Documentary-making is a hard business in which to find work. Until you win an Oscar.

“I never got into making documentaries for any kind of success, because documentary careers are generally ones of prolonged failures,” Morgan Neville tells the Straight in a call from Los Angeles to talk about his latest film, The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble (opening Friday [July 22]). “You make documentaries because you love doing it; it’s the only sane reason to make documentaries.”

After 2013’s Academy Award–winning 20 Feet From Stardom, Neville had a much easier time getting his films made. Last year’s Best of Enemies was in production for five years before finally hitting theatres to rave reviews. Likewise, it was about four-and-a-half years ago that Yo-Yo Ma reached out to the director in hopes of doing a concert documentary.

Neville, a born-and-bred Californian who lists the Clash as his favourite band of all time, initially balked at a proposed partnership with Ma.

But the director, who has done docs on the likes of Keith Richards, Brian Wilson, and Johnny Cash, was surprised when he met Ma. “He was so not what I expected; he was so funny and charming and crass and all these things,” Neville says.

He also found that he and Ma had the same goal: to try to use music to both understand and, possibly, change the world. “As someone who has been making films about culture for 20-plus years, these are questions I ask myself all the time.”

It took one lunch for the legendary cellist to convince Neville to turn his camera on artist-collaboration project the Silk Road Ensemble. Because Neville has made so many films that revolve around music, he has garnered something of a reputation. Lately, that has meant refusing a lot of stuff. The Music of Strangers, however, seemed like a departure from the usual fare.

“Telling stories of sex, drugs, and getting screwed over by your record label are kind of the three least interesting things about the music world,” the director says. “And that story’s been told over and over and over. To me, it’s always about figuring out a story that’s going to tell a bigger story. That’s what intrigues me. This is also just a world I knew nothing about. For somebody that likes to learn, it just seemed like it was going to open my mind in a radical way, and it did.”

Neville continues, his passion unmistakable: “I feel like that’s a really valuable thing to be doing in 2016, to be trying to understand other cultures rather than just exit the union or build walls or whatever.”