Moment of Truth: Marshall Curry on Bringing Racing Dreams -- and NASCAR's Next Wave -- to Life

Welcome back to Moment of Truth, Movieline's weekly spotlight on the best in nonfiction cinema. Today we hear from Marshall Curry, whose Racing Dreams opens Friday in New York and July 23 in Los Angeles.

After earning an Oscar nomination for his gripping 2005 political documentary Street Fight, filmmaker Marshall Curry turned to perhaps the last subject anyone would have seen coming: NASCAR. More specifically, the "Little League of NASCAR," where the adolescent subjects of Curry's fine new film Racing Dreams have a lot more at stake than just a trophy at the end of their 20th lap.

Curry tracked young racers Annabeth Barnes (then 11 years old), Josh Hobson (12) and Brandon Warren (13) through a season on the World Karting Association circuit, where future stock-car heroes are made. More than just observing the treachery and expense of the sport, however, Curry charts the even more challenging terrain of adolescence. He and his crew are seemingly everywhere, drawing a complex, intimate portrait of kids, families and the cultural traditions that come to dominate their lives for better or worse. And as with the developments witnessed through Curry's honest camera eye in Street Fight, it's not always for the better. Such is life, and such is good docmaking.

Moveline talked to Curry this week about the route from bare-knuckle New Jersey elections to rural race tracks, the importance of luck in nonfiction, and how Jeff Gordon came to make an unforgettable cameo.

Coming off Street Fight, how did you hit upon this story and this film?

I had been interested in NASCAR as a phenomenon -- something I didn't know anything about. I thought it could be interesting that there was this sport that's the second-biggest spectator sport -- bigger than baseball, bigger than basketball -- and I don't know anything about it. Really, almost no one in New York seems to know anything about it. So it was interesting that it could split that way. At one point I'd written down "NASCAR" and stuck it in a file of idea that I keep for documentaries. Not long after that I read an article about the World Karting Association and these kids who race go-karts that go 70 miles per hour. It's the Little League for NASCAR! That seemed kind of amazing to me, both on its face -- the idea of an 11-year-old kid driving anything that goes 70 miles per hour -- and as an interesting way of getting at that NASCAR story without being so on the nose. So I went to a couple races, took a camera, shot some footage and met some kids. And the racing was dangerous and exciting and loud and everything races are supposed to be. The kids that I met were smart and funny and charismatic, and so I thought, "OK, there's a good story here."

But I also have an interest in adolescence -- just that age of 11, 12, 13 , where we have a foot in childhood and a foot in adulthood. For a filmmaker, it's the perfect age, because the kids are adult enough to be articulate and talk about things that are interesting to adults, but they're young enough to where they're not cynical yet. They're not studied and rehearsed. They're still kind of wide open. So I thought, "This cultural interest in racing and a larger interest in adolescence are meeting each other, so let's make this movie."

How did you choose these three kids?

When I went to the races just to see what they looked like, I asked around with a bunch of people if there were any kids they thought I should meet. I would ask the referees, the flag men, the parents. Over and over I kept hearing, "How about that Josh Hobson, have you met him?" And so I met him just when was coming off winning his fourth Grand National Race of the weekend. I talked to him for 20 minutes, and instantly you see that he's an adult in a child's body. He is so professional and polite -- and also funny -- but he's not a robot. He's a bright and engaging kid. So I thought, "Oh, wow, well this is great."

Once I'd raised the money to make the movie, I needed to find some other kids. So I went to the awards ceremony from the previous year, which is right next door to this big karting convention. Annabeth was signing autographs; I met her [there]. We met probably 50 or 75 kids -- a lot of kids -- and we would ask them: "What does your room look like? Do you believe in God? What do your parents do for a living?" Questions like that to get a sense of what made them tick. And Annabeth just sort of popped. She's so sweet and funny and spunky. Later on that night, I met Brandon. You could tell from meeting him that he's got this glint in his eye; he's also funny and seemed like kind of a rascally character. So I thought, "Well, these three seem great."

How did their family lives and dynamics affect your choices?

I knew from the beginning that the film would also be about their families. Annabeth's father is a retired race-car driver; that was interesting. How does something like this get passed along form generation to generation? With Josh, his parents were both really interesting, but neither of them really grew up around racing. Josh's mother explains that Josh just kind of sprung to life as this fully-formed individual. That was interesting. Then Brandon lives with his grandfather, whom I talked to for 15 minutes. His grandfather is instantly this charismatic guy who uses racing metaphors in everything he talks about and does paint and body work for a racing team, and they live out in the country in North Carolina. It just seemed like a perfect type of background for one of the characters.

Pages: 1 2