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The first time we saw Marshall Curry's Racing Dreams at last year's Tribeca Film Festival, we were blown away by how drawn we were to watching the lives of three very different kids ranging from 11 to 13 as they compete in the National Go Karting Championship.




Following the articulate Josh Hobson, the ambitious Annabeth Barnes and the troubled Brandon Warren over the course of a year, Curry created a film that's very much a coming-of-age story at its core, capturing the innocence of youth within the highly competitive field that's paved the way for some of the greatest racers in NASCAR. Even so, you absolutely don't have to be a fan of NASCAR racing to enjoy the movie for the story it tells, though watching the kids drive these karts around at high speeds is certainly thrilling in itself.



Curry exploded out of the gate as a filmmaker five years ago with the excellent Street Fight about the fierce battle for the mayorship of Newark, a debut so strong it received a surprise nomination at the Oscars that year. Similarly, Racing Dreams itself has won a number of awards at various festivals, proving Curry isn't going to be one of those doc filmmakers who only has one great doc in them.



ComingSoon.net got on the phone with the New York-based filmmaker last week to talk about the doc that hopefully more people will make an effort to check out this holiday weekend.



ComingSoon.net: Your last movie "Street Fight" takes place in New Jersey, which is very close to New York City, but the world of NASCAR is not something you really see or hear a lot about in New York, so how did you get involved in that world?

Marshall Curry: I was always sort of interested in it for that reason. I live in New York and pretty much nobody who I know in New York could name three NASCAR drivers, and yet my wife is from Charlotte, North Carolina, my parents are both from South Carolina and I got a bunch of family down there. When I go down South, it's huge and that's when you understand. They say it's the second-biggest spectator sport after football. It's bigger than baseball and basketball, and when you go down to Charlotte, you really see it. I just thought that was interesting that there can be something that's such a huge part of my country's culture and I don't know anything about it. One of the cool things about making documentaries is that you get to spend a year or two learning about stuff you don't know anything about. In the back of my mind, I always thought that maybe it would be interesting to do something about NASCAR then I read an article about these kids that race go karts that go 70 miles an hour. I thought that seemed pretty interesting and went to a few races and decided that yeah, there's a movie in that.



CS: How long after "Street Fight" was that? 'Cause that came out in 2005, right?

Curry: That's right, and it sort of spilled into 2006 with the Oscar stuff. It did festivals for a while and then it was on PBS, and then it was doing foreign sales and DVD, HBO Latin America, places like that, so I was doing a lot of promotion for that. This one, I really started doing research for right after "Street Fight" and we started filming for real in January of 2007, so the movie followed the 2007 year for those kids.



CS: Were they all centrally located around that North Carolina area and is that generally where most of these young racers come from?

Curry: There are a lot there. Brandon and Annabeth are both in North Carolina, Josh is in Michigan, and the racing takes place in North Carolina, but also in Pennsylvania and Upstate New York. It is considered the national series so on that level, you have kids from all over the place who are coming to compete. But I would say that it's the most popular in the South.



CS: So how did you find the three kids your movie follows? I guess some of them you found at the races you attended?

Curry: When I was first researching the project, I went to a couple of races and that's where I met Josh Hobson, the super-articulate great racer, he's like a grown-up in a child's body. When I met him, I thought, "Oh, wow, if I can find some other kids like this than there's definitely a story here." I shot a little bit of test footage and cut together a trailer, shopped it around and raised the money to make the movie and then spoke to a couple people down to the awards ceremony from the previous year. We met 50 maybe 75 kids and we would just ask then, "What does your room look like?" "What do your parents do for a living?" "What kinds of books do you like to read?" Stuff that didn't necessarily have to do with racing but would just draw out their personality and find out what kind of kids they were, and who might be interesting on camera. There were a few that popped, but those three: Josh, Anabeth and Brandon, really stood out. In fact, the awards ceremony is right next door to this giant karting convention that happens every year, and Anabeth's opening scene where she's signing the autographs where she explains that ever since she was a little girl she wanted to be the first woman to win the Daytona 500, that was actually the test footage that we shot of her. You can see that she's so funny and bubbly and articulate and charming. Once we met her, five minutes later I thought, "She'd gotta be in this movie."



CS: So you were filming right from the beginning, even as you were trying to find the right kids for the movie?

Curry: That's right, that's right, and then the third, Brandon, we just found later that night, so I had a conversation with him. One of the things that was interesting was trying to think about the way that the movie was going to be structured 'cause Brandon doesn't race against Anabeth and Josh. I decided very early that I didn't want to make another kid competition film. I mean, "Spellbound" has done it and done it perfectly. We don't need another one. Obviously, there are a number of movies like that and so to me, at the very beginning I thought, "Okay, I'm not going to find ten kids and whittle them down to see who wins the National Go Karting series." That's not what I was interested in. What I really wanted to do was make a movie about adolescence and about three kids have one foot in childhood and one foot in adulthood who happen to also race go karts that go 70 miles per hour. The racing and the series provides suspense and it's exciting to watch but even from the beginning as I was picking characters who weren't even going to be racing against each other, I knew that this was more about characters than it will be about fitting into the kid competition (thing).



CS: What were the logistics of following all three stories? Because you do show the kids at home a lot as well as these races all over the country.

Curry: What we would do is just go and spend time with each of the kids, so we'd go spend a few days or however much time, and sometimes we would just go when we haven't seen them in a little while and usually I would either shoot with a soundperson or I would do sounds with a (shooter) and then there would be a third person there. Everything we shot went onto cards rather than tapes, so we had to constantly dump those cards onto harddrives and back up the harddrives so we had a third person there who would hang out in the van with all the computer equipment and do all that. We would just kind of pop in and just hang out for a few days. I would be in touch with the families a lot and sometimes, I would know, say like when Annabeth and her Dad go to buy a race car, her Dad told me. "Oh, we're thinking of going to buy a race car," so I said "Great, I'll be on a plane and I'll be there to catch that," because I thought that would be a moment. But a lot of the stuff was just hanging around and seeing what happens. We shot 500 hours of footage to make a 90 minute movie and in most of it, nothing much did happen, but all we needed was 90 minutes.



CS: I spoke to a couple of filmmakers who made a movie about the Kentucky Derby (called "First Saturday in May") and it was amazing because they were following these horses in the year leading up to the Derby, and they had to do some reverse-engineering to figure out which horses might actually make it. You kind of lucked out because you ended up with these great kids who ended up doing reasonably well. Did you try to figure that out as well or would it have been fine if they lost or dropped out?

Curry: It definitely makes it more fun that they end up doing well, but I think if they hadn't done well, I think it would have still been a compelling movie, but it would just be a different movie. It sort of goes back to what I was saying. Whether they did well or not, I think we would have a movie about kids struggling with having family issues and feeling romance for the first time and all of those issues that had nothing to do with who became the National Go Karting Champion.



CS: They have great personalities and you do root for them, so were you editing as you went along or did you have to wait until the end when you knew how things would end and then backtrack?

Curry: We were not really editing as we were going along but I was thinking about editing a lot as we were going along. I shoot and edit and I would think as we were going, "Okay, here's where Anabeth's story seems to be going, so we need to pursue this and that." When we finally finished, each kid had 50 dead-ends and I thought, "Maybe this will be important. We need to chase this down to the very end" and some storylines turned out to not be as interesting or as significant as I thought it might be at one point, but as we were going, we were constantly talking about what is the storyline going to be for each of these kids and where is their story going to go? We were definitely thinking a lot about getting the elements that would enable us to tell the story when we got to the edit room.



CS: The narrative is very unique for a doc, maybe because you did leave it until after you had figured out the story. I know lots of doc filmmakers are editing as they go along, which must create a different dynamic.

Curry: Yeah, we edited for a year and a half and there were three editors working together on the footage, so when we were shooting, we would chase down storylines but also try not to force them. Some of my favorite material in the footage is stuff that just came out of nowhere. When Brandon called Annabeth that time and they had that phone conversation where they're saying "Who do you like? Who do you like?" and they're giggling and Brandon's toes are squirming. All of that was just kind of, it's that gold that documentary filmmakers love and I knew it as we were shooting that this was going to be one of my favorite scenes, it's going to be one of the better scenes I've ever shot. I was thinking, "Oh my gosh, I've been on that call myself and everyone I know has been on that call themselves and yet, I've never seen it in a movie before." That kind of balance between being prepared to get the beats that we need to tell the story and then just being wide open and flexible and willing to follow where the story takes you. There's a great quote from Albert Maysles. Alfred Hitchcock had said, "In fiction films, the director is God. In a documentary film, God is the director." I sort of liked that line and there's obviously a lot of truth in that.