INT: Hi, my name is Lynne Littman. Today is October 29th, 2014. I'm conducting an interview with filmmaker Steve James for the Directors Guild of America's Visual History Program. We are at the DGA in Los Angeles, California.

SJ: My name is Steve James and I was born with that name on March 8th, 1955 in Hampton, Virginia.

INT: I'll begin with a direct quote from your, one of your most recent films about Roger Ebert, LIFE ITSELF. It says, "In my life I inherited certain things from each of my parents." What did you inherit from your parents?

SJ: Oh, you didn't even make up your questions. You're stealing mine. That's a good question. I think from my dad, my dad… First of all, he was a terrific athlete and so I really looked up to him and his athletic prowess. It's one of the reasons why I played basketball instead of football, baseball or ran track, 'cause that's what he did and did it exceedingly well. [INT: Basketball or he did the others?] I did basketball he did the others. And so, you know, I… He was just, he was a sports-minded guy. He had a good sense of humor. He was a small businessman; had a carpeting and floor tile business in Hampton, Virginia. And he was looked at in the community as a real, like, honest guy, great businessman and a pillar of sorts. I mean he, you know, president at the Lions Club for several years. So, you know, he was just a highly regarded, highly respected man. And so I think in some ways I, not to say my mom didn't have principles, but I think that strong kind of principled view of, you know, how you conduct yourself, if I succeed at that, came from him. I think from my mom, my mom was also very funny. Her sense of humor was more caustic and I do have that… some. She was, she is--she's still with us. She is a great storyteller. She's one of those people like if you're a documentary filmmaker you love as a subject because she could tell you the same story vividly 10 times and each time it would seem like it's the first time she's told it. That's, and believe me I heard many of her stories way more than 10 times over the years. But I, you know, I did marvel at her ability to tell a good story. So I think whatever storytelling ability I have as a filmmaker probably came from her.

INT: And did they agree with each other or were they quite different from each other [referring to his parents]?

SJ: They agreed and disagreed. You know, my mom was a Democrat for a lot of the formative years of my life. My dad was a Republican. But they didn't talk politics much around the table or anything like that. But I kind of gleaned that. So they're, you know, they did kind of see the world a little bit differently in some ways. But my dad was kind of Republican. He would have been like a moderate Republican now, you know. I mean he was not some, you know, Tea Party-type guy at all. [INT: And religion? Was there any?] Religion, my dad was a very religious person. My mom has become far more religious in recent years. In part since he died. But my dad was deeply religious. My grandmother, who was in my hometown and we saw all the time... [INT: Which was Hampton, Virginia?] ...which was Hampton, Virginia, was very, very religious. You know, my dad in the mornings, every morning, would read from this publication that he got while we ate breakfast called The Upper Room. You know, The Upper Room. And it usually was like a couple of pages long and it was some, you know, it was like having a little sermon in the morning with a thought for the day at the end of it. We, of course, hated it. I mean we would sit there and eat our cereal and just keep eating and just, you know, and he would be saying it to us and... But he, you know, he was very committed to that. But he wasn't one of these religious guys who was a zealot or proselytizer at all. It was a very personal faith [INT: Was there a sect? Was there...] Methodist. [INT: Methodist.] Methodist. [INT: And what about your, the rest of, sisters and brothers?] What about them? What do you want to know? [INT: Who are...] Who are they? [INT: Did you have sisters and brothers?] Yes. [INT: You don't have to name them.] Yeah, yeah. Older sister, Sharon. Oldest kid in the family. And then an older brother, Randy, who, you know, like me was into basketball in a big way. And then I have a younger brother, Richard, who played tennis more.

INT: As you grew up, how long did you stay in Hampton [Hampton, Virginia]? Did you leave for college?

SJ: Yeah. I, yeah, I mean I essentially lived in Hampton up through the end of my college years even though I was gone, you know, during the semester, the Fall and Spring semesters, to James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. But I'd come back in the Summer. So I essentially lived at home until I graduated from college. And then I was happy to leave. I mean I really, I gleaned early on that it was not a place I particularly wanted to live. [INT: Why?] Well it just seemed too, it's not like I had some big sophisticated idea of what I was gonna do in life and it's not like I, “Hey, I want to live in New York City” or anything like that. It just seemed like a boring, kind of backwater city to live in to me at the time. Now I've come to feel differently about it. That was prompted by doing this film, you know, NO CROSSOVER [NO CROSSOVER: THE TRIAL OF ALLEN IVERSON], which maybe we'll talk about later. But it was like, at the time I was just like, I just want to get out of here. I don't know where I want to go but I want to get out of here. And I grew up, you know, my family didn't travel much like I, we went to visit my grandmother on my mom's side in Frostburg, Maryland, you know, hot metropolis on a regular basis. We would go to D.C. [Washington D.C.], which was three hours away, to visit my uncle. And outside of those trips, you know, which were kind of a semi-regular thing, the only two places I went in my youth was we once made a trip to Louisville [Louisville, Kentucky] to visit my uncle on my mom's side and we once went to Nags Head, North Carolina, which was a beach community, for, we went there for two weeks, which, at the time I remember thinking, “god, this is like what a real vacation's like.” And that was it. We didn't, we, I never went anywhere else until, you know, I got into college and after college. I didn't even fly on a, except for flying on an airplane when I was a kid related to some heart surgery stuff when I was really young, not surgery, but a heart condition, I wasn't on an actual airplane until I was probably, I don't know. I probably wasn't on an actual airplane until I was 27, maybe. I lived a very, you know, sheltered life. [INT: Well you lived, it sounds like you lived a safe life.] Yeah. [INT: Which is quite different from the lives that you walk into in your films. I mean...] I've had a lot of catching up to do. [INT: It feels like you lived in a funny, not so funny, in a way you feel like lived a Norman Rockwell life. It feels very peaceful. You know...] Well... [INT: It was routine and you knew what going to happen and you...] Yeah, it was routine. I wouldn't say it was Norman Rockwell in the sense that I didn't, you know, I had, you know, I had some of the same kinds of, you know, teenage struggles and issues and battling depression and things like that. I mean, you know, there were, and my dad's business had some years where he was really concerned about its future when the, 'cause it was, for a while there it was really contingent on the housing market. When the housing market would go in the tube, in the dumps, then people defaulted on... [INT: Put me in time. Where are we in years? You were born in...] I was born 1955. So, you know, so he, you know, he had this fledgling kind of business. He provided for us just fine but it was struggle at times and he worked very hard, especially for someone from that time period. You know, I, in my life today, you know, to work 'til all hours of the night is a kind of normal thing. But in that time and that place, if you got home at like 6:30, 7:00 at night, the neighbors were like, wow, he's really working hard. And my dad, you know, would routinely get home late. He was, you know, he was very driven to try to make this business succeed. Probably got the drivenness from him too.

INT: What I've been thinking about is the portraits that you've made of, mostly of these kids, are portraits of driven people. And I'm surprised--[SJ: And dreamers.] And dreamers. [SJ: And some dreamers too.] And what I'm asking, and when you say you were not a dreamer, you just sort of wanted to change your set up. Do you think maybe really were and just...

SJ: Well I, my dreams growing up, I was very serious about basketball. I was not serious about academics at all. I mean I was a very, you know, I was intelligent but I didn't do that great in school. I mean I did okay, you know. Just enough to get by, basically. And if I hadn't been playing basketball there would have been seriously no motivation for me to want to be in school. When I graduated high school, if my dad had said, "I don't really think you should go to college," I think I might have said, "Oh, okay." I mean I, it wasn't like I had big dreams and plans around that because once I realized basketball wasn't gonna happen I, you know, I had the dream of playing college and professional basketball. [INT: You did? So talk about that.] Yeah. Yeah. I had that, you know, and I realized, you know, when I was about a junior in high school that I don't think I'm going to the NBA. You know, I'm a pretty solid high school player but I don't think the NBA is in my future. I remember realizing that one day, you know, while I was shooting baskets outside my house and... [INT: Alone?] Alone, yes, of course. Alone. Perfect. Alone. And so, you know, I, those were probably the only real aspirations I had growing up were around sports. But for awhile there they were pretty intense. I think the dreamer part and my fascination with kind of the American dream, which I think does run through some of my films, probably came more from my dad. Because my dad, he had sort of big aspirations for his business. He actually envisioned a kind of, what would become a kind of Home Depot or Lowes. Like, you know, a place where you could, kind of the homeowner could get all this stuff, carpeting, floor tile, tools, lumber. And so in a very small scale way he tried to pull that off. But he didn't have the resources or the ability to do it. And, of course, then when those kind of franchises came on the scene, they were a threat to his business. And so he had sort of a lot of aspirations in that way. And I think he always felt that he never fulfilled those aspirations himself.

INT: Did they [his parents] push you in any way? What drove you? It doesn't seem like it could have been very ordinary. I mean it must have been...

SJ: Well I think sports was the--My family was, with the exception of my sister, my family was a very sports-driven mad family. I didn't realize how crazy sports driven we were really until I kind of got to college and, you know, I'd get letters from my mom in college and my roommate, you know, like freshman year I'd be telling him what's in the letters and, you know, three quarters of them were about sports. And he's like, "Wait. This is from your mom?" And I'd be like, "Yeah. Yeah." And my mom was a total sports nuts. My dad obviously was. We all were. We played sports. You know, we were very serious about sports. So I think the drivenness in that regard came from that. [INT: And it would be, then became a natural expertise. So you weren't walking into an alien world in your early, in HOOP DREAMS and films...] No. [INT: This was your, the world you were comfortable in.] Well yeah. I think it, yes. To some degree. Although I was going into, you know, growing up in Hampton [Hampton, Virginia] I went to a high school that was probably a little more than half, 50, little more than 50 percent white and a little under 50 percent black. The basketball team was, there were just, there were two white guys on the basketball team. [INT: You were one of them?] And I was one of them. And I was a starter. And the, so was the other guy actually. And but it was, you know, I had a lot of black teammates over the years and I did become fascinated with race, going back to my childhood because of my dad's business being in a black part of town. [INT: And the person who worked...] And I worked for him and the guy that worked for him, Alan, you know, who I would help in the summers. And so, and I, but I lived in a white part of town. And so I really was kind of straddling these two very different worlds in some ways. But I wasn't really close to my fellow teammates in the way that I might have liked. They were teammates and we were, you know, we did the, what teammates do but we weren't like buddies and stuff. But, to go back to your question, having grown up around a lot of ball players and black ball players, I had a level, I think a level of comfort in dealing with, you know, people who loved the game in the black community and even in Chicago, which is very different from where I grew up in. It became a kind of bond and a way of connection when I decided that I wanted to do this film. Absolutely.

INT: And in a way your expertise in the material made up for your newness at filmmaking? [referring to basketball culture in HOOP DREAMS] [SJ: Yeah. Well I mean I'd studied film. I went to Southern Illinois University…] Tell me about what you studied in school.

SJ: Yeah. Well I mean I fell in love with movies. I liked going to movies but I fell in love with movies to the point of like really falling in love with them with the thought of like, “Wow, this is something that could be a career,” when I was a junior in college. Up until then I'd been in the communications department but they didn't have film and I was kind of into radio. They had an NPR [National Public Radio] station. I worked at the radio station [WSIU]. I sort of envisioned myself maybe following that kind of career path of working as a journalist in radio. NPR seemed very appealing to me. But I loved movies. Somebody told me about, you know, people told me about this guy in the English department that taught this film class that every, that where you watched a bunch of movies and it was a really good class. So I said, "Well, I really like movies so I'm gonna take it." So I took it. It so happened that he was doing a, that particular semester he decided to do a class on auteurs and auteur theory. And so we looked at the works of Ernst Lubitsch, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Renoir and Arthur Penn. And that class was a true turning point. I fell hook, line and sinker at that point for the idea of being a filmmaker. [INT: How lucky.] But there wasn't any way to study it there. And so what happened was is that I graduated from there. I got a couple of independent studies where I got to make a couple of little Super 8 movies that I made. [INT: Really?] Yeah. [INT: Out of undergraduate school that was not a film school?] Yeah. No. [INT: Fabulous.] You know, they had a camera and a little Super 8 Rewind in the department there. So I borrowed it and went and started doing my ambitious, these were narrative films. And, you know, it was a great way to get an easy A and also just try to do it, you know. I started doing film reviews for the radio station. You know... [INT: Wow.] Me who knew so much about film now. I decided, you know, I was gonna now be the reviewer, official reviewer for the radio station. They were like, "Oh. Okay. Sure. Go ahead." So, you know, but then when I graduated I was like, “Well I don't know how to do any of this. I would love to learn more about it.”

INT: So when you say you made these little narrative films, what did you hire your friends? [SJ: Hire?] Well you know what I mean. You enlisted your friends and you had… did you have a script? Did you think about scripts and stories and…

SJ: I mean I did one--Basically what I did is I did one narrative, 'cause it, you know, during my senior year. And it was like 17 minutes long and I got my friend to be in it. I don't think I wrote out a script. I think I just kind of... And he played a French guy that worked--No, no. I don't know if he was French but I put French music to it or something. I don't know. He worked in a parking deck as an attendant and he dreamed… That's what it was, he had dreams of being something other than a parking lot attendant. So it was all centered around his... And so then we went off on these fantasies. So in one of the fantasies he saw himself as this sort of, you know, Jean-Paul Belmondo character. You know going down the street and I got some kids to kick around a soccer ball so that made it seem like we were in France, you know. And I put French music to it and I mean this was all like no sync 'cause the camera was no, it wasn't a sync Super 8 camera so it was all what we called rubber sync. You know, you create a soundtrack that you sync up and play 'em both at the same time, that kind of thing. The other dream, one of the other dreams he had was that he dreamed he was a, like a Tom Waits, Tom Waits was big at that time. He'd just emerged on the scene. So he was like a Tom Waits kind of singer in a club and we, and I set it up actually in the TV studio at the school and we brought in tables and tablecloths and we lit it real dramatically and then he lip synced to a Tom Waits' song. Of course lip syncing in that situation, it was out of sync immediately but, you know, it was kind of cool and people were, I had all my friends sitting around, you know, clicking their fingers. And I mean I haven't watched this thing, you know, in forever. It'd be kind of interesting if it even would play anymore. But that's the kind of thing I did. They were kind of ambitious for first efforts. [INT: Very, very.] And then after I graduated, before I ended up going to Southern, out to Southern Illinois [Southern Illinois University], I did another, I bought my own camera and I got a friend of mine, who was the best actor in the department and I did kind of like my Crime and Punishment in a half hour. You know, he was this tortured soul who, you know, I don't even remember the story hardly now but it was a half hour long and it was called COLD COMFORT. You know, it was very serious, serious movie, you know. [INT: Wow. So, I mean you were doing films about dreamers and you say you weren't a dreamer.] And failures. Dreamers and failures. That's my stock in trade. [LAUGHS] Sometimes they're both the same.] I, from what I've seen they must be both the same I think.

SJ: So anyhow I ended up going to Southern Illinois University because my girlfriend at the time was going there to study clinical psych in a PhD program. I was looking through her catalogue and I saw they had a whole entire film department in, at Southern Illinois University. And I was like, “holy, wow.” Classes on production and film theory and all this stuff. And I didn't want to break up with her. That was the other piece of it. And it's interesting to think about if I would have gone ahead and broken up with her, if there hadn't been those film, that film department. I have actually think we might have just parted company like a lot of people do at that point, right? They just kind of, you go your separate ways. I think that actually might have happened with us. But I had another reason to stay together 'cause I said, "I'm gonna go out there and take some classes and learn about this and how does that sound?" She was like, "Okay." [INT: And this was all you alone? No buddies, no best friend who was doing the same thing?] No. I didn't know anybody that was doing any of this. [INT: Wow.] Yeah. There wasn't a hotbed of film activity in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Yeah, just wasn't really happening. There was one guy there that I didn't know well that once I got into it he, and I kind of connected with him on Facebook some years ago. I don't remember what he's doing now but he was like, I discovered that he was kind of like the registered film geek guy. And he was making these like really, you know, kind of very arty little narratives, again on Super 8. And he would end all of them with “Fin”, you know. And he was, you know, and I thought, “god, man, he's so sophisticated. I'm just doing these like, you know, stupid little…” you know. [INT: Oh, it was the French New Wave.] Exactly. [INT: I mean you were right...] No, well this was... [INT: It was a little bit after but...] Well this was a time when, I mean when I was a senior in college, we started, once I really fell for this, my whole senior year we would make an hour pilgrimage regularly down to Charlottesville because they had this art house theater there which would show these double bills of like Lina Wertmüller or, you know, THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY or DAY OF THE LOCUSTS [THE DAY OF THE LOCUSTS]. They, I saw a double feature, DAY OF THE LOCUSTS and THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY. Talk about wanting to commit suicide after that was over, it was like, I mean I totally got into it, you know, and I was just, I mean I just drank it up at that point. So... [INT: It's quite amazing. It's quite amazing.]

INT: So you went from, let's say circumstance kept you serious about film or got you seriously into it. Then what? Then you did in, then you went to graduate school and you got...

SJ: Yeah, and then I ended up just deciding to go ahead and get an MFA in film production because I thought, well, maybe I'll try and teach. You know, should have, if I'm gonna study it maybe I should get a degree of some sort instead of just take classes and then move on. Plus I was scared to death of being out in the real world. So I made grad school last a really long time. [INT: How long?] Well I had to take classes in order to qualify to apply first 'cause I had nothing to show the--or I was too embarrassed to show, I didn't show them what I had done back in Harrisonburg [Harrisonburg, Virginia]. [INT: Wow.] I just, I did not show them that. I just felt like they'll never take me if I show 'em. I mean they might have but I just, you know, I didn't have a lot of confidence. So it took me awhile to just qualify to then apply to grad school. And by the time I applied I'd done some work there that they liked so they let me into grad school. But I was in Carbondale [Carbondale, Illinois], which is where SIU [Southern Illinois University] is, from like '78 [1978] or beginning of '79 [1979] to '85 [1985]. I was there for over six years just getting an MFA in film. And then I moved to Chicago. [INT: But you were also growing up.] And I married the girl. [INT: Fabulous.] We started a family. Once I get to Chicago we did. And we're still married. So, it's been a long time. [INT: You made a couple of good choices.] I think so. [LAUGH]

INT: So Kartemquin [Kartemquin Films], so all of this was going on and you were on your own; you were in your own world it sounds like. I mean whether you talk about it with great passion or respect is another thing but it, you were doing it. And you were doing it with intensity and focus.

SJ: You're talking about in school or... [INT: Yeah.] Yeah. [INT: Yeah, being a, you were--] Yeah, no I did a lot-- [INT: --doing film.] --in school. I made a lot of films. I made a lot of different kinds of films. I made documentaries. I made an experimental film, which, you know, has my favorite title of any film I've done. [INT: What?] NO GENITAL SENSATION. You know, experimental, you know, you gotta... [INT: That's called I didn't feel a thing.] Yeah, well it was a film about orgasm and orgasm of violence and in cinema, okay? It was a very serious seven-minute film. And... [INT: Any censors? Any censorship?] No, no. It was all shot in an optical printer so, and it was made up of She's… SOME LIKE IT HOT, THE SELLING OF THE PENTAGON and BONNIE AND CLYDE, the climactic, violent scene. I mean, it was pretty good for an experimental student film. But I loved the title most of all. But and I did some, you know, like minimalist narratives and, I mean, it was a school that was good for me because it exposed me to a lot of different kinds of filmmaking. And I tried a lot of different things, but I found that documentary was the thing that I really enjoyed the most, you know, while I was there. [INT: And it sounds like you paid attention to the way films were made as opposed to just sinking into the movies.] Yeah. [INT: You...] Yeah, it was good. I mean the strength of that program was too that, the whole idea of that program was to make you a complete filmmaker, so that from start to finish, so you did literally everything. You did, you came up with your idea. You, if there was a script to be written you wrote the script or treatment or something. You shot it. You edited it yourself. And 'cause this was a film school you also mixed it. They had a nice little mix place, so I mixed my own film. [INT: And you were editing with...] Real editing, yes. [INT: Yeah, real editing.] Real editing not this Avid, full, no. Like on Steenbecks and rewinds [film rewinds] and scopes and stuff. [INT: And by then you were doing 16 millimeter?] Yeah. And doing 16 millimeter. And then we'd mix it, like you'd mix your own film. And then you'd conform your own film. I conformed my own film. I mean, and I think that was really...You know, I know that some schools have specialization, and I know all the virtues of that, but I think the virtues of this approach was is that when I did get out of school and came to Chicago to try to start a career, I, for me to get anything of my own off the ground, I knew that I would kind of, was gonna have to kind of originate it in every respect, and be, you know, be able to kind of do it all on--I mean I didn't end up doing it all, but be able to and be knowledgeable enough to do it. And it, I think that helped. [INT: Which is a fantastic, that's wonderful training.] Yeah.

SJ: And for a while there, when I first moved to Chicago, I dare say that I was the only PA [Production Assistant] in Chicago with an MFA, and I think I was probably the oldest PA in Chicago. And I used to, I would lie about my age, because I felt so old. I was, I, when I got to Chicago I turned 30. I was 30 when I arrived in Chicago. And I was 30-years-old with an MFA and no track record outside of shooting, making student films. And I was working as a PA on TV commercials. My first job was to get… this was actually one of the better jobs I had for a couple of years. I was, they were shooting a commercial down at Oak Street Beach, downtown, and my job was to get really cute girls in bikinis to sign a release, and I'd give 'em a dollar so that they would walk through the frame. That was my first job, and it went downhill from there. I, that was, I was like... [INT: They signed and put their telephone numbers?] No. Well, no. I was married, remember? [INT: Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.] [LAUGH] So… No kids at that point, but I was married. So, you know, it was, I did some pretty, I mean my, you know, I have a, I could take up, you know, your, I could tell you many stories of being a PA. [INT: But you were earning money. [LAUGH] You were working and earning money. You were subsisting.] I was subsisting. I was miserable, but I was subsisting.

INT: And when did you, how did you bump into Kartemquin [Kartemquin Films]?

SJ: I had heard about Kartemquin when I was in school at Southern [Southern Illinois University]. They started up this little film festival down there while I was there called The Big Muddy Film Festival, and the very first year of the festival, they had Jerry Blumenthal, who was one of the key guys, not technically a founder, but basically a founder, Jerry came down and showed some of Kartemquin's work. [INT: And tell me what Kartemquin is.] Kartemquin--[INT: Quin, pardon me.]--started, Kartemquin Films started as a collective back in 1966, so before my time. And it was started by three guys named Karter [Stan Karter], Temaner [Jerry Temaner] and Quinn [Gordon Quinn], and they put their names together, Kartemquin, because--I'm certain of this--they were, it was the '60s [1960s] and they were sitting around trying to think of what they were gonna call their collective film company, and they loved that it sounded, this is a true story, they loved that it sounded like Potemkin. And, you know, I mean they were, it must have been pretty late in the evening when they came to that one, so they started this collective and they, with the idea of doing socially active, socially revolutionary change media, documentaries, whatever. And over the years it evolved. The collective idea, like it did for a lot of things, didn't quite work. You know, when you have 12 people's opinion it's hard to get anything done when they all differ and they're all very political. So it morphed. And so by the time I encountered them, which was in the early '80s [1980s], when they came down for this festival, they were still, you know, very much a socially relevant, socially active and engaged production company, which they are to this day, but they were no longer a collective. And so--but they had done some really interesting films and Jerry came down and showed them. And they were, a lot of them were labor oriented. They did one called THE LAST PULLMAN CAR about the Pullman car strike, workers and all that. They did one on collective bargaining called TAYLOR CHAIN, and they did a TAYLOR CHAIN I [TAYLOR CHAIN I: A STORY IN A UNION LOCAL] and a sequel [TAYLOR CHAIN II: A STORY OF COLLECTIVE BARGAINING]. And, you know, they did…So they did all this interesting stuff, and I watched and I thought, "Ah, they're doing really cool stuff."

SJ: So when I had this idea to do HOOP DREAMS, which actually happened while I was at Southern playing ball one day at the rec center, when I moved to Chicago I knew that I wanted to pursue this idea that was gonna become HOOP DREAMS. And so I went with a fellow grad student friend of mine named Frederick Marx who ended up being one of the principals on the film, we went to Kartemquin and we met with Quinn, of Kartemquin [Kartemquin Films], Gordon Quinn. And we pitched this idea of doing a short film focused on a single court somewhere in Chicago where there are young dreamers, washed up ball players and maybe a pro player had come off that court. And I had this little proposal that I had written up and made a little cover with, with little stick on letters, you know. [LAUGH] 'Cause I could draw, 'cause I did draw a lot in my youth. I had drawn a picture on the cover and I had the title, HOOP DREAMS. And that's about all I had. [LAUGH] And so, and Gordon, bless his heart, he looked at it. He looked at my thesis film from school, which was a profile of my dad and his business. [INT: Oh my goodness. You did...] Yeah, I'd done a profile of my dad and his business. And he liked it enough, you know, enough. And he liked the concept that he said, "Okay, I'll let you guys come here and I'll try to help." Now they didn't give us money, you know, or anything. But they gave us, they gave us, you know, their name. [INT: And you guys were, you and...] Frederick Marx. [INT: Frederick Marx.] At that point. And yeah. And so the idea was is that we were gonna try to raise the money to shoot a film, not video, film. And I mean I, not long ago I looked, went back and looked at my original proposal, which is kind of funny to look at now, and the idea was is that we were gonna shoot for, we were gonna shoot for like two weeks and then edit for like four months and, you know, the whole thing was gonna be done in like six months. I mean start to finish. And it was gonna be a short. 'Cause we were trying to be realistic about it. You know, I wasn't a guy with a lot of confidence, as I think I've made clear. And so I was like, there's no way we could do anything longer and raise money for it. And I was right about that. We couldn't even raise money for that. So the idea was, you know, let's do something shorter. We were gonna shoot on film, which is not cheap and so, you know, I think, well I don't know what I thought it would achieve for me professionally. I just knew that I wanted to do it 'cause I'd had this idea and I thought it would be really good story to tell. [INT: And you had a whole drama happening in one location.] One location. [INT: I mean you had that...] It was a...Yeah. [INT: It was very smart.] And it was a good idea. [INT: Yes.] It was a very good idea. In fact, after HOOP DREAMS came out, a couple of years later, and not, I think this film had been in production when we were, so it wasn't like they got an idea from us. A documentary came out called SOUL TO THE HOLE [SOUL IN THE HOLE], S-O-U-L TO THE HOLE, that was shot in New York on a playground. It's like it was the idea. It was a longer film, but it was the idea that I had had that someone else had had and gone and made that film. And so, yeah, that was the original idea. And Gordon took a flyer on us and gave us credibility with the organization 'cause they had made some documentaries and people knew them a bit in the funding world, and they knew the ropes of the funding world, and they, and Gordon had been making docs a lot longer than me. [LAUGH] And so it was just, you know, it was great of them to kind of adopt us, really, and try to help us kind of make this happen.

INT: And the little film [HOOP DREAMS] grew and grew and grew or did you make a single little film? But no, this grew and grew and grew.

SJ: Well what happened was after beating our head against the wall for a year and a half trying to get people to give us money and not happening, 'cause we were like, "Who are these guys?," number one. And number two it's like, "They want to do a film about basketball? I mean a documentary? I mean, you know, this--you probably remember this. But this is a time, you know, this is in the mid-'80s [mid-1980s]. People weren't making documentaries about sports in any way. I mean it was, like, that's not serious enough, you know? Child hunger, okay, yeah, that's a good topic, you know. Racism would be a good topic, but what, kids who want to play basketball? What are you, you know, I don't get that. So we, nobody did. So no one gave us any money until I got a $2,000 Illinois Arts Council, it's like State funding, Fellowship [Illinois Arts Council Fellowship]. And I know that the only reason I got it was because my old professor from SIU [Southern Illinois University] sat on the funding board that particular round, and I think he just threw me a bone. You know, just like, gonna give him, I'm gonna help him try to get [LAUGH] his career going. I'm sure that that's how I got that money. So we took that 2,000; we said, we gotta go out and just start this. So we went out with this guy named “Big Earl” Smith [Earl Smith], who's in the movie, because--[INT: The scout.] Who's a scout. Now, you know, he's normally an insurance salesman, but we found Big Earl because I wanted to find, you know, part of the hook of the film was gonna be if a great professional player also came from this neighborhood, right? I wanted it to be a court that, you know, greatness had come off of, but then guys who never made it also. So I went out to visit with Gene Pingatore because at that time Isiah Thomas was the biggest star in the NBA who hailed from Chicago. So I met with Gene and I said, "We'd love to do this film. We'd love to find a court, maybe a court that he came off of. If we do, do you think you could help us get to Isiah, that he would be interviewed for the film?" And he said, "Maybe. Maybe." And he said, "Do you know where you're gonna go try and shoot?" and I said, "No." And he said, "I got just the guy to show you the courts. He knows every court in the city." He introduced us to Earl. I didn't know that Earl recruited for him at that time. And so we went around with Earl, and we were literally looking for courts to focus the film on when he discovers Arthur [Arthur Agee]. And it was so fascinating to us that he, you know--and he said, "I think I'm gonna take him out to see--let Gene take a look at him." And I'm like, "Gene Pingatore?" He's like, "Yeah." "Well we've met him." So we kind of, you know, we had the presence of mind to realize like--[INT: Can we go with you?]--let's just follow this for a second and see what this is, 'cause this is pretty fascinating. And at that point Peter Gilbert had joined the project as a cameraman only. He eventually became a, you know, Producer and maker of the film too.

INT: Now were you shooting [HOOP DREAMS] in the, at this point? Had you started out thinking you were going to shoot?

SJ: Me shoot? [INT: You.] No. We originally thought... No, ‘cause I was thinking, you know, I'm gonna direct it. The idea was I'm gonna direct it. Fred [Frederick Marx] and I would produce it. Fred would edit it. But we wanted to find a shooter. And we thought at the time that we should probably try to find a good African American shooter, for a couple of reasons. One is, is that we thought it would help us with connecting with the kids. And we also, because I'd never been in as big a city as Chicago before, I hadn't been in neighborhoods like that. And I thought, you know, it might be a good safety thing too to have a multi-racial crew. And it's like, you know, that's like I don't know about wandering into those communities, you know? I just didn't know. I mean I'd heard stories, you know. And so, but then a woman who worked at Kartemquin [Kartemquin Films] at the time, Marcy McCall, she said, "Oh I," we didn't have any money. She said--and this, you have to remember, this is a time when we had to make a decision, we're not gonna shoot film with that $2,000. So we said, "Okay. Maybe we can shift to film at some point if we get money, but we're gonna have to shoot video. And it's like, well we should at least make it broadcast quality video because, you know, video's ugly enough as it is and if we want to have any hope of it ever getting on TV it better be broadcast quality." Well back then, not everybody had cameras, right? I mean back then a broadcast quality Betacam camera was about $60,000 with the lenses. I mean and that's in '86 [1986] dollars. I mean it was a lot of money. Well it just so happened Peter Gilbert was a guy who was working as a cameraman and Marcy said, "And you'll love him. He's a huge basketball fan. He's had Bulls [Chicago Bulls] tickets forever. And he did a lot of shooting for Barbara Kopple on AMERICAN DREAM." And I was like, "I gotta meet this guy." She goes, "But he's not Black." [LAUGH] I was like, "I don't care. I gotta meet him." And I called Peter up and we talked for literally three hours the first conversation we ever had. And it was, like, you're on this man. And he had a camera and so that's how we got started.

SJ: So, and so we just started following -- we followed Arthur [Arthur Agee]. It's in the movie [HOOP DREAMS]. We follow him out to St. Joe's [St. Joseph High School]. He goes out for that camp. He gets to play Isiah [Isiah Thomas]. It was like, god, we got Isiah in the movie. And then Gene [Gene Pingatore], as you find out in the movie, he says, "I got this other kid coming in that's special. This kid, his name's William Gates." And so I said, "Where is he?" He goes, "Well he's in the stands today. He's twisted his ankle." So he introduced me to him and we were like… And again, the original idea was, okay, well we'll try and--we don't have any money. We'll try to follow both these kids and maybe one of them will be interesting, you know.

INT: Now, these were minors,the kids you were following [in HOOP DREAMS]. Did you have to deal with their parents or did you have to go meet their parents? [SJ: Yeah.] What did you, how did you--

SJ: And I learned one of my first real lessons of documentary filmmaking the first time I went to meet Arthur's [Arthur Agee] parents with Earl [Earl Smith]. 'Cause we had to get permission. Which is, we met Arthur--I mean we didn't start shooting him, we shot him the second time Earl looked at him. The very first time we were fascinated by it… or I don't know; we might have shot a little bit. But anyway, before we got too far with it we needed to-- [INT: In the playground?] Yeah. [INT: Okay. Great.] We talked to Arthur and we said, "We're interested in this," and so Arthur went home and talked to his mom and dad about it. And I only learned this side of the story much later. Arthur said he went in and he said to his mom, "Mom, Mom, there are these white guys that want to make a movie about me." And she… Arthur was a bit of a comedian and she didn't believe him. She literally just said, "Get away from me with all that bull. That's, you know, that's not true." And then Earl and I showed up. And she [LAUGH] told us, she didn't have her false teeth in and she was running around getting her false teeth in. She was, like, she couldn't believe this was happening. Of course they didn't know that we were like nothing. I mean we had no money. You know, but to us, they were, we were like white guy filmmakers, you know what I mean. So I learned a very valuable lesson that day. We went in to meet the family and I met with them with Arthur there and explained what I was doing. And I remember thinking, I should be, not so much shooting me doing the presentation but there were things happening there that was like, we should be filming this, 'cause Earl was talking to them about Arthur. You know, about he thinks he has talent. And I was like, god, I can't believe we're not shooting this. So I learned a very valuable lesson there, which is, always have the camera--[INT: Rolling.]--with you somewhere. You know, have it with you at, close at hand. So yeah, so we had to get their permission. And then with William [William Gates], his dad was not a part of the family. We eventually had to get, before we started filming we had to get permission from his brother, Curtis [Curtis Gates], and from his mother--[INT: Mother.]--Emma [Emma Gates]. So... [INT: His brother actually could have...] Well, he was the de facto-- [INT: Father.] --father figure in the family. I mean it's like without his blessing it wasn't gonna happen. [INT: And what did you--] And then Curtis became part of the movie, which was, you know, really great-- [INT: Important.] --too. [INT: And what did you do legally? Did you know about releases? I mean was anybody helping you out? Was that Kartemquin [Kartemquin Films]?] Yeah, Kartemquin helped us out with that. We got releases signed.

SJ: But, you know, we didn't immediately say we want to follow you for the next nearly five years of your life [to the subjects of HOOP DREAMS], you know. We did though, very early on, have this kind of fantasy that, god, what would it be like if we could follow them over a period of time because you see it again in the movie where Pingatore [Gene Pingatore] says to Arthur [Arthur Agee] after literally just seeing, watching him play for a day and meeting with him, he says, "If you work hard, if you come here and you work hard at basketball and the grades I can help you get to college." We, I remembered thinking, what an extraordinary promise to make to a kid that you just met. And who you told us is a raw talent, like, you know, maybe he'll be good, maybe he won't. I just thought, what an extraordinary thing to say. And it did get the wheels turning on, like, god, well what is gonna happen to this kid in four years? You know, will he go to college with basketball or not? And so the seed got planted, and then when we, I remember when I first broached it with the families, each family, I told them, "Look, you know, we don't really have money right now. We're, you know, but I don't know what we're gonna be able to do, but it would be really cool if maybe once a month we could just check in and see what's going on, you know? And we'll just see how it goes." And they were game, you know? They were, like, flattered that someone, you know, thought we--[INT: Paid attention.]--they were worthy of a film, which happens a lot with subjects. You know, there's a certain kind of, you know, it's, it can be quite flattering to, especially people who are, you know, at the margins of society--well anybody, but if you're at the margins of society and have never even ever once thought that you were subject matter for a movie, you know, a film, that can be quite a intoxicating thought. And so, you know, they were kind of game. But, you know, if I had said then like we're gonna, if I had known, had a crystal ball and said how much time we would eventually spend with them they probably would have said, "You're crazy. Get out of here," you know. [LAUGH]

INT: And what about the schools? The institutions went along with it as well, that's tough!

SJ: Well Pingatore [Gene Pingatore] was key with St. Joe's [St. Joseph High School] because he was very important there. You know, he was a hugely powerful basketball court--coach in Chicagoland. And he was also, you know, he was also, had other duties at the school like... [INT: Oh he was…] You know, so he was very influential, so he got us in there. But we had certain limitations about what we could film in school. And in fact, the whole first year, where I learned another valuable lesson in documentary filmmaking, the whole first year that Arthur [Arthur Agee] and William [William Gates] were at St. Joe's, I never, we never filmed them in class. [INT: Were you able to film the other kids? I mean did you have to get--] Well we didn't, we didn’t film any… I mean the whole first year we did not film in class. That was partly due to, a big part due to Pingatore saying, "Look, this whole filming in the school thing, we're gonna have to kind of ease into this. You know, you're fine to film my practices, our games," which we did, "but being in classes and stuff that's a little tricky. We're gonna have to..." Now this was also before there was a tremendous amount of nervousness about anybody filming anybody in schools. It wasn't the same atmosphere that we're living in now. But, he did say, "We're gonna have to ease into this." And I, and my attitude was, no problem. We're gonna be here for four years. You know, we're, we'll come back next year and do it. And as a result, though, when Arthur got kicked out of St. Joe's, we had not a single frame of footage of him in a classroom. And when I, when we got to editing, that became a kind of really interesting challenge, was how do we sort of more suggest his freshman year without you really seeing it? We had one preciously important interview with him outside the school. He was wearing a nice sweater and a tie. [INT: Yes. Yes.] And the school's behind him, and that was like gold because it made you feel like you were seeing him at school. Instead of just seeing him on the basketball court. [INT: And that was the one where he said it was hard getting used to being around only white people.] Yes. And about all the plants, and yeah. [INT: That was wonderful. That was wonderful.] Yeah.

INT: Had you seen Michael Apted's series, or part of it, at that point, SEVEN UP!?

SJ: Yes. In fact I credit 28 UP, 'cause that was the one I saw and I think that was the first addition that was distributed in America in any degree. I saw that when I was in school. And I was blown away by it. You know, I was just totally blown away by the ambition of it and just this whole, just the idea of seeing these people literally grow up before the camera, you know, in every, in seven year increments. And I think that definitely got lodged in the back of my head when all this was going on, this idea of, you know, of seeing them grow up. You know, I think it definitely was an influence. [INT: And the sociology of it.] Yeah. [INT: I mean it was a… And as HOOP DREAMS is, it's a serious look at a society.] Yeah. It just, it's funny because it just took funders a long time, I mean, to get that. And, you know, if you look at some of the proposals that we wrote, even the early ones, and especially once we found Arthur [Arthur Agee] and William [William Gates], and then we would revise a proposal because now we have some main subjects. And it's like, when you look at it it's not like the proposal doesn't make mention of, like, this is going to grapple with the American dream and the difficulty of it and the long odds of using sports to, you know, make, lift a family out of poverty and all. You know, it wasn't like, we weren't-- we didn't just want to do a cool basketball film, you know. We were thinking in those directions. Not nearly in the kind of depth that the film would eventually reveal to us from capturing it over those years, but it wasn't… So it's, so but we still had trouble getting funding, because, again, we weren't established filmmakers. And I think there was this bias against sports as a topic of a movie, even one that was trying to kind of do more than just be about basketball. I remember very distinctly having a conversation with a, I don't know how I got on the phone with him, but I was on the phone with a higher up at CPB, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, in the wake of them having rejected a proposal of ours, like maybe the second time for funding. And somehow I got him on the phone to just talk to him about like well why, you know, why can't we seem to get funding? And this was a black executive, okay? And I say that because I think that it is relevant to what he said to me. I mean it would have been just as bad coming from a white executive, but I was shocked that it came from him, which was, he said, "You know," he goes, "yeah, yeah, yeah. I know, I see what you're trying to do here," he goes, "but you know, maybe if one of these kids, like, became a drug dealer or a drug addict or something or maybe if one of 'em died, now you got a story." And I was like, "God, that would be awful. We don't want that to happen." He goes, "No, no. I know you don't want that to happen, but, you know, I just don't, I'm not seeing the drama here. I'm not seeing the gravitas, you know, of what you're trying to do here. It's like, they're just kids who want to play basketball and that's kind of farfetched, you know?" And I, you know, that was an actual conversation with a pretty high up executive. [LAUGHS] Wow.