Hey all! I wanted to give everyone a heads-up for an upcoming Director's Cut guest, Robert Stone. He'll be visiting the ThinkTalk studios next week to talk with our host Erika about his career in the film business and his advice for students, and you can submit a question for the interview at Stone's bio page.

Stone's latest documentary, Earth Days looks back to the dawn and development of the modern environmental movement, from its post-war rumblings in the 1950s to the first 1970 Earth Day celebration and the subsequent firestorm of political action. The 2-hour documentary is set to premiere on Monday, April 19, 2010 on PBS -- 40 years after the first Earth Day in 1970.

Stone's first project in 1987, Radio Bikini, earned him a nomination for Best Feature Documentary Academy Award, and the early success encouraged him to continue studying and making films about American history, pop-culture and the mass media. Filmmaker Magazine recently interviewed Stone about the making of Earth Days, and I thought this bit about Stone's approach to directing was really interesting:

Filmmaker: I want to talk about the stylistic approach you took with the film, for instance the lack of a narrator.

Stone: Well, I've never used narration. I feel as a filmmaker that it's cheating and I think it puts a distance between you and the audience, like you're lecturing at them rather than them discovering something themselves. My basic approach to documentary filmmaking is that I think all films basically function the same way, whether they're documentaries or dramatic feature films, in how they work on an audience. A film succeeds and is at its most satisfying when there's a process of discovery or a feeling that you've watched something and put two and two together and come up with a new way of thinking about something. Rather than been lectured to. With a subject as vast as this, I felt it was vital that it was firmly grounded in personal narrative so finding characters whose personal life journeys mirrored the journey of the film was step one. We set out to follow their trajectory from being kids and understanding the motivation that generation had coming out of the 50s to go out and remake the world, explaining the psychology behind it and then showing what happened and how it all fell apart.

If you want see Earth Days, tune into PBS on April 19 or you can watch it on April 11 at 8pm EST during a live social screening on Facebook. It should be a great interview, so submit your questions online by April 5th to get an answer from Stone!