Did you encounter any resistance to this project?

No, I didn't. I was very pleased that I didn't, obviously. The women in the shelter were extremely cooperative. Toward the end of the shooting I was talking about the film with a group of them. I had previously told them that the film would be shown theatrically and on public television and I asked them why they agreed to be in the movie. They said they cooperated because they wanted to let other people know about their experiences with the hope that it might be helpful to others in a similar situation. I thought this was extremely generous given the complexity and difficulty of their lives.

So, what's to be done about all this?

What's to be done? I'm no expert on that. I admire the patience and perseverance of the people working at the shelter. I thought that the staff, with their diligence and their patience, got through -- at least appeared to be getting through -- to some of the clients. It's hard to know the long-term effect. It seems to me they were people of good will who were committed to trying to help their clients understand the destructive patterns in their behavior, and to try to assist them to break the pattern. That's quite a lot, actually, because it requires grinding, day-to-day work. There's no kind of "shazam" or easy solution to the situations the clients were in.

I'm interested in the idea of documentary film having some social utility. Could you speak to that?

Well, it's very hard to know. It's very hard to measure. When I first started out, I had a rather naive and pretentious view that there was some kind of one-to-one connection between a film and social change. But now, while I like to think there might be a connection, I think there is no real way of knowing. People have all kinds of sources of different information, and it's totally presumptuous to assume that any documentary, or any one work of any sort, is going to be that important. Which is not to say I don't hope it has an effect, but I think if it does, it's elliptical, subterranean, circuitous and certainly not measurable.

Could you describe the process of making this film? How much footage did you shoot? How long did it take to edit?

The shooting was eight weeks, and in eight weeks I accumulated about 110 hours. The movie took about a year to edit. And the second one will also take about a year to edit. You make or break a movie like this in the editing. You can have good material and screw it up, and you can have mediocre material and improve it by the way you put it together.

I have no idea what the themes or the point of view are going to be until I get well into the editing. I don't have a story in mind in advance and I don't set out in these movies to prove a thesis. I discover what the themes are as I put the film together, as I edit the sequences and study the material.

So it's only after maybe six or seven months of editing, when I've edited all the scenes that I think might make it into the final film, that I actually start working on a structure. And then it takes me a couple of days to do the first assembly of the film. The first version of the film comes out to be 20 or 30 minutes longer than the final version. And then what I do is work on the internal rhythm of the sequences, and then, particularly, on the rhythm between the sequences. I work very hard to find a dramatic structure for the material. They're meant to be movies, and so they have to work as movies, whatever that may mean. Timing and rhythm are extremely important.

Could you talk about your editing style? A lot of movies and television shows today use lots of fast cuts. You seem to be in a different camp.

I think I have an obligation, to the people who have consented to be in the film, to make a film that is fair to their experience. The editing of my films is a long and selective process. I do feel that when I cut a sequence, I have an obligation to the people who are in it, to cut it so that it fairly represents what I felt was going on at the time, in the original event. I don't try and cut it to meet the standards of a producer or a network or a television show.

My principal obligation is to make as good a movie as I can, and try to fairly represent the complexity of what went on. That means that sometimes the films are long, it means that sometimes the scenes are long. I don't think it's fair just to cut to the most sensational part of the scene, and then cut to another sensational scene, because that means that there's absolutely no context. In each scene, I have an obligation to provide the context and, from my point of view, the result is more dramatic than when you just cut to the most sensational aspect. The so-called juicy part of the scene is more comprehensible and more powerful because the context is clear.

When you're working on a film, do you consider your audience?

When I'm making a movie, I have no idea how to think about an audience. I think the kinds of surveys they do in Hollywood are basically high comedy. I hope you don't think that what I'm about to say is arrogant. I have no idea how anybody else is going to respond to the movie, what their experience or their interests are, what books they've read or movies they've seen, what their general interests are, etc. So the only audience I have in mind when I make the movie is myself. And I try to make it to my own standards, and I hope that somebody else who sees it will connect to it. The only things I know a little bit about -- and I don't say I know a lot about them either -- are my own standards.

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