What Nora Ephron's Son Jacob Bernstein Learned About His Late Mother While Making the Documentary 'Everything Is Copy'

If anyone is perfectly equipped to make a moving and balanced documentary about trailblazing author-journalist-screenwriter-director Nora Ephron, it’s her son, Jacob Bernstein. Not just because of the family connection, but because the first-time filmmaker is also a journalist who approached his subject with extreme care and objectivity.

Everything Is Copy, now airing on HBO, is a 90-minute documentary named for the Sleepless in Seattle writer/director’s life motto: that everything that happens in life, no matter good or bad, has the potential to become a great story. Bernstein’s narrative explores his mother’s philosophy and her legacy through a series of stock footage from Ephron’s many TV appearances, excerpts from her audio books, and interviews with people who knew her best, including Meryl Streep, Meg Ryan and Rosie O’Donnell.

“Most of the people who are celebrities and were friends of my mother’s are not close friends of mine,” Bernstein tells PEOPLE of his connection to his mother’s famous friends. “Meg [Ryan] I know better now than when my mother was alive. We had our first conversation in many years the day that my mother died, when I went to call a number of her friends and say, ‘This is what’s happening,'” he recalls. “Meg and I had a lovely talk and it was clear to me that she had really both adored my mother and experienced some of the same difficulties with her that I had. I think that Meg understood my mother deeply.”

Bernstein reveals that one of the things he found most surprising while doing his documentary is how frequently his mother wrote less-than-flattering pieces about news figures and wasn’t blacklisted for doing so.

“I found it incredibly surprising how many people my mother worked over as a journalist and got away with it,” he says. “Because she was operating at a time when there were fewer publicists and marketing consultants. Now you literally have reporters and their subjects separated by barricades, whether you’re talking about people covering Donald Trump’s campaign or people who are talking to movie stars on red carpet.”

Unsurprisingly, Bernstein’s childhood memories of his mother involve and revolve around the family business – the written word. “A lot of the early memories I have of my mother are of reading books together,” he recalls. “A lot of it was about writing, a big part of my connection to her was about books and movies and plays.”

Bernstein says he was careful about showing his mother his work at the beginning of his career and that he preferred to go to his journalist father Carl Bernstein, famous for his reporting on Watergate. “He was actually sometimes a better editor to go to then her,” admits Bernstein. “She was a fantastic line editor, but she was somewhat more unsparing in her criticism. My father had a slightly lighter touch.”

Not to say that Bernstein and his mother avoided the subject, of course. When asked what advice Ephron gave him about writing he recites it with ease: “Always know the lede, that was one thing she said. Never begin an article with a quote,” Bernstein adds. “Which was something her mother had said to her, I’m not sure it’s totally true. The other big advice was to be counterintuitive. If everybody was praising something, it maybe meant that you didn’t want to write about it, or that you wanted to look at it from another tack and if everyone was kicking someone, maybe they were worth defending. I think that is a big part of what made her journalism spectacular.”

As a journalist for the New York Times, Bernstein frequently covers entertainment personalities for work, including the celebrities he considers family friends by way of their relationships with his mother. As such, he is unfazed by his celebrity encounters and has a more matter-of-fact, objective take on the subject.

“I think it makes it a little bit easier,” Bernstein says of his on-the-job encounters with Ephron’s celebrity friends. “I think they are a little bit nicer and more relaxed when they run into me then when they run into other people but, I wouldn’t say that I’m close to very many of them. I’m totally aware doing this job that they exist in a world for the most part that is separate from the world of journalists, critics, and creative people who aren’t represented by [talent agencies] CAA, William Morris, or UTA.”

Like his mother, Bernstein has strong opinions about the famous people he covers and/or encounters as part of his work which he doesn’t mind sharing, like why Tom Cruise is like Mitt Romney and that the Kardashians deserve more credit than they get.

“I think that George Clooney and Sarah Jessica Parker are the most adept at it,” Bernstein says of Clooney and Parker’s press personas. “I think they are very good at navigating their fame and I think they are also genuinely curious people, so that means they read newspapers and magazines and don’t consider reporters to be naturally terrible people. Tom Cruise is nice, he’s sort of like running into Mitt Romney. He is the type of person who’s saying things like ‘sport’ or ‘pal.’ Leonardo DiCaprio‘s version of Jay Gatsby [in The Great Gatsby] reminds me of Tom Cruise.”

Bernstein also he thinks his mother would have been very interested in the Kardashians.

“The Kardashians are more interesting than people give them credit for, they are also nicer,” says Bernstein. “I think if my mother was still around she would be a fan of the Kardashians. Look at Caitlyn Jenner, every week, people are watching her children be nice to her. I don’t know, all sorts of people that we know who are supposed to be better educated and smarter and more well-read than the Kardashians seem to behave far worse.”

Working on the documentary, which currently has a 100 percent “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes has provided Bernstein an exercise in continuance, not closure.

“Doing the documentary allowed me to keep talking about her and researching her and experiencing her, even though she was no longer the person on the phone or the person I was eating dinner with or going on vacation with,” Bernstein says. “I don’t believe in closure, it is the truth. I think it’s a totally overrated American concept. I believe in continuance and I’m really grateful that there was a budget of over a million dollars to make a movie in which I was able to do that.”

While the critical acclaim for Everything Is Copy is certainly appreciated, Bernstein says he was happiest when he received a positive reaction from his brother Max.

“When he saw it and felt that the tone was okay, that was a big wave of relief,” he says. “Then of course I wondered should I have gone further.”

“My mom was a real kick in the ass,” he says with admiration. “She made all of us want to be the most capable, ambitious, collected versions of ourselves. That sometimes made it difficult to face her, I think it also made us more likely to aspire to something and to work hard.”

Bernstein plans to keep working in journalism while also considering the possibility of making more documentaries.

“I want to keep doing journalism,” he says. “I love writing for the New York Times. There are not a lot of places you can write 4000-word pieces anymore and there are very few places that have the reach of the New York Times. But I do see documentaries as, I’ve only done one of these, but it gives me the ability to stretch and do a longer form thing with a little less of the pain of sitting in a room by myself.”

Everything Is Copy is now playing on HBO and available for viewing on the company’s streaming platforms HBO NOW and HBO GO.