Over at Nerve, Daniel Nemet-Nejat interviews A.J. Schnack,, whose Kurt Cobain Without a Son recently played at the AFI Festival. Constructed around a series of audio recordings of Cobain conducted by journalist Michael Azerrad, the doc is a surprisingly poetic and non-didactic portrait of a reluctant rock star’s interior life.

Here’s Schnack on his approach towards constructing the film:

I tried to pay attention to Michael’s desires that it be unusual, not the typical cut-and-paste piece about a band. Immediately I thought what would be interesting to me is if the tapes would be the single source for the narrative, that there would be no other interviews, no tracking down his childhood friends, nothing else. I thought that the visuals should sort of have this dreamlike quality because you’re having this intimate listening with someone who’s no longer with us. So, I thought that the visuals should sort of display that and they shouldn’t look like grunge or early 90’s stuff, they shouldn’t be locked into a particular time or place because then you’re constantly reminded of his absence. Instead you should have this experience where you’re kind of sucked into what he’s saying and his voice even more so because you’re looking at these very beautiful images of the places he lived and of the stories he’s telling.