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.
You mentioned asking a lot of questions of the kids, but what kinds of questions did they and their families ask of you?
They just wanted to know what it was -- what it was they were trying to do. I was surprised they allowed me into their lives -- in very intimate moments -- as intimately as they did. We'd been shooting for a long, long time before any of them ever saw Street Fight. If someone asked to do a documentary about me or my family, the first thing I'd do is go out and rent their other work to find out who they were and what they had in mind. But they were just trusting. I sat down and said, "Here's my idea for the story. It's going to be about racing, it's going to be about school and family and your lives away from the track at least much as it is about your lives at the track. We're going to hang around a lot and shoot a lot, and hopefully your story will be captured and shown to the world." And they were interested in that happening.
I'm really interested in how you approached shooting the races as well, which essentially are full-blown action scenes. How did you work out filmmaking in this new environment?
My natural strength, I would say, is in personal, intimate moments. I think I'm pretty good at getting people to relax around the camera and keeping an eye out for the details that make life interesting. So it was kind of a stretch to say, "OK, now we have to shoot an action sequence that's a race." I met with the different shooters that I worked with and figured out a strategy to do it. And basically what we did was at the race events, we would take three cameras and three sound people. These events would last for three days, and each kid would have this crew following them. And during that time, I would float from crew to crew and sort of take over sound or shooting for a little while to get a sense of where the story was going and nudge it one way or the other and move on the the next one.
When the actual race would happen, all three of them would be at the track. Two of them would kind of shoot detail -- a particular corner, or a long shot across the track. The third camera would shoot reaction shots of families and parents and people in the crowd. We had a fourth camera -- a big HDX900 with a great zoom lens -- and that one we'd get up high on bleachers or the roof of an RV. It was a kind of establishing shot you could always cut back to, and constantly that would zoom in and out on our characters, That was the camera you'd cut to when you wanted to explain what was happening in a race. The cameras on the ground were the ones we'd use to get a fast pass or other detailed moments we'd cut between.
Did that method work from the beginning?
It got smoother over time, but every track you'd go to would be different. So you'd have to pick your positions. Usually they had had practices and time trials and things, so you could go and say, "Here's a good corner, here's an interesting perspective." Sometimes we overcranked the races so we could get some nice slow-motion shots. But with all of the races, I knew we were going to boil them down to two minutes. They don't take very long once they're edited.
I love the sequence with Josh and Jeff Gordon, which made me smile even as I was kind of holding my breath. How did that come to pass?
Josh's dad was friends with somebody who worked at Toyota, who got them pit passes. Then what we had to do was get permission to take a camera into the pit area. And we shot that with a camera that looks bigger than a regular consumer camera, but it's not this big thing that sits on your shoulder. So we just sort of followed Josh and his family around that whole day, and he saw Jeff Gordon over there being interviewed. He sent away all the camera crews, and it was going to be fan time. I just got our camera guy to go stand next to Jeff -- kind of over his shoulder and behind a little bit. The scene is totally unscripted; Jeff had no idea we were making a movie. In the end we had to get permission from him and NASCAR to use that scene, but what makes it work so well is that he has no idea. That's just how he talks to kids.
Street Fight and Racing Dreams are full of these moments, though -- these serendipitous developments. What do you attribute that to? Luck? Right place, right time?
It's definitely partly luck. There's that great Alfred Hitchcock line that Albert Maysles quotes a lot: "In fiction film, the director is God; in documentary, God is the director." There's definitely an element of lucky things happening. There's also a lot of sweat behind it, too. I can't remember who it was who said, "The more I practice, the luckier I get." I fee like it's the same to some extent with documentaries: The harder you work, and the more you're paying attention, the luckier you get. We spent a lot of time; we shot 500 hours of footage over the course of a year to make a 90-minute movie. When you're shooting, you're being ruthless with yourself. It's so tempting when everyone sits down to eat -- or at the end of another long day -- to just put down your camera and relax. But you know 100 percent of the time -- I can guarantee it -- the person who does that will say the great thing you've been waiting for all day. So there's lot of shooting that is kind of outlasting your subjects and their ability to perform or to be aware. After a certain period of time you can wear them down to wear they just get used to having you around. The real side of themselves starts to pop out. That's when I feel a lot of the magical moments happen.