These films – now more prevalent and popular than ever – do more than merely list facts: They tell a story, a narrative shaped not by the subjects (except in the cases of a few celebrities), but by an unseen person behind the camera. People agree to be in documentaries for a variety of reasons but often don’t realize how much control they are giving up about their life stories. 

The new documentary, “Subject,” explores this topic and the ethical issues around it, interviewing people who were in the documentaries “The Staircase,” “Hoop Dreams,” “Capturing the Friedmans,” “The Wolfpack,” and “The Square.” (The film will kick off its Los Angeles theatrical run on Nov. 3 at Laemmle Glendale.)

Of course, these people are now subjecting themselves to the process a second time, but filmmakers Jennifer Tiexiera and Camilla Hall say they were committed to a more open and moral way of making documentaries. Tiexiera spoke recently by video along with Margie Ratliff, who serves as a producer but also appears on camera – she was thrust into the spotlight as a young adult when her father, Michael Peterson, was accused of murdering his wife, a story captured in “The Staircase.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Q. What motivated you to tackle all these topics?

Tiexiera: Camilla was a journalist for the Financial Times in the Middle East before she made her first documentary. When she entered this world, she was shocked that there were no rules whatsoever. It’s like the Wild West.

I had been a film editor for about 15 years and found myself making these really intense decisions about people’s lives or communities in the edit room without ever meeting them or knowing their hopes and dreams for the project. The better I did my job the more sensationalized some of these decisions felt, which led me to producing and directing. So we were having these existential crises, but the third part of the mix is Margie – this film would not exist without Margie.

Ratliff: I met Camilla and Jen five days before Netflix released all those episodes of “The Staircase,” which was dredging things back up for my family.

When Camilla told me about “Subject,” I liked the idea of finding a better way that we can treat people in our films. I said, “Maybe I could consult – I don’t want to be in it, for sure.” It was only later when the HBO Max Series was beginning and I met Jesse Friedman [the focus on “Capturing The Friedmans”] and the rest that I realized I can’t hide from this and if I can start to make it better for other people, then I can kind of sacrifice myself.

Q. How was your process different from a typical documentary?

Tiexiera: After we did our rough cut – the process was extremely lengthy – we had each participant go through their own sections and ultimately have creative agency and then sent it to the other directors interviewed in the film and made sure that they felt represented correctly. And we gave each of the original directors of the films we focused on the opportunity to workshop with us as long as they wanted. Some went on for months and there were long, awkward conversations but they ultimately made the film so much stronger because it was so much more representative of everyone’s point of view.

In the first cut that [“Capturing the Friedman’s” director] Andrew Jarecki saw, he said, “I’m just not feeling that the closeness of me and Jesse” and he was right because that relationship he has with Jesse is separate from his relationship with “Capturing the Friedmans.”

There wasn’t anything where we disagreed and it became problematic. It wasn’t like things got omitted but it’s more that we were able to protect people’s mental health and not re-traumatize them. That’s also why we brought on a psychologist to be available after interviews.

We are huge supporters of DAWG, the Documentary Accountability Working Group, which put together a framework of things to consider when making a documentary where there is this power imbalance between the filmmaker and community or potential participant. 

Ratliff: I’ve luckily been able to travel around the globe with “Subject” and talk to so many different filmmakers from different areas about the connection that you have to the community, to the story. Why are you telling it? And are you thinking about the impact that you want the film to have and how your participants can be a part of that impact? And I think those are all such important questions to talk with your participants and really figure out before you even start picking up the camera.

I’m now taking real steps to make change. I’ve started a nonprofit, the Documentary Participants Empowerment Alliance, that deals with legal access,  advocacy, and mental health to guide filmmakers for a duty of care for participants.

Q. The film also includes the idea that film festivals bear some responsibility. Is that changing? 

Tiexiera: At Sundance, there have been films with really questionable methods as far as the treatment of the participants. But last year for the first time on the Sundance application was a question about participant wellness and care and the steps that were taken during the filmmaking process. And that was a huge win for all of us. 

Q. So are you hopeful that we will see substantial change in the next few years?

Ratliff: One indicator is at universities – we’ve been showing “Subject” and having conversations with film departments and legal departments about these provisions for ethical making. There are new classes being taught about how to make your films ethically. 

Tiexiera: The question will be, How do we fit these changes into small and shrinking budgets? But there’s always a way to figure it out. 

On my last series with HBO, we had therapy in the line item budget. We had three different therapists from production through airing on HBO. And we also did trauma training for the entire crew because we were going to be dealing with survivors of trauma and abuse. On our next series, Camilla and I have the same sort of infrastructure, and we have support from HBO and partners like Bad Robot. So this is not a pipe dream. 

Tim O’Brien is best known for his books about Vietnam, National Book Award-winner “Going After Cacciato” and the spare but unforgettable “The Things They Carried.” But his first novel in two decades, “America Fantastica,” is a rollicking road trip and wild satire that will surprise people who know him from those books.

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In the novel, the spread of dishonesty and delusion is helped along by a kind of Johnny Appleseed of deceit: Boyd Halverston, whose lies have already ruined his life, robs a bank and kidnaps the teller, the motormouthed proselytizer Angie Bing. Their journey includes deadly violence, the unmasking of their pursuers and possibly some redemption.

In a recent video interview, O’Brien confessed the book and his damaged, occasionally deranged, characters surprised even him.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. You’ve talked about how you first thought of the book two decades ago. You haven’t written a novel in all those years. What brought you back to it?

Boyd and Angie. I wrote 18 or 20 pages and then dropped it because I had two young children and decided I was going to be a good father, or at least try. I couldn’t do it if I’m getting up in the middle of the night to write. And you can’t be a good father if even when you’re wide awake and sitting at the dinner table, you’re thinking about these make-believe characters instead of your own kid. So I quit.

But the characters kept yapping at me. Boyd is a compulsive liar. I was interested in what made him this way. And what made Angie this devout Pentecostal with all these less-than-pious exceptions, like numerous fiancés. They seemed reflections of the world through the Trump years and through COVID.

Also, I was curious about conspiracy theorists. Did they really believe it or are they just lying? Or is it a combination of the two? Did Trump lie when he said he won the election or did he really believe it?

Q. The book is populated with wild and crazy characters. Who surprised you the most? 

I was more surprised by the background characters. I became those people as I wrote them in a way I never have before. I particularly felt that when I was writing the dialogue. It was fun, but I felt I was living on a cliff edge the whole time.

At one point Randy [Angie’s first fiancé, who is both stupid and violent] says, “Why does everybody underestimate me? Except me.” That’s not my voice. That’s him, he’s this doofus but he’s dangerous. I didn’t know that when I started writing, he was just a boyfriend chasing after Angie, but he became more and more part of my life. I kept getting an evil version of Matthew McConaughey in my head, a lean cowboy sort, but absolutely amoral – he doesn’t know what morality is so he can’t be immoral.

Maybe I was just watching too much Fox New Channel — I try putting myself on a diet of once every seven years or so, but it doesn’t work because I’m curious about these people.

Q. After spending time inhabiting these characters, what did you learn about yourself?

I learned that I’m not just Tim O’Brien; there are aspects of my personality that were foreign to me. I felt like a stranger when I was writing these voices. That kind of surprise didn’t happen with my Vietnam books where I was working so much on memory of personal experience and the language of Vietnam and of the military. This was different.

Q. The rich are so greedy and willing to commit crimes that it feels like a parody, but real life is not that far removed from this kind of entitlement and self-indulgence. How did you intend them to be seen?

It was definitely satire.

I’m a big fan of Jonathan Swift – in college, I read “A Modest Proposal,” in which Swift posits the cure for famine is to eat our children. And I liked Mark Twain’s later writing when he’s cynical and fed up with society and pious hypocrisy. I was hoping I could bear witness to what’s happening in this country through a book that’s at least partly funny. I mean, I hope it’s at least partly funny. I have a perverse sense of humor.

Laughter can be a revenge of sorts. You can’t speak rationally to these conspiracy people. It is impossible to speak rationally to the half of the country that believes Trump won that election. And you can’t argue them out of it. So why not laugh at them? Or at all of us, I suppose.

Q. Do you let the characters go where they go at the end, or do you try to find an ending that each deserves?

The characters make their destinies. As I’m typing, one sentence leads to the next and that sentence to the next and so on. They’ve made their own future by what they’ve done in the sentence before or the paragraph before. Throughout the whole novel, Angie is saying, more or less, “I’m a missionary. I want to save souls.” So I couldn’t have her go back on that at the end; she goes with who she thought needed her the most, which made a perverse sense to me.

Q. The early days of COVID, which come at the end of the book, altered so many people’s plans and destinies. How did you factor that into which characters survived it and which did not?? 

I wanted to make sure that both contagions in the book — the real one, COVID, and the one I made up, mythomania, had lethal consequences. The epidemic of lying kills and kills the human spirit and constitutional democracy. You betray yourself and others when you lie. So I wanted everyone to face consequences for their actions.

Q. You’ve said this is your last novel. Why?

I’ve got really bad carpal tunnel – my left hand is either numb or hurts and I can’t hit the right keys anymore. Writing another novel seems virtually impossible. There’s great joy that comes from a paragraph or a sentence that has some grace and maybe emotion to it but they’re infrequent. And I’m 77 years old now and I’ve got only so many years left, maybe not a lot, since I’m a smoker, so I don’t want to deal with the frustrations of it all. I want to spend as much time with my sons as I can.

On the other hand, my wife came home a week ago and said her friend said her mother, who was over 80, came out of the shower naked and there was a total stranger sleeping in her bed. And I just started thinking, “What an opening to a novel.” And I started wondering who this character would be – is it a long lost love, is it a stranger? And what happens after that?

This could have been a beautiful story.

But as Sinclair portrays her own childhood in “How to Say Babylon,” her father, Howard, a talented reggae musician whose record deal went sour, became bitter, controlling and even violent. Sinclair and her siblings, especially she and her sisters, were increasingly subjugated and isolated, even as their mother tried to find ways to nurture them.

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While the memoir is deeply personal, Sinclair, a Whiting Award-winning poet, blends the racial and social history and geography of Jamaica and the Rastafari with the turbulence of her childhood and her discovery of her own voice through poetry.

She spoke recently by video from her home in Arizona where she teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.

Q. You’ve written about your family and your trauma in your poetry, but a memoir is different. What made you willing to go back and relive everything you went through in such detail?

I was thinking first that this might be cathartic, a way to alchemize the chaos and hurt, a mode for a hopeful change in my family, breaking the cycles of trauma.

I’m also writing this for younger girls in that same place of isolation and doubt and questioning themselves because we live continually in this patriarchal system that puts these confines on our bodies and our autonomy.

Also, there was so much to be said about Jamaica because people in the U.S. just don’t know about it. I’ve had so many conversations with people who are so excited to tell me they had dreadlocks in college and loved Bob Marley at one time. I thought maybe there was a way to expand the knowledge people have about Rastafari culture and Jamaican history and the way they’re intertwined.

Q. What was it like to sit down and write it?

I didn’t know what I was in for. While writing, I was heading toward a catharsis but it meant reliving the pain in the hope that at the end it would evaporate into something else — a sense of release, of processing what happened.

There were many times it was difficult sticking with a scene and giving the details because I had to dive into the memory and stay there so the reader would feel immersed in my experiences. I wanted the text to feel skin-close and I wanted the reader to feel breath caught.

Q. How did writing the book change the way you look at your life and your relationships?

The thing that changed most is my relationship with my father and how I think about him. He was this grand authoritarian figure who loomed so large; he never humanized himself to us when we were growing up.

I had to think about his trauma and his wounds — his childhood and why he came to Rastafari — in a way I never had before.

If I had begun the book when I first started thinking about it ten years ago, I would have written a different book. I never thought of myself as a forgiving person but writing this book, I learned to be more forgiving and patient, to give more grace.

Q. Near the end your father says, “I’m listening and I hear you.” He wasn’t ready to go there ten years ago so maybe you couldn’t have been forgiving then because of his behavior.

I probably wouldn’t have even finished writing the book if that hadn’t happened. It was after he said that and made these gestures of change and took steps to apologize that I felt I could start writing the book. Those were the first steps to healing; it’s not perfect but we’re on the road. Without that, it wouldn’t have been the same book and I wouldn’t have had the same capacity for forgiveness.

Q. You write about understanding your mother quite differently, too. Back then, you seemed more angry and incredulous that she’d stay in a relationship with someone who mistreated her children so badly.

I learned to see and appreciate her in new ways while writing. When I was a teenager, it was, “Why did she do this?” or “Why didn’t she do that?” With time, and a little more wisdom I can see she was always strong in her own ways and always doing things to make our world so much larger — we weren’t allowed to have friends or leave the house but our mother gave us this love of books and encouraged my writing and somehow got my father’s approval to let me try modeling. I never thought about her sacrifices or how she made these things happen until I was writing the book and I saw her strength and how expansive she made our world.

Q. Your father’s religious beliefs are harshly misogynistic but they seem in keeping with extremists in other faiths.

These extremist ideas, no matter where they are geographically or how new or old the religions are, tend toward the control of women’s bodies and thoughts. For these men to maintain power somebody has to be diminished. The chains and shackles run deep and strong in the patriarchy, not just in Rastafari.

Q. Did writing the book change your poetry?

It pushed me toward being less narrative. I started craving to go back to the kind of poetic incantation, the intoxication of the lyrical. I feel renewed and restored.

Also, I had to capture the way my father speaks because Rastafari have their own vernacular, which is not something I’ve explored in my poetry before but now it has ignited my poet’s mind. I’m thinking about the anti-colonial linguistics — my father says “overstand” instead of “understand” and the idea is about turning the English language on its head as an act of rebellion. So I’m calling it Rasta-poetic and thinking about what I can do with that framework.

Q. You’ve lived in America for years. What about Jamaica stays within you?

When I say home, I mean Jamaica. I go back several times a year. When I think about it, it’s the sea village of White House, where I was born. I have all these dreams about the sea, especially now that I’m living in the desert in Arizona. In all of my poems, there’s not one line that doesn’t begin with the heartbeat of the sea behind it.

Would you guess Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller or Edward Albee?

They may be the original Mount Rushmore of American drama but Patti Hartigan’s new biography, “August Wilson: A Life,” is a vivid reminder why the writer of “Fences,” “Jitney” and “The Piano Lesson” deserves to be etched in stone alongside — or perhaps above – them. 

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Wilson’s American Century Cycle featured one play set in each decade of the 20th century, all but “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” set in Pittsburgh, and all illuminating the troubles imposed on Black Americans by White society while celebrating the Black community’s resilience. 

His plays featured dazzling monologues, soaring riffs reminiscent of the blues music he loved so powerfully. The work attracted and boosted several generations of Black actors; just the list of stars from the original Broadway productions is impressive: Delroy Lindo, Angela Bassett, James Earl Jones, Mary Alice, Courtney B. Vance, Frankie Faison, Charles S. Dutton, S. Epatha Merkerson, Anthony Chisholm, Laurence Fishburne, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Viola Davis, Phylicia Rashad Keith David, Stephen McKinley Henderson and John Douglas Thompson.

“Wilson is right there in the pantheon of great Americans who came from nothing, like Abe Lincoln and Barack Obama,” says Hartigan. “That’s why I spent six years writing the book.”

Hartigan captures Wilson’s life in all its complexity, starting with the mythology he created about himself: He took on a new last name, wouldn’t talk about his estranged White father and didn’t really discuss his childhood stutter while embellishing other facts about his life. 

The book features backstage battles like his fight with a neophyte producer and James Earl Jones over the ending of his breakout hit, “Fences” to the dissolution of his partnership with legendary director Lloyd Richards. And she examines his evolving attempts to write fuller, richer characters for women to the way his temper could sometimes explode at unsuspecting hotel clerks, waitresses and others. 

“He was like his character Levee [in ‘Ma Rainey’],” Hartigan said in a recent phone interview about the book. “He doesn’t blow up because somebody stepped on his shoes, he blows up because he’s faced a lifetime of racism and of being a talented person living in a culture that doesn’t recognize him.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Q. What made Wilson’s plays so powerful when they were first staged and what makes them still so relevant today even as the theater finally welcomes the voices of more Black playwrights?

There’s poetry in his plays, like there is in those by Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill. You can take a Wilson monologue out of the play, bring it two blocks away and deliver it – and it stands on its own. The writing is that brilliant. And the characters he created are so full-blooded; they’re so universal and yet so specific to the streets of Pittsburgh. He’s documenting the brilliant perseverance of those people.

Also what he was capturing in those ten plays is the history of this country. That’s why they’re so important. 

People have asked me what he would have thought about George Floyd’s murder and everything that happened after that and if you look at these plays written 30 or 40 years ago, it’s all in there. 

Q. Why did his estate deny you access to his papers and what impact did it have on the book? 

It didn’t work out with the estate and that’s too bad. I wish her peace [Wilson’s widow, Constanza Romero]. That’s all I’ll say.

It made it much more difficult because I had to work ten times as hard to get documents like unpublished plays and unpublished poetry. But in August Wilson’s universe, there are a lot of pack rats who saved everything and there were many people who were so generous and many archives, like Lloyd Richards’ at Yale. 

Q. Some say Wilson’s work went downhill after his rift with longtime director Lloyd Richards, but there was powerful work like “Gem of the Ocean.” So how much do you think the split really impacted his final plays?

When they broke up, there was a real divide. There were those who sided with Wilson, those who sided with Richards and those who said, “Mom and Dad, please just get back together.” The ones who sided with Lloyd will tell you hands-down that the plays suffered. “Hedley” and “Radio Golf” are not his finest plays but with “Hedley” he hated the 1980s culture, hated the hip-hop culture. He struggled with that and probably would have with Lloyd there, although Lloyd always did ask really good questions. The fact that he got “Radio Golf” finished at all is monumental – you have a couple of months to live and you finish what you promised you’d do and that’s admirable. 

When you look at the work he did on [rewriting his early play] “Jitney,” it was brilliant and so different from the original. He had lived a life and he no longer just solved things by killing people off. I can’t see it without crying and loving all the characters. It’s his most accessible and in a weird way heartwarming play. 

Q. Had he lived, were there any other plays besides “Jitney” he might have revisited? Which might have benefited most from a fresh look?

I don’t know if he would have gone back again. He was 60 and he had finished these plays. He had a novel and a comedy play in the works. But I do know he wasn’t satisfied with “Two Trains Running.” He felt you could just switch the order of the scenes and it would still work and that’s a problem for a play. 

Q. In a later production of “Two Trains,” Wilson seems unable to accept an actor’s ideas for playing the character of Hambone, ideas that seem to strengthen the play. Why was he so resistant?

He was stubborn and particular about what he wrote. It’s partly because of what happened with “Fences,” where you write one of the best endings in American drama and someone wanted to change that. When that happens, you become a little attached to your work. There’s something admirable about that. 

Q. Do you have a favorite Wilson play?

My favorite is clearly “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.” I do think it’s a masterpiece but it was also the first one that I saw. It was 1986 and I was reviewing for a Boston newspaper. Being there on opening night, seeing that play for the first time and hearing those speeches and that phenomenal ending – it’s not an exaggeration to say it was life-changing. It opened up a whole world to me.

Later on after Nkrumah’s death, a man named John Ackah Blay-Miezah started telling people that Nkrumah had been protecting his nation’s riches in a vault in Switzerland, stashing it there until it was safe to bring the money back home. Blay-Miezah said the former president had placed him in charge of the fund, called the Oman Ghana Trust Fund. 

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It’s a great story, but none of it was true. Blay-Miezah was a liar and a con man who spent decades distorting the history of his country to bilk investors who thought they’d get a piece of that treasure. 

His story is recounted in “Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington and Swindled the World,” by Yepoka Yeebo. The author, who was raised in London by Ghanian parents, details Blay-Miezah’s exploits across the decades (with cameos by everyone from child star turned ambassador Shirley Temple Black to disgraced attorney general John Mitchell) but has greater ambitions. 

In a recent video interview, Yeebo discussed using this story to set the record straight on much of Ghana’s distorted and manipulated history — from Nkrumah to a more recent president, Jerry Rawlings, who Yeebo says targeted other Ghanaians including her own father — and on the damage wreaked by interference from Great Britain and the United States. 

Q. How much was this about telling John Ackah Blay-Miezah’s and how much was it about getting the truth out about Ghana’s history and the West’s responsibility for the problems there?

I grew up in London and had not heard of Blay-Miezah until my mom sent me the “60 Minutes” clip, where it was obvious to me that his story was patently ridiculous. But my mother said, “No, this is possible.” 

It was shocking that he was able to con so many people, including famous and well-respected people, and that even now many people still believe he was telling some form of the truth, thinking, “Maybe he was a con man who didn’t do the right thing, but the fund exists.” 

When I started out, I thought this was just a really good yarn, very entertaining and messy. I love a messy detail. But early in the research, I realized the con wouldn’t make sense without context and then the context fed into what Blay-Miezah did: He’d use breaking news moments like political unrest to delay payments. And then I’d see what he did creep into the news and change people’s interpretations of what was happening at the time. Then I realized you couldn’t write about how he was able to get away with such audacious things without telling this whole story.

But it was also important to tell the history. Nkrumah has long seemed outlandishly corrupt – and he wasn’t. But that didn’t stop people; it was just accepted without evidence. Rawlings actively tried to murder my father, who was a minor politician at the time. My parents had friends who were disappeared and when I started asking about this period it was pretty clear they had post-traumatic stress and that really broke my heart.

Rawlings could see which way the wind was blowing and adjust. He was brilliant at laundering his image, breaking with his reputation as a murderous dictator by having a state funeral for Nkrumah and holding state visits with President Clinton. But he was actively grafting on a massive scale all along. Younger people who didn’t know the past loved him because he was incredibly charismatic and ushered in a period of relative prosperity. When his death was announced, even my cousins posted loving tributes to him. 

Q. How difficult was it to dig up the truth of Ghana’s modern history?

The idea that a con man could manipulate history so much surprised me, but it was with help from the U.K. and the U.S. – his stories kept being retold and had such legs. It really breaks my heart that so much of Ghanian history has been obscured or lost and so outlandishly manipulated. The worst of it was in foreign newspapers like the New York Times articles from the 1960s. I was always offended by how lazy they were. 

There’s so much history that was lost; and when older people I was trying to get to talk died, it felt like it was slipping through my fingers.

When I went looking for sources, they didn’t exist. At the British Library, there was an old magazine where someone had ripped out the two pages I was looking for. The basic information I expected to get from books wasn’t there. 

There’s a weird vacuum and people exploited that and filled the vacuum. A lot of sources I found are not easily accessible, including people’s personal archives – one source I had to keep calling at dawn so I could look in his filing system. One archivist friend was walking past the high court and there were files open to the elements, people’s lives rotting in the humidity. Another archivist friend found more files in the basement of a building. 

It’s important to preserve this history before it’s too late and establish research trails so others can replicate that work and build on it. Hopefully, many more people will find stories and go through family archives and write all their stories into history, adding real information on top of a pile of incredibly suspect history to balance the picture and fill it out. 

Q. You write about lies changing history and about Blay-Miezah trying to run out the clock on his trials while he ran for president, hoping a victory would solve his legal problems. That sounds kind of familiar.

I originally thought the problems were specific to Ghana but they weren’t. We all discovered over the past couple of years how much corruption there is everywhere and how people make their fortunes and get to continue to graft after indictments and being out of office and seemingly being disgraced. 

If I’d written this book ten years ago people in the U.K. and the U.S. would have said, “That doesn’t happen here.” But Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, who is also a huckster extraordinaire, got elected and the book started to mean something different.

Like her stories, the book is mordantly funny, such as a scene in which the character Finn and Lily, his dead ex-girlfriend (yes, you read that right), discuss possible tombstone epitaphs like, “WELL, THAT WAS WEIRD” and “GOT NO EMOJIS FOR THIS” and “ATTENTION UNDERLYING CONDITIONS.”

As Moore’s sharply etched characters struggle to make sense of their world, readers may find themselves trying to make sense of Moore’s world with its shifting storylines. There’s the occasional bit of speculative 19th-century historical fiction with John Wilkes Booth as a boarder in a spinster’s home, an incident set well after the time he was killed. 

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For 40-odd pages, Moore writes a realistic and devastatingly moving section where Finn, a high school teacher in the Midwest, comes to New York to visit his brother Max, who is in hospice and dying far too young. 

Then the rest of the book is a surreal road trip, where Finn unhesitatingly abandons Max to help Lily. But she has committed suicide and so when Finn finds Lily, she’s hoping to bum a ride to a burial spot in another state. (She’s also, uh, decomposing.) All of this is taking place in 2016 in the weeks leading up to the presidential election. 

“The book is about grief — about the country at large and for Finn — and it’s also about denial. And how you balance denial while also questioning the official narrative,” Moore said in a recent video interview. 

Q. Max is dying. Lily has killed herself. Finn feels helpless in the face of all this and makes some dubious decisions. 

We all try to help people in our lives who are suffering, and we often get it wrong. And certain kinds of suffering seem mysterious, which is what I wanted to show, how Lily’s suffering is mysterious to Finn. Suicidality and depression are kind of a black box; other people can’t really get it. 

Once, for about 45 seconds, I felt so bleak and so dark, and I realized there are people who feel like this all the time and thought about how unbearable that would be. I have my own issues, but I don’t have that. 

The title refers to people who are not home in the world or life or society or in this country. I thought of it as a sort of blues song title. 

Q. Finn seems to be unmoored, which feels connected to his trouble at work where he’s teaching conspiracy theories to his high school students. 

Finn is trying to reclaim the term “conspiracy theory,” to say that society pulls the trigger, not just one person. He is questioning the shorthand of official narratives on national stories and the official narrative of Lily – he doesn’t quite buy that she’s with this new guy or that she’s dead. And maybe there’s something to his questioning. 

I was letting him occupy an ambiguous zone. He’s not a black-and-white thinker and these shades of grey are where the trip with Lily occurs. If people want to read this as Finn’s crackup and hallucination, I give him a car accident where he hits his head and some other signs that he’s a little destabilized, but it doesn’t have to be read that way. It could be that this is what happened to Finn. It’s just in keeping with his denial of any official narrative and his distrust.

Q. The storyline is bleak, but the writing is really funny. Lily says, “Jokes are flotation devices on the great sea of sorrowful life. They are the exit signs in a very dark room.” Do you consciously write funny to offset the sad or is that just the way real life is?

If you don’t include humor, you’re not telling the whole truth about life. Humor and suffering and loss often sit side by side. One of my favorite Shakespearean characters is Mercutio in “Romeo and Juliet,” who says, “Ask for me tomorrow, you’ll find me a grave man.” 

Q. This is a fast read with clever writing; do you try at certain points to slow the reader down so they think about the themes of loss and grieving?

I may just be very bad at pacing, but with a novel, you don’t know how fast a reader will go or where they’re going to stop and put it down and make dinner. You can construct a novel with beautiful chapters — Jane Austen is a classic example and Dickens, of course, was writing on an installment plan so he has terrifically shaped chapters — but today you have no idea and can’t control the reader. You can control the reader more with short stories, which are going to be read in a single sitting. 

The novel can be anything in terms of structure and construction and pacing, which is why we have everything from “Ulysses” to “To Kill A Mockingbird.” Maybe I’ve just thrown up my hands with novels and said, “I’m just going to do this my own way.” 

So the pacing has to be guessed at and people can get it wrong and I’m sure I do. There are times this book may seem to be spinning its wheels, but that I did do deliberately so you can feel that they’re trapped.

Q. Finn and Lilly are metaphorically spinning their wheels on their trip.

Yes, and their conversation is too. They’re trapped in this circle. 

Q. And you don’t worry about the readers, right? I’ve seen you quoted as saying some books are just “confusing” and some need to be read twice. Was this on your mind while you were writing?

I didn’t show the book to anyone while I was writing because I knew it was weird. I didn’t want to have to report in and answer literal questions or have interference with the journey. I thought there would be some people who would understand and that’s who I was writing for. 

I said to Jane Smiley, “I’m finishing this very weird novel and if I can get this past my agent and editor I do feel it will find some readers.” Jane said that’s exactly how I felt about “Perestroika in Paris” so I went and read it and thought, “Well, at least I don’t have a talking horse,” so maybe it’ll work out. A lot of people don’t understand it and that’s fine but it’s lovely and satisfying to me that some people do get it.

What most people don’t know is that it was a pitch he learned from a Black pitcher, Rube Foster, who’d been quietly brought in by Giants manager John McGraw to teach Mathewson. 

Foster, who went on to pitching greatness himself, later founded the Negro Leagues, which would become home to the legendary Satchel Paige, whose control was so masterful, his daughter would say, that he could pick out a single berry on a bush and hit it with a pitch. 

Those stories, as well as the history of Black players before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in the Major Leagues in 1947, are recounted in “The League,” the new documentary about the Negro Leagues directed by Sam Pollard (whose previous films include “MLK/FBI” and “Citizen Ashe”).

The film, which is in selected theatres and available for streaming on July 14, spans from the 19th century when Black players were first banned all the way to the demise of leagues after integration. It also looks at external forces, from the 1896 Plessy vs Ferguson Supreme Court decision that enforced the “separate but equal doctrine,” to the rise of thriving Black communities. But the emphasis is on players and executives, including Effa Manley, the only woman to own a team, and catcher Josh Gibson, who was haunted by personal demons and died tragically young. 

Pollard spoke recently by video about his awakening as a baseball fan, about the film and about incorporating Negro League statistics into the official record books. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Q. What drew you to this project?

My dad spent some time in St. Louis and had some brothers there so he was a big Cardinals fan. I was a huge baseball fan growing up and in 1963 and 1964 I became a fan of Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, Curt Flood and Bill White. I always knew about Jackie Robinson, but then as a young man, I started doing research and learning about Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson and Cool Papa Bell. 

Byron Motley’s father, Bob Motley, had been a Negro League umpire and Byron had done a tremendous amount of legwork and shot all these interviews with different players like Monte Irvin and Satchel Paige and Willie Mays. He approached me a few years back and knowing what I did about the history, I was excited about telling the story for people of the 21st century who don’t know about these trailblazers like Rube Foster, who started the Negro Leagues. 

Baseball is not the national pastime anymore. It’s an opportunity now to give people a chance to see that baseball was pretty interesting back then. I wanted to get these people the recognition they deserve.

Q. How much did you try to balance the “inside baseball” stories with the human interest stories”?

We wanted to give you both inside baseball stories and the human stories. It was an opportunity to bring some nuance and to tell the real history of the evolution of the Negro Leagues all the way up to its demise. For instance, I wanted to talk about Effa Manley, the first Black woman to own a team and to be in the Hall of Fame. 

Q. In the section on Jackie Robinson you puncture the halo surrounding Branch Rickey when you talk about how, unlike Bill Veeck (who signed Larry Doby and Satchel Paige), he took Negro League players without providing compensation to the owners — and how Manley was outspoken in pushing back.

We can’t tell this story without paying homage to Jackie Robinson – and people don’t know that part of the story. It was a sign of the times and there was no way it was going to go differently. Robinson’s signing was the big thing. Did Branch Rickey pay for Robinson or Roy Campanella or Don Newcombe? He didn’t feel like had to. I was glad we had that story about Effa challenging Rickey and then Veeck giving her money for Doby.

Integration was a very complex thing – there were these thriving Black communities that were changed and that’s what happened with the Negro Leagues, but that’s the cross we bear.

Q. There has been a recent decision to include Negro League statistics in official major statistics but some argue that they were not always playing against major league quality opponents, especially when they were barnstorming. How do you feel about that issue?

I think it’s complicated when you try to break down how many homers were in Negro League games or in barnstorming games – there were different teams, different level of players. The upside is that Major League Baseball now see that these players are part of the evolution of American Baseball. I hope this film contributes to that as well. The percentage of African American players is now so small; maybe all this will mean that some young athlete will be inspired to play baseball.

In the film, which had its premiere at the newly reopened Vidiots video store and opens in theaters July 7, Mark Duplass plays Billy, the conservative U.S. president whose actions are largely responsible for the environmental cataclysm. The only reason he’s still alive is that his best friend since childhood, Sterling K. Brown’s Ray, is a scientist who built a biodome for the two of them to escape end times.

Inside their safety zone, they’ve got books, plants and fish that reproduce and keep them fed,; the two spend their time exercising and debating the relationships between Mario and Luigi in “Super Mario Brothers” even as they feel haunted by a mysterious green light outside their home.

“Biosphere” is a two-hander, a comedy within an existential crisis that’s asking questions about identity and evolution on numerous levels. It was written by Duplass and Mel Eslyn and directed by Eslyn, president of Duplass Brothers Productions, the company Mark founded with his sibling Jay.

Duplass, who said in a recent phone interview that they wrote the part for Brown without knowing if he’d say yes, is thrilled to give Eslyn, a veteran producer, her first turn at the helm, overseeing these two men as they try sorting out their feelings and their lives.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. Do you see things as hopeful or hopeless – both in terms of world and climate change as well as interpersonal relationships?

Wow, that’s a big question. I’m an optimist by nature but I’m not a blind optimist. I’m essentially a cockroach — you just can’t kill me because I’m so willing to pivot to whatever is working and I find some glimmer of hope and positivity and put myself into that. I’m an uber-realist who has a sense of, “Man, I’m just lucky to be here in the first place” — not just on the planet but also in an industry that pays me to make weird art like “Biosphere.”

Q. How did this movie come about?

I’m a man who grew up in the South and went to an all-male parochial high school where we were told, “You are the smartest and most powerful and you should be the leaders.” I’ve been slowly unwinding that element of my masculinity for a while, as a person in therapy and inside my art. 

Then I brought in Mel, and with her perspective as a queer woman, it became something bigger. That’s something I’m really enjoying lately –for a while it was just myself and my brother against the world and now I’m collaborating with lots of different types of people. There are things I don’t have the authority to do or I’m not good at doing that they bring into the mix. 

Q. This film, your 2019 film “Paddleton,” and your new series, “The Long, Long Night” are all focused on male friendships. 

I was just following my instincts with my art but here’s my b.s. armchair analysis about why I’m doing these projects about platonic relationships: I met the love of my life when I was 24 years old in Katie [Aselton]. That element, with the ups-and-downs, the great sine-cosine waves, the “will it work or not” was filled for me, so the great area of exploration took the form of familial and then platonic relationships — that’s where I experience crushes, heartbreaks. So that’s why I’m drawn to it.

I have this interest in telling these male intimacy stories. I didn’t think it was a unique perspective because of how my brother and I are, but when I put it on screen people would say, “Wow these guys are wildly different than your average North American males in how they relate to each other.” That encouraged me to explore it a little further. “Biosphere” use almost a fable element to go into reaches of places I haven’t really gone before. 

Q. There’s a lot going on in the movie — about environmental calamity, gender identity, friendship, mortality and the deeper meanings of the relationship between Mario and Luigi. How do you balance it all?

It’s not a message movie at its core. Our goal was just to give people a great ride and let them laugh. But finding the tonal balance, where you need to hold “Dumb and Dumber” and “Waiting for Godot” inside, was challenging. Mel and I really believed we could do that, but we were nervous. It took a long time to get it right. 

No filmmaker does this on their own. We showed it to hundreds of our closest filmmaker friends and let them tell us, “This is not working” or “This is not as funny as you think it is.”

Q. You’ve been doing this for so long and have your own sense of humor, so if they say that but you and Mel think it’s funny, whose judgment do you trust?

Usually, they explain, “I know why you think it’s funny, but I was ahead of you at this moment so if you shave off three frames it’ll be funny the way you think it is,” or “The score was so mysterious here that I was losing the humor.”

Q. There’s a lot of science in the whole biosphere concept. How much do you sweat the details of that versus focusing on emotional truths?

We filled the script full of the real science and then pared it back. Our goal was to give people as little as they need to feel comfortable that they were in good hands with the story and then focus on the interpersonal dynamics. Those scientific elements are just the support system for what’s going on between the two men in the film.

Q. You’ve plumbed the depths of the Mario and Luigi relationship. What’s left for you to explore?

We had this film under wraps for a long time, so we were relishing that people are just starting to see it now. Then Mel and I were on the phone yesterday and we started doing what we always do, asking, “What’s the next movie?” We caught ourselves and said, “What if we didn’t ruin our enjoyment by worrying about that – what if we just enjoyed the release of “Biosphere.” It’s an exercise in self-restraint. 

Q. Why was it exciting to have the Los Angeles premiere at the new Vidiots Foundation theater at Eagle Rock, of which you are a founding member?

Vidiots is my heart right now. I grew up in New Orleans going to a movie theater called Pitchers that had drinks and food and was a second-run art house. It meant so much to be able to learn about independent filmmakers there. That’s been missing in my life. So when Maggie Mackay called me and said, “I want to try and bring Vidiots back,” I said, “You want to try and bring back a physical video rental store with an art-house movie theater?”

It was so anti-capitalist and so against the grain that I said, “Let’s go for it.” If “Biosphere” is about anything, it’s about magic and keeping little flickers of your dreams alive, even when they don’t seem practical.

“Nobody comes downstairs. Nobody is upstairs, or anywhere else in this house,” Rachman writes. “Only Dora, pondering a fictional character, this husband Barry, based on someone she met in passing once, and written into a story that isn’t quite working, as none of her stories quite work anymore.”

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Rachman enjoys gently tugging the rug underneath the readers throughout his book as Dora faces her cognitive decline and tries to finish one last novel before taking her life. In between hearing directly from Dora in her diaries, we read lightly connected chapters that read as short stories about people from Dora’s lives, from her daughter to a deliveryman. 

Dora is not reporting truthfully but conjuring up new worlds and relationships for these people as she grows increasingly isolated, particularly as Covid sends the world into lockdown. 

Some of her stories are comedic, like the story of Danny, another struggling novelist who makes one faux pas after another at a literary festival, while others are deadly serious, like the story of Amir, who tries returning home to Syria for his father’s funeral only to be detained and tortured. We eventually get glimpses of the “real” people beyond these imposters.

This is the fourth novel by Rachman, and it hits stores June 27. His first, “The Imperfectionists,” centered on newspaper journalists and was a best seller. All of his books, which include “The Rise & Fall of Great Powers” and “The Italian Teacher,” earned critical acclaim and share some thematic similarities.

“It isn’t conscious, but I’ve noticed that I keep writing about the culture, both in terms of the arts and in terms of political culture,” Rachman said in a recent video interview from his home in England. “I was a journalist for a long time, so I feel quite connected to the political world and the history that’s breaking around us. I also have a professional and personal interest in what’s happening to the arts.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. Your characters often feel isolated, even, or especially, from their families. That’s especially true of Dora.  

The loneliness of the characters pushes through all these books. Many are desperately yearning for human connection and sometimes they’re woefully disappointed with what they’ve found in their family. Like Dora, they’re looking out the window at other lives. 

I felt that had a resonance during the pandemic, which is when I was writing. A writer—Dora, or me— spends all this time looking at a screen and imagining people and the larger world and then bringing them to life on that screen. You’re in isolation but surrounding yourself with humanity. You can see everything going on all at once online but you also feel like you’re missing out. Covid seemed like a strange echo of this life. 

Q. Do you feel isolated when you’re writing?

I can never tell if writing is a pathetic attempt by me to escape or if it’s an enrichment of life. When I’m doing it, it feels blissful, being lost in my imagination, conjuring things, taking aesthetic pleasure in trying to piece it all together. But I also do it to escape the world sometimes. In terrible periods of my life, I’d disappear into the story. 

Q. One character says, “That’s the real midlife crisis: You’re irrelevant.” Do you worry about that for you and for novelists in general?

The question of relevance is at the heart of this book. In our society, it feels increasingly like literature is in a marginal place and that’s saddening to me. When I was young, I dreamed of accessing the literary world. Now that world is smaller and less pertinent. The age when a novelist could have imagined being on the cover of Time magazine is now as unimaginable as actually reading Time magazine.

Separately, I’m constantly thinking, maybe it’s just me. People might roll their eyes and say, “Novels aren’t dead, just your perspective.” I’m open to that possibility. Either way, it’s not good news. 

Q. This novel feels darker than your others. Was it the pandemic, existential issues like the climate crisis and democracies faltering, or things going on in your life that fed this mood?

It’s all the things you just said. The book has humor all the way through but this does feel like a world in jeopardy — the absolute chaos that climate change is bringing, the extremist politics shredding democracy, which is making people lose faith in the system and human beings, and also the elements of technology that arrive as marvels but transform our lives in ways that aren’t marvelous. It feels like things are out of our control now.

And I was writing when the pandemic hit. It also speaks of a darker time in my life. I was having a hard time and struggling to write and all that came out in the book.

Q. What motivates Dora as she works without a publishing deal and while fretting about her cognitive decline?

It seems like she’s trying to recall and recount her life but then you realize it’s more of a way to correct or amend it — not necessarily better it in every case but to try and revise reality. Dora is trying to create the life she wanted. Writers are often looking for characters on the page that accord with the world they’d like or the world they understand. 

She longs for that fictional Barry to live with her but knows she couldn’t have lasted two weeks with him. She’s looking back and wondering if she got it all wrong and whether she could have done things differently or if that’s just who she is. 

Q. As Dora creates characters based on real people, were you trying to get us thinking about how novelists utilize real people in their books?

It is a playful way to mess around with that. There’s an odd interplay between what’s real and what the writer creates.

With my first book, people kept saying, “You based this character on so-and-so” with absolute certainty. But what happens is I take tiny little details that are true — like the way someone holds their pencil — but then the character takes on a separate life. When I first started out, if I’d get stuck I’d base a character on somebody I know, but those characters were always terrible. They never came to life. 

Q. In one lighter moment, Danny says to Dora, “I might be one of your characters” to which she retorts, “Oh, you are. Are you only realizing that now?” That felt pretty meta. 

I enjoy playing with that ambiguity — it’s meant to make the reader pause and wonder, but I didn’t do too much of that because it separates the concept from the story. You want the reader to be in the story and only occasionally to think from a different angle. If you just are pointing out the artifice, it can become an ironic display that’s irritating to read.

Q. Are you often thinking about people as potential characters?

There’s often a dissonance between the superficial thin version of people you encounter during the course of your day and the certainty that there’s a huge amount more in everyone’s lives, whether it’s your bank teller or bus driver. Writers are curious about other people’s lives, about getting into their rooms, their thoughts and their hearts.

The band’s live energy fueled their rise and soon they were opening for Lenny Kravitz, Queen’s Brian May and The Who. But all that touring meant that after their debut album, “Bomb Shelter Sessions,” in 2011, recording often took a backseat. Their second album, “1 Hopeful Rd.,” took four years to release and the third, “Juke Joint Gems,” took another six, arriving in 2021 to give their fans something to get them through the pandemic – it featured material that had been meant for an earlier album that had gotten shelved. 

Being stuck at home in Los Angeles during lockdown gave the band a chance to focus on their recording career for the first time. Unable to gather in a studio, everyone recorded their own parts at home, which helps give the album, “Heavy Hymnal” (June 23), a more textured sound than early Vintage Trouble. 

Still, that vintage sound is still there. “We wanted to make sure that even though we were doing this new record in a different style that we didn’t lose our rowdiness,” Taylor says.

The garrulous Taylor and Colt spoke about the album by video recently, each from their own homes. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Q. On first listen, this album sounds fuller, crisper and brighter than your past albums. Would you agree?

Taylor: So that means the last albums were thin, dull and dark? (Laughs) 

Colt: This record was made quite differently because it was made during the pandemic. We met our producer, Chris Seefried, right before we started. And we individually made our own recording studios and sent him our tracks. 

Before, we always went in with a vision of us being a live band. When Don Was produced us, he said, “I want to capture that energy of you guys just playing.” This time, I had to do my guitars by myself.

Taylor: We could each be scientific about it and fine-tune everything, without losing our feel as individuals. So it’s crisper because there’s no extra sound from the other instruments bleeding in. 

And Chris is really into soundscapes. The crispness comes because for the first time, we were really thinking about sonic real estate. That’ll be the name of my new band, Sonic Real Estate. 

Q. That makes sense because it feels like these songs have more layers in the production.

Taylor: There have layers on other records but the difference now is that you hear each one. I’m a fan of the Phil Spector Wall of Sound – there’s something really beautiful about that – but there’s also something beautiful about hearing what everything is doing on this album, where you hear the counterpoints.

Colt: When we play the new songs live, we’re playing in a more organized way now. 

Taylor: It’s arranged so much on this record that we could stand still live and the music would still dance. That takes some getting used to. Although when I look back on our first performances, I feel like I didn’t trust the organization and I need to do it more. You get used to bashing things out live. One thing I like that the lyricist did – I’m the lyricist – is that I concentrated a lot on inside rhymes within each line. Recording it, I gave each syllable that room but live I forgot all about that.

Q. Are you forever changed, like so many office workers, by working from home?

Colt: It’s an album made in our PJs.

Taylor: Did you read Rick Rubin’s “The Creative Act”? It talks about how no matter what kind of system you have for creating, it’s your responsibility as an artist to try something different. You might find something new.

Colt: Everything during the pandemic was such a great education. We really honed in on learning you can do something in a small environment. And Chris really nourished the tracks we sent him and found a place for each. 

Taylor: There’s something really lovely about being at home. You can do a little bit, drink some coffee, come back, dance, do it, cry, do it. You’re able to fine-tune and feel the details of what you want to put in. In the studio, with other people waiting, you end up settling. And there’s a lot of hours we weren’t traveling or packing up. 

Q. Will you go back to the office?

Taylor: Of course, but there might be times where you play something in the studio and then say everyone go home and record your part. 

Colt: There’s something beautiful about being in the room together and playing. Even when we play live to record next, with us all in a room together we wouldn’t get rid of what we learned on this album. 

Q. What are the themes you’re exploring lyrically?

Taylor: We released one single, “Outside In” at the top of the pandemic, which was about how we’re used to dealing with our outside energy and now we’re stuck inside. 

On the album, you can hear what the last few years of my life were about. The theme is the life lived during the pandemic. There are a couple of songs that people think are love songs or breakup songs but I didn’t have that many lovers during that time period so the lyrics might have been me talking to one of my bandmates. Nalle is now saying, “What song is about me?”

Q. Do you think the sound of this album is more commercial or accessible for listeners?

Taylor: I’ve changed from thinking about songs being commercial to thinking about how we make music for a reason. The world is going through a lot of turmoil and so the more people you can reach with your music, the more you can do.  It’s not about being on the top of the chart but if I can share what makes me get up and think about life every day, it’s helping heal the world.