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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.

Reel Movie Trailers: [Rec] 2 Restricted trailer

From the makers of [Rec], you know, the foreign movie that Quarantine copied because so many people in America can't be bothered to read subtitles, comes [Rec] 2, and this time a lucky few of you will be able to see it. Magnet Releasing is putting the film out in limited release on July 9th, and accordingly, they've released an age-restricted trailer, which you can view below.

[Rec] 2 picks up 15 minutes after the first film, taking us back into the quarantined apartment building where a terrifying virus has run rampant, turning the occupants into mindlessly violent, raging beasts. A heavily armed SWAT team and a mysterious government official are sent in to assess and attempt to neutralize the situation. What they find inside lies beyond the scope of medical science—a demonic nightmare of biblical proportions more terrifying than they could have possibly imagined. Above all it must be contained, before it escapes to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting world outside.

Just enter your birthday to prove you can handle such harsh material as contained within the restricted trailer and enjoy the bloody mayhem!

Synopsis

A group of rogue soldiers seek shelter from the zombie apocalypse on scenic Plum Island, only to become caught up in a bitter feud between two warring families. Sarge (Alan Van Sprang) and his motley crew of military abandoners are searching for a safe place to rest when they cross paths with Patrick O'Flynn (Kenneth Welsh). O'Flynn has been banished from Plum Island, where his family is locked in a longtime quarrel with the Muldoons. The O'Flynns see the flesh-eaters as subhuman, never hesitating to put a bullet between their eyes; the Muldoons balk at the prospect of killing their gut-munching loved ones, instead opting to care for their rotting kinfolk until scientists find a cure for the undead scourge. As the division between the two families grows deeper and wider, Crocket and his men realize that on Plum Island, the zombies are the least of their worries. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

Carl Rinsch Directing Warner Bros' New Logan's Run Remake!

Welcome to the 23rd Century. Heat Vision is reporting that Warner Bros has hired Carl Rinsch, the big up-and-coming director and Ridley Scott protege who most recently directed the The Gift short, to direct their upcoming remake of Logan's Run. We've already known that a remake of this 1979 sci-fi film was in the works, but this is fresh news that we didn't see coming! Joel Silver and Akiva Goldsman are producing the project. Back in 2005 Bryan Singer was attached to Logan's Run and was going to direct, but that was a different iteration. Now it's Rinsch's turn to kick some ass! WB is now looking to find a writer for a rewrite.

Although he's done some shorts and is attached to a number of other projects, such as 47 Ronin, Rinsch still hasn't actually directed a feature film yet. I hear he's been waiting to choose the right project to debut with, and it may be Logan's Run, although I think he might shoot 47 Ronin first. Logan's Run is actually based on a 1967 novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. The film's premise sees a future society that demands the death of everyone upon reaching a certain age. Anyone who veers from that destiny is dubbed a "runner" and is hunted by operatives known as Sandmen. Logan is a Sandman who's forced to go on the run.

I know it's another remake, but I'm actually pretty excited for this, mainly because I think Rinsch may be the next big thing and I'm interested in whatever he ends up directing. Looking forward to seeing this develop!

Next Batman Movie in 2011

New Jersey's Courier-Post talked to Batman Begins and The Dark Knight executive producer Michael Uslan, who expects the third installment of the Christopher Nolan-directed films, starring Christian Bale, to hit theaters in 2011:

Uslan will be onboard as executive producer for the "Dark Knight" sequel, which he estimates will be theaters by 2011. As for the identity of the next round of Batman's supervillains and love interests, Uslan remains tight-lipped. "It's one of those deals where if I told you, I'd have to kill you," he says with a chuckle.

In related news, while The Dark Knight did not receive the Producer of the Year Award at the Producers Guild of America Awards on Saturday (it went to Slumdog Millionaire), the movie did receive awards at the Screen Actors Guild Awards on Sunday - Heath Ledger won for Best Supporting Actor and The Dark Knight also won Outstanding Performance by a Stunt Ensemble in a Motion Picture.

MOVIE REVIEW: Prince Of Persia (12A)

The Computer Game movie- once regarded with disdain, it’s still rare to see a story make the jump from the hard drive to the drive in successfully. So, will lord of the box office Jerry Bruckheimer make a rare exception to the rule with ‘Prince of Persia: Sands of Time’?

Prince Dastan (Jake Gyllenhaal) is the adopted son of the King of Persia, and a new national hero when he storms the gates of a sacred city. However, when he is framed for the death of his father, he must go on the run with the princess of the city, Tamina (Gemma Arterton). Together, they must prove his innocence, and save the world via a mystic dagger that contains the sands of time.

The film plays like an Arabian Bond movie- our dashing, quick-witted hero leaps and bounds from one scrape to another. There’s no huge, epic battle sequences, with director Mike Newell deciding on tighter, one-on-one fights for the most part which makes it seem more like a video game than a movie. In it’s favour, the pace is lightning fast for a two hour film, and being a Bruckheimer production one doesn’t get the chance to get bored.

Jake Gyllenhaal has carved a career playing characters who are best described as ‘troubled’, so it’s good to see him changing it up a bit with a lighter, more humour-based role. In many ways this is his audition for the big leagues- he’s never been the star of a blockbuster of this size, and whilst it’s not a Jack Sparrow-worthy performance he carries the weight of this very Hollywood film with enthusiasm. Gemma Arterton similarly is heading for the big time, and as the feisty princess there’s a spark between her and Gyllenhaal which is maybe the most entertaining aspect of this movie. Kingsley looks bored throughout, and one wonders how long he can do these money-driven bad guy roles. A big surprise is Alfred Molina, playing an odd cockney version of Sallah from the Indiana Jones movies, and although it’s completely out of place he’s quite funny.

A big, overblown movie with explosions, beautiful people and a shaky script- yup, it’s a Bruckheimer film! Fortunately for him, the formula works (just about) and even though this action/adventure is nothing that will live long in the memory, you can happily while away a couple of hours and not feel cheated.