there is no artist on earth i love more than natasha kohli. 

for a variety of reasons.

but i know how much natasha hates being on camera. especially at this time, when she preferred to let her art do the talking for her. but as her career was picking up, there were requests to learn more about her. i pitched making a short doc about her.

and we ran into the familiar foe of on-camera discomfort. i scrapped the shoot we had in progress (something that happens more often than you might think) and spent a few days reconfiguring our process.

before the days of the BOND call, i would just hit record and have a conversation. but without that wide-ranging pre-interview, there was little to prevent the rapid creep of insecurity.

for natasha, i watched hours of Chef’s Table - at the time, one of her favorite shows. i noticed that the show tended to fall into seven sections, following a traditional narrative arc. and with each episode i watched, i would jot down the types of questions i think were asked to get a Christina Tosi to open up.

i ended up with a list of around 88 questions. i typed them all up and gave them to steve and natasha. i asked steve to setup a recording session where natasha would talk in relative privacy into a microphone. pick any of the questions - or all of them - and steve would be the ideal companion for that session. patient, nurturing, and silent.

natasha gave nearly 3 hours of open ended, soulful answers. and i spent a lot of time cutting that audio down - distilling it to its essence, which becomes the talk track in this short piece.

to bring it all together, we followed her around her hometown of evanston, to show her at work. pulled b-roll from shoots she did earlier in her career, and i pieced it all together. this piece really represents the start of method. the first time i ran a process from start to finish, trusting my gut and intuition to find the story.

and it was from this story that the process became concrete and refined.

thank you, natasha, for trusting me to make you comfortable.