Lizzie Gottlieb has been directing theater and film in New York for 20 years. She founded an Off-Broadway theater company that developed and produced new plays. Her films include “Today’s Man” and “Romeo Romeo.” The former aired on PBS’ “Independent Lens” and screened at festivals and conferences worldwide, while the latter aired on PBS’ “America Reframed” and won the 2017 NLGJA award for Excellence in Documentary.

“Turn Every Page – The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb” is screening at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival, which is taking place June 8-19.

W&H: ​​Describe the film in your own words.

LG: Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Robert Caro and legendary editor Robert Gottlieb have worked and fought together for 50 years, forging one of publishing’s most iconic and productive partnerships. Now 86, Caro is working to complete the final volume of his masterwork, “The Years of Lyndon Johnson”; Gottlieb, 91, waits to edit it. The task of finishing their life’s work looms before them.

“Turn Every Page” explores their remarkable creative collaboration, including the behind-the-scenes drama of the making of Caro’s “The Power Broker” and the LBJ series. With humor and insight, this unique double portrait reveals the work habits, peculiarities, and professional joys of these two ferocious intellects at the culmination of a journey that has consumed both their lives and impacted generations of politicians, activists, writers, and readers.

W&H: What drew you to this story?

LG: My father, Robert Gottlieb, has been the editor-in-chief of Simon and Schuster, Knopf, and The New Yorker. He has been the long-time editor of writers such as Toni Morrison, Joseph Heller, Doris Lessing, Bill Clinton, John le Carré, Nora Ephron, and Salman Rushdie. One of his most complicated, celebrated, and mysterious relationships is with the writer Robert Caro. I wanted to make this film to try to understand a wildly productive, oddly contentious, hugely important collaboration, and through that, to open a window into a secretive creative process, a vanishing world of book publishing, and the way truths about power in America are revealed.

My father is now 91. Caro is now 86. Their collaboration is still as vital and complicated as ever. Caro is on the brink of finishing the final book in his LBJ series. As the publishing world and his avid fan base — including Presidents Obama and Clinton, among millions of others — await the final volume, the stakes for him to finish become higher and higher. The possibility that he might not finish, and that my father might not get to edit it, looms over every scene. I wanted to capture the delicate power balance between them, the steadfast dedication to craft, collaboration, and the incredible industriousness with which they approach the process of writing and editing. I wanted to really understand what it takes to create something that changes how people understand power, and that will endure.

W&H: What do you want people to think about after they watch the film?

LG: I think at heart this is a story about what it takes to make works that endure. About integrity and mortality and legacy. About what my generation and my children’s generation should hold onto from this world that is disappearing before our eyes.

W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?

LG: This film has been a labor of love that I have been working on for almost seven years. Possibly the biggest challenge was convincing the two Bobs to let me make the film at all. When I first approached them about making this film, they each said no. Several times.

They are both skeptical of anything that seems self-aggrandizing, or that distracts them from their work. And there is something dramatic and dynamic in their relationship that they were hesitant to let anyone into.

I grew up surrounded by the writers my father worked with — Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, Katharine Graham, John le Carré. They were all close family friends. But I didn’t even meet Bob Caro until my father’s 80th birthday. Of all my father’s writers, I felt that there was something important to capture between these two — both in their individual lives and work, and in their collaboration. Also they are very funny. So I persevered.

Caro eventually said that he thought a film about a writer and an editor could be an important one, but that though he and my father had worked together for 50 years, he would not be filmed in the same room as my father because “it might get contentious.” There was something maddening, endearing, and irresistible about the challenge. I plunged in and started filming them separately, hoping that eventually they would change their minds.

W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made.

LG: I was able to start making this film for very little money, mostly because my friend, the cinematographer Mott Hupfel, agreed to start shooting it with me. So we just sort of plunged in and started interviewing people. We were able to get far enough without outside funding to make a sizzle reel. At that point we went out to look for financing. People really responded to the sizzle, and a few individual funders came on board, which allowed us to start editing. Once we had a rough cut, Amanda Lebow at CAA introduced me to Topic Studios, who came on as our partners. Maria Zuckerman and Christine Conner at Topic have been the most spectacular partners in every aspect of getting this film made.

W&H: What inspired you to become a filmmaker?

LG: I was a theater director for many years. I became a documentary filmmaker almost by accident. There was a story I desperately wanted to tell and I couldn’t figure out whether it should be a play or a fiction film, and I literally sat up in bed one morning with a lightning bolt realization that it needed to be a documentary.

The story was of my brother, who is on the autism spectrum. He is a remarkable, brilliant, odd, and unusual person, who was at a critical moment in his life. I realized that no fictional version of him could ever live up to the real young man. So I set out to make the film.

I thought my experience developing and directing new plays would be enough that I would know what I was doing. That was both true and not at all true. It was an incredibly hard project for me, emotionally and artistically, but I had a wonderful producing partner who believed in me and the project, and I asked many people for help along the way – sort of piecing together a film education over the course of making the film. The movie, “Today’s Man,” eventually made its way to PBS’ “Independent Lens.” Once I made that film I was hooked, and wanted to keep doing this.

W&H: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve received?

LG: After four years of working on this film, I showed my unedited footage to someone I respect and admire and he told me very bluntly that this wasn’t a film — that maybe I could make a 20-minute short out of it, but it would never be a feature and I should give up. I was devastated and paralyzed for a while.

But I remembered Nora Ephron saying something like, “Don’t listen to people who don’t like your work!” I think about that a lot and what she meant. I don’t think she meant that we should ignore criticism or not listen to feedback we don’t like. I think she meant that we should seek advice from people who like what we are trying to do, who are in sympathy with our goals, and who want us to succeed. That’s probably the best advice I’ve received.

W&H: What advice do you have for other women directors?

LG: Find people you love to work with! Support each other! I have had the incredible good fortune to make this film with two producing partners – Joanne Nerenberg and Jen Small. They have my back in the most powerful way. They are incredible at what they do, but also, they are the most wonderful human beings. We all are mothers and have found a way to support each other in this project and in our lives. Also, we have so much fun together.

W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.

LG: Can it be a co-directed film? My favorite film in recent years is “Crip Camp,” co-directed by Nicole Newnham and James Lebrecht. I just think it is so inspiring, and manages to be so important and simultaneously so much fun to watch. How did they do that? I’ve watched it four times.

W&H: How are you adjusting to life during the COVID-19 pandemic? Are you keeping creative, and if so, how?

LG: I felt very lucky to be able to finish this film during the pandemic. I was able to work with both of our editors, Molly Bernstein and Kristen Nutile, during COVID, remotely. And to have that work during months of isolation was really amazing and kept me from going insane.

W&H: The film industry has a long history of underrepresenting people of color onscreen and behind the scenes and reinforcing — and creating — negative stereotypes. What actions do you think need to be taken to make Hollywood and/or the doc world more inclusive?

LG: This is something I think about a lot. I teach documentary filmmaking at the New York Film Academy. I am so inspired by the BIPOC students who we have coming through our programs, and so impressed with the films they are making, the questions they are asking. I don’t know what the answer is on a large scale. For myself, I try to help students build the confidence and skill sets they need to tell their stories, and to develop the networks of collaborators that are so critical to success in the film world.