Confession time. I love Christina Costantini. Our professional paths have overlap twice, first at the Huffington Post, then at Fusion TV, where I watched as Christina

soared from investigative journalists to documentary filmmaker. Her first film Science Fair

won awards at Sundance and South by Southwest, and led to her new Netflix doc, Mucho Mucho Amor,

about the private life of Walter Mercado. Today, we talk about how she and her co-director

convinced the famed television astrologer

to give them unprecedented access

during what would become his final days.

And we nerd out, as we often do,

about what makes a subject worthy of a documentary

as I get the story of how Christina learned to direct

without ever going to film school.

Music the story of how Christina learned to direct without ever going to film school. What was it that pulled you to documentary?

I was spent eight years basically of my life nonstop on the phone with detainees and talking to drug cartel leaders.

And I was doing very difficult stories.

And they really were taking a toll.

And I think the world is a dark place and is in strife. And whenever I need a break from

that, I need a little bit of hope. I would watch these documentaries like Spellbound or MadHop Ballroom,

which are documentaries about kids who are doing amazing things. And I started thinking back to my own experience as a kid in the

International High School Science Fair. And I just remembered the joy, what a unique environment it is. It's

majority female, majority non-white. Then you have kids doing some of the most brilliant, amazing

research. And they're also hilarious because they're

like, you know, they're real go-getters and they haven't learned how to edit themselves yet.

...