In 2001, I was sitting at my desk in my office here, and I saw the World Trade Centers hit and collapse. I was very aware of the people who made the choice to jump out of the building rather than perish in the flames. So, in a way, since I had already seen people leap to their death, I was sort of prepared to film The Bridge. On the other hand, one can't emotionally prepare to see the end of a human life.

Before, when I worked as a producer on films like Angela's Ashes [3] and Bringing Out The Dead [4], there was a much bigger collaboration going on, and I wasn't the one steering the ship. In this case, I was the one trying to make sense of what was happening and what we were seeing day in and day out.

In trying to make sense of it all, I think the film tries to pose a series of questions, rather than provides answers. There must be some reason the Golden Gate Bridge is the top suicide destination in the world, but I think we may only be able to understand why subliminally.

The film offers a number of possibilities. One is that the bridge is incredibly beautiful. There is no denying how stunning it can be. It's also incredibly easy to climb over a four-foot rail; a seven-year-old could do it in a matter of seconds. There are lots of people there all the time, and not a lot of safeguards. Lastly, it's hard to jump off that bridge and not perish, so once you jump, there is no way out.

I also think that one of the reasons people choose the bridge is the likelihood that they will be seen. With being seen comes the possibility that one can be saved.

I believe that we see our lives as a narrative. There is no more powerful metaphor than stepping over the ledge, looking into the abyss and having someone reach out and grab you in this tremendous bear-hug embrace and pull you back. In almost every act of suicide, no matter how definitive, I think there's also always a voice that says, "I don't want to go." There's always conflict in it.

Before I started filming the suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge, I really didn't have any religious concepts about suicide. My great uncle committed suicide, and it was never really discussed. I have friends who have attempted suicide and some who have committed suicide.

In a political sense, I believe in liberty above all else, and so one may make the argument that control of your death is the ultimate freedom. I don't think I ever took it that far. The question of suicide didn't really haunt me until after the deaths of my brother and sister, when I was feeling incredible, intense despair.

I think we all have moments of unbearable despair and think, "Why don't I just end it?" The feeling usually doesn't last. There were days when I woke up wondering why I didn't feel more suicidal, but I suspected that what I was experiencing wasn't that distant a feeling from the people who jumped, who had an increment more of despair.

Questions of the fragile connection between life and death are the central questions I try to work out in my psyche every day. What struck me was the concept that to jump from the bridge, one had to make the walk from some spot off the bridge to its middle, in broad daylight and in front of people.

As those footsteps took place, I knew it must have been the darkest moments of a human life, but because it occurred in public, on some level I believed the act was meant to be seen and understood. Suicide is something we choose not to see. It's not that it's not there. It's there in staggering numbers.

There was a time when the word 'cancer' wasn't even used in a cancer hospital. So much has changed in the science of treating cancer and in terms of the ability to speak openly about cancer.

We've made such tremendous strides in the ability to overcome cancer, so that was the model - If people were able to look at suicide and talk about it and understand it for what it really was, then perhaps we can help to overcome this phenomenon that penetrates the social order in which we live.

No matter how hard we try to keep it in the dark, or in the forest or in the garage, suicide is taking place in public, and so we cannot deny that it's there. I thought we needed some new way that people could talk about it.

*****

There are some people who think this film should not have been made... people working in suicide prevention, who had this fear that if you even mention the word suicide, you would somehow infect the population with a desire to end their life.

I am completely aware of the guidelines that have been put out to prevent copycat suicides. At the same time, the unexpected consequence of experts asking journalists not to report suicide is people not understanding suicide.

Also, the majority of suicides are not copycat suicides, and none of the people we found were doing it because someone else had done it. They were doing it because of the mental or psychological illnesses that were compelling them. I just don't believe that most people who commit suicide do it because someone showed them a picture of it.

The final argument to the concerned suicide prevention workers is the idea that our film actually drives home the finality of suicide. People who watch the film see that the jumpers did not surface. They say that seeing the permanence of it actually convinced them to always choose life. Every time we had a screening, we had people come up to us thanking us for making the film because it gave them a way to process their own issues about suicide.

If we had only read about the World Trade Centers falling, there never would have been the same outcry. The Bridge does the same thing; it makes people bear witness and want to do something about what they saw.

My crew and I all knew that there was a reason we were doing this. It's not a movie where people walk out, throw away the popcorn and say, "Gee, that was fun." They walk out and start talking, or they're silent for a day and then talk later.

Probably all documentary filmmakers make a series of moral and ethical choices along the way. One of the first choices I had to make was whether to tell the bridge authorities exactly what I intended to capture. There's always the balance between giving honest information without corrupting what you capture by giving too much information.

When the bridge suicide toll had reached almost 1,000, the radio stations started having contests to see who would be #1,000. To me, the greatest risk that I faced was if word got out in the community of what we were doing, some people who weren't thinking clearly or who were seeking attention in all the wrong ways, would see The Bridge as their opportunity to be immortalized on film. If that was option A and option B was not telling the park authorities precisely what I was doing, then I had to choose the latter every time.

That being said, I was also aware that on some level, the bridge and park officials, the coast guard, the highway patrol, the National Guard - almost every agency that had any connection to the bridge - were very aware of what we were seeing, because we were always the first people to call when someone jumped. We were calling before people were jumping if we saw someone acting suspiciously. We always let the officials look through our cameras. For them to act like they didn't know is very disingenuous. You cannot point your camera at the bridge every day for a year and not capture the footage that we got.

*****

To assemble a crew, I put an ad on Craigslist and around the local universities. The ad didn't really say anything about the subject of the film. It just said it was a year-long video project. I met with people at the Starbucks in San Francisco's Pacific Heights and we talked about the hours and logistics. Once I felt comfortable enough, I swore some people to secrecy and told them the real story.

No one signed on the bottom line then and there; I asked them to think about it and expected they'd have questions and concerns that we could all talk about. From that, I put together a crew of about 10, three of them who joined later on.

To deal with the emotional fallout, from the very beginning I encouraged everyone to talk about their feelings. I told them that the minute we saw someone make a move and step over the railing, the first thing we'd do was call for help; getting the shot was secondary. That alone set the tone for how we approached the project.

Because there were always two people working, we created sort of a buddy system. We also had some people from a suicide prevention team come speak to us as a group. Pretty much every time we knew someone had died, a series of discussions took place.

The people who jumped were initially strangers, but as we came to learn more about them, they became real. They had names and families and histories. We would meet about every week for BBQs or pizza night and we would try to understand those lives that were lost and how hard it was for us to bear witness to the end of these lives. It took a greater toll on some people than on others. It helped us to know that in a way, what we were doing might save others and that there was some providence in what we were seeing.

I knew I was not going to exploit the footage that we had or the generosity of the families that opened their doors to us. Because I had that belief all the way through, I wasn't so concerned about the notion I hadn't told the families up front that I had footage of their loved ones. I had a plan to tell all the families as soon as we completed the filming and all the interviews, but before we began piecing the film together.

My idea was to create a 360 degree view of what was happening. When I told the Bridge District that I had this footage and asked them to participate in this documentary, they decided to take my letter of request and send it to the San Francisco Chronicle to make it seem as though I was the Dr. Kevorkian filmmaker.

Because it was splashed in the paper, my plan happened out of sequence and there were a great many families who were stunned and surprised. It did take a while to repair that. When I sent the finished film to the families prior to the San Francisco Film Festival, it was a great source of reservation for me, but all the families who have seen it have embraced the film. Ultimately, we wanted to spare other families the same pain, and they realized we had done something important to that effect.

For me, what was so haunting about what I witnessed at the World Trade Centers was that, for the people inside, neither option - jumping or staying - was a good option. People who died in the inferno had no choice, any more than the people who jumped from the building. They were ending, and there was not a right way to do so. It points to the line of what we see as manageable despair versus unmanageable despair. That line is so hard to determine and variable from one person to the next.

In The Bridge, I was trying to strip away the judgment as to whether the "choice" was right or wrong. The people we learned about didn't seem to be making a choice. It seemed their lives were hurdling to this place for a long period of time.

I perceived the Bridge District as making some sort of moral judgment. The reason we don't have a suicide barrier on the bridge is because there is a belief that the people who are ending their own life don't deserve to be saved.

Apparently pedestrians walking on the bridge deserve to be protected from traffic, though there has never been a pedestrian-vehicular casualty. The Bridge District also invested in a moveable median divider, though, to my knowledge, there has never been a head-on collision. The people who really need protection are precisely the people they won't offer protection to.

*****

I don't have any belief in life after death. The stories of the people who jumped end at the moment of impact. After that, it's not about them anymore. There is no life after impact that I can figure out. All I know is the ripple of that splash, which goes on and on forever in the lives they leave behind. It's that struggle to cope afterwards that becomes the story. The people just went down; they didn't fly, there was no release of their spirit. In comparison, the struggle of the people who have to try to make sense of it is so epic.

I am incredibly grateful that I wake up and want to be here and make things happen in the world around me. I wish there was more we could do as a society to help people who don't wake up feeling that way. I try to rally people to do so in any way I can. I do believe the film penetrated into the social network of people who can make a difference.

It's hard to get people to stare at something they're afraid of, but once they do, the images don't go away. That's the way things change. In San Francisco, the fight for a suicide barrier is much more passionate than before, so we did what we set out to do. Hopefully it's just the beginning.

*****

Click here for suicide prevention links [5].