Filmmaker drawn to big questions

She said officials "were aware of the church's reputation as being closed" to scrutiny and "they wanted to change that perception. The walls were coming down anyway with Mitt Romney's presidential candidacy. Why not make their network debut on PBS with a filmmaker whose work they liked?"

The church had no input on the four-hour documentary's content, "nor did they ever try to," she said. "They saw it for the first time with the rest of the nation on April 30."

Music and visual metaphors for religious concepts were difficult, and there were challenges deciding whether the right images should be literal or abstract. Feedback on the music — much of it by classical composers — was mixed, as was the reaction to many of the film's visual images, including a modern dance sequence.

Extracting factual information from interview subjects that "stripped away the generic language of piety that can kill a film" was another challenge, she said.

At one point, she lived with an LDS family in Denver for a time to immerse herself in how they lived their faith in a time of family crisis as a daughter was diagnosed with a rare disease. "They are faithful but without piety. They have questions. They're Democrats with 10 kids and their parents were Holocaust survivors."

She was concerned in the beginning because many of her interviews were "boring" but after talking with nearly 1,000 people, Whitney said she found the breadth she was looking for in trying to answer the question she knew her audience would be asking themselves: "Why should I care?"

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