How To Be A More Engaged Citizen: Steve James on Documentary
- Posted: 12th Aug 2011
- Category: Articles
- Tags: steve james, hoop dreams, chicago, gangs
By Olivia Humphreys
For his latest film, acclaimed director Steve James (Hoop Dreams, Stevie) spent a year following three 'violence interrupters' on the streets of Chicago; former gangbangers Eddie, Ameena and Cobe intervene in conflicts before the incidents explode into violence, while confiding their own moving stories of redemption. Olivia Humphreys caught up with Steve James in London, where the riots made the film's issues even more searingly relevant.
Olivia Humphries: The film is a collaboration with Alex Kotlowitz, a writer and journalist [author of There Are No Children Here]. This was his first experience of filmmaking; do you think having someone from a different medium changed your approach?
Steve James: Alex worried there wasn’t enough of a narrative to carry us through the film; early on he wanted to figure out ‘What’s the story we’re going to tell?’ and I was like, ‘We’re gonna see’. I’ve been through this process enough that I feel you have to have a certain patience; but perhaps because he’s a writer, he doesn’t usually have the luxury of that time. We decided to film for a year and use the seasons as markers. And we were fortunate, or unfortunate, depending which way you look at it, that that year in Chicago was particularly eventful.
OH: You’ve talked about how The Interrupters is not so much about change as about people finding their ‘true selves’.
SJ: Right, that’s the coin of the realm in documentary, ‘I showed somebody changing’. But this film made me reconsider that idea – it’s hard to picture Cobe and Eddie being gangbangers, Cobe’s such a teddy bear. If you imagine them growing up in certain circumstances, and without certain pressures, maybe they would have never gone that direction. It was a different way of trying to think about change, that really these people are finding their true selves instead of undergoing this big, dramatic change that every Hollywood movie loves to show.
OH: Is there any audience in particular you really hope to reach through the film?
SJ: My joke is that I want people who live in these communities to see it and I want people who don’t live in these communities to see it. We think Obama needs to see it, and we absolutely have an intention to get it in front of people who make policy, because they will look at it in a different way.
OH: What do you see the role of documentary as being?
SJ: Bearing witness, being there, not letting a story leave our consciousness the next day; instead, saying ‘Wait, that’s really significant, I’m going to really look into that and try and understand that’. I don’t think documentary can replace daily journalism, but in The Interrupters, we try and show you the way the media typically treats these kinds of stories and then the way we’re trying to treat them, with being there when they’re no longer in the news.
I think in the West, we increasingly experience the world through media, through our screens and not through direct experience – and even though documentary is part of that, you watch it on a screen, I feel like its goal is to somehow connect you to that world, instead of take you away from it or let you escape it.
I’m a much more engaged citizen when I’m making documentaries than in any other part of my life, because I’m forcing myself out into the world, into places I don’t normally go, meeting people I wouldn’t normally meet and trying to understand things I don’t already understand. I think everyone should make documentaries!
OH: When you came to the end of your year with the Interrupters, did you feel ready to stop filming?
SJ: Some films give you as a gift perfect ending points, like in Hoop Dreams where Arthur and William went off to college. In this case it was trickier because we wanted to have some sense of resolution, but not a sense that it’s all fixed now and it’s all over. Sometimes I think documentaries try to bring too tidy an end and that’s fine in fiction; but I think in documentary you want to leave people with the sense that lives do go on; and in this case that there are so many unfinished lives out there, people with promise and potential that need help.
The Interrupters is released in UK cinemeas on Friday 12th August 2011.
Read Kate Garner's review of the film here.