Director's Statement

After graduating from college where I had majored in comparative religion, I wanted to make documentaries. I couldn't imagine a better job than watching and listening to people, learning from them and about them -- and then structuring what I had learned into a film that engaged and moved an audience.

I convinced a filmmaker who was directing a documentary for PBS to let me help him, and when that was over, I moved to NY to look for a job that would pay me to do it.

I got hired, initially as a writer, at a company doing touch-screen interactive documentaries for museums. When the Internet took off, the company began focusing more on web design, and I stayed there producing and directing educational websites. It was great work -- I led the team that designed and built the Metropolitan Museum’s website -- but I knew that I really wanted to make films. The internet is peerless when it comes to conveying and organizing information, but it not so good at touching its users’ lives. I wanted to tell stories with characters that an audience gets to know over an hour or ninety minutes.

I had saved up some money and thought, “I could either go to film school or take time off of work and just make a film.” So I left my job and took a leap; I bought a camera and a few days later started shooting in Newark.

I didn’t have any formal film training, and most of what I learned was the result of trial and error. At night after shooting I’d go home and watch the footage and try to figure out how to improve the light or the framing, or -- equally important -- how to make people more comfortable while I was filming them. Most of my editing knowledge came similarly, from spending month after month holed up in my apartment, cutting and recutting scenes, experimenting until I liked them. I also read about documentaries, and I watched scores of them, paying close attention to how they were constructed. Sometimes, if I really liked a film, I would watch it a few times in a row and perform a kind of obsessive exegesis, writing down how long each scene lasted and what role it played in the story arc (e.g., building tension, breaking tension, etc.)

I wanted to experience and learn every aspect of filmmaking, which was convenient since I didn't have money to hire others. This made it slow-going, however -- just logging the 200 hours of footage took me months -- and I broke it up with a number of short, finishable projects. During the two years that I worked on Street Fight, I made a short film for the Rainforest Foundation about a tribe in Brazil who had successfully fought off ranchers and miners, and another about an elementary school education project in Jamaica.

Without being too starry-eyed, I think that documentaries can be a force for good in the world. At their best, they expose people to new issues, struggles, characters and lifestyles. They challenge us and help us to understand -- and hopefully care about -- each other. The films that I love most do this seductively, using humor, irony and drama to lure us out of our comfort zones.

Street Fight is a film about race and politics, but my goal in making it was to attract an audience that does not necessarily care about, or does not know that they care about, race and politics. I hoped that if I focused on telling a good story -- if it felt more like a movie than a lecture -- the issues would find their own way out.

So while the critical response to the film has been gratifying, much more important to me have been the Audience Awards from non-experts and the comments that I've gotten from regular people in places like Newark and Iowa and California and Amsterdam.

Marshall Curry
11/05