Editor’s Note: On October 2, 2005, Dana Perry’s 15-year-old son, Evan, committed suicide by jumping from his bedroom window. Nearly four years later comes "Boy Interrupted," a film by Dana and her husband, Hart, with executive producer Sheila Nevins. The film traces Evan’s illness over the course of his life, and features the Perrys’ home videos, personal photographs and interviews with various people in Evan’s life. Dana sat down with wOw recently to talk about her son’s life and death, hindsight and regret, her thoughts on moving forward and the strength she’s found in action. "Boy Interrupted" will premiere on HBO Monday, August 3, as part of the HBO Summer Documentary Series.

WOWOWOW: Dana, hello. I have to tell you right off the bat that I watched "Boy Interrupted" over the weekend and it took my breath away. I had to watch it in two pieces.

DANA PERRY: It’s a lot to ask, I think. I always feel like apologizing because it’s just so heavy.

WOW: You shouldn’t apologize. If anything, viewers should thank you for sharing this story because it’s so powerful, it’s so touching and it’s such an important topic.

DANA: I just know it’s very hard to ask people to sit through it. From my standpoint it’s sort of like, here’s all my shit. You know what I mean?

WOW: I do.

DANA: It’s difficult when people don’t really know what to say, since it makes them uncomfortable, which is all, I think, fine and good. It means that we’ve touched a nerve, of course. But I’m a little shy about it, just because it’s so intense.

WOW: Could you go into the back story, for the readers who haven’t seen the film yet?

Watch a clip from "Boy Interrupted":

Video courtesy of HBO

DANA: The film "Boy Interrupted" is a documentary about my son Evan. He was diagnosed as bipolar when he was 11 years old, following a suicide attempt. And finally, at the age of 15, he did commit suicide. The film is the story of both his life and his death, and his illness and its impact on his world – his friends, his family, us. I’m the mother, I’m also the filmmaker, which is, I think, somewhat unusual. My husband, Hart, was the director of photography. So it’s very much a family affair. We’ve been filmmakers and have had a company producing documentaries for 20 years now and it’s very much our family business. Evan himself was a budding filmmaker. As he got older, around 13 to 15, he started working with us and also making his own films, which are included in "Boy Interrupted." So I probably covered our family life more extensively than a normal person, although everybody takes home movies and really that’s all the film is made of, is home movies, in the sense that we weren’t shooting Evan’s ups and downs for the purpose of the film by any means. That was never an intention while he was alive.

WOW: But yet you caught those moments, those ups and downs, those extremes. You caught them on film.

DANA: At the time you shoot them and put them in the closet. And I think that’s what most people do. They take videos and then put them away for years. And it was the same thing for us. We were just either on vacation or playing with a new camera, maybe, or working on a project for Evan’s school, shooting various things, and it really didn’t have much meaning at all. Then after he died and I started to go through all the movies and photographs, I started to see profoundly shocking moments that illustrated his illness that I did not see, or take note of, while we were shooting them or while he was alive. I was kind of surprised at how revealing they were.

WOW: Do you remember the first time that you thought to yourself that maybe Evan’s mind was in a darker place than that of other kids?

DANA: I should start by saying that Evan was my firstborn. He has an older half-brother, my stepson, but I was a very young mother. I had this baby, my first one. I didn’t know the difference between anything. First-time mothers are like, "Oh, this is what it’s like. Oh, OK. I get it." And I just thought, "Well, all babies cry all the time and need to be held constantly and don’t go to sleep easily." So even as a baby he was a little bit more restless and cried more I think, and was hungrier and needier than other babies. I can’t really say because I didn’t have much to compare it to. But certainly by the time he was a toddler, his behavior started to seem unusual to us.