Fast chat: Super filmmaker Davis Guggenheim

Davis Guggenheim directed what probably was the most influential documentary of the past 20 years - "An Inconvenient Truth" - and won an Oscar for doing it.

On Friday, his new film, "Waiting for Superman," opens, and could do for the American education system what "Truth" did for the environment.

Guggenheim has three children with actress Elisabeth Shue; all attend private school (something he's open about in "Superman"). And they sure aren't living off their father's nonfiction film business. "I do a television pilot every year," Guggenheim said, "and the pilot, which takes two months, covers 10 months of my expenses. The documentaries, which take more than 10 months of the year, pay for two months."

His latest pilot is "The Defenders" with Jim Belushi, which debuts Wednesday on CBS. He talked with Newsday contributor John Anderson at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Everyone agrees that the school systems are a mess, but why did you want to open this can of worms?

I remember, in 1968 I was a kid living in Washington, D.C., and I asked my mom, "Why am I taking a bus across the Potomac, 40 minutes into Virginia, to go to school?" And my mom said, "Because the schools in D.C. are broken." Forty years later, I'm taking my kids to school in our minivan and driving past three public schools. Our schools are still broken. But when Participant Media and Diane Weyermann asked me to do this film, I initially said, "No, it's too complex, it's a quagmire, a storytelling quagmire." And then I started seeing the schools I was passing in the corner of my eye, and thinking, "What about those kids?"

Since "Superman" premiered at Sundance in January, there have been several films and TV reports that cover some of the same areas as you - charter schools, alternative education, the teachers' unions, even Harlem Children's Zone founder Geoffrey Canada. You worry about that?

No, it worried us when we were making "An Inconvenient Truth" that there were some other projects that had the same statistics that we had. But I think with this film, it's a good sign. Education issues are in the zeitgeist. When you're making a movie like this, you want to feel like you're riding a wave and that maybe your movie will help the wave crest. Nine hundred people showed up at our screening last night, and while it sounds like I'm bragging, it's more surprise: This is not a subject people usually get excited by.

Is the school problem all about unions?

With "An Inconvenient Truth," it wasn't hard to be angry at oil companies and dirty coal polluters. In this movie, you dig deep and start to realize there are some really uncomfortable truths, that the Democratic Party, for instance, which should be helping the disadvantaged, has been pretty quiet on this issue because their largest funders are the unions. I'm in a union. And it's hard attacking things that undermine my own core values.

It's a great title.

My producer and partner, Leslie Chilcott, came up with it, but it refers to something Geoffrey Canada says, that when he was a boy, the saddest day of his life was when his mom told him Superman wasn't real, because it meant there was nobody powerful enough to come and save his neighborhood. So it fits: There's this fantasy that schools are going to get better on their own.

Don't a lot of people assume that bad neighborhoods mean bad parents mean bad students?

That question comes up at every screening - "What about the parents?" When I made my first doc ("The First Year") I'd see these passionate teachers make such progress. And then the kid would go home and the TV was on, they didn't do their homework, they didn't have a good breakfast, and they'd get to school and be three steps back. And that was a real problem. What's changed is that there is a new group of reformers who say, 'That's real, but it's no longer an excuse." They address the issue by having longer school days, more school days and making school the most important thing in their students' lives.

What's your approach to nonfiction?

A lot of reality shows, news shows, even some bad documentaries don't go deep, and there's no secret to going deep other than being there a lot. I tell my subjects, "OK, I want to wake up and have breakfast with you."

Were there any moments during "Superman" that you wanted to go back to school?

No! I was a terrible student.