It could be said that as a monologist, Spalding Gray's favorite subject was himself. Swimming to Cambodia touches on his trip to Southeast Asia to play a U.S. ambassador's aide in Roland Joffe's The Killing Fields; Terrors of Pleasure chronicles his adventures with his girlfriend in a cabin in the Catskills; Monster in a Box details the writing of his first novel, Impossible Vacation, which was, while not autobiographical, based on personal experience.

In 1996, director Steven Soderbergh brought Gray's Anatomy to the screen. Anatomy dealt with Gray's humorous investigations into alternative medicine for an eye condition he'd developed. Four years after his death in 2004, Gray's widow, Kathie Russo, approached Soderbergh to do a documentary on her husband's life. At the filmmaker's disposal was a collection of Gray's personal tapes—over 90 hours of monologues, lectures and conversations from the past 30 years, culled from interviews, newscasts, television specials and short biographies. The result is the documentary And Everything Is Going Fine.

While producer Amy Hobby tracked down the original sources for the footage, editor Susan Littenberg—who edited Gray's Anatomy for Soderbergh—was faced with the gargantuan task of sifting through all the material, which had been transferred from 3/4-inch tape and VHS to DigiBeta, then ingested on an Avid Media Composer. (The original 4:3 aspect ratios are preserved in the film.)

"It was a creative endeavor just to figure out how to organize it," Littenberg remarks. "Steven's direction was to pick what was most compelling, so I started by screening the footage and breaking it down by subject. I created bins for the subjects he repeated most, then I categorized his monologues and interviews by subject. Sometimes a clip would relate to more than one subject, so it went into multiple bins."

Because she didn't have an assistant to help her assemble footage, Littenberg needed to come up with clever ways to stay organized. When she found a compelling clip, she'd name it with four or five words she thought best described the contents. She also used color codes: a color code for the best clips, the selects of the selects. Each cut had its own color code so she could keep track of what clips and sequences were held over from a previous cut.

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As Littenberg and Soderbergh honed the footage, an interesting format began to emerge. "It feels like a series of memories flashing across the span of his life. It has a cumulative effect," the editor describes. "He's telling a story in one shot in one location, and it cuts to 20 years later and he's telling the same story in a completely different location."

And Everything Is Going Fine is something of a final monologue for Gray. Even though its chronological structure might skew from his meandering, loosely structured style of speaking, it's Gray doing what he does better than anyone else: talking about Gray.