How did you approach his drug use? What did you want to say about it or how did you think about it in the context of this project?

Well, when I started the project. I certainly wasn't going to try to make any statement about it. That's not how I work or operate. I wasn't trying to make a social issue film. But I think in part of the idea of presenting this story in an honest way, we needed to address it.

There's this scene that's been getting a lot of — people have been talking quite a bit about where Kurt and Courtney are trying to give Frances her first haircut, and Kurt is very heavily sedated. This happens very late in the film, he's got blemishes all over, he's emaciated, and he's falling asleep while he holds his daughter in his hands, and it's terrible, and it's horrific, and it's something that nobody wants to see. And when I screened the film for Kurt's mother and sister for the first time, they were horrified, as one would expect. I think Wendy Cobain would have preferred, and I don't blame her, a rose-tinted view of Kurt, maybe Saint Kurt, and was like, "Why do we need to do this to him?"

But it wasn't Wendy's story to tell, it was Frances' and I was operating off her desire to tell the story in an honest way.

How did she feel about it?

She never blinked, but I'll share something with you. Kim Cobain, Kurt's sister, was very upset and said to me, "You know, my brother was really embarrassed about his heroin use, do you think he would want this in the film?"

And I said, "You know, Kim, the one thing you've always shared with me is that Kurt's biggest fear was that he would inspire or influence kids to do heroin, and I don't think there's anything in this picture that's romanticizing it. In fact, if anything it's doing the opposite. And there's a slight chance that there may be one kid who sees this movie and as a result decides not to do heroin, and I have a feeling if your brother was here and was given the choice of saving one life or selling 100 million records, he would choose to save the one life."

And sure enough at the third screening of this film at the Sundance Film Festival, a young woman came up to me in tears, shaking, and telling me that the experience of watching the film was what she needed to overcome her own battles of addiction.

Without that image, we're once again just propagating this myth, because everyone knows Kurt's associated with heroin, but we haven't seen the face of it. The idea was not to tear him down, nor was it to put him on a pedestal. It was just simply to look him in the eye, and I feel that when you strip away the layers of mythology to reveal and reveal the man, the man is so much more endearing and dynamic than the myth.