How did documentary films end up influencing your fictional features?
He and Ms. Woodworth have been producing fictional features together since the mid-2000s.
The fascination with genius, ambition and the creative process — and the project of making high culture accessible to a popular audience — continued in Mr. Russell's later fictional features.
He is instead — as he so often has, in fictional features and documentaries alike — probing the contradictions of the human heart, in which nobility and savagery are so entwined as to be almost indistinguishable.
The ambiguous approach recalls another children's-striving contest currently fashionable in US cinema: the spelling bee, which in the documentary Spellbound and in the fictional features Bee Season and Akeelah and the Bee offers opportunities for family-conflict drama.
Michel Gondry's "Thorn in the Heart" is a documentary portrait of the director's indefatigably spirited aunt, Suzette Gondry, a rural schoolteacher, that forsakes the elevated mind games of his fictional features like "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind".
