The director of “The Nature of Existence” gave us a few minutes before the closing night screening of his film, which traces his own journey to find the answers to the big questions: why do we exist? Does God exist? What is sin? How can we find happiness? For more on the film, including footage that was cut from the final edit, see www.thenatureofexistence.com.
Did you find anyone not willing to talk to you?
Yes. It’s rare, but celebrities, as you could imagine, are hard to pin down because they’ve got a lot of people who want their time. The true believers and the scientists are easy. Anyone who had doubts about what they believe in, they were the ones who were reluctant, because they’re having a hard enough time erecting this believe system. I think that requires so much energy that it’s very difficult for them to debate or get into it without self-questioning, whereas someone who’s a true believer? No problem. They’re exhilarated.
Did you find your own thoughts changing?
Every interview I did changed my thoughts because I learned from everone I met. A lot of my suspicions were confirmed, and a lot of thing I had no concept of changed my beliefs. Like, Jainists are the oldest living religion on the planet. They’ve been continuously practicing their belief system for somewhere over 3000 years. They came from the same source as Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism. If your criteria for who’s right is longevity, you gotta give it to the Jains. If your criteria is something else, then you could discount that. but anyway that was interesting to me, I had no idea they even existed until I started investigating.
Will this film be a stepping stone to another project?
I have lots of ideas. I considered: what would be an even more difficult, incomprehensible topic than the nature of existence? Maybe the nature of marriage, the concept of marriage. I’d love to get into that and the minutia. Why do we get married? How does it work? Why doesn’t it work? Should divorce be outlawed? Should we even be using the word “marriage?” Arranged marriages, gay marriage. It’s a substantive topic. All I know is: if it fascinates me, it’ll keep me interested enough to finish editing.
Do you have a process you go through when you put together your films?
It’s a journey. For me, I write questions down. My documentaries are not like your typical documentary. I think they’re seriously flawed in the typical sense of a documentary. Usually a documentary is about one person or a small group of people. It’s a story with a beginning, middle and an end. Maybe it ends with a trial or a verdict of some kind, did they make it on a sports team, did they win or lose. My documentaries are more issue-oriented and it’s harder to hold someone’s attention a story for ninety minutes without a story. Finding that narrative thread in an issue-oriented documentary is very challenging.