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MillimeterFade to Black
Jun 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By Darroch Greer
Most people who saw Hoop Dreams, if they considered it, presumed that the filmmakers found their story only after following a half-dozen young basketball players around for five years, then wheedling the film down to its two main characters.
“We couldn't afford to follow six or seven kids,” says director Steve James. “We were doing this with no money. I'm a believer that if you pick your subjects wisely, go with your gut. … You're going to have a good story if you're just patient and sensitive enough to tell it.”
The latest story from director/editor James (with executive producer/shooter Gordon Quinn, and producer/sound recorder Adam Singer of Kartemquin Films) — is Stevie, an unlikely tale about an unlikely subject. When you meet Stevie, an abused man in his 20s who grew up in foster homes in rural Illinois, it's hard to imagine spending two hours with him. Yet the journey made by the film and its filmmaker, over another five-year period, is the stuff of which great films are made.
“The story really is a process of discovery,” says James, whose idea was to film a brief portrait of a kid he had been a Big Brother to and what had happened to him during the years over which they had lost contact. “And that was going to be it. I saw it as a fairly modest enterprise. But when he was arrested for this crime, and the film took this other turn, this very severe turn, then the film had to change with it — or what's the point? The film began to dictate where it was going to go.”
James had originally set out with a formalistic approach: composed imagery and live action portraits of Stevie and his family with well-lit interviews. “But when events unfolded, and suddenly we were in the middle of an unfolding story, then that made the whole approach change, and so it became more vérité in its approach. … By the end we were doing everything we could to stay away from lighting at all, because we were trying to keep it as natural and realistic as it could be because that's the story we were telling.” Very few of the formalistic shots remain in the film.
“I think that sometimes filmmakers make the mistake of not letting go of their original conception when they need to,” says James. “And so they end up making a film that's at odds with what's happening in front of the camera.”
What happens in front of the camera is remarkable, particularly considering that Stevie lived a six-hour drive from James' home in Chicago. The team shot about 70 hours of Super 16 film, compared to the 250 hours of tape they shot for Hoop Dreams. As James says, there was a good discipline in that.
“The fact that he was six hours away meant that we had to pick and choose when we would go down and film. Of course, we missed stuff, but to a remarkable degree we captured a lot of things.” The stuff James literally missed was about 10 minutes of early footage that was lost by a series of film houses going out of business. As James was too busy with other film projects to begin editing over the five years he shot Stevie, the team didn't find out about the loss until they went to finish it. “It was very distressing. So that's why, in the first part of the film, you're not sure what [the format] is. We had to go off of our dailies that were on Betacam as our original.”
The sound is strong as well. James and Adam Singer prefer a combination of boom and lav mikes. James is on camera much of the time with Stevie, so they both have lavs on, but a boom is always going at the same time. “We really don't like the sound of lav mikes — that closeness, that lack of ambience that a lav mike gives you is not a very naturalistic sound. Boom mikes are much better but you can't always get it, especially if two people are talking over each other. It's not like a scripted situation where you know [where to mike]. You're winging it. So we try and go with both, and then in the mixing we, ideally, will mix the two.”
James edited his Betacam SP dailies on an Avid, but as they had no American distributor, they decided to blow the 16mm neg up to hi-def, so that at least it could play on television if they never got a theatrical distribution. SenArt Films came in in the eleventh hour and blew the film up to 35mm, and Lions Gate joined the team for theatrical distribution. “It looks pretty great now, but to be honest, the hi-def version just looks spectacular.”
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.