INTERVIEW: Acclaimed filmmaker explores life of Michael Vick in latest ’30 for 30′
Photo: Michael Vick is the subject of a new two-part documentary from filmmaker Stanley Nelson. Photo courtesy of ESPN Films / Provided by Sunshine Sachs with permission.
Michael Vick is a former NFL quarterback who saw his life and career reach the highest of highs and then descend into a precipitous fall. He was the first African-American quarterback to be drafted as the top pick in the NFL draft, and he found great success at the Atlanta Falcons.
His place at the top of the professional football league was all but cemented, but then he served time in prison for his involvement in a dog-fighting operation, the details of which are still quite shocking to read.
Still, Vick had several comebacks in him after serving his sentence. He returned to the NFL and grabbed the headlines as a member of the Philadelphia Eagles and a couple other teams.
Now his story, a complicated one that elicits strong reactions from viewers, is the subject of the latest 30 for 30 documentary from ESPN Films. This profile, simply called Vick and broken into two parts, comes courtesy of the acclaimed filmmaker Stanley Nelson, who has helmed many successful documentaries, including Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool and The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution.
“I had wanted to do a 30 for 30 for a long time, and we were talking about potential projects and came up with the idea of Michael Vick,” Nelson said in a recent phone interview. “As we started talking, it instantly sounded like a great project. There’s the football part, the sports part, but it’s also an incredible story that has so many other components, so many other facets that it was a real fascinating story for me to tackle.”
After Nelson started thinking seriously about the project, an immediate goal came to mind: they needed to get Vick on board for an interview. If the retired quarterback was unwilling to speak, there would be too many obstacles in the way to tell this story properly.
“That was almost a dealbreaker,” he said. “We were thinking, well, if we don’t get Michael Vick, what do we do? We put a lot of effort into trying to get Michael Vick to commit to be part of it, and once we did, we felt that we were pretty good. We could get the other people that we needed to tell the story. It would have been a hard story to tell without Michael in the film, so it was important for us to get Michael to commit.”
Nelson realized that one could look at Vick’s life and career through many societal and cultural lenses. As he put it in a director’s statement about the film: he was after contextualization and placing the athlete’s story in a larger historical narrative. He also wanted to discover the differing opinions amongst African-American football fans and white football fans, and how they viewed Vick’s legacy.
“I think as someone says in the film, Vick was a very, very polarizing figure,” Nelson said. “That’s what he was. … White folks saw it a lot of times in one way, and African-Americans saw it as another. I think white people many times saw it as a dog-fighting issue and dog-loving issue. Black people, who love dogs just as much as anybody, also saw it as a criminal justice issue. As someone says in the film, black people have such a history of mistreatment by the law and by the criminal justice system that a lot of times things are viewed very differently in the African-American community.”
The exploration of interesting, sometimes difficult, chapters in history is what makes Nelson engaged and interested in his documentary projects, of which there are many, spanning more than two decades.
“I think one of the great things about documentary film is it allows us to go back and look at things again, to let some time pass and in some ways cool down and say, OK, let’s look at this again,” he said. “Let’s look at this from all these different angles. There are so many more facets that we can look at this, so many different ways that we can look at this. Let’s take a real clear-eyed look after some time has passed.”
Nelson calls himself a football fan, but not a football fanatic. Many of the gridiron successes in Vick’s career he was aware of, but perhaps not all the details. As the director put it, the quarterback set the college game afire when he seemed to come out of nowhere at Virginia Tech (he originally grew up in Newport News, Virginia). Next was that historic draft pick and the many years at the Falcons.
“So I was well aware of Michael Vick, and, of course, like everybody I knew a bit about the dog fighting and the conviction,” he said. “I think the details are horrifying. I think there’s no denying that, and for us to deny that would have been crazy. They are horrifying, and I think that’s what makes the story so much more fascinating. And the fact that Michael Vick sees the things that he did … as horrifying now and is willing to talk about that, I think that’s one of the things that makes the story fascinating.”
One challenge of filming any documentary about a popular figure like Vick is that the audience will know many of the chapter headings before watching the two-part film. That means Nelson and his team need to go beyond the “x’s and o’s,” as he put it. To do just that, the director asked himself a series of questions:
“What makes this a bigger story? What are the reverberations? What’s underlying it?” he said. “What makes it more complicated? I think this story checked all those boxes. … When I go into making a film, I go in knowing that this might take a couple years to come to fruition, so I want to do a story that is at least important enough for me personally to feel like it’s something I want to be involved in.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Vick: Part I is now available to stream from ESPN Films. Vick: Part II will be released Thursday, Feb. 6. Click here for more information on 30 for 30.
