Q. We have been calling the “In Pursuit,” film series, “a new American history for our time.” From your perspective as director of the series, what’s meant by that?

A. It’s been decades since a documentary series has taken on the challenge of documenting a major U.S. city’s history, more than 20 years since PBS first aired a docuseries about New York and Chicago. With our present media universe splintered, it becomes difficult to imagine such deep and thoughtful projects gaining traction in the world of reels and algorithm-defined content. But I think there’s a growing appetite for a big-picture history that looks at a place over time and tries to suss out trends and make sense of it all. To me, the time feels right for an honest and expansive history that includes the multiplicity of voices and perspectives, and new understandings of history revealed in scholarship of the 21st century.

No city is a better choice for that project than Philadelphia, where many of the most extraordinary transformations in American history were shaped and launched. Of course everyone knows it as the founding city, but across so many eras of history, from the shaping of religious freedom to dispossession of native lands, abolitionism, westward expansion, industrial capitalism, urban renewal and civil rights, Philadelphia has driven American history forward. My collaborators and I were awed by this immensity as we worked on the earlier shorter series “Philadelphia the Great Experiment,” and that led us to imagine “In Pursuit,” a truly expansive project that immerses viewers in the grand narrative of American history through the raucous, inspiring and conflicted lens of Philadelphia.

Q. This is American history through the lens of Philadelphia. What makes Philadelphia uniquely suited as a window on the story of America?

A. Philadelphia is a singular city in the U.S. in that it has been a place of significance for all of American history, and it has also kept so much of that history intact and in place (often intentionally and just as often by accident or chance). Too much has been lost, but even after all of that loss, Philadelphia retains an extraordinary amount of living historical memory for an American city. It goes beyond what you can see by walking around. Philadelphia also has one of the most (perhaps the most) extraordinary collection of archives dedicated to preserving and conserving the city’s history. And as filmmakers we could use these collections to show the pages and artifacts of real history, the visual record of long-vanished eras, which wouldn’t even be possible in most other U.S. cities.

Q. Philadelphia audiences have been responding very powerfully to the series at an emotional level. Why do you think that is? What’s the film doing to solicit such strong response?

A. My collaborators, including producer Sam Katz and writer Nathaniel Popkin, poured an extraordinary amount of passion into this series. We were not commissioned to make this. We willed it into being at no small sacrifice. We did it because we knew that Philadelphia could serve as that captivating lens on history in a way that no other American city could. So, if the work is resonating emotionally with viewers, maybe something is coming through of that passion and emotion that resonated with us as we were making it.

Q. “In Pursuit” covers 400-plus years in 10 episodes over 12 hours… an epic of inquiry. What’s the through line, the big idea connecting Episode 1 to Episode 10?

A. What began as an attempt to tell American history through the lens of Philadelphia evolved into “In Pursuit,” because as we worked on each era’s episode, we realized they often lined up with a particular desire, dream or pursuit animating people in that time. Long before Europeans came, Lenape people pursued their idea of freedom, and then Quakers came seeking their own freedom in the same land. Waves of migrant settlers came in pursuit of land. Here the nation pursued its independence. In the years before and after the Civil War, Philadelphia’s streets were rocked by clashes over immigration, religion and civil rights — nothing less than the pursuit of what America would become. Philadelphia embodied the grandeur and the struggles over the pursuit of wealth during the Gilded Age. It became a definitive setting for the pursuit of urban renewal and, later, of personal liberation in the 1960s and ’70s. We trace these pursuits up to the present day.

Q. You’ve directed every element of this project, from the on-screen interviews to the dramatic re-creations to the atmospheric b-roll shot around the city to the choice of archival materials to shaping the script to working intimately with our editors, animator, composer and sound designer. What’s been your favorite part of the process? When you look back on it, what part was most satisfying?

A. I love so many aspects of this process, from devising dramatic re-creations with our crew to the deep dives into newspaper and photo archives, but the most extraordinary experience for me was to be able to conduct hundreds of on-camera interviews with scholars, artists, thinkers and eyewitnesses to history. It was in the interview studio that the genesis of “In Pursuit” took place. As I absorbed the fascinating, deeply felt stories from an amazing range of interviewees — many people who devoted their lives to the study of a particular area of Philadelphia history — at scale it struck me what an extraordinary place could inspire and feed such devoted passion. It was clear that something very deep was going on with this city’s relationship to history, and it was thrilling to attempt to channel the passion of these many collected voices into our series.

Q. Across these 12 hours of history, what story stands out to you as a must-see? Either for the way we’ve treated it in the film or for its importance to understanding the American and Philadelphia stories?

A. Since our series spans 10 very different episodes, I’ll pick two stories. In the first episode, the contrasting visions of Lenape and Quaker freedom contain echoes that have never stopped resonating 400 years later. Local readers should note that in that first episode, we use captivating murals by the great Chestnut Hill artist Violet Oakley to help illustrate the life of William Penn. Another standout is the 20th century story of urban renewal, which remade Philadelphia and its neighborhoods from the Ben Franklin Parkway to Independence Mall and Society Hill, the public housing authority, and the 1950s’ practice of “slum clearance.” In so many ways, the city we live with today was born in this renewal era. We go behind the story of how these massive projects and institutions were created, why powerful people wanted them, whom they served, displaced, and how they changed the city.

Q. Over the years, we’ve done more than 500 on-camera interviews with hundreds of scholars, journalists, artists and ordinary people. Why was the choice of such a broad and diverse range of people so important? What does it say about the ambition of this project and also about the city it treats?

A. I felt from the start that this film had to feel like Philadelphia was speaking. It had to at least try to represent the multiplicity of voices and perspectives that exist in the city around any given topic. This wasn’t to be a clinical third-person look at history. For one, that wouldn’t feel connected to the passion we witnessed from people in the interview studio, so writer Nathaniel Popkin and I were committed to keeping this film from slipping into dry and analytical territory. We hope there’s a lot of love and personal truth being spoken on screen, and if that comes across in the episodes, then I’ll feel like the series has succeeded.