27.05.2020
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“It’s one of those films,” begins Steve James, discussing “Stevie,” his new documentary feature, booked exclusively at the Cineplex Odeon Dupont Circle.
2018 Academy Award Nominee, Steve James So what exactly does one say to one of the most respected documentary filmmakers of our time? What does one say to the man who literally inspired countless future. Start studying documentary final. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools. The roots of Steve James's disturbing documentary lie in youthful idealism: As a student at Southern Illinois University in the mid-1980s, he became a Big Brother to Stephen Fielding, an. What happened to Stevie Fielding? It can be a nickname for Stephen/Steven or Stefanie/Stephanie in Engl. What happened to Stephen dale fielding the subject of Steve James documentary Stevie?
Despite how prepared you think you are to undertake a documentary project, as any filmmaker can tell you, things never go according to plan. But often these mishaps and detours end up being silver linings in the final film, according to award-winning director Steve James (“Life Itself,” “Hoop Dreams”), during his masterclass at Oregon Doc Camp on May 29 in Sublimity, Oregon.
“When things don’t go like you planned, and in my experience, that has happened on every single film and in a way, I’m thankful for that because anytime I’ve had an idea for a film and then had the good fortune to make it, my ideas about what it was going to be, what came out at the end was better than I could have imagined,” he told the audience of filmmakers.
In fact, James suggested that “if all you get is what you expected to get, then it wouldn’t be that enriching an experience to make the film and it probably wouldn’t be that enriching film….You typically don’t know as much as you think you know going in. The process itself is enriching.”
James detailed some of the problems he encountered during three productions and explained how he turned them into silver linings.
James had a hard time getting anyone to talk on camera about an incident where star basketball player Allen Iverson was arrested after a racial brawl in a bowling alley in Hampton, Virginia, the small town where James grew up. Not only did Iverson refuse to be interviewed, but “many of the white people in the community especially those who had been in the bowling alley the night of the brawl refused to speak,” according to James. And the African-Americans in the community were also reticent about participating since they were concerned about how a white director might approach the issue.
But there were other unexpected moments that helped take the film in another direction — one that made it a much more personal project for James. At one point, James’ African-American cameraman Keith Walker, asked him “did you ever wish you were black?”
“I didn’t expect that question from a camera man,” said James. “Those kinds of moments were not expected but it came to feel absolutely important.”
James ended up being on camera in the film as part of the story, something he had never intended to do.
“I was not planning to be in much at all, mostly narrating…But those are the kinds of things when you’re making your film you look at what the film is at its essence and you react to it. Even though I didn’t get to interview white people who were in the bowling alley, I felt like I was able to represent what went on in the community.”
James initially started out thinking of “Stevie” as a short film, which was also how “Hoop Dreams” began. “I I like to delude myself into thinking it’s going to be a short film and then it’s three hours long,” said James, who added that this was a difficult film to get funding for — even after the mega-success of “Hoop Dreams.”
As with “No Crossover,” James had no plans to insert himself into the story, but things didn’t go according to plan.
The film was initially going to be a short profile of Stevie Fielding, a man whom, a decade earlier, James had mentored as a Big Brother. “My collaborators said, ‘You haven’t seen him in ten years, you should film yourself a little bit with him. I was like ‘I’m not going to be in this.’ I never wanted to be in any of my films, but they said, ‘You don’t have to put it into the movie but you should just have it.’ I said ‘Okay, but it’s never going in the movie.’ I was very sure about that.” Needless to say, James ended up playing a major role in the documentary.
“I felt like the only honest way to proceed with making this film… was to put myself in the film because I wasn’t just going to film him, I was going to be a big brother as well,” said James. “I felt I needed to be in the film and treat myself like I would treat anybody else in the film, to put an honest lens on myself… that led to a very interesting challenge as a filmmaker.”
It was a big shift in perspective because James said he had “always looked with great skepticism on personal documentaries. I was always very skeptical about the whole enterprise. It seemed like an ego thing.”
The project also took a major detour when Fielding was accused (and eventually convicted) of child molestation.
“It was going to be a fairly harmless short film and then life is not so simple and pat to begin with,” said James. “What’s the silver lining? I don’t know if there is a silver lining in this film, but it made a very different film than what I set out to make. It ends up being a film about a sex offender where part of the goal of the film was not to whitewash his life or his crime.”
The film turned out to be a much more ambitious and difficult project than he initially anticipated. “It’s the hardest film I’ve ever made, without question and I hope it remains so. But it’s also the deepest film I’ve made.”
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If there is a silver lining, James said, it’s that “I did end up making this film and I’m proud of this film now and even though it’s a long and tortuous film.”
When James set out to film Roger Ebert’s autobiography, “we started while he was alive and there was no expectation he was going to die during the making of it,” he said. But, when Ebert died about four months into the production, “the concept of the film changed. It didn’t start out that it was going to be a eulogy of Roger as well as a biography.”
While James had counted on being able to interview Ebert, he ended up having to craft e-mail questions for him while he was in the hospital with what seemed to be a minor hip injury, but turned out to be much more serious. “I was planning this big massive sit-down interview when he gets out of the hospital,” said James. “Then he died without many of my questions being answered. I wasn’t able to film him the last two weeks of his life because the doctors didn’t want us around.”
As a result, James ended up making a creative decision to weave his e-mail exchanges with Ebert throughout the film. “I think it ends up adding a very poignant and interesting element to the film that never was intended… I would have loved for Roger to live and to see the film… Roger also had a sense of drama. He didn’t purposely die, but he was completely aware of the ramifications of what would happen if he died during this film.”
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I’ve been wanting to start up a column on documentary classics for a while now but couldn’t decide what film to start with. Yesterday I watched Steve James’ “Stevie” for the first time, and — oh yeah — this is the one. Less than ten years old, it might seem too new a film to be considered a “classic.” Docs tend to age a lot quicker than fiction films, though, with only a few years needed to determine if they’re permanent must-see works or momentary imperatives that quickly become outdated. A more obvious and easy choice would be James’ “Hoop Dreams,” and certainly it deserves a discussion here in the future. However, I partly wish to recommend lesser known films requiring more attention, either than what they received to begin with or than they have had since.
As we await the release of James’ latest nonfiction masterpiece, “The Interrupters” (out in NYC July 29), as well as what is being called a “mini festival” retrospective of some of the filmmaker’s work (including this film, which screens at the IFC Center tonight as part of the Stranger Than Fiction series), it’s a great time to get acquainted with an undervalued documentarian and what’s undoubtedly his most narratively and ethically complex achievement. In fact, “Stevie” is one of the most narratively and ethically complex docs ever. It’s incredibly rich and challenging and emotionally difficult. In short, it’s absolutely brilliant.
“Stevie” presents a first-person story, in which James returns to Southern Illinois to reconnect with the young man he mentored ten years earlier as a Big Brother. Mostly the film is about this eponymous young man, an ex-foster child dealing with a complicated family dynamic and sudden yet unsurprising criminal charges. On the surface it appears to be your usual look at poor white eccentrics and miscreants, typical popular subjects for documentary cinema worldwide. But it’s a biography inside of an autobiography and in the end it’s really James’ struggle we’re dealing with. At times it feels so personal, particularly on moral and visceral levels, that it’s amazing he was able to compile the doc with a clear head. I presume co-editor William Haugse (with whom James shares an earlier editing Oscar nomination) must have been an enormous help at the steering wheel of this one.
In part I see the film as an unintentional condemning of mentoring organizations like Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, but for that I also have to see equal issue with foster care and, well, a lot of documentary filmmaking. James had personally recommended his own film to me after a discussion we had about documentarians’ relationships with their subjects after the camera is turned off. “Stevie” deals in this issue somewhat metaphorically because the reunion between Steve and Stevie is similar to what a reunion between filmmaker and film subject is like. As is another sequence in the doc where Stevie reconnects with his first and favorite foster parents after fifteen years out of touch. What is the responsibility of all these people to the person they once completely focused on, and is it more detrimental than beneficial to the “Little Brothers,” the foster kids and the film subjects, enough that these relationships are not even worth having to begin with?
For raising such a question, “Stevie” easily reminded me of Nick Broomfield’s “Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer,” which came out shortly after “Stevie” and more literally deals with a filmmaker revisiting a prior subject ten years later (the first film was “Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer”) and experiencing all kinds of inner turmoil as a result. Stylistically, however, the films aren’t that similar, as James doesn’t bring out his ethical dilemmas to the forefront of his film’s narrative too often. We’re able to mostly focus on Stevie’s story while contemplating how it’s affecting James in the back of our heads, occasionally reminded through the filmmaker’s voice-over and appearances onscreen just how significant his own involvement with this story is, and vice versa.
This is also stylistically dissimilar to the rest of James’ films, at least those I’ve seen. I don’t think he’s done anything this autobiographical, before or since, and it has a kind of Ross McElwee-ish tone at times. Primarily because of the voice-over and first-person approach, but also because like “Sherman’s March” (like “Hoop Dreams” a necessary but obvious documentary classic to look at later) it begins as one thing and then finds itself in another, larger story. “Stevie” was always meant to be a personal project about the boy James mentored, but it was initially intended as a short, and James had no idea of the legal and emotional road ahead given that Stevie’s crime occurred after a preliminary documented reunion. Other docs it falls in line with include Kim Reed’s “Prodigal Sons,” about the filmmaker’s return home to her estranged family following her own gender reassignment procedure, and the non-autobiographical family portrait of Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher’s “October Country.” Once you’ve seen this, see those (or the other way around).
In an interview with the BBC from 2003, James admitted that he thought of abandoning the film at least on one occasion. I’m glad he didn’t, and he proves through its completion that a film like this can work and is important when made by a genuine, respectful and sensitive documentarian such as himself. I tend to expect and prefer more distanced perspectives, but James is doing much to change my mind about documentaries lately (“The Interrupters” has done a rare thing in making me feel strongly for a cause, for instance). In that BBC interview he also said if he ever quit making docs it’d be because of the personal struggle he had with “Stevie.” Once you’ve seen “The Interrupters,” you’ll be glad “Stevie” didn’t make him stop — at least not yet. Based on our recent talk it’s clearly still on his mind almost a decade later. I have a feeling it will stick with me for many years, too, although not nearly as heavily.
Those of you who are in NYC and can manage on short notice to get to the IFC Center tonight really should make an effort. James will be there for a discussion afterward, and that is sure to be a big deal for both him and the audience. I can’t make it to the film but there is no way I’m going to miss the Q&A. Hopefully I see some of you there. For now, if anyone’s seen it before and wants to get the talk started earlier, drop a comment down below.
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