingly wide range of projects, from the Mars Rover to the fight for gay marriage to the unsolved murder of a nun in Baltimore. The
most recent project is Pamela A Love Story. It's a re examination of nineties bombshell Pamela Anderson and the major events of her life, from her rise to fame to the leak of her stolen's sex tape with then husband Tommy Lee.
I didn't feel like I had a lot of respect. Would you want to be a serious actress. I'm a serious actress. I had to make a career out of the pieces left. But I'm not the damsel in distress. I put myself in crazy situations and survived though. I don't care what people think, because that's the only choice I had. If I care what people think, it wouldn't be here. So men think, oh, she's the playboy, thanger, the sexual person, and they hate you for being something else.
In twenty nineteen, The Baywatch Star retreated from The Spotlight to Vancouver Island, Canada. Much of the film takes place there and features a makeup free version of the actress, along with personal journals and home video. It's Anderson at her most raw and vulnerable, with White's insight into a different side of Anderson. I wanted to know why he thought she kept up the centerfold persona for so much of her career.
Well, I think she would say that she got stuck in a caricature that she could not break out of. And I think finally with this film coming out, you know, and pulling away at that caricature. But one of the things I love most about Pamela is, you know you mentioned what could have been? Is that Pamela does not spend a lot of the real estate in her mind
dedicated to what could have been. She's always looking forward, which makes for a very difficult documentary subject at times because she doesn't she doesn't want to reflect a lot on the past or regrets or you know, some of those heavier things that she went through in her life. She's a very I always I always relate Pamela to like a fairy. She's kind of floating through the world and always looking forward, and so I think that's more important to her than anything else. And I don't think
you know. One of the things I also love about Pamela is she's not incredibly ambitious. She'll be the first.
We're done, We're done the same subjects, because you just said it all.
She never she never really wanted a career that bad. She doesn't love acting, she likes she's an artist like which is which is sort of ironic because I don't think anyone thinks of or most people don't think of Pamela Anderson as an artist. But she really does have
an artist's brain, and she loves the artistic collaboration. So even if she's modeling, say, one of Pamela's best friends is the photographer David la Chappelle, and she told me that, you know, she drives David crazy because she's never interested
in seeing the photographs after they take them. And to her, it's because that process of modeling is all about the collaboration with the artist in that case David, and that's what she enjoys and she doesn't really care about the final product, and she was very similar in making this documentary. She didn't care about the documentary product at all. She just enjoyed the hanging out part, the artistic collaboration part.
I feel similarly and not too you know, intrude with my own life. But it's interesting that I relate to that because it's like someone would say, you want to come watch a cut of the film, and I'd say no, and to varying degrees, the directors and producers and people would look at me like they were like mildly aghast. They were like, you don't want to watch a cut of the film, And I'm like, well, what do you mean?
Are you going to take my notes? So the sun approached you, you weren't leaning toward doing a documentary.
He pitched you, He pitched me, and I actually said no, thank you. At the beginning. You know, I'm born in nineteen eighty one, so mathematically that means Pamela is like the most famous person in the world. As I'm coming of age in my adolescent years in the mid nineties. So I also, like, I think a lot of people came with these preconceived notions about who she would be.
And that's I spent a lot of my time saying no to making celebrity documentaries, and it's because of what I thought Pamela it would be that usually these huge celebrities, especially if her icon status, have a big team of people around them, of agents and managers.
Was it like that with Serena?
No?
And that was part of the appeal of making the film about Serena as well. There were a lot of people around Serena, but Serena is autonomous. She did the deciding yes exactly.
So the son pitched you, he did, And what convinced you after you would think you were leaning toward no, what convinced.
You a zoom conversation with Pamela is what convinced me. So I had this lunch with Brandon, who's Pamela's son, and I think the subtext that you can't say out loud today when you're hiring people of that lunch was they were looking for a gig documentary director because I think they had tried out other directors and they just weren't the right fit. And most of Pamela's best friends, you know, she doesn't have a lot of people in her inner circle, but most of her best friends are
Dan Matthews, David la Chappelle, gay men. So I think Brandon couldn't say that out loud to me.
And do you think right right? And do you think that that's a I'm not a calling card. I think that's an advantage you have.
Yeah. I don't know if it's my sexuality necessarily that makes them comfortable. But you know, I also grew up in a house of women of like a single mom and a grandma and an older sister.
Where did you grow up.
In Georgia outside of Atlanta?
Where'd you go to college?
I went to college at Duke, which has the Center for Documentary Studies. So I studied all fields of documentary at Duke.
Oh my gosh, you immersed yourself from that. Did you You knew then you wanted to go in that direction?
Yeah. I wanted to be a filmmaker because I loved I loved films growing up. I didn't even know documentaries were a thing. It's not like they were playing, you know, at the megaplex in Georgia.
Well, we're going to talk about that later, the expansion of documentaries into real programming. So you're there studying and when you get out, do you go to more education beyond that you go right to work.
No, I'm like the only one of my friends that didn't go to graduate school. I went straight to work for you know. Two thousand and four is when I graduated from college, and there weren't a lot of jobs in the documentary space. There were, you know, very few, very few positions to be had. We were known as the broccoli of filmmaking, you know, where you don't want to but it's good for you. And so I worked for one of the very few filmmakers who was hiring
at the time. Her name was Sherry Jones. She actually just passed away last year, but I kind of learned underneath her. She was one of the very few filmmakers who had her own company at the time because it was hard to make a living, and she basically made like frontliney type PBS documentaries or Bill Moyer's specials or Peter Jennings specials. But that was my first job, and I learned under her, and I learned how to run a business.
You were in New York.
It was in Washington, d C. Actually, wow, but New York really was the hubbit at the time. It's moved a lot over to Los Angeles since I've been in my career, but yeah, that was where I kind of cut my teeth was under Sherry Jones.
What is the movie Palada? Your first one was called Palada.
It was It's a documentary about pickup soccer, street soccer all over the world that we filmed in twenty five countries, which is totally absurd, Like, the only the type of film that you would think you can pull off at twenty five years old. If a twenty five year old were coming to me now that I would say, that's insane.
You know, I can see are you trying to raise money? You're like, I want to do leave about soccer, and they're like, well, where is it? Said?
You go everywhere everywhere.
I'm going to go everywhere that soccer is and make a movie about it. So after you do that, what's the first movie you do, Whether it's a pitch from you or someone's commissioning you were approaching, what's the first movie you have where you've got a real budget? Who was it for?
It was my third film that was for HBO, where Sheila Evans was the head of HBO. At the time, and she is, you know, the the godmother of ADUs. Oh you did, She's the best. Yeah. It felt like I had gotten the golden ticket when Sheila bought my film. I made a film about gay marriage that came out I think twenty fourteen, but I started making it Case against eight, Case against eight, So it was about Proposition eight, which passed in two thousand and eight when Obama was elect did so Case.
Against eight has great resonance for you. You're at Sundance, you're nominated for two m's. Is that correct? Yes, and you're shortlisted for the Oscar. Yes to everything I'm assuming changes after that.
It did, and also the documentary landscape was changing after that. That was like the year that Netflix was emerging and streamers, you know, were kind of a glimmer in our eye
at that point. But the real changing factor for me a Case Against Eight was very successful critically, but I followed that up with a documentary series for Netflix called The Keepers, which was about the murder of a nun in Baltimore, but basically cover ups of the Catholic church, which is you know, no yeah, no revolutionary story, but it was in the it was in the era of
Netflix where there just wasn't the overabundance of content. It was the follow up to Making a Murder, It was it was the next true crime series on Netflix after that. So there was such a huge captive audience. So the amount of people that tuned in for The Keepers was mind blowing for me as a documentary film maker.
Eventually you get to the point where you start doing these biographical ones. You do, Doctor Ruth West, Is that your first one, Doctor Ruth?
I think I did Serena before, Doctor Ruth.
Oh, you did shoot it before, so let's talk about that. So Serena, I would imagine that someone who is as I always have a different metric which is not just successful and monolithic in their career, but they deserve it. She's earned everything that's come her way. I mean I was there at the US up them when she freaked out on the judge. I was there in the President's box. Did you find that the yin and yang of the intensity?
Because athletes are people who have to turn on a level of aggression you and I can't even imagine, and then turn it off exactly.
But she could turn that on playing cards with you as well. Yeah, Parade so she that's just in that's in Serena's DNA in a way that I've never seen before. You know, I'm the exact same age as Serena. She's I think a couple weeks younger than me. So being around her was so it was so fascinating because she was so youthful. I think there's some arrested development when you're when you get really famous and successful at something when you're a teenager. And so Serena has this infectious
spirit unless she's playing a game, and tennis included. That's like she is one of the most fun people to be around outside of a tennis court. And so yeah, that there is a switch in her and even you know, even in practicing tennis, she was so intense.
Who broke with that? Who broke that production? You pitched them or they came to you.
Well that was interesting because that was before the documentary heyday. And you know, I hate even talking about this documentary because it's literally unavailable now we talk about the shifting Landscape of documentary was made by Epics, and Epics had a license at some point which lapsed and now there's actually no way to watch that documentary.
You see the Suina doc.
Yeah, unless I send you a Vimeo link, it's currently not on any of the streamers, and it's because the license laps and it didn't go to one of the streams. So I mean, it's one of it's probably I love Serena and I love tennis, so it's probably one of my favorite films. I think I've made fifteen and I got to be there during the craziest year of Serena's life, and she let me the craziest year of her career
at least, and she let me film everything craziest. Why because it was the best year of her career and then it ended in the biggest failure. That was the year that she won the first three Grand Slams was at the US Open. The field had totally opened up. She just had to beat two kind of unseeded, no name Italian women to win the Calendar Slam. It was gonna be the first Calendar Slams in thirty years labor. Yeah, and she lost in the semi final to Roberta Vinci.
I was there on the court with her filming and it was the biggest you know, there's a part in my film where I'm just in bed with her afterwards, and she's talking about being such an embarrassment to the entire country. And so to me, that film is incredibly special because I had never seen an athlete of her stature, let a filmmaker that close to the process and be that vulnerable to the pain, the pain and that the ups and the downs. And you know, that's where I
think Serena is. Serena, Doctor Ruth and Pamela I consider very similar, even though it's totally different fields.
Only you could make a statement like that house so well.
They're great documentary subjects in the sense that they have they've all been through, they've been you know, chewed up and spit out by society, Pamela and Serena more so than doctor Ruth, I think, But they're they don't really care that much how they're perceived, because they've had the worst things said about them, and so they're very unashamed about who they are. And so that's like when you have a non controlling documentary subject who's just allowing you
to be everywhere, which both Serena and Pamela did. That's where the really good stuff comes from, I think, is opposed to when you have agents and managers and publicists circling you and saying, don't say this, don't say that. If Serena's told that, she would say, I'm going to say what I want to say now.
I would imagine we'll just choose these two examples of how parapatetic. The Sermena williams Is of the world are traveling in the world everywhere, go go go, tournament, tennis appearances, whatever. Her whole bouquet is of activities, and there's Pamela sitting by the river. You know what I mean. Did you have to chase Serena around the world to film her?
Yeah? I mean I basically made that film myself because I didn't have a crew because Serena is so on the go. You know, you can't. You can't with a sound person and a camera track jump in a tar with Serena or on a private plane. So that movie's just basically me with my camera alongside Serena the whole way.
Pamela is actually quite similar. Like you would think the bigger the documentary subject or the bigger the fame, that the bigger the crew would be, or the more overproduced the celebrity would want it to be one of the things I loved about Pamela from the beginning when we had initial conversations like that zoom, she wanted to do
something totally stripped down, in bare bones. Pamela hates watching celebrity documentaries and I hate them do to be honest, like the overproduced ones that feel like these glossy, you know, one interview portraits. And so we did that film very very stripped down, small crew, no lights at all, you know. I remember asking Brandon her Son, like, like, what do we need for a hair and makeup budget, and like,
how do we deal with that in Vancouver Island? And he burst into laughter and said, my mom's gonna do her own hair and makeup. She has her entire career. And so she constantly challenged those preconceived notions I had of her probably being, you know, this larger than life, perhaps more difficult personality, and she was incredibly easy to work with in that way.
Director Ryan White. If you enjoy conversations with insightful documentary directors, check out my episode with the most recent winner of the Academy Award for Feature Documentary, Daniel Rher.
You asked quite a pointy question and that's whether or not, like say, actually has a reasonable chance of ever becoming president. And what he spoke to was the Moscow mayoral race of twenty thirteen. He started that race with two percent of the vote. People didn't like him. They caricatured him as just a blogger and some wacky internet guy, and he finished with twenty seven percent of the vote. It
wasn't a fair election. There was malfeasans and I think the Kremlin who let him run an election was so nervous about his performance. He ran an American style campaign. He was kissing babies, knocking on doors in the subways, distributing literature, tens of thousands of volunteers. There has never been a political organization in Russia like that.
They were afraid.
I don't know if the guy will be president, but what I hope, at the very least is that he will have the chance to compete in the democratic election.
To hear more of my conversation with NAVALNY director Daniel Rohr, go to Here's the Thing dot org. After the break, Ryan White speculates on the impact that filming the document Henry had on Pamela Anderson's life. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. One of the themes of documentary filmmaker Ryan White's Pamela A Love Story is
the roller coaster of Pamela Anderson's love life. The film examines her relationships with rockers Tommy Lee and Kid Rock and her most recent brief marriage to contractor Dan Hayhurst the fifth for the actress, I wanted to know what Ryan White discovered about Anderson's search for true love from working on the film.
She's always looking for some things, a spark, and that spark is often combustible, as it was with Tommy and I think it's a spark. It's too combustible. And she knows that it's the type of relationship that is unsustainable because there's too much passion at the center of it. But that's always what she's seeking out. But I'm curious,
like watching the film, though, did you? Because for me, as someone who got to inherit all Pamela's archive and get to watch all of these tapes and the you know, the stolen sex tape has gone down in infamy, but getting to watch all these other tapes that they had shot of each other, and I hope the film does this in some ways. I hope it also strips the caricature of Tommy a little bit, where he's a human being.
And when you watch the tapes of you know, them just falling in love or starting a family or once they have kids, I think that passed out rocker fades away a little bit and you get to see the real hymn.
I was never quite sure with them what was real and what was them just performing, you know what I mean, Like like you can tell that. I mean, I think one of the most tragic things because the sex tape thing, you know, the Kardashian Empire, which is now calculated in the billions of dollars, is founded on a sex tape that's not kid ourselves. Then you tell the story of the safe. They never found out who did it? Did they?
Well, there's theories about who did it, and there's a whole Hulu show about some of those theories. But we actually have a line in the film that Pamela says where she says, I don't care who stole it. I don't need to figure that out at this point, And I think that's incredibly unimportant to her. The who it's just it did what it did to her life, and the who is not that important to her.
Well, then that leads me to when she meets a solid citizen. She marries that guy, who's the guy that lives up there near her what was his name, Dan? Dan? And that didn't work. You think, why that didn't last? Why?
Well, this is an interesting example. You know, you learn in film school or like documentary one oh one, that your job as a filmmaker is to not affect the person's trajectory in any way. You know, you hear these terms like cinema verite or fly on the wall. This was a glaring example of the films that I've made were the mere fact that I was making a movie change.
It stirred something up in Pamela that even the very first shoot I had with her in Canada, that's when she's watching those tapes of her and Tommy's life basically, and she's just plugging them into the VCR and watching. She was going through this emotional turmoil. She had never watched those tapes, and she's looking at me saying, like, what the fuck am I doing here? I thought I
was coming here to die. I was marrying a local I thought this was going to be the end of my life, and I'm watching the best years of my life. You know, I think she's self aware enough to know that she's seeing that through rose tinted glasses now and that even you know, watching those things in retrospect, she's overlooking a lot of the darkness that was during those years. But it stirred something up in her where, you know.
I don't want to say the film caused a divorce, but it definitely precipitated her and saying like, this is not the final thirty years of my life. I need to get out of here.
So she doesn't like to watch the movie. She doesn't like to see the movie. Did her son watch the movie? I assume so.
Brandon produced the movie, so she watched cuts as we went along.
Did he have any editorial control? No? Did he seek any editorial control?
No? And I'm I mean he gave me notes, but they were actually good notes. This is the benefit of Usually producing a film with the son of the subject would be a nightmare. Sure, and I thought this might be a nightmare. I knew that was going to be kind of rolling the dice. But it's also the benefit of making a film about the child of a couple who've been the center of the tabloids for thirty years.
Is they just don't really care. So the things I thought he would be really sensitive about, like his mom maybe well nudity for sure, but also his mom may be saying inappropriate thing here or there, or joking about other husbands or her sex life. Brandon was fine with all of that. So yeah, no, he didn't. He didn't change. I'm very lucky as a filmmaker. I haven't had a bad experience yet with a distributor or any producers ever, not letting me make what I want to make. And
Ben Pamela herself was just so uninterested. So she did watch it once after the film was and I think she only kind of half watched it because she even when I talk to her now, she still doesn't realize some of the things that are in the film. And she watched it with her son Dylan at Netflix while the film the film was already coming out and she was doing press, and Brandon said like, Mom, you're you're answering these questions in such weird ways because you don't
know what's in the film. Will you just watch it and Dylan hadn't seen it yet either, because Dylan wasn't a producer, So they watch it together in a little room at Netflix. Netflix asked me if I wanted to be there, and I said hell no, And apparently it was just well, first of all, there's a lot of nudity in the film, so it was a lot of Pamela covering Dylan's eyes, is what I've heard from people
in the room. And she took a few bathroom breaks even while the film kept playing, so she still, you know, like like you see in the film. She gave me every single diary from her entire life. I have them in a closet with a coded lock on them. And she had no idea what I was going to use, how I was going to use it. And she's still because she's only half watched the film, doesn't really.
David NuGen and I produced The Summer Dock to be programed for you in East Hampton, and let's say, going back to fifteen years ago, they would fire the starter's pistol at Sundance. The latest crop of the of the more exciting docs was announced and screened at Sundance, and then we had a relatively easy time booking three, sometimes four of them, but now if there's twelve, we have our eye on good God, we consider ourselves lucky we can get two or three of them. They're old to
selling like hotcakes. Do you find that explosion is a part of your career as well?
Yeah? I mean, and that's that's a lot of people talk about Sundance now and the lack of truly independent films because so many documentaries over the last few years that have gotten into Sundance had distribution already, even if it's not super public, like I've had films. I think I've had four films at Sundance, and there's been times I've been at Sundance where you don't know my film has a distributor attached. It might seem like a free agent,
but it's not. And I think Sundance is doing a good job of moving back a little bit more to independent filmmakers. Not that not that I'm thrilled about that, because usually my films do come with distribution at this point in my career, So I don't want it to get harder to get into sun Dance just because I have a Netflix or an Amazon behind me. But I think we're seeing like an EBB and flow in the
documentary industry. And I don't want to get too nitty gritty, but like recently we've seen a lot of documentary units shut down, like at HBO, Max, CNN Films, Showtime, Zoom shutdown. Yeah, and they just made NAVALNI, which won the Oscar and so the documentary part of CNN Films is shutting down.
And so we're also seeing this constriction that at least for people in my world, is a little concerning because you know, like back when I made the case against Date, Sheila and Evans, like that was the golden ticket, like I said, but that was one of the only distributors at the time unless you went the theatrical route, where your film got a lot of attention because Sheila was so powerful at HBO. And then there was you know, the birth of all of the streamers, which was incredible
for the last ten years. But now we're seeing that again. So I don't know anywhere, especially, I'm interested to hear you say it's hard for you guys to even get three or four films, because I think what we're seeing now is a lot, especially a lot of the political films or hard hitting films are a harder cell, like the things that Shila would have taken on at HBO ten or fifteen years ago, those are often the ones. Assassins.
It's a great example, you know, that was one of the very few films where I eked out a sale of that film. I almost lost a lot of money making that film. Not because people didn't love it. All the distributors loved it, but they were afraid of it. They were afraid why because it was about North Korea, because of the Sony hack. No one wanted to touch a film that was going after Kim Jong Un. No one wanted to go after a film. Geopolitics are really difficult right now.
Director Ryan White, if you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio apps, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Back.
Ryan White shares the movie that inspired him to become a documentary filmmaker. I'm Alec Baldwin and you were listening to Here's the Thing. Director Ryan White helmed one of my favorite documentaries of all time, Assassins. It traces the murder of Kim Jong UN's half brother Kim Jong nam, and the subsequent trial of his killers. The film needs to be seen to be believed. Considering the near total
lack of diplomatic relations with North Korea. I wanted to know how White managed to pull off a film with such a challenging subject matter.
I came across it because I went to Duke, and a journalist who had gone to Duke, who was what's much younger than me, had written an article in GQ magazine that had been very popular in whatever year that was, like twy eighteen, and he approached me because he was getting a ton of documentary interests because True crime was in twenty eighteen twenty nineteen was huge, and this was
like true Crime on steroids. It involved Kim Jong un, It involved a prank show, it involved female assassins, involved a capital punishment trial that was happening, And so I flew with the journalists to Malaysia where this trial was happening, and met all of his sources, basically all the people who had played a role in recruiting these women to
be on the so called prank show. Because the women were saying, yes, we assassinated this man, but we thought we were on a prank show when we did the assassination. It's unbelievable. It's literally unbelievable. But as we started peeling back the layers we started and meeting the people who were a part of recruiting them, it seemed I don't know about believable, but it seemed conceivable at least that maybe they were telling the truth. And then it became
a film that was about life or death. Like I knew, I was making a film that would probably prove that these women were innocent. But if I didn't finish the film in time, I needed the film ready to go in case they were convicted, because they were going to be hung almost immediately in the Malaysian court system. So it was a very it was very heavy film to make and not to ruin the ending, but luckily both women got off at like the eleventh hour, you know.
Like I said, I thought I had struck gold with that film because it was true crime, but it was on a geopolitical level. I thought who distributed that In the end, It was a company called Greenwich. No streamers, no streamers.
Where can you find it now?
I think it's on Stars, but none of the streamers would even put it on their platform, much less make it. You know, a yeah, yeah, it's it's It was a It was a film that nobody wanted to touch. And unfortunately I learned a lot of lessons from making that film on how you for example, Well like in Avalney, for instance, Daniel pulled off something very brave and incredible.
But now that distributor doesn't exist anymore, I don't know where you would take an evalni now, so touching you know, North Korea, Russia, China, these countries, it's more and more difficult. You can make those films, but are they going to find a home? Are they going to and if they can't find a home, are they going to find an audience?
And knowing that we all spend at least a couple of years, if not five or six years making our films, to think that they'll just you know, be a tree falling in the forest, I think is all of our worst nightmares as filmmakers.
Well, it's also, like you said, you're right, the arc of that film is kind of a specific, which is it goes from being like mysterious, you don't know what's going on here, to being downright silly to being like crushing at the end, like you really think they're going to I mean I was, I was really thinking if I stopped the film and said, okay, everybody, let's bet what happens, I would have bet they were going to be killed.
That's what everyone was telling us. Everybody on the ground was saying, they're going to die.
Now have you only shot digital your entire career? Did you ever shoot film?
Well, we shot some film with Pamela actually, ironically so my last film. I shot some film, But I've never shot a full document like I give me shelter type of You don't felt fully on film. Oh I would love to, but the budgets don't support it. Also, my style of filmmaking doesn't really support it. Like I can't jumping on a private plane with Serena with my little camera.
I can't do that with tons of mags. Yeah, yeah, and I shoot a ton, you know, and most so do most of my colleagues at this point.
For you, I'm sure there's a lot of films that you're considering. You probably get a lot of pots on the stove. Have you ever examined the subject and you thought you were going to make the movie and then you cut out. You didn't do it.
Only one time. And I still feel incredibly guilty about it.
Can you say that?
Yeah, I mean it was a long time ago. It was early in my career, but I started making a very Aaron Brockovich type of story about a community that had been built on top of an old shell oil reservoir basically, and it's your unfortunately it's your Diama Dozen environmental terrorism store, and it's you know, people getting cancer and not realizing why, and then they realized they're living on top of an oil field. And it was such a bleak subject.
Matter what part of the country.
It was near LA in Carson, California, just south of LA, and it was just such a bleak subject matter. I couldn't raise any money to do it, and I'd started shooting it, and then I had to go to all these people that were my characters and say, like, I'm bowing out. And I still like even saying that. I hate saying it out loud right now because I still feel very guilty about it. But I'm very careful now in picking documentaries. You know, I can only make maybe
two things at the same time. I'm very careful at picking things that I think will make it to the finish line.
What are you working on next?
I am working I'm doing a return to true crime. I'm actually working with Charlie's Theren on a film about an incredible story about a mother who gave up her daughter for adoption and then twenty years later finds out that her daughter went missing when she was young, and she goes on this quest to find out what happened to her daughter, and that kind of uncovers a serial
killer who was living in a small town. I really resisted going back to true crime after The Keepers was such a phenomenon and didn't want to be pigeonholed in that way. But this is the type of true crime that I love, where there's an incredible character at the center of it, and Charlie's brought us the project and it's very passionate about it. And I'm always trying to balance, you know. I made a film last year called good Night Appy, about a robot that went to Mars, and
it is very hopeful, very heartwarming. It's really about the best parts of humanity. And I'm always trying to kind of balance, you know, subjects that are quite dark and bleak and make me feel afraid when I'm out there in the field like an assassin's with something that is much more fun and hopeful and can kind of bring me and my crew because I roll the same people over, my editors, my producers on the same films that can kind of bring us out of that darkness in a sort of Yin and Yang way.
Yeah, oh, assassins is one of my favorites. I really mean that. It's amazing.
Thank you well. You were one of the few.
When you see the moment where they get him at the airport where they do it to him, the real moment when they do with him, you're kind of like you just gasp, like there it is. You know they really did this him. Now. Last question is, because I'm such a doc junkie and I'm assuming you are too, give me three docs that just were indelible in your movie going history.
I mean, I could give you dozens, but I'll anecdotally like the film that made me a documentary filmmaker. Do you know Agnes Varda, the French filmmaker who passed away recently, She to me is like she's my ultimate, Like if I could if I could have dinner with someone, it would be her. And that's what's cool about my industry is you are with an arm's length of your hero. So I got to meet her many times before she
passed away. But it was seeing her film in a theater at Duke when I didn't even know what documentaries were. It was the film called the Gleaners, and I, well, it has a French title, but that's the English translation. That just blew my mind and made me want to be a documentary filmmaker. And in those same years, Spellbound came out, the Jeff Blitz's film about the Spelling Bee,
which totally changed my conception. Again if the Broccoli filmmaking that you don't want to do it, but it's good for you, where Spellbound was pure entertainment, a hilarious film, a character portrait of many kids during that year's script Spelling Beiece. So that one changed my conception that I couldn't make things that are entertaining, which really is my goal as a documentary filmmaker. I'm not an activist filmmaker.
I don't really make the matic films. I mostly focus on character films, even if it's about a robot that I hope will entertain people by going on this journey. And then Laura Poitross. I don't know if you've met her, but like I could go on and on about a lot of her films. You know, her film this year was All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which was beautiful.
But I remember seeing a film of hers soon after I graduated, when I was very young in the documentary business called called The Oath, and that is such a beautiful film. And you can tell in all of Laura's films how hands on of a filmmaker she is. And that's what I strive to do as a filmmaker. Like I said, not huge crews. I think the smaller we are,
the more intimate it is, and the better performance. And I'm using that in quotation marks you get out of your documentary subject, even if they're as famous as Serena Williams or Pamela Anderson. The more stripped down you are, I think, the better results you get. And Laura Poitrous, I feel like has done. She made the Edward Snowden film, you know, where she's in hotel rooms with him as he's fleeing, and so I think she really taught me in her films a lot of that sort of diy feel,
which I really love. No matter how successful or how big our budgets get, I still love making films in that diy. I'm just carrying a camera, you know, and in a room with sometimes just me with that person.
It lends itself to documentary filmmaking and its pure sense more easily if you've got a bunch of guys setting up a bunch of c stands and you've got a whole lot of shit going on exactly. It's tricky. But anyway, HI, very best to you. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.
Thank you, I appreciate it. I enjoyed the conversation.
My thanks to documentary filmmaker Ryan. This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. We're produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, and Maureen Hobin. Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is Daniel Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.