"Where does our responsibility to people … end?" asks the manager of a rural Illinois general store in Steve James’ harrowing documentary, Stevie. It’s just about his only line in the movie, but when an otherwise inessential character is kind enough to summarize the theme of your movie, you leave it in.

At the center of Stevie is the relationship between James and Stephen Fielding, who was a troubled, desperately shy boy when James served as his Big Brother while attending graduate school in southern Illinois. Ten years later, promises to keep in touch fallen by the wayside, James returns to find that Fielding has grown into a troubled young man who's been in and out of jail several times, still lives with his grandmother, can't hold a steady job and has grown a calloused exterior around his childish shyness. By the time James returns two years later, things have gone from bad to worse: Fielding has been charged with sexually molesting his 8-year-old niece.

Trust is, of course, at the very heart of the documentary process: Without it, people would never allow themselves to be filmed (although most reality-show participants don't seem to care how they look as long as they get on TV). With Fielding, though, James was starting from less than zero. He had to convince someone whose trust he'd already betrayed to trust him again.

"The issue of trust with this film didn't start out where it ended up," James says from home in Chicago. "When I first suggested to Stevie it might be interesting to do a little film about all the intervening years since I'd lost touch with him, it wasn't going to be a very ambitious film, just a little portrait, looking back on the time I'd been his Big Brother. But then that changed with his arrest."

Fielding's arrest also changed his relationship to James, and James' relationship to the film he was making. Although James' other documentaries are essentially in a cinéma vérité vein, where the filmmakers' ultimate goal is to have no effect on the people they're filming, Stevie takes the risky step of bringing James into the frame, essentially making him the part-subject of his own documentary. While his presence in some scenes is minimal, in others James comes to the fore, urging Fielding's lawyer to more aggressively pressure his client to cop a plea, or helping broker a reunion between Fielding and the mother who all but abandoned him.

Not one to seek the spotlight, James was reluctant to cross the line. "I never started out with the intention of being in the film," he says. "Part of it was, film or no film, I did get drawn back into that relationship. It became a question, if we're going to proceed, how to account for that. It seemed like [including me] was the only honest way to proceed."

James was all too aware of the way his presence in the film might seem contrived or self-aggrandizing. "One of the pitfalls is you really are in a house of mirrors," he explains. "Even if what you're putting in is self-critical, it can appear -- or even be -- a backdoor attempt for sympathy from the audience. It was very important that I had help from the other producers, the other editor, to have those other voices to assess where my character lay within the story, to try and walk that line between being candid and honest and self-critical, but not coming off as a ploy for sympathy."

James admits he's broken the vérité creed, but he muses that Stevie is, in some ways, "almost meta-vérité, in its candidness about my own involvement." Indeed, though the movie keeps self-consciousness to a minimum, it addresses issues that are usually the province of experimental film, where the filmmaker's relationship to and effect on the work is incessantly questioned. One issue that cut particularly deep was whether or not nonfiction filmmaking is inherently exploitative, the science of packaging other people's lives for profit. While Fielding was in jail, he and James "talked at length" about whether to continue filming or not, but even securing Fielding's permission, James says, "didn't keep me from feeling that I might be essentially violating a trust. Any documentary where you're following people and misfortune befalls them, that question always looms for the filmmaker, and for sensitive viewers. And this is a film in which those issues were inescapable."

James was further sensitized by being a character in his own film, a process that proved surprisingly painful. "Being in front of the camera was a slap in the face of just how exposed one can be," James says. "But this film is, for me, the most honest film I've made, and the most complicated. It really reminded me how important it is to try and present people in as complex a way as you can, while still trying to make a compassionate film. Sometimes those things can be at odds, to be honest and compassionate and complicated."