Back in 2009, director Marshall Curry’s documentary "Racing Dreams" was the opening night selection for the inaugural rendition of a new city event called the Milwaukee Film Festival.

Five years later, a lot has changed.

Curry landed himself a second Oscar nomination for "If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front" in 2011, furthering his name as one of the best documentarians currently working in the art. Meanwhile, the Milwaukee Film Festival grew out from that first year, quickly becoming one of the city’s best and biggest events – now sprawled across over 200 movies, countless great guests and four theaters.

Both have launched incredibly forward in half a decade, and now, they’re coming back together for "Point and Shoot," Curry’s latest film, a sensational story about a young man on a road trip who finds up a Libyan freedom fighter. The film premieres on Tuesday, Oct. 7 at 7 p.m. at the Oriental Theatre, with Curry expected to be on hand to also receive an honor as a Milwaukee Film Festival tribute.

Before the showing rolls around, however, OnMilwaukee.com got a chance to chat with Curry about finding the incredible story for his latest film, what got him in the business and why the movie originally didn’t work for him.

OnMilwaukee.com: I have to know: Where did you find the story for "Point and Shoot"?

Marshall Curry: Well, I didn’t know anything about it until I got an email one day from Matt Vandyke, saying that he had returned from Libya and had this incredible experience. He had shot a lot of footage and thought it would make an interesting documentary. So he came to New York with his girlfriend Lauren, and they met with me and my wife, who is a producer on the film.

They told us this story, and it is an unbelievable story. He set off on this 30,000-mile motorcycle trip through Northern Africa and the Middle East, and ended up joining the rebels fighting Gaddafi. We listened to them talk for about three or four hours, and after they left, my wife and I couldn’t stop talking about it. It’s a very exciting but also provocative story that raises lots of questions about war and manhood and about the way we define mahood and the way we use cameras to shape our experiences.

So I said to him that the only way I would be interested in doing this film is if I had full creative control of it – complete independence – and also business control of the story, and he agreed to both of those. So I went to Baltimore and shot the interview with him that makes up the spine of the movie.

OMC: What was it like working with the footage he gave you? How much did he actually have, and how did you figure out how to work that into a narrative?

MC: I want to say he had between 100 and 200 hours of footage, so it was a huge range that he had shot over many years – some of it on old mini-DV tapes that had never been digitized, and some of it later onto digital cards.

The first process was just getting all of the footage organized and standardized because it was shot on different cameras with different formats. Then we just went through it, looking for things that were beautiful or interesting or dramatic – and there’s a lot of it. This motorcycle trip he took is about 30,000 miles and took place over a number of years. It’s just full of adventures and beautiful material. And then, when he decided to go to Libya, that’s where the footage became really incredible because it was a backstage view, an insider’s view of an Arab civil war, something most Americans don’t get a chance to view.

OMC: In a recent Indiewire piece, you talked about how you need to have two or more topics for a documentary. It sounds like this story had that built in.

MC: The plot changes about a third of the way through from a romantic adventure story to a much more serious story about war and violence and struggle. Also, there were a number of things that really interested me in this story though.

Matt, when he decided to go on this trip in the first place, described it to me as "wanting to go on a crash course in manhood," and that was the reason that he set off in the first place. And for me, that was such a great turn of phrase, but it raised a lot of questions about how we define manhood and if it is something you can chase by having adventures. And I think his view of manhood changes somewhat over the course of the film and his life.

Another element that really interested me in the movie was the way that Matt used a camera to write their own life stories. Salman Rushdie has a great line about the way telling stories about our lives gives us power over them and lets us create who we are by the way we tell stories. And Matt, in this movie, uses a camera to do the same thing – and as do all of the people around him.

During this war, there’s footage of guys in the middle of battle in Libya, spraying machine gun fire at the enemy and around them are four other people with cell phone cameras filming them. It was such an extraordinary thing for me because I knew that Americans had become obsessed with filming everything around us and posting things to Facebook and tweeting photos. With the ubiquity of camera phones, everybody has become a documentarian of their own lives.

I think that’s extremely interesting because it used to be that, for documentarians, there was a battle between filming something and being fully present in a moment. When you’re making a documentary, I find it hard sometimes to both be thinking about focus and story and framing and light, and at the same time, be fully present and human with the people you’re with. And now, I think that’s something that almost everybody has to deal with.

People go to the park, and they take a walk with their son. Are they fully present with their son? Or are they looking for a photo op that they can take a great picture of to post on Facebook? You go on a vacation: Are you enjoying the vacation, or are you constantly looking for things that you can photograph to create an image of yourself? All of that is really rich material.

OMC: Going all the way back in your life and career, what was really the film or documentary that made you want to become a filmmaker?

MC: I loved documentaries. Since I was in college or in the years after college, I began watching them seriously. I would say there are two documentaries that encouraged me more than any other to pick up a camera and try to make a film. One of them is Ross McElwee’s "Sherman’s March," and the other one is a film called "Hands on a Hard Body," a quirky film about a contest in Texas where people would put their hand on a truck and the last person with their hand on the truck wins the truck.

It’s a very simple, small film that’s shot with terrible equipment. The camerawork is mediocre. But it’s completely engaging. I realized when I watched that film that technical problems could be forgiven if you had compelling characters doing something interesting. That’s what gave me the courage to just buy a camera and try to film something. I was intimidated by the technical components of filming and editing, and when I saw films like that – or "Sherman’s March," where there are sections where the microphone batteries fail and the camerawork is a little messy – it made me think that maybe this is something I can do.

OMC: There’s an interesting debate going on about documentaries. There’s this idea that docs need to be more cinematic. Do you agree?

MC: I sort of feel that documentaries are like music: There are lots of different styles. I think Duke Ellington said, "If it sounds good, it is good." I kind of feel this way about documentaries. I don’t have a set of rules about how they’re supposed to be made. There are movies like "Koyaanisqatsi" that’s just intense, impressionistic footage. There are movies like Michael Moore’s stuff that’s funny. There are movies with reenactments that are amazing. There are movies with animation. So I guess I have a very big tent policy when it comes to documentaries.

The only thing I don’t love is when documentaries are predictable. If they are lectures that are speaking to people who already agree with them; to me, that’s not very compelling. Other than that, character-driven stories are great. Visual things are great.

I do think it’s better when documentaries feel like "movies," but that doesn’t necessarily mean Hollywood movies. It just means that there needs to be something about it that makes you want to watch it. Something emotional, something dramatic, something beautiful. If it works and it draws an audience in, then that’s great. I don’t have a right set of rules; there’s a lot of ways to do that. 

OMC: You said in an Indiewire piece, you talked about how, when you start making a documentary, you try to find docs with similar themes and try to see what those films did with those themes and break the spell there and dig into those. Did you do that for "Point and Shoot" as well?

MC: "Point and Shoot" is very different from the other documentaries I’ve done. Usually, I shoot all of the footage; either physically I’m holding the camera, or I’m standing with the person who’s holding the camera, and I’m getting sound. In this case – and also, those films are usually built out of conversations with lots of people – this film is essentially one conversation intercut with footage that he shot. So stylistically, it was very different for me.

I think one of the big challenges of it was that, when I did the first cut of it, each minute was amazing, I felt. This guy’s story is so dramatic; he has so many moments that would be the climax of a normal documentary, and here, they’re throwaway moments in a montage. I assumed at the beginning, when I started editing, that all I would have to do was just piece these pieces together, and I would have an amazing movie.

When I watched the first cut, I found it surprisingly boring. What I discovered was that the way I was trying to tell it was, "This happened, and then this happened, and then this happened." And a series of events is not a movie. A movie needs to have directionality; it needs to be going somewhere.

OMC: What did you want to change?

MC: In some cases, it meant getting rid of scenes that I thought were neat and good, but were clutter for the narrative through line. In some cases, it meant bringing scenes up front that, in the previous cut, were further back. In some cases, it meant building whole new sections that would set the stakes and communicate early on what it was that Matt was going for so we knew where we were going.

When I edit, I have a card above my editing computer that says two lines on it. One says, "What happens next?" and the other says, "I didn’t know that." I really feel like, for a movie to be successful, the audience needs to say one of those lines to themselves every two or three minutes. Because if you tell people things they already know or the story goes in the direction that the audience is expecting, they will begin to tune out. There’s no point in watching something that’s telling you something you already know or that’s telling you a story that’s predictable.

What makes movies work is when they stretch people and surprise people. And I think this movie does that.