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Marshall Curry Documents Newark and NASCAR
Marshall Curry shooting his latest doc, Racing Dreams.
When Marshall Curry took a break from his job working for a Web design company so that he could make films, he had not been to film school nor had he received any formal film training; he went out, bought a camera and started shooting. Curry’s first film, Street Fight, documented the 2002 battle between Cory Booker and Sharpe James for the position of mayor of Newark, NJ. His second, Racing Dreams, follows three children trying to win the National Championship of the World Karting Association, a.k.a. the Little League of NASCAR. On the surface, it looks as though the films could not be more different, but both documentaries skillfully tell the stories of people who work hard to achieve their dreams.
It’s safe to say that since that initial first leap, Curry has been successful in his career as a documentary moviemaker—Street Fight was nominated for the Best Feature Documentary Oscar in 2006 and Racing Dreams was named Best Documentary at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival. Curry took time to answer some of MovieMaker’s questions about wearing multiple hats as a moviemaker, NASCAR and what’s coming next.
Rebecca Pahle (MM): On Street Fight, your first feature-length film, not only were you the director, but you edited, shot and produced the film as well. Which of these jobs did you enjoy the most? Or did you enjoy doing everything and having more control over the final outcome?
Marshall Curry (MC): I like shooting and editing a lot. They are so different—shooting requires you to push yourself out of your comfort zone, to dig into people’s lives or to climb up on that rooftop over there to see if you can get a better angle on something. It is physically demanding—we always work long hours and the food is generally lousy. There’s a constant anxiety that you are missing something, but the flip side is an electric hope that something amazing is just about to happen. I imagine it’s what a fisherman feels—you go out all day and every time you throw your hook in you see a fish hopping somewhere else across the lake; some days you spend all day and get nothing. But every once in a while, you pull out a whopper and it’s pretty thrilling. I never want to take breaks, because you know that the moment you put down the camera and everyone relaxes, a great moment will happen. The only way to get those moments is to have more stamina than your subjects.
Editing is the opposite. It is all internal—turning a story over and over in your head until pieces fall away and other pieces start to stick together. It’s grueling, too, but different—you are sitting in front of a computer in a windowless room for months and months. What has happened has happened, so there’s no hope that a whopper fish is going to appear. You just have to make it into a story. But I love it. There’s a great feeling of satisfaction when you build a scene out of hours of raw footage, and it pops. Or when you solve a tricky problem that you’ve been banging your head against. You just want to watch it over and over. That’s the test for me. Sometimes I think I’ve edited a scene well enough, but then I ask myself, ‘Do you want to watch this again and again?’ and if the answer is no, then I know it’s not really good yet.
With Street Fight I did most of the shooting myself but with Racing Dreams there was a great team. I shot and edited, but I also worked with amazing shooters and editors.
Working with other shooters took some getting used to because I know exactly what I want when I’m shooting myself. If I know, for example, that a moment of a conversation isn’t going to be in the film, I can use that opportunity to grab cutaways. But another shooter doesn’t know exactly what I find interesting or important, and he might make a different decision. So that’s the downside. But there’s also a huge upside. The shooters I worked with were great. They have amazing eyes and steady hands and have been shooting every day for years and years. And you can see that in their work.
Editing is similar; there were scenes that I couldn’t figure out and it was great to be able to hand them over to Mary Manhardt or Matt Hamachek—the editors who I worked with—and have them bring a fresh eye and sharp skills and crack it.
MM: The audience can see some of the problems you encountered while shooting Street Fight, particularly when the security team of Newark’s incumbent mayor Sharpe James tries to get you to stop filming at one of his rallies. It was addressed in the film that people were afraid to speak up against James. Did you have trouble getting people to speak to you on camera? What other difficulties did you have in shooting the film?
MC: There were definitely people who were intimidated by the political machine in Newark and were afraid to be on camera. They’d tell me, “You don’t understand politics here—if you say something bad about the mayor you can lose your public housing or lose your job or have code enforcement shut down your business.” In the movie you see a Newark resident who is accused by the mayor of being a terrorist and shaken down by the police—all because he supported the mayor’s opponent. So that posed a challenge. But there were also a lot of brave people—people who were fed up and willing to say what they thought. That conflict ultimately made the story more compelling.
Being a one-man band was also really hard. I was shooting and doing sound and driving the car and getting releases, so I was pretty ragged by the end of each day. Raising money was impossible too. I shot the film on my own—just bought a camera and a bunch of tapes and started shooting. And afterward, I cut a trailer, but no one would give me money because it was my first film—and who wants to take a chance on that? So I bought a Mac and learned Final Cut Pro and just cut it myself. That was pretty brutal, and there were a lot of days when I’d be in my apartment editing, wondering what I was doing. Did I have any idea how to make a documentary? When I had about a 110-minute cut, ITVS [Independent Television Service] and “POV” [a documentary program on PBS] came on board and gave me money to hire another editor to finish it up with me—and that was a life saver.
MM: In Racing Dreams you follow three children as they race to win the National Championship of the World Karting Association—the Little League of NASCAR. It is a different film in tone from Street Fight. How did your experience in making the two films differ? Did you have to take a different approach to the subject matter in Racing Dreams than in Street Fight?
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by Zara on 9/02/09 at 11:56 pm
Need to see Racing Dreams now, i always think what i would have done when i was a kid!
- Comment by Vadim Uvazhny on 9/08/09 at 4:06 am
A few years ago I realized the dream of my childhood: to become a Racer (frankly I’ve become a racer for 1 hour :) ). Great impressions.
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- Comment by منتديات on 9/24/10 at 7:16 am
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