Terry Gross

He's best known for his cult films Tales From the Gimli Hospital, (1998) and Careful (1992). His short film The Heart of the World (2000) won a special award from the National Society of Film Critics and was voted one of the 10 best films of the year by J. Hoberman of The Village Voice and A.O. Scott of The New York Times. His new film The Saddest Music in The World stars Isabella Rossellini as a beer baroness in search of, aptly, the saddest music in the world. It also stars Mark McKinney, best known for his work with The Kids in the Hall.

His new film, The Clay Bird, is set in 1960s Pakistan, before Bangladesh gained its independence in 1971. It tells the story of Anu, a student torn between Muslim and Hindu worlds. Masud spent much of his youth in an Islamic seminary school in Bangladesh before the war for independence. He is a founding member of the Short Film Forum, the main organization for alternative filmmakers in Bangladesh.

Four months after he became a Los Angeles police officer, he shot and killed a suspect. Now he's a professor at the University of Missouri. He's just written a book about police shootings — why they happen, how cops train to avoid them, and what shootings do to officers who pull the trigger. It's called Into the Kill Zone: A Cop's Eye View of Deadly Force.