Kevin Ford grew up in a town of 500 in Northern California, where a retired German filmmaker taught him the fundamentals of documentary. At 20 he moved to New York, where Anthology Film Archives gave him the bug for experimental film and filming rock bands gave him a start. With Carter B. Smith he shot concerts for Stone Temple Pilots, Bush and 311, then co-directed the Jane’s Addiction documentary Three Days. In 2000 he was DP on Philip Seymour Hoffman’s only documentary, The Party’s Over. Twenty-five years later, he and Smith are collaborating again, on a project with Sting.

In Austin, he documented the making of Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation, which led to more work with Linklater, who produced Ford’s documentary The Pushback, about people fighting racism in Texas. It also led to a friendship with author Eric Schlosser, who tapped Ford to make a short film promoting his book Command and Control. That grew into their film The Bomb, which played at the 2017 Nobel Peace Awards ceremony. Later work brought him to Adrien Brody, with whom he has documented the restoration of Stone Barn Castle, and to Robert Downey Jr., with whom he made the Netflix documentary Sr. Brody also produced By The River, featuring Ellar Coltrane, whom Linklater had introduced. Ford and Coltrane later made Everything Is Stolen together.

Ford moves between independent documentary, narrative and experimental film, and has kept making his own self-financed work between assignments ever since. His latest, 67 Bombs to Enid, executive produced by Errol Morris and recently screened at the United Nations in Geneva, followed his move to Oklahoma City.