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Marshall Curry Documents Newark and NASCAR
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MC: The style of Racing Dreams is in some ways very different from Street Fight. I narrate Street Fight but Racing Dreams has no narration. Street Fight was shot in a very “run-and-gun” style—intimate but sometimes rough—which seemed appropriate for the subject. For Racing Dreams, I wanted to capture the colors and spectacle of racing and so we shot it in HD with brilliant shooters and the production values are pretty high.
On the face, the subject matter seems very different too: One is about a gritty political campaign in Newark, NJ, the other is about pre-adolescents who dream of racing for NASCAR. Both movies, though, are fundamentally about people with dreams—Cory Booker wanted to be Mayor of Newark, and the three kids in Racing Dreams want to win the National Championship, which will bring them a step closer to becoming NASCAR drivers. In both cases I valued the story and intimacy with the characters above everything else. I am constantly chasing these moments of realness that cut through the clutter of media that barrages us every day—stuff like when Brandon [one of the Racing Dreams subjects] is on the phone, talking with Annabeth for the first time. People love that scene because they have all been on that phone call themselves, talking to a girl or boy who you like and trying to suss out whether they like you too. To get those things, I think it’s really important to make yourself very small while shooting. With Street Fight is was just me, and with Racing Dreams it was two people: Me shooting with a sound person, or a DP shooting with me running sound.
MM: NASCAR racing is a hugely popular sport in much of the United States. In other parts, though—like New York City—many people don’t understand its appeal. What drew you to the subject? What are your feelings toward racing now that you have finished Racing Dreams?
MC: Like a lot of New Yorkers, I didn’t know anything about the world of NASCAR before making this movie, and, honestly, I didn’t really understand the appeal. But NASCAR is the second biggest spectator sport in America after football—bigger than baseball or basketball. And I began to think about that: We New Yorkers think of ourselves as so worldly and broad-minded, but we don’t know anything about a sport and culture that’s a huge part of our own country. That sparked my curiosity.
In some ways, racing is the MacGuffin of the movie, though. It’s really about kids’ dreams and figuring out romance and parental relationships. And that age—11, 12, 13—is a really important time, but it seems under-examined and under-appreciated to me.
The more I learned about racing, the more interesting it became to me. There’s a scene in the film I like where Annabeth’s mom says, “A lot of people don’t understand racing—they think it’s just cars going around in circles. But we don’t understand, like, baseball. It’s just a bunch of guys sitting out in a field hoping someone might hit him a ball.” It shows that pretty much everything is silly when you view it from the outside. But when you get inside and start to understand something—what makes a great pass in racing or a great pitch in baseball—suddenly the world becomes a little richer. And one of the things that films should try to do is stretch us that way.
MM: You’ve learned about documentary moviemaking by actually going out and making films, seeing what works and what doesn’t. What are some of the first things you learned about how best to make a documentary film?
MC: There is a lot of filmmaking that is craft and I had to learn that on the job: Getting exposure right and gathering the right combination of shots to make a scene editable—establishing wide shots, closeups, cutaways. I found the best way to learn that stuff was just to go out and shoot a lot and then come home and try to edit your material. When something is bad, you see it and you think, “Man, I’m never going to do that again.”
In shooting, one of the main things that I learned is how to balance preparedness and flexibility. When you are first starting out there’s a temptation to just go into a situation and shoot a lot and hope that the editor will figure it out. But that doesn’t work of course. You need to constantly anticipate what might happen in this scene and what are the elements you need to get to make this scene make sense. And, on a more macro level, how will this scene play in the arc of the movie and what scenes you need for the whole thing to make sense and be compelling.
On the other hand, you can’t be rigid. Often the best things that happen will come out of nowhere. So you have to be flexible enough to let them happen and follow them when they do. I think watching [the documentary] Sherman’s March taught me a good lesson in that. There’s a great scene where a minister is describing the apocalypse and a little girl starts reacting to something off screen. A lesser filmmaker would have said, “I’m trying to get the Apocalypse scene and this girl is ruining it so I’m going to crop her out of the shot.” But [Sherman’s March director] Ross McElwee was flexible enough to bend the scene to include what she was looking at—which turns out to be a man in an Easter bunny suit. So the scene becomes very funny and sweet and a comment on that great American mashing of religion and consumerism.
MM: What will you be working on next?
MC: I have a new film about a radical environmentalist who was part of the Earth Liberation Front and burned two timber facilities in Oregon. He’s now in prison and the film looks at his story and all of the issues flying around it. I’m hoping to be done with the editing next spring.
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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.
- Comment by cilt bakımı on 6/24/10 at 9:02 am
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- Comment by Sikis on 7/05/10 at 3:47 pm
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- Comment by Oyuncak on 8/23/10 at 5:00 am
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- Comment by borsa on 8/28/10 at 7:23 pm
Thanks admin… Good post…
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- Comment by منتديات on 9/24/10 at 7:16 am
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- Comment by vizyonfilmizle on 10/05/10 at 8:40 am
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