Peter Asher: Everywhere Man: "I love to be slightly terrified when we start a new project. I want it to be so new in terms of topic and approach that I’m not comfortable. That makes it more fun."

Peter Asher: Everywhere Man: "I love to be slightly terrified when we start a new project. I want it to be so new in terms of topic and approach that I’m not comfortable. That makes it more fun."

In this vHopeful Conversations episode, I sit down with legendary San Francisco–based documentary duo Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine to talk about their new film, PETER ASHER: EVERYWHERE MAN. They trace the project’s unlikely origin—from a Linda Ronstadt–invited cabaret night at Bimbo’s to deciding to build their own documentary loosely around Peter Asher’s memoir show. The conversation explores how they used the cabaret as a backbone while expanding outward through interviews with James Taylor, Carole King, Linda Ronstadt, Kate Taylor, and others, and how editor Darren Lund helped shape a sprightly, archival-rich portrait of a producer-manager whose taste and loyalty transformed modern music. Along the way, they discuss Apple Records, Paul McCartney’s friendship and support of Peter, and the ’60s–’70s cultural milieu, the ethics of handling painful chapters in Peter’s life, what it means to resist repeating oneself as artists, and the challenges of getting a film about a “behind-the-scenes” figure into theaters when gatekeepers underestimate audiences’ curiosity. Transcript lightly edited. Podcast available on Dream of a Better World [https://vanessahope.substack.com/podcast], & Apple [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/vhopeful-conversations-podcast/id1872137258], Spotify [https://open.spotify.com/show/465mqdUcSwAp5Q0UchSXtA] or wherever you listen Vanessa Hope: I’m very excited to be joined by our friends from San Francisco, Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine, who are a San Francisco–based co-directing and producing couple known for formally inventive, deeply researched documentaries that braid cultural history and intimate character portraits. Over more than 30 years of collaborating, they’ve made films including BALLETS RUSSES, SOMETHING VENTURED, THE GALAPAGOS AFFAIR: SATAN CAME TO EDEN—so, so good, everyone must see this film—and HALLELUJAH: LEONARD COHEN, A JOURNEY, A SONG. Their latest feature, PETER ASHER: EVERYWHERE MAN, is in theaters now; it world-premiered at the 2025 Telluride Film Festival and extends their work to the life and career of producer, manager, and performer Peter Asher. Dan Geller: Hi Vanessa, it’s really fun to see you again. Dayna Goldfine: I know, it’s so fun to be here. It was great to get your invite. Vanessa: It was so fun to see San Francisco at the beginning of this fantastic documentary. You’re kind of panning down from Bimbo’s sign. Dayna: It’s an old speakeasy-slash-nightclub-slash-performance space that’s been going since before Prohibition. Vanessa: When we lived in San Francisco, we went, and I was so, so happy to see that and then to be taken into this incredible venue for this performance by Peter Asher, which I understand your friend Linda Ronstadt invited you to. And in the middle of watching, you turned to each other and thought, “This has to be a documentary.” Dan: That happened in December 2019, but backing up to 2011—and actually Dayna would have turned to me, I suspect, but in 2011 Dayna was invited on a plus-one ticket by her high school boyfriend, who’s a friend of ours. So she couldn’t turn to me in 2011. It took eight years to turn to me. Dayna: Mostly I just thought, “Oh man, I wish Dan was here.” So what happened is, in 2011, Peter was just starting out with doing his show, and he came to San Francisco. My lovely still-friends-with-high-school boyfriend, who’s really close friends with Linda Ronstadt, called out of the blue and said, “You know, Linda’s got a spare ticket to see Peter Asher.” At the time, he was performing at Hotel Nikko in the Rrazz Room. And I said, “I have no idea who this guy is, but if I get to sit at Linda Ronstadt’s table, I am so there.” I walked in, it started to unfold, and I was like, “Oh, I thought I was here to meet Linda, but I’m really here because this is an amazing show—and if Dan were here, I think he’d agree.” Mostly I was frustrated that there had only been one ticket, because I knew that Dan would feel the way I felt. Dan: Well, frustrated also because there was someone filming right then and there at that actual performance, and filming in the lobby afterward. Dayna: Right. As I was thinking, “Oh man, I wish Dan was here, this would be a great documentary,” I looked across the room and there was a woman with a camera, and I was like, “Oh my god, someone’s gotten here first.” So I walked over to her, introduced myself, and said, “Are you by chance making a documentary about Peter?” And she said, “I am.” And I said something which I very rarely say because I really don’t feel this about many projects, but I was like, “Wow. I’m very envious. I’m jealous of you. I think you’ve got a great project on your hands, and I wish you well and I can’t wait to see it.” Dan: So we actually then, over the intervening years, got to be friends with Linda. At a certain point, because we heard nothing bubbling up about a Peter Asher movie, we asked her to check out what was happening, and she said that Peter told her the project just went nowhere. We kept following up as we got to be better and better friends with Linda, and eventually, seven years later, Linda said, “By the way, that’s not happening.” And then she said Peter’s coming back to town in a couple months, maybe Dan should come see the show as well. I did, and you see it in the movie: as soon as Peter starts to talk on stage, he’s so charming and such a fun storyteller. He’s telling this wild tale but also sort of amazed at his own good fortune—or luck, although he doesn’t believe in luck, whatever you want to call it. We have to invent a new word for what Peter considers this thing that keeps happening to him. Dayna: I think sometimes he uses the word “happenstance,” and I think if you really press him, he has to acknowledge there’s a certain degree of good fortune, if he doesn’t want to call it luck. Dan: But anyway, he does end up in the right place at the right time. It’s what he does with that opportunity that makes him so unique. Vanessa: That’s a great way to think about it. And how did you figure out the way in, if it wasn’t going to simply be filming this one show? You expand our understanding of him, and the world of the film expands too. How did you put it all together? Dan: We knew that, in fact, when we approached Peter after the show—he came over to Linda’s table, we went over to Linda’s table—we said we wanted to do something loosely based on his show. The show is really entertaining, but it’s limiting at the same time, because you only get Peter’s perspective. This way, we could—with any good fortune on our part—get Carole King, get James Taylor, get Linda Ronstadt, get Natalie Merchant, get all these people into the movie and have their perspectives, not only on Peter, but on what Peter did for their own lives and careers. And then really begin to roll in a lot of archival material that we went on the hunt for: great stuff from the ’60s and ’70s, even before, when he was a child actor. We knew from the beginning that was the aesthetic and the challenge we were throwing down for ourselves. Dayna: And then it was a lot of trial and error to find the balance: how long do we hang with the show, when do we move away from it, when does it feel like we need to get back to it? We had seen things like Spalding Gray’s SWIMMING TO CAMBODIA—there are amazing documentaries that are truly based only around a one-person performance—but that never really occurred to us. It was always: what kind of challenge would it be, and can we actually achieve it, if we use the show as a backbone but also as a springboard? It was interesting in the editing room to figure out how to weave in and out. A lot of trial and error before we got the mix to work, and then a lot of it depended on: is Peter a reliable narrator? What if we go talk to these people and find out he’s just making up stories? It was really fun to get their perspective, but mostly he was a pretty reliable narrator. Dan: Exactly. Mostly, we thought: take this stage performance, shoot it multi-camera, and then figure out where and how and when to weave it in and out of interviews and archival material. Vanessa: You do it so well, though. You truly bring his whole life arc into our view and understanding. I have many memories now from your film—this cute family of redheaded siblings who get discovered and cast in movies; then he meets this friend Gordon in school and suddenly is part of a duo, Peter and Gordon, and they’re performing everywhere. Then his sister starts dating Jane Asher, who sticks with acting, and dating Paul McCartney when the Beatles are kind of in London and he needs a room. It’s in their family home, so then he’s kind of next door to Peter making music. So Paul gives him some songs. It’s wacky. It’s crazy. How did you figure this out, and how did it come together to illuminate everything about this person? Dan: I definitely want to give credit to Darren Lund, who is the prime editor on the project—so good and so collaborative. He and Jason Reid started editing together just to try to get as many things going as quickly as possible. They’re based up in Seattle, and we met them because Jason was a producer and editor on a documentary called SAM NOW, which we were supportive of when it was doing its Academy run. We really admired the editing in that, asked if he’d want to come on and do this, and he said yes—and that he had this partner, Darren Lund, who ultimately became the lead editor. Jason stepped off to produce something else, so Darren really did an incredible job. Dayna: Dan and I, as we always tend to, jumped in later in the editing process to start reworking scenes and trading scenes back and forth with Darren. Bay Area legendary filmmaker, director, and editor Bill Weber came on board for a while toward the very end, really worked some of the scenes with us, and helped build a beginning and an ending. They deserve an enormous amount of credit, especially Darren. Dan: Some of what makes the film so sprightly, beyond Peter’s own aspect as a character, is that Darren—who is, you know, in his early 40s—didn’t grow up with this material, didn’t grow up loving Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor because it wasn’t his era of music, didn’t know the culture around it. He was so excited to discover all this that I think it communicates through the film in the editing style and pacing he brought to it. Dayna: The other thing is, once we really started delving into Peter’s story beyond what he talks about and performs in his memoir show, we realized there were a lot of other things and a lot more richness to each chapter. In a two-hour cabaret show, with a lot more songs sung in their entirety, there’s only so much he can put in. His show more or less stopped at the Rolling Stone cover; it didn’t really spend much time with Linda Ronstadt, it didn’t have any Kate Taylor, it just touched upon Apple for a brief period of time. So we amplified a lot of moments and really built the Linda Ronstadt story because we were quite moved by that. We went into much greater detail about the swinging ’60s epicenter of the Indica bookstore and art gallery. Vanessa: I love that. I’ve watched all these films about John and Yoko and had no idea that Peter Asher was behind the creation of this bookstore, this happening site in London, which is where John and Yoko met. I mean, it is remarkable. And you’ve spoken to that question of being in the right place at the right time—the culture that’s around you—but then having an ear and knowing what to do with your talent and skill at the same time. He kind of discovered James Taylor. Yes, he had a friend who had recommended him, but still, that was a leap, and their first album didn’t hit. Dayna: And also, what I think is really fascinating about Peter is that he has an ego—obviously, you can’t do all the things he’s done without having an ego and being secure in your own abilities—but he’s also willing to admit when he’s maybe made some mistakes. As an example, that first James Taylor album: I’m very impressed by Peter’s willingness to say, “Maybe it’s overproduced; maybe it’s certainly my fault that it didn’t catapult James out.” Then he took what he learned from doing that overproduced album and weeded everything out, brought it down to the basics when he went into the studio in L.A. to record SWEET BABY JAMES. Dan: The difference is, on the original James Taylor album, he set out to prove to people that James was not just another long-haired folky. So he imposed something on the songs, and he learned from that moment on to always honor: what is the artist trying to do and say, what is the vibe and style around that artist, and how can Peter support and enhance that without imposing something on it? I think that’s an unusual thing for a record producer to do and to acknowledge so early in his own career. Vanessa: And then they’re in Los Angeles, and he’s paring down, focusing in on James Taylor’s sound, and he finds Carole King to put on piano. Dayna: It’s not that he just “found” her—he sought her out based on hearing her demo tapes and understanding something about her piano playing, thinking, “She could really match well with James,” and pulling her kind of out of the Brill Building orbit. By then she wasn’t literally still in the Brill Building, but he heard something in her playing that made him think she should be on this album. Vanessa: Right—that’s huge. I know. That’s his spectacular ears, which are so rare, and then to focus on her and say, “Maybe you’d like to do your own album,” and produce that. He figured out Linda Ronstadt. This is really huge. What would we do without this music? Dayna: I know, right? No idea. Because Carole King making TAPESTRY and then going out on the road with it—you know, would it have happened? She probably would have recorded TAPESTRY, but she wasn’t going to be a performing artist by her own admission. And she’s such a good performing artist. All these little things—that’s why, when we contacted people to be in the movie, they all really quickly said yes, because they know Peter has done something amazing for their lives as artists, just their lives, and yes, financially too, I’m sure. Dan: That’s not why they did it. Dayna: No, no—of course not. I’m just saying he’s benefited them in so many different ways. But mostly, their wanting to be part of this project had solely to do with their feeling of incredible gratitude for what Peter had done for their art. Vanessa: And then also, as directors, obviously they would trust you to handle it well. Dayna: Not all of them knew our work, but a lot of it was us knocking on their doors and saying, “We’re doing this thing about Peter Asher.” In the case of Carole King, it was interesting because her daughter is her manager. We emailed her, and she wrote back really quickly and said, “This is a really nice ask, but Mom doesn’t really do interviews anymore.” Then she said, “Because it’s Peter, I will pose the question.” And to her amazement, within a minute, Carole said, “Sure, tell them I’ll do it. When do they want to come?” Dan: That kept happening over and over again. I think it’s a tribute to what Peter gave them. In the case of someone like James Taylor, what he gave him wasn’t just in terms of his art, but in terms of sticking by him through ups and downs, and managing him the way he managed Linda and James. I’m not being flip about what that did financially—it brought them enormous wealth and enormous careers. Peter knew, having been managed in the ’60s as part of Peter and Gordon, what it would take: how do you build a career, get a record contract, put someone out on the road and build an audience over time, negotiate that kind of contract back and forth. It’s a double barrel: he could bring producing skills, because he’s such a great musician himself and has great ears, and management skills. That’s an unusual double hit. Vanessa: And when that career transition or transformation happens, isn’t it James Taylor who tells you in interview that he called Paul McCartney to ask, “Do you think I should ask Peter to manage me?” Dayna: Peter broached the subject with James. James was in rehab at the time. Peter calls James—he’s in McLean Hospital, or some such place in western Massachusetts—and says, “We’re both here in the United States now. I think maybe I should manage you and go out and try to find you a record deal.” And then, as James says, “I didn’t know anything about business. I was kind of a junkie coming down from drugs.” So he called Paul McCartney and said, “What do you think of this?” Dan: Then he says a line I love: he asked Paul, “What do you think I should pay a manager?” And Paul said, “I don’t know—one percent.” Then we cut to Peter, because we told him that in the middle of an interview, and Peter just started laughing and said, “I did slightly better than that.” Dayna: And also, when James said that to us in the interview—James has a hilarious sense of humor, but it’s very droll. He’ll say something without cracking a smile. When he said, “And then Paul said one percent,” I just sat there staring at him, calculating in my head and thinking, “That is so off.” He waited, and said, “Dayna, I’m kidding.” He was kidding. Paul was kidding. Vanessa: So funny. For you guys, I look at the film—the Apple Records moment is coming to mind, because James Taylor was part of Apple Records for a minute, right, before they both moved on. He was the first artist signed outside of the Beatles. This is all in your film; I’m learning this from your film, because I know the artists and their music but I never knew the full story of the culture around them, how they got produced, how they developed as artists. It’s all really fascinating to learn. Now I’m thinking: in today’s world we have Apple Computers, and Steve Jobs might have been inspired by the other Apple. But where have we come? I feel like Peter talks about this revolutionary spirit in the ’60s—maybe it was just sex, drugs, and rock and roll—because it was coming out of stiff upper lip, postwar Britain. He’s in your film talking to his friend Eric Idle about being Baby Boomers, post–World War II, stiff-upper-lip generation, repressed ’50s that then let loose in the ’60s and ’70s. Were you thinking about these questions of music and culture, and how much they can transform our world in great ways, but are always up against power structures? Because now we have Baby Boomers in office, and look what’s going on in the world. Dan: I don’t know. I think music survives no matter what. If music is reaching a big audience, then moneyed interests are going to try to take it over and wring whatever else they can out of it. But I do think music perseveres no matter what, and it’s coming from all corners of the world now. Economically it’s difficult—there are like one or two acts in the world, maybe three, that are making huge money, mostly from touring, not from streaming or record revenues. But what’s interesting now is that you can get all sorts of music: Afro-Cuban, music coming out of Thailand, you can get anything. That’s the upside. Unfortunately, it’s all funneling through Spotify or Pandora or something, so the economics aren’t great, but the exposure is amazing. Dayna: Honestly, for me, when we were in the process of researching and filming and editing, I wasn’t thinking at all about what’s going on today. If you look back at our last several films—not our first ones, but for sure starting with BALLETS RUSSES—we were looking at an era that didn’t exist any longer, but we felt was very important to capture before it was gone. So I wasn’t thinking, “Oh god, Baby Boomers are running the country now and look how screwed we are.” I was thinking more, “Here’s a series of pop-cultural moments this guy lived through, and he can take us on a journey that’s unique.” We’re documenting it for posterity. Mostly, I would say Baby Boomers are the primary first adopters of this film, but when we sit in audiences with younger people—like it played in Long Island a couple of weeks ago and a woman in her late 20s came up afterwards and said, “Wow, this was so moving. My question to my peers is: where are our troubadours going to be? Where can we find the clubs, the gathering spots that fostered all those different cultural moments, whether it was Indica in the ’60s or the Troubadour in the ’70s in Los Angeles?” I love that it might be allowing a different generation to percolate and think. There was an article in The New York Times recently about these social get-togethers, these clubs—puzzling clubs, people who do puzzles; or intellectual discussions—that you can sign up for online. There’s a draw for people who say, “It’s too lonely to be at home, too lonely to be scrolling all the time. We’re missing something. Unless you go to a bar—and most people don’t like to meet people in a bar unless you know them already—there’s a movement starting with a younger generation to say, ‘We need to find each other, look each other in the eyes, sit and talk and do things.’” Dan: I think that’s one of the reasons why the movie might resonate with younger people—to say, “That is how it was before everything got mediated by the other Apple, Apple Computer Corp., and every technology company that says, ‘Oh, you don’t need other people, just look at a screen and that’s it.’” I’m hoping the music from that era, which is so largely underproduced and unmediated, can reach people. Vanessa: I think that’s such a great point about the longevity of music and culture—that it outlasts, and it will stay with us, also thanks to technology. I wonder, when you were going deeper on Peter’s story, whether the more challenging moments in his life—his father’s death, his split from his first wife—and the way he wanted to talk about them or not surprised you. How did you figure out how to handle that? Dayna: It didn’t surprise us that he didn’t want to talk about them. None of those moments are in his show, clearly. Peter is a British gentleman from a certain era, and he’s not comfortable talking about his feelings. But we also knew we needed to make him go there at least a couple of times, because otherwise it wasn’t a real reflection of what anyone’s life is. No one’s life is all roses. Dan: I think the moments where we did probe are like a rest in music—the note that’s not played. He says something, and then at that point it’s cinema: it’s the look on his face, his body language, looking out the window and letting the silence sit. You can see how uncomfortable he is, and that invites an audience in to understand, instead of talking it away, to feel what it must have been like in that moment—his father committing suicide and discovering that in the house, or with his first wife Betsy, with whom he was such a creative partner, falling apart from drug addiction and mental illness. Dayna: For certain people, we might have pushed and asked more and more and not necessarily gotten anything more emotionally than just watching him answer as briefly as he did and then literally hug himself. It was really excavating and pulling back these layers of an onion we had no idea were there. With his father, the way we even found out about his suicide was that one of our archivists in the UK said, “You know Peter Asher’s father Richard killed himself, right?” And we were like, “No.” He said, “I’m going to send you the newspaper articles because it was a huge deal.” And we were like, “Oh, wow.” Dan: Peter’s current wife Wendy said, “I didn’t know. I’d been married to Peter for ten years before I knew.” She happened to go to the UK with Peter, got sick, went to see another doctor, who said, “By the way, you’re married to Peter Asher—did you know his father committed suicide?” Great bedside chat. Dayna: With Betsy, we were being interviewed in Santa Barbara for the film festival there, and the moderator said, “After seeing your film, I’ve been searching all over for anything about Betsy Asher. There’s nothing on Peter’s Wikipedia page, nothing here, nothing there.” We were like, “We know—it was really a digging job.” Vanessa: It brings to mind the James Taylor song—that he was transforming the pain and challenging difficult moments into something musical as a way to process it. If Peter was producing, they were both kind of in it, understanding each other and transforming it, as artists, into music, which is beautiful. Dayna: I think it is. We had no idea that song was about Peter and Betsy. Even music critics have said to us, “We always thought that song was about Carly Simon and James. We had no idea it was about Peter and Betsy.” So that’s powerful. And I think that says a lot about him as a musician, artist, and producer. Vanessa: Okay, Ted had two questions I’m going to throw in, since you mentioned Kate Taylor, James Taylor’s sister. That’s a really interesting story that neither of us knew. How did you work that in and figure it out? Dan: Jeff Alan Ross, who was the musical director for the show we shot at Bimbo’s and co-wrote the original score with Lauren Stuber for this movie, said we should make sure to have a ticket for Kate Taylor to come to the Bimbo’s show. We shot a Saturday night and a Sunday matinee, stocked them with invited audiences so we could control the situation in case we had to do restarts and things like that. We said sure, why not. She flew herself out, and when we met her and realized she is the antipodes of James in terms of her volubility and larger-than-life embrace of people—and yet looks a lot like James—we said, “After the Saturday night performance, before the Sunday matinee, come back down to Bimbo’s. We’ll use part of the bar area that’s not part of the main show and sit you down for an interview.” We shot it right then and there and started to learn all about her story. Dayna: What happened is, when she first got there—we met her probably the night before the first Bimbo’s shoot—I think one of us said, “By the way, how do you know Peter Asher? What’s your connection here, other than being James’s sister?” She told us the story about the swimming pool, and we were so captivated by it. We were like, “This is something no one knows.” So we said, “You need to tell us that story on camera.” Vanessa: Great. The other thing that’s really remarkable is the length of Peter’s life and the ongoing stories—he keeps working. Obviously he loves the work, he loves performing. He’s seen many of his friends die in recent years and keeps going. It’s interesting; I wonder how you thought about that. This is a bit of a Ted intervention, but we’re both impressed and fascinated by your body of work. HALLELUJAH really focuses in on one song, and here you’re expanding out into someone’s whole life up through his 80s, and he’s still going. For you as filmmakers, how did that feel, or what was different? Dan: We’d done our Isadora Duncan movie, the first movie we made together, and then we wound up making basically three films in a row about young people, with young people as the main characters. Then, when we started with BALLETS RUSSES, I realized BALLETS RUSSES, THE GALAPAGOS AFFAIR, SOMETHING VENTURED, HALLELUJAH, and this film are all about people who have lived a fair bit, if not a lot, of their lives. In GALAPAGOS AFFAIR, a couple were cut short, oops, but especially with BALLETS RUSSES and SOMETHING VENTURED, they were still, in one way or another, doing what they started doing out of passion and love. If they weren’t dancing center stage at age 80, they were setting ballets on companies. The VCs were still investing in companies because they had such fun doing it early on. With Leonard Cohen, yes, HALLELUJAH is focused on one song, but there are 22 other songs in that movie by Leonard. It’s the arc of his life as seen through the excuse of the song, and we see him performing well into his 70s in incredible world tour concerts. It feels like there are people radiating something so passionate and fulfilling that it leaks off the screen and makes you—it certainly makes me—feel like, “Yeah, that’s great. I want to be able to do that too in my dotage.” Dayna: For me—and I don’t want to speak for you too much—the world wants artists to repeat themselves. Once you’ve made one film, it’s much more comfortable if you go on and stay within that form, whether it’s vérité or personal, or it’s a music doc. When we finished our first film, the Isadora Duncan documentary, which was finished in 1988 and premiered at Sundance in ’89, the first question we got—over and over—was, “What’s the next dance film you’re going to make?” It was shocking. I was like, “Why would we make another dance film? We’ve already done that.” It made it hard for us to raise funds: foundations didn’t want to fund us before we made ISADORA because we’d never made a film, and then they were like, “Why would we fund you to do a vérité documentary about life in a freshman dorm when you’ve never proved you can do that?” It happens a lot, not just to us. The world feels more comfortable if they’ve pigeonholed you. Once you leave that little pigeonhole, they don’t know what to do with you. When we finished HALLELUJAH, I don’t think either of us thought, “Oh, let’s make another music documentary.” Actually, we’d seen Peter’s show before we started HALLELUJAH. If I saw it in 2011, we started researching HALLELUJAH in 2014. Peter was kind of here in the background, mostly in my head, because you hadn’t seen the show yet in 2019. HALLELUJAH wasn’t even, “Oh, let’s make a music doc.” Honestly, we were sitting with David Thomson, the great writer about film, having dinner, and he randomly said, “Have you ever considered making a documentary about a song?” That ultimately led us to think about HALLELUJAH. Dan: I’m thinking about what Leonard says in the HALLELUJAH movie—that sometimes he thinks, “First thought, best thought,” and sometimes, “I don’t have a thought at all.” First idea, best idea; sometimes, “I don’t have an idea at all.” I just leave the mind open to find something, rather than force it. Dayna: I haven’t read her Substack on this, but documentarian Penny Lane—who I really admire—has a Substack where she talks about her process. I think last week’s headline was something like, “Why I sit down every morning and come up with five new ideas.” I was like, “That’s so different from what we do.” We just sort of waft through life, and all of a sudden we get the chill when David Thomson says, “Have you ever considered making a documentary about a song?” We first say no and shrug it off, and then HALLELUJAH comes into our heads. Or randomly, I want to sit next to Linda Ronstadt at a concert and then there’s Peter. Dan: I like leaving the mind open for something to present itself, rather than saying, “What if I did this? What if I did that?” I don’t think that way—not to put it down at all. For me, I was like, “Wow, I’ve never heard this as a process.” I think a lot of authors and filmmakers are asked, “Do you have six ideas for your next book?” But what you’re describing, and the way you keep transforming, in a way makes you the perfect filmmakers to have told Peter Asher’s story. Dayna: Oh, thank you. Dan: Yeah, thank you. It was definitely a fun one, and it was frustrating and hard. I personally love to be slightly terrified when we start a new project. I want it to be so new in terms of topic and approach that I’m not comfortable. That makes it more fun. I’d be terrified about repeating and being bored by a movie. To me, there’s that Diaghilev line he would tell all his choreographers and dancers: “Astonish me.” I feel like, as far as feeling the weight of responsibility—that can be scary—I feel like we need, in some ways, to amaze people, because the material we’re working with, the person’s story or the group’s story, was so amazing in the first place to trigger this response of “Let’s make a movie about it.” We have to preserve that and transmit it somehow. Above all else, that’s the most important thing: can that sense of amazement that struck me in the first place sustain and come across the screen? Dayna: And not worry in advance about what the gatekeepers are going to say. We’ve had a lot—there were many distributors we approached. It was amazing that we got such a great distributor in Greenwich Entertainment and Ed Arentz. Almost every other distributor said, “No one’s going to know who Peter Asher is; therefore, we will not distribute your film.” Our response was, “Why do you need to constantly tell an audience about something they already know? Maybe they actually want to go into a theater and learn something new.” Dan: It’s amazing how hard it is to get gatekeepers to buy into that concept. I think it’s why, in Hollywood, they just keep doing number one, two, three, four of the same blockbuster. We’ve been gratified to see that people are enjoying learning about this. That’s also why the Beatles, at a certain point, said, “All right, we’re going to no longer tour and we’re going to go into the studio and make things that cannot be toured. We probably just blew up our careers and no one will ever buy a record from us again—but it’s what we want to do.” There’s that sense: it’s such a wonderful motivating story. There are many like that—a person or a group that says, “We won’t keep going with what got us here.” We made a survival movie about Tim Rollins and the art group KOS. When they hit it big, one of their most requested paintings was based on Kafka’s AMERICA, the unfinished novel. It’s on a matrix of book pages and it’s a design of the Golden Horn: if you were designing your own flawed sense of what a democracy could be. It’s the last scene of the book—a discordant group coming together to celebrate America and freedom, blowing horns, all out of tune with each other. It’s total chaos, but that’s the messiness of democracy. “What would your horn look like?” So the kids, on that collaborative concept, would each draw their own horns. It was a beautiful idea. They made several of the paintings; one they put as a large-scale mural on the side of the Board of Education in New York. Then Tim said, “We’re never making one again. That’s it. If we just keep cranking these things out, it’s not why we started doing what we did. If we lose our patrons and client base in the art world, we’re artists. We have to keep doing what we want to do.” I found that inspiring too. Vanessa: Totally inspiring. And thank you for making this movie against all odds and bringing that sense of wonder and astonishment to viewers who get to meet Peter Asher through your film. It’s really wonderful. Dayna: Thank you. Dan: Thank you so much. Dayna: Again, I feel like it’s not as much “against all odds” that we made the film, but against all odds that it’s getting out, which to me— Dan: I bet Ted would have lots to say about that. Vanessa: Hell yeah. We’ll put all the info for the upcoming screenings—you’re rolling out in theaters across the country, you’re going for Q&As, this is happening now. Dayna: Yes. Now it’s actually going to so many cities that we can’t really do Q&As everywhere. I think it’s playing in 15 cities right now, and opening in another 10 this weekend. I think there are at least 70 bookings so far; Ed’s guesstimating it will be at 100 before it’s done. Dan: Ted would be intrigued by this whole idea of what the gatekeepers see and don’t see, and then how you navigate a world where the people who are in control of things have very little imagination—or very little willingness to take a risk, because it is risky. Dayna: It’s risky. Everything’s a risk. I think it’s a risk opening MINIONS 10. Vanessa: We noticed that Morgan Neville was an EP on your Peter Asher doc, and then realized we hadn’t yet seen his Paul McCartney MAN ON THE RUN doc. We watched it last night. Everything you were just saying about how you transition into a new phase in your artistic, creative, musical career when you’ve been pegged—talk about pegged, you can’t ever get away from being a Beatle—but you can start a new life and band and make music and go on the road. It was addressing exactly what you’re talking about. In your film, Peter Asher does it again and again and again. Dayna: Yeah. Dan: Yeah. And since you brought up Morgan—Morgan’s amazing and so generous. He actually came on as an EP on our HALLELUJAH doc too, which was so generous and so important because we had never made a music doc. He gave us some street cred we needed when we entered that realm—not so much with funders, but with Sony Music and whatnot. It really helped to say, “Morgan believes in us and this project.” Vanessa: That’s beautiful. Well, we do too. Everyone should see this movie. It’s totally incredible. Thank you again. Dayna: Thank you so much. Dan: Thanks. It’s been really fun. Dan Geller — Director/Producer/Camera Dayna Goldfine — Director/Producer/Location Sound For over 35 years, Emmy-award winning directors/producers Geller and Goldfine have jointly created critically acclaimed multi-character documentary narratives that braid the personal stories of their protagonists to form a larger portrait of the human experience. Their most recent film, HALLELUJAH: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song, debuted in September 2021 at both the Venice and Telluride Film Festivals, had a worldwide theatrical release via Sony Pictures Classics and was shortlisted for a documentary Oscar. Hallelujah is currently streaming on Hulu. Geller and Goldfine’s work also includes The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden (2013), which had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival and its European premiere in Berlin, and played theatrically internationally; Something Ventured (2011), which premiered at SXSW and went on to play festivals and screen internationally, as well as in educational distribution, VOD and DVD worldwide, including a national PBS broadcast in January 2013; Ballets Russes (2005), which was recognized as one of the top five documentaries of 2005 by the National Society of Film Critics and the National Board of Review, appeared on a dozen critical top-ten lists, including Time Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Hollywood Reporter, the San Francisco Chronicle and Slate; Now and Then: From Frosh to Seniors, which premiered theatrically in October 1999 and aired on PBS in October 2000 as the lead program of the Independent Lens series; Kids of Survival: The Art and Life of Tim Rollins + K.O.S. (1996), a feature-length documentary about the South Bronx-based art group, which aired on Cinemax in September 1998 and was the recipient of two national Emmy Awards; Frosh: Nine Months in a Freshman Dorm (1994); and, the award-winning Isadora Duncan: Movement from the Soul (1988). Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine were admitted to the Documentary Branch of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in June 2014. The film is currently playing in theaters as it expands nationally, tickets and showtimes are here: [https://peterashermovie.com] https://peterashermovie.com Dream of a Better World is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe [https://vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Ghost in the Machine: "I think the bravery and boldness to think outside the box, to create outside the box, and to trust that you’ll find your audience...that is what resonates right now."

In this vHopeful Conversation, I speak with filmmaker Valerie Veatch about her Sundance 2026 documentary Ghost in the Machine. We dive into the dirty wiring behind today’s AI boom—its roots in eugenics and race science, its extraction‑driven infrastructures, and the white male techno‑fantasies shaping it. Veatch unpacks how a “secret” artist program around OpenAI’s Sora jolted her from curiosity to resistance, why she chose a scrappy, Zoom‑based, self‑funded film over platform‑friendly series formats, and how archival discoveries (from Norbert Wiener to Claude Shannon) reveal an unbroken line between so‑called neutral data and explicitly racist projects. She connects Kenyan data‑labeling sweatshops, water‑hungry data centers, and venture‑funded rationalists in Silicon Valley into a single story about power, misogyny, and the abandonment of the earth. Above all, she makes a bracing case for refusal—arguing that saying no to AI in our workflows, schools, and cultural institutions is not Luddite panic but a necessary act of care, clarity, and democratic self‑defense. Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe [https://vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

We Are Pat: "This needed to be funny, to show nuanced perspectives of trans people where we could be flawed, messy, idiotic, funny—all the things."

This vHopeful Conversation features director–producer Rowan Haber and Emmy‑winning producer Caryn Capotosto discussing their documentary We Are Pat, which revisits SNL’s 1990s “It’s Pat” sketches through a contemporary trans and non‑binary lens. We talk about why this is the right cultural moment to unearth Pat again, how Ro’s realization that “the punchline wasn’t about me, it was me” became the emotional engine of the film, and what it meant to bring Julia Sweeney into a room with younger trans and non‑binary comics to rewrite and restage the sketches. We explore the tension between humor that harms and humor that connects, who gets to tell which jokes, how power and perspective shape comedy, and why We Are Pat is designed less as a political treatise than a joyful, community‑building conversation starter about gender, art, and the possibility of talking across difference. Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe [https://vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Gaslit: "Even though the film is U.S.‑focused, these are the same fights people are experiencing everywhere!"

In this vHopeful Conversations episode, filmmaker Katie Camosy joins me to talk about her new Greenpeace‑backed documentary GASLIT, which follows Jane Fonda, Connie Britton, and Maggie Rogers through Texas and the Gulf South as they bear witness to LNG export terminals, petrochemical corridors, and the communities living in their shadow. Katie traces how a shocking first encounter with the Permian Basin’s fracking fields grew into a feature‑length film about liquefied “natural” gas, export‑driven extraction, and the human cost of America’s fossil fuel build‑out. We dive into GASLIT’s balance of grief and hope—devastating stories of illness, loss, and dispossession alongside shrimpers, ranchers, faith leaders, and organizers who are fighting back with thermal cameras, citizen lawsuits, historic‑preservation tactics, and cross‑political alliances. We also unpack the ways GASLIT counters the narrative promoted by hit series like LANDMAN, explore the global reach of companies like Formosa Plastics and the international struggle against LNG and single‑use plastics, and highlight concrete pathways for viewers to plug into the movement—from GaslitDoc.com resources to voting out fossil‑funded politicians and joining local campaigns. Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe [https://vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Get Away with Janet Hsieh: "If you’re curious about people, you’ll ask questions. You’ll be more accepting. You’ll want to learn about them and their culture. Same with food, places, knowledge."

This vHopeful Conversation features creator, producer, and host Janet Hsieh whose journey runs from MIT pre‑med and the long‑running Discovery travel series Fun Taiwan to funding and creating her new YouTube travel show GET AWAY with Janet Hsieh. We talk through the “drought” Janet faced moving back to the U.S., how a chance reunion with high‑school friend and Emmy‑winning producer Joe Litzinger led to their three‑person production model, and why YouTube’s flexible runtimes and small‑crew freedom let them chase eruptions in Hawaii, 24‑hour love letters to Taipei, and spontaneous, music‑infused moments like playing violin atop Mauna Kea. Along the way, Janet opens up about brutal beauty standards in Asian entertainment, eating disorders, IVF, pregnancy, perimenopause, and aging on camera, and how honesty, vulnerability, and “Janet of all trades” curiosity have turned her travel work into a coming‑of‑age series for midlife—one that invites everyone to embrace imperfection, adventure, and bridge‑building across cultures. Get full access to Dream of a Better World at vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe [https://vanessahope.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]