Ramin Bahrani on his new documentary about the creator of the modern bulletproof vest

First responders, law enforcement, soldiers and even journalists use bulletproof vests, but very few people probably know how some of these lightweight pieces of armor came to be. In a new documentary, we get a shocking look at the now-defunct bulletproof vest manufacturer, Second Chance, that modernized the vests and the larger-than-life personality behind the company. Ramin Bahrani is the director of the documentary, also named "2nd Chance," and joins us now. Welcome to the program.To get more news about bulletproof tactical helmet, you can visit bulletproofboxs.com official website.

RAMIN BAHRANI: Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

RASCOE: So the person who is really, I guess, the star of the documentary, if you want to call it the star, is Richard Davis, who founded the company Second Chance, which made bulletproof vests for the police, the military. Even former President George W. Bush wore one of his vests. What made you interested in Davis' story?

BARANHI: There were a lot of themes that resonated with me - the rags-to-riches story. He was a salesman, which I'm very attracted to the American salesman character, and the moral crisis that came to be at the center of the story. I was quite drawn to those things. I typically make fiction films. This is my first documentary, and a lot of my fiction films deal with those themes. So they seem to be presenting themselves here in a character, as you said, that is larger than life. So the myth of Richard Davis was also quite appealing to me.

RASCOE: Yeah, I mean, that's the thing about it. And I have to say, this is a man who shot himself in the torso almost 200 times to prove that his product worked. That's on camera. Did you get a sense of, like, why he did that?

BARANHI: We could say it's crazy or foolish or we could say it's brave, and his bravery created a device that saved thousands of people. And I like to think of it that way. It did because that bravery he demonstrated and his ingenuity - again, that rags-to-riches - that is something very positive. But next to it, there's a lot of wild things that become unearthed in the telling of this film that aren't so good. There are quite disturbing things he did. But again, to the myth-making - he made movies about all this, too. He made eight hours of film - marketing, propaganda. Some of them were quite brutal and fascistic, and some of them are hilarious and bizarre and camp and funny. It was kind of like, how could I not make the film about this guy?

RASCOE: It seemed to also be - not only was he focused on being a hero, being courageous. It seemed like part of why Richard Davis might have been searching for that is because of his relationship with his father, who was in, you know, Iwo Jima and, you know, was fighting in World War II and all of these things. But that relationship between Richard Davis and his father and then between Richard Davis and his own son is very interesting that you dive into in this documentary.