In his new film, “Jonestown: The Life and Death of the People’s Temple,” documentary filmmaker Stanley Nelson chronicles the rise and fall of evangelist Jim Jones, who masterminded the mass-murder/suicide of more than 900 of his followers in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978.

Nelson is a veteran director and producer of numerous television documentaries including “Two Dollars and a Dream,” about the first black female millionaire Madame C.J. Walker, “The Murder of Emmett Till,” about the murder of a black teenager in Mississippi in 1955 and “Soldiers without Swords,” a documentary about the black press in the United States.

He came upon the story of the People’s Temple after hearing a radio broadcast of Jonestown survivors a few years ago. He was fascinated by the story of Jim Jones, whose ideas for a utopian society took a tragic turn. When he began production on the movie, he sought to show a more humanized portrait of a man whose complexities have never been truly explored or understood.

On May 3, the San Francisco International Film Festival honored the movie with a Golden Gate Award for best Bay Area Documentary Feature. In an interview at the Kabuki 8 Theatres two days before the ceremony, Nelson sat down to discuss his experience in documenting the story of People’s Temple, its members and what it felt like to tell a story that has never fully been told.

[X]press: What has been the response to the movie so far?

Stanley Nelson: The response has been great so far. We’re in the San Francisco Film Festival and at the same time we’re in the Tribeca Film Festival. We’ve only had four showings of the film so far, but every single one has been standing-room only. The question and answer (sessions) have been lively and long and it’s been great.

[X]: Most of your large-scale documentaries have chronicled events in the African-American experience in the United States, which I guess you could say is a theme. Do you think that this movie (Jonestown) is in keeping with that theme?

SN: Well, I think it’s a little bit of both. The People’s Temple was over 70 percent black; it was a black church. But, it was also something that I was really fascinated by. I thought it combined a lot of the themes that I’ve worked on, but also in some ways it was very different. I don’t want to make the same film over and over again. So I made “Two Dollars and a Dream,” which was the first independent film I made (in 1989), about Madame C.J. Walker, which was a historical film. The next one I made was about the Methadone program, a very current affairs type of film.

I try to do a mix of different things, but a mix of things that I think are important to me and films that say something, and I think this was in keeping with that. I think that’s really important, when you make a film it has to be something you’re concerned with, intrigued by it. When you go into that film you don’t know how long it’s going to take. It may take five, six, seven years to make a film, so it has to be something that the filmmaker feels is very important.

[X]: As a documentary (filmmaker), you are a storyteller, but you are also an editor. Were there some elements of Jonestown, the (People’s Temple) and Jim Jones that inevitably got left out of the documentary that you would like to have seen in there?

SN: Sure, there were a lot of things that got left out. This was a very complex and fascinating story, so there were great stories in this saga that I would have loved to have in there, but the film had to be an hour and a half long, so we had to take some things out. What was essential for us was to make a film that gave you (the) whole idea of what the People’s Temple represented. Some of the stories (left out of the film) will be on DVD. One of the things that I really wanted to do that we weren’t able to do was to tell a lot more of the individual’s personal stories. Why an individual came to the People’s Temple, what it represented for them while they were there and how they survived. That’s one of the things I think people are always wondering: ‘How did this person actually live through this experience?’-- the nuts and bolts of why they didn’t die that day.

[X]: So of other elements that were included in the documentary, what things do you think were especially important for people to understand the man behind the myth that is Jim Jones?

SN: I think it was really important to understand that the People’s Temple was a progressive movement, was a social movement that for a good part of its history delivered on what it promised people. It promised people a communal life. It promised people they would be part of a social movement, helping to change the country and the world. And for a large part of its time in existence, the People’s Temple provided that.

[X]: So there are a lot of elements included in the movie--I guess you could say sex, drugs and power-- that some might consider a classic fallen-idol story. Is there a moral to this tale for the viewers or were you just trying to present the more human aspects of a man that some people might have considered larger than life?

SN: I think that as one of the People’s Temple members says in the film, ‘I gave my will and my life to Jim Jones because I felt he had a better plan’ and so many others did. In some ways I feel that’s the moral of the story. You can’t give your will and your life up to people. You have to question things. But I think the moral of the story in this film doesn’t hit you over the head. It’s the kind of film that people have told me over and over again they think about a good deal afterward. It (also) has something to do with our time. We’re in a time of great religious zealotry, not only in the Arab world, but also in this country and I think the film says you have to question it.

[X]: Are there any plans for it to be shown on television?

SN: The film was produced for a show on public television, called the ‘American Experience’ and it will be on in 2007. They have been gracious enough to push back the airdate to see if it can get a theatrical (release) and we’ll have that window of opportunity. At this point we’re thinking the first part of the year (in) 2007.

[X]: So what’s next for you?

A: We’re working for another project for the ‘American Experience,’ where they’re doing a huge five-part series on Native American History in the Unites States that starts out in 1650 and goes all the way up… to the present day. We’re doing the last hour in the series, a film about the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the occupation of Alcatraz.