Sitting Down with the Director of “The Rise of Jordan Peterson”

“I would say the social aspects of making the film were really difficult for me because a lot of my network and friends and social circle is progressive, and, obviously, progressives are not a fan of [Peterson’s].”

Following up on his recent two-part interview with Maziar Ghaderi, the producer of the 2019 documentary The Rise of Jordan Peterson, Kambiz Tavana now sits down with Patricia Marcoccia, the film’s director (and Ghaderi’s wife). In this discussion, Marcoccia walks Tavana through many of the artistic choices she made in directing and editing the film, as well as commenting on the feedback—both positive and negative—she has fielded since the film first screened.

So, first of all—congratulations. Great movie. Loved it. Tell me this: How did you decide to make this movie—because when you first met Jordan Peterson he was not famous. Am I correct?

That’s right. Yeah. So the backstory is that I’ve known about Jordan Peterson’s work for quite a long time: his work as an academic, his work on the psychology of meaning. Those are really the ideas that drew me to him initially.

So I used to study psychology as an undergraduate student at McMaster University. And at that time, I came across his book Maps of Meaning. This is probably in 2003, and I was taking a lot of philosophy classes as well, studying Nietzsche and such. I was very interested in the big existential questions. And so when I came across his book, I found it really fascinating—in particular the way he talks about the nature of reality: this kind of metaphysical idea of how there’s the reality of objects. Then another way of looking at reality is a sort of narrative with these characters in a story. And when you look at it from a psychological perspective, it’s sort of just as true to look at reality from these two different perspectives as a narrative and as objects.