The filmmakers of The Dance, the paean to Louisiana prison boxing coach Billy Roth, sat down with senior editor Roxanne Bogucka to discuss their unusual documentary.

RB: I’m with JOHN DARLING HAYNES and SCOTT MAYO, the director and DP of The Dance. Welcome. John, why this story?

JDH: Ooh, that’s a very good question. I think that, for Scott and I, when we came, the little bit I explained in there, the first time I walked in, in ’97, to this prison, I just knew the story had to be told. And I’ll never forget the day that Scott and I decided, we came together and we talked. You know we had talked about a year beforehand that we wanted to do a film together, and what was it going to be. We were going to wait for a story that could truly move people, that could inspire people, could inspire hope. And when we sat down that day in Dallas, Texas and we said, this is the story. This is the story that can truly make a difference. And this could inspire people to want to help others, you know?

RB: So y’all had not done previous films, or had not done previous films together?

JDH: We had not done previous films together.

SM: This is a debut film for all of us. We worked in the industry. I do a lot of work in Dallas in advertising and marketing, things like that, but this is really our first effort as a filmmaking team, so. First-time try.

RB: So who was the crew? Were y’all it?

JDH: You’re looking at them. [laughs] We brought in, about two-thirds of the way through, we brought in a sound guy that came in and offered those services and helped grip. But really it was just a two-man team.

RB: So where did you get, like a lot of times we were looking at visuals that are not what people are saying at the moment. People are saying something else. Billy is talking to a fighter, giving them fighting tips and coaching or something, but the voiceover that we have is something else. So did that happen after the sound guy showed up, or… Was there like a sound person showed up and then there were these interviews that you laid over? Or how did it go?

JDH: I think I follow your question.

SM: Sometimes the narration doesn’t match up with the visuals? Is that kind of…?

RB: Yeah. Like Billy’s driving the car, he’s obviously not talking to anybody but we’re hearing him say stuff. Or there’ll be a scene where he’s talking to a fighter outside the ring, but what he’s saying is about boxing and life or something.

JDH: Right. Well and I think that goes back to the way that, when we sat down and talked about doing this film, we literally said, “Well how are we going to do this?” you know. Is this going to be a gritty film? Is this going to be a hand-held film? Our approach was, and I don’t know if this is the right word, but we wanted to make a more cinematic type film. In other words, we wanted the shots to be able to stand on their own. We wanted the interviews to be their own. I think in shooting the documentary the way we did, as opposed to put a camera on our shoulder, roll camera, and follow every bit of action, that you know there’s probably, there’s little quick moments that would go by that we’d miss, but we would get the stronger visual impressions and so that’s what we had to build our story with. We had the story in the can from an audio standpoint, from a sound-bite standpoint. And then it was to go back and build powerful images, not that every single image is an image-bank shot, but so that’s just the creative kind of mode that we took, and just try to do something different than the, what now is the typical hand-held, edgy, shot-on-video, documentary.

RB: So, have you talked to other documentarians about what that meant in terms of, I mean when you talk to other documentary filmmakers they’ll say “Oh gosh we were there for a year and we’ve got 300 hours of footage, and we edited down to this.” I mean, because you had planned these to have a certain type of visual image, does that mean that you looked for certain types of images and didn’t have as much film, or what?

SM: Actually our ratio, our catalog of footage is way, way under what a typical documentary would have. Because we shot on film, because we took a very careful approach to it, so instead of having a hundred hours of footage to go through, it was kind of an approach that we took, and shooting less. And shooting efficiently. So kind of every frame of film is almost represented in the piece, so to speak, so… it’s a different approach. It’s a different film, and hopefully it paid off creatively.

RB: Tell me a little bit more about the choices for the way it looked. It is not in fact, camera-on-the-should, let’s get it all. It’s a very styly… there are a lot of things that were, that were interesting choices, a lot of people walking in slow motion. Countless shots of Billy framed by doors and windows. What was the thought process behind this?

JDH: A lot the, your first question about the slow walking, a lot of 48-frame, which is slow motion, is, I mean, everything behind the walls [of prison] is slow. They’re there for a long time. The time is, the days go by slowly there. And when you’re working in the fields all the hours, then you come into the gym, and so for us, but there was also a, Scott kind of touched upon it, in there a beauty about the prison. And there is something just truly beautiful about the story, and we wanted to bring that element of the beauty of the story, of what Billy had done and the lives he had changed within those walls. And when you start adding 48-frames you take the edge off of the look, and that just creates that more cinematic, beautiful feel, you know. Not to kind of, it doesn’t 100 percent relate to what you’re saying but

SM: Another reason for just approaching it the way we did was just what I said in there, which was there not only are the four boxers and Billy the five characters of this film, but Louisiana was a character in this film. I mean we wanted this to come across as a Southern film. I mean we wanted it to have a Southern flair. We wanted to capitalize on that strength. Also, prison being extremely visual, it’s… we wanted to show the chain gangs, we wanted to show the long hallways, the mass amount of bars, the immense amount of barbed wire. So that became a character in the film. And as well as boxing. You could shoot boxing in regular speed and you could turn on HBO and get the same thing. There’s something beauty about the physical specimen of a highly trained and physically fit body. And it just all, it all is justified to us in that it’s a beautiful story, these are beautiful images, which enhances… and there’s a juxtaposition there, I mean it’s a beautiful image of barbed wire. Well that’s kind of strange. But it’s… you can’t get away from the fact that barbed wire is a horrendous image, it’s barbaric yet at the same time it’s beautiful, so again, the style, a preference thing. I mean some of the shots have meaning. There’s a shot of Billy in a window frame, and it’s a little metaphor. The bars almost line up like prison bars. And there’s something about him going in there, it’s nothing that was talked about in the film, but it’s almost an imprisonment for him. I mean he spends most of his time in a prison. Where as the others made decisions to get in there, but they didn’t willfully want to go inside there. Whereas he willfully decides to put himself behind the bars to help out others.

RB: I notice that you were saying that Louisiana and many things were characters, the prison as well as Louisiana, and that you wanted a distinctly Southern feel to it, which seems to come out in the music choices. Who was your music supervisor, and…

JDH: Turn to Mr. Geadelmann, he’s the man for that.

RB: Okay, and here we have Eric Geadelmann, music supervisor and also producer.

EG: Actually Scott Brazer, who is an award-winning composer, arranger, and producer, we worked together to do the music. It goes back to what they just got through saying from the visual aspects and the character, you know in the South, in Louisiana and prison, enhancing those aspects of the story as characters themselves really using music to be able to do that. The old gospel, you know the choirs, you know a lot of the blues, the real just Southern feel, and being in Nashville, I was really able to capitalize on relationships within the recording artist and music arena down there, where people really responded to the story. They really fell in love with the story and really wanted to contribute. From Sara Evans, who, you know is RCA multi-platinum artists that did “Amazing Grace” at the end, and I mean she wouldn’t let me pay her, you know. To Phil Keggy, who’s a legendary guitarist, who did all the guitar work for this. You know Phil, initially we were just going to go in the studio and just get some cues and you know he gave us over 60 minutes of original music for it. To Trace Adkins, who also provided the narration. Jack Ingram, who’s a big Texas favorite here. People just really responded to the story and wanted to come up and contribute.

RB: How’d you get your access to the prisons?

JDH: Access to the prisons came basically…

SM: John was released. [all laugh]

JDH: Access to the prisons was basically you have to go through the appropriate channels and you have to submit and that kind of thing. And you have to submit, things have become really hard to get into the prisons. It was challenging at times. But it’s just normal channels, just like any other media. No special thing that, no special process.

SM: Particularly at Angola, the Louisiana state penitentiary, a lot of, they do a lot of production companies do different projects down there, so it was a very structured, very formal process to go through, and they don’t bend that for anyone. And but again, like we touched on in there, Billy being who he is and the wardens and other representatives of the prison system being very, they were very encouraging and very supportive of the project so they did what they could to help us out, but at the same time, I mean, it’s prison and you know, it was for our own protection, the things that we had to go through as well as…

JDH: And they wanted to encourage people like Billy Roth to keep coming. Not that they’re not doing their job there, but it does make their job easier when someone else does come in to help, someone like this, that gives hope, not just the people that actually work there. The people that are coming there, week to week, or on a daily basis, really have, are making a difference, you know?

RB: Okay. The look-and-feel of the film is something that I keep coming back to. And it’s interesting because, I don’t know if you guys got to go to any of the conference panels? I went to a couple about making documentaries and there were a couple of filmmakers who were talking about… things they would do and things they would not do. And I know particularly Louis Alvarez was taking about the documentary police coming to get you for certain things, you know. There were things that would happen, and they were like, “Oh God, I wish we’d got that!” Well we could recreate it, or we could set it up, you know, and he was like, “I feel like the documentary police would come and get me.” So I’m wondering what you think are sort of documentary boundaries? You know, because obviously there’s more than just being non-fiction, you know, but it’s not as stringent as being like Dogme 95 or something, so what do you view as sort of the boundaries?

SM: I think that what you have to open yourself up to is that there are no boundaries. And when you start saying that you can’t approach it in a certain way, then you’ve put a boundary around it. You know it’s purely instinctive, it’s purely creative, and it’s purely preferential. And for us as a filmmaking team, when three of us get together and we decide how we want to approach it, and all three of us lay our ideas on the table and they match up, that was just our instinct. And we really wanted, we felt that that, the way that we approached it in being more…

JDH: Cinematic, is what I said.

SM: In being more cinematic was for a couple of reasons. Like I said that there being so many different visual characters in this film. Nothing was staged. It’s just the way that you decide to go about doing it, and I think that our response to this film, in doing it that way, has set us apart. I don’t necessarily think that now we’re apart from everybody else, but people have, even you asking your questions, it has drawn something different to this film that other films don’t get. And in today’s media, I mean you have to set yourself apart. We want to tell a true story, which we did, and we wanted to do it effectively, which I think we did. We just had to do it by unconventional means. And actually, we kind of went back to what I would consider more old-school philosophy. Before the DV cam, and before the digital filmmaker came out, it was a more… you know, film is expensive, you have to approach it in a different attitude. It’s more of a science. You can’t just set the iris at one level or put it on automatic focus and iris and go. And so…

RB: But do you feel like that was particular to this story or if y’all were to sit down and tell another story would it maybe not lend itself to this approach?

JDH: We’ve started another story. And the story, and we’ll shoot it very, we’re shooting it basically the same way. I think it’s somewhat our filmmaking team—

RB: Your brand.

JDH: —style. This is our deal. And granted, there may be some stories that we would use a little more hand-held, or we might do some little bit edgier techniques, but this is us. I think when you think of Haynes-Geadelmann Pictures and Casa Grande Entertainment, you will see this type of beauty.

EG: And there’ve been some battles over that too, you know? [laughs] Not so much from the style but from editing, just the creative collaboration that typically goes on about how long to pause on that beautiful shot and those type of things, so it’s a… I think John’s point, that I think it is more of a branding aspect of what we’re doing and I think that it helps identify future projects in terms of what projects lend themself to this style as well. As opposed to trying to force something. The project that John was referring to is a really significant project that you’ll be hearing more about in the near future, for a major museum. It’s a Holocaust, World War II project about the liberation of a concentration camp. You can’t imagine a more grotesque type of visual or type of project or story setting, but the way that we have approached it is significantly different that, in just the early work of what we’ve done has been really, really effective. And so I think it is more of a branding thing. And I think it also really plays to those guys’ strengths. John is a painter and Scott as a director of photography, that their talents visually are really exceptional, and using the visuals to really enhance the storytelling, I think it’s effective.

SM: Just one little small thing is that, like I said before, when you make a story, you want it to be true and real. But you also want people to be able to see it, you know? You want people to be able to see it beyond the film festival circuit. And so I think that the approach was also to create something that was palatable for the masses. And I think that…

RB: I think you’re underestimating the masses.

SM: I just, I think that…

EG: What?

RB: I think he’s underestimating the masses.

EG: Meaning?

RB: I think you can show something that is, I guess, what your film has in spades is production value. It looks great, you know. But I don’t think that people, just because people maybe want to see something like Spiderman or something that has an incredible CGI doesn’t necessarily mean that they won’t sit still to watch something that’s rough-looking. Which doesn’t mean that it has to be rough-looking. But I don’t think…

SM: Yeah, well certainly the suggestion is not that it has to be that way for a mass amount of people to be interested in it. Again, it’s just, it’s I think that now everything has gone that way? And so to create something different, we have now come back to the other side, so to speak. Purely creative.

EG: Yeah, purely creative.

JDH: Yeah, nobody’s saying…

RB: No, it’s another choice.

JDH: Another choice.

RB: Yeah. So where does The Dance go from here?

JDH: The film will continue on the festival circuit and as I indicated in there, we’re starting preliminary discussions with some potential distributors that are interested, and we’ll see. We’ll see. So we’ll keep you posted.

RB: Let’s see, I’m sure there was something else. I had a question, just a content question that I kind of wondered as I was watching him be “Pops.” These guys are calling him “Pops” when he’s teaching them to box, and to be men. And I wondered if Billy’s son boxed.

JDH: That’s a very good question. His son actually, when he was a child, a baby, came down with a high, high grade of fever, and it somewhat made him physically challenged. And so he was never really able to participate in sports to the… He was always challenged. So he never was really able to box. He might have played around a little bit but it wasn’t a professional thing or even an amateur thing. It was just, maybe playing around the house. And, but he’s teaching right now his grandchildren are very very capable, really good athletes. And he has taught them how to box. He has taught them how to play football, baseball, Billy coaches them in every sport.

EG: They have like powerlifting records and all kinds of stuff.

JDH: Yes. So they’re great athletes.

RB: And just studying Billy Roth’s life and his mission led you to have the quote from MATTHEW* at the beginning?

JDH: That was actually a great choice by Eric.

RB: Good choice.

EG: Thank you. Thank you very much. No, we just kind of…

RB: Good material.

EG: Trying to, you know, identify something, some type of quote, something to kind of set up the story. And you know we really just came upon that, in that, you know… It was really powerful. And those three lines sum up Billy Roth, you know. And I think with Aaron Neville’s music with it, and those visuals, it was just… at least it worked for the three of us. I don’t know if it worked for anybody else, but [all laugh]

RB: Worked for me. I have to tell you that I came to this movie from Strange Fruit. So I came to this movie from having seen a movie with a very powerful song and many many images of black men being lynched. I came to this movie and saw black men being liberated, and the just the emotional juxtaposition for me was like, I came out of Strange Fruit, I’m like “Oh Lord help us.” I came to this movie, I’m like, “Okay, it’s getting better.” Thank you all very much.

EG: Thank you very much. We appreciate your time and your questions.

SM: And your thoroughness, my gosh.

*Matthew 25:36: I needed clothes and you clothed me. I was sick and you looked after me. I was in prison and you came to visit me.