Austinist Interviews SXSW: Hell on Wheels Director Bob Ray

It must be scary starting a project like that and not knowing where it’s gonna go. I’m in constant awe of documentary filmmakers who are able to do something like, for example, American Movie. How did those people have any idea that their subjects would be such a goldmine?

Totally. It could have failed miserably. And you’ll see documentaries where they’ll do that, but they’ll film three or four people, and then leave one or two on the cutting room floor. Like Errol Morris with Fast, Cheap and Out of Control—he was also filming that guy, Dr. Death, who is the guy who built the electric chair. And he ended up being so compelling to Errol Morris that he made a whole different documentary about him. Those are the good strokes of luck.

And we had that too. We didn’t know where our story was going to take us, and so there were individuals who we filmed a little more of; maybe more of their work or of their personal life, but that wasn’t really our focus. Our focus was more on the society than on the individual, as far as a social movement and the inner workings of the society that they created, which was their “derby world”. So we didn’t do a ton of that personal, Hoop Dreams, “following them around to their house” kind of stuff. We tried to do enough of it that people are empathetic and understand the characters, but our goal was to not be in there for surgeries, or divorces or miscarriages—that’s not what our story is about.

Obviously this took years to happen…

Five years and three months!

How much did the project change over such a long a span of time?

Every week our project changed. The thing was, we knew from the get-go that as long as they try—whether they succeed or fail—as long as they actually try, we have a movie. But we didn’t know. Maybe they were only going to have one game and go “we did it!” and that would be it.

At first, they had to learn how to play derby; they got the rules wrong at first—and that’s no slight against them, it’s just that there aren’t derby handbooks out there. It’s not like football or basketball where you could just go down to the library and pick up the rule book. But we figured, if they had their full season, we’ll frame it around the championship. One of their goals was to make derby a legitimate sport, so that was gonna be a little bit more of our story. It’d be a story about someone creating something.

Turns out after the first game, there was nearly a walkout, and there was a huge rift forming between the management and the workers. I say workers because I sort of equate it to unionization of industrial workers in the 30s or revolutionary groups forming in unstable countries in Central America. It had that feel to it, and it worked out for us in the sense that we took a sociological approach form the beginning—it was much more interesting to us than the personal drama. And then the ownership became an issue because the people who were putting it together didn’t have a lot of business experience, so they made a lot of mistakes. So that became a point of contention with a lot of the skaters. By midseason, though, they had some positive events in terms of publicity and other things, so that managed to push down the uprising a little bit. But ultimately, that just kept things boiling until they boiled over, and then there was a huge rift that was beyond repair.

And I’d never wish that on anybody, because it was so painful for the people involved. And people say, “Why are you so serious? It’s just derby!—but if you’ve ever tried to start a business, ever been in a band, ever tried to run a zine, ever done anything where you have to invest a lot of time in it, you understand. To an outside person it’s like, “Oh, it’s just a little zine”, but to you it’s everything. You spend 60 hours a week doing it, and you become emotionally invested and financially invested… every part of you is invested. And so, hell yeah they take it personally, and they get really emotional about it.

That must be the weird part about making a documentary— that you have to be a little bit excited when things go wrong.

Yeah. And that would be on my list of things I don’t like about making a documentary. When tragedy happens to people who are close to you, you have to be right there to film it. And it sucks. It sucks to have that burden of, “what do you include, and am I being as objective as I can be?”

I’m a narrative filmmaker by choice. This was just something really cool that was happening, but I’m looking forward to getting into narratives again, because it’s a lot more fun, and you don’t have those burdens, and you’re not playing with people’s real lives.

Your background is sort of varied—you’ve done some music videos and some narrative fiction.

Yeah. I’m all over the place. And I just finished a cartoon too, so I covered the other base that I hadn’t touched yet!

What do you like doing most?

I use this analogy, because I have sort of an art background in that I’ve always been drawing and creating things like that: If you’re creating a sculpture, you can get a giant chunk of rock and chisel away at it until you get what’s left of that giant rock, and that’s your sculpture. Or you can start with a chicken-wire frame, and add to it and add to it until you’ve created something that becomes your sculpture. And I’d equate narrative filmmaking with the chicken wire approach. You start with an idea, and you start putting the elements together to get it to take shape. Whereas with this type of documentary, we kind of know the story, but really you do it all in post. There are a million ways we could have told this story, so we just had to chisel away at until we had something that was presentable—something that conveyed the messages and the emotions that we wanted to.

I know you used to shoot skate videos – did that help with filming the action during the games?

Definitely. A few times I put on rollerskates [and filmed]. It looks really cool—it’s a bit shaky though, because I had to use the rental skates, which aren’t very good. But yeah, I think that helped a bunch. And a lot of the girls’ boyfriends were skateboarders, so they helped us film too. Most skateboarders have operated a camera, because one of their buddies has one and they want to see how they look.

Are you excited about showing the film at SXSW?

I can’t imagine a better festival for this premiere. I mean, Sundance or Toronto would be great, but then neither of the leagues would get to see it. And the Paramount is such a great theatre—everything about it is beautiful. And we’ll have all the support of all the people who’ve worked on it. A lot of people helped us out over the course of these five years, and a lot of that is because I’ve been making films here since the mid 90s, so we could have people come in and help us film a bout.

Then the other side is, there is still a lot of animosity between the two camps. So it’ll be interesting because it’s to some degree opening up old wounds. It had some really, heavy emotional parts, and it’s gonna be interesting to see some of the women who actually lived it three, four, five years ago, and haven’t really talked about it much since then.

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