Steve James, Kartemquin’s celebrated documentarian says he believes “We are living in a Golden Age for documentary filmmaking,” as he gets ready to fly to Britain this week to give a master class at the Sheffield Doc/Fest, June 8-12, and screen his latest doc, The Interrupters.
The quality of current documentary films is incredible, he feels. “Before, people used to want to make narrative films, but suddenly people realized what you could do with the documentary,” he says in an interview with the British news outlet, The Guardian.
He says the vogue was helped by the success of Michael Moore’s films, such as Roger and Me and Bowling for Columbine, as well as his own 1994 multi-award winning Hoop Dreams, the first of a half dozen feature-length docs James has helmed for Kartemquin over the past 20 years.
But the key is a change of attitude, with movie-goers no longer thinking that the documentary is “good for you” rather than entertaining. “People now go to see documentaries not because they think they should, but because they really want to.”
The financial pressures, however, are as bad as they have ever been, he notes. With younger film-makers embarking on projects that cost just $50,000, using ever-cheaper equipment, producers such as James (who come from the more old-fashioned “cinema verité” school of documentary-making) are struggling to fund their work.
If anything demonstrates the advantages of proper documentary investment, it’s his latest production, The Interrupters, with an $800,000 budget that was partly funded by BBC4’s Storyville.
The two-hour film, caught when Chicago’s murder rate was spiking, is an uncompromising look at life in some of Chicago’s roughest neighborhoods.
The story is told from the perspective of the “Violence Interrupters,” a remarkable group of former gang members whose job is to defuse potentially lethal situations on the streets, and to try to educate some of the city’s most disadvantaged citizens away from a life of violence.
It is film-making that addresses very urgent concerns about the modern world that James believes has a future — not least because some of the more intelligent U.S scripted films, such as The Hurt Locker or The Fighter, have been fictions shot in documentary style.
“They all have an urgency and are trying to make stories in a gritty way, but you could argue that rather than make fiction in a documentary style you could just go and shoot a documentary.”
The Interrupters will be released theatrically in August in the U.S. and the U.K. It’s scheduled to open in Chicago and other cities to be announced. Up until now, it has been exclusively screened in film festivals around the world.
