Maria Bamford on the Best Part of Starring in Her Own Documentary: ‘Other People Are Doing Most of the Work!’

Judd Apatow and Neil Berkeley have each found success making documentaries about the pantheon of comedy legends, from Gilbert Gottfried to Mel Brooks. Now, they’ve teamed up to document another great performer in “Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story,” which premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.

Apatow and Berkeley were joined by Bamford herself in the IndieWire Studio, presented by Dropbox, to discuss the process of assembling a film about her multifaceted career.

“Her act has always been so fascinating,” Apatow said of Bamford. “She tells so many incredible stories about things she’s gone through in her life which are really inventive and hilarious, but also give people a lot of hope. I just always thought, ‘I think all this should be in one place, to get the whole story.’ Throughout her career she has all these specials and she tells a piece of it as she’s going through it. That was the first idea, what if you could hear the whole story through her stand-up in a documentary.”

Berkeley explained that, when you’re working with an artist that’s as prolific as Bamford, one of the biggest challenges is finding a way to tell a side of her story that she hasn’t already told herself.

“It was just trying to figure out what the story was. Maria has told her story so many times in so many different ways, it’s like ‘How are we bringing something new to that?’ That was always a big challenge,” Berkeley said. “I’d go shoot some stuff, I’d show it to Judd, we’d go through the archive and just piece the story together as we went.”

At the beginning of the film, Bamford isn’t sure if she wants to participate in the documentary at all. She eventually came around, of course, and she had a predictably funny answer about the biggest difference between making a documentary and other forms of art.

“Other people are doing most of the work!,” she said with a laugh, before sincerely adding that “it’s lovely to have somebody take interest in your life and your work.”

Watch the complete conversation with the “Paralyzed by Hope” team above.

Dropbox is proud to partner with IndieWire and the Sundance Film Festival. In 2026, 68% of feature films premiering at Sundance used Dropbox during production. Dropbox helps filmmakers and creative teams find, organize, secure, and share the content that matters most to any project.