'Hoop Dreams' brought us back to our roots in veríté filmmaking. What we saw in the powerful emotional scenes within it - at nearly three hours long and with no star power - was an outreach to a different and more important audiences. There were the similarly involved folks who saw it that were part of the struggle, but there was also a new audience that weren't empathetic or sympathetic to the people we were portraying. They would never watch a film about inner city families, but they watched 'Hoop Dreams.'

Gentrification can be a plague, as it eats up neighborhoods.

'Hoop Dreams'was an unbelievable struggle. We were trying to raise money in the midst of shooting it, and just explaining to people took a lot of effort. I remember talking to someone who should have gotten it, this person was in Public Television, and they didn't think we had a story, until 'maybe something bad happens to one of the boys.' Besides being somewhat heartless, it was also wrong.

That's what I love about documentary filmmaking, we never know where the story is going, we don't know what is going to happen next, and we're inside a culture of people that you have to figure out in many ways. It's a relationship between what you thought might have been the story, and what happens in the 'field.'

'Hoop Dreams' brought us back to our roots in veríté filmmaking. What we saw in the powerful emotional scenes within it - at nearly three hours long and with no star power - was an outreach to a different and more important audiences. There were the similarly involved folks who saw it that were part of the struggle, but there was also a new audience that weren't empathetic or sympathetic to the people we were portraying. They would never watch a film about inner city families, but they watched 'Hoop Dreams.'

None of our films look alike, we are very dialectical in our approach to each one, and 'Hoop Dreams' was no exception. That's what I love about documentary filmmaking, we never know where the story is going, we don't know what is going to happen next, and we're inside a culture of people that you have to figure out in many ways. It's a relationship between what you thought might have been the story, and what happens in the 'field.' Out of that comes the story, which was exactly what happened with 'Hoop Dreams.'

Every ten years or so, I liked to do a film about an artist - this allowed me to reflect on our own work.