I have a strong need to make films that have a message. It is so difficult to get a film made that I don't want to finish with it and say, "It's just entertainment." Or worse yet, "It was frivolous." So many films are frivolous, in fact have a bad message, such as sex, violence, and murder. What I want to do, with every film I make, is to have a message in there of some kind, even if I had to sneak it in.

I want the audience to benefit. The audiences are global for movies and documentaries and I want the audience to get some positive message from the film. The message in this particular film is: Don't betray your spouse, it might be a huge mistake. That was my little moral lesson that I wanted to get across.
iMahal:  The message is a prime motivator for you when you make your films.
Bill:  Exactly. When I did a documentary on heart disease, I was trying to educate people about the causes of heart disease. And when I made a film on smoking, the tobacco industry was spending 2.2 billion dollars a year just on billboards in the US. These advertising campaigns were terrible: Joe Camel was aimed at children, and You've Come a Long Way Baby, was aimed at women. When I think about 2.2 billion dollars -- what that money could do for mankind -- it still makes me mad. That money was spent to give our children an addiction; that is what motivated me to make the film, Dying For a Smoke.

And I made a film on alcohol abuse because I had a personal connection with that problem. My assistant, who worked with me at CBS News and then on films in LA, drank himself to death. So I made the documentary One for the Road on the subject of alcoholism because this person -- who my wife and I thought the world of -- was completely taken over by alcoholism.

I made the film on heart disease because my father had died of a heart attack and my way of dealing with that kind of grief is to grab my camera and go explore it. I found out what caused a heart attack. It's two things, heredity and abuse. One or the other. Again, a reason to learn and a reason to help inform other people.

And so when I made Island Prey it's sort of a continuation of my documentary and journalistic background type of thinking. I made Island Prey with the idea, "We are all human. This woman made a mistake, and it nearly cost her life, her husband's life, and their marriage." It was very important to me to do a good movie and I feel that we achieved that.

I think the best movies have to do with love triangles. Titanic was not about a boat sinking. It was about a love triangle. It was about this young man meeting this young woman. She was in first class and he was down in the belly of the boat. She had a fiance, from an arranged marriage, and she was sneaking off with this young man. Hugely successful. Another example is Doctor Zhivago. Some of the best movies are love triangles; the strongest of human-interest stories.

So that's what Island Prey is, it's a love triangle, with a very subtle message of my own kind of moral thinking. But I admit this with great caution because I don't want people to think that I am preaching to them or stepping outside the genre of entertainment. It's just that I can't make a film without incorporating something I believe strongly about.