I met with James and producer Zak Piper just hours before the premiere at the Prospector Square Theater in Park City, Utah to discuss the project, which began on July 4, 2018. James shared that he had always wanted to create a “portrait of Chicago,” but the timing never seemed right until the recent intersection of the open mayoral elections and the disturbing police shooting trial. James said that he wanted to “…use the election and the trial as important spines … and hopefully [show] a larger portrait of the city and its people and what’s going on now. And what’s going on now in Chicago is what’s going on across America. The struggles that Chicago’s having with money, with race, with police, with development, with gentrification: all these are issues are national in scope and they’re very potent in Chicago.”
The film finds just the right moments, places, and people to represent the varied neighborhoods of Chicago. His access and vérité style, is awe-inspiring. From local shops, diners, celebrations, the Board of Elections, City Hall, political fund raising events, and politicians’ headquarters and homes, James and his small crew comprised of Piper and James’ son Jackson, talk intimately with residents and politicians, capturing the passionate unrest, the ennui surrounding the justice system, and the corruption coursing through the city’s venous system.
To the viewer, trust building and intricate planning seem imperative, but James stated, “A lot of it was serendipitous.” He continued, “…we’ve been doing this for a while and I think if people understand why you’re doing what you’re doing and they think it’s a good idea or believe in it, then people are remarkably open and they want to be heard. Most of the films that we’ve done … have been about people who tend to be [the] marginalized voices, [those] who don’t feel like anyone cares what they have to say. So when we show up and the way in which we ingratiate ourselves into situations, we let people know that we’re here to hear from them and people have a lot to say.”
The passionate conversations, particularly in the South Side barber shop where Harith Augustus was shot by police in July, 2018, leaves a lasting impression as “a knock down drag out argument” occurred between the owner and customer, yet there was a sense that the two listened to one another without harboring any
ill will afterward. James said,
“One of the things we were struck by, and I’m going to generalize a little bit here, but I think in the Black community, there’s more of a willingness to engage in that way and not have it be, well, I’m leaving, I can’t deal with you. … That rarely happens, in my experience, in the white community. And that white barbershop, if they had differing ideas of who should be mayor, they probably steered clear of talking about it too much because there’s this feeling of if we’re friends, we can’t get into things.”
Piper added, “We were in contact with the campaign so we knew where some of that was happening, but we were also following a lot of things on Twitter and the AP Day Book. … We would meet in the morning and have an idea about what we were going to do, but then … we’d meet someone and it would turn into a whole other thing.” James punctuated this stating, “A lot of it is just a process of
discovery while we’re out there … just being open to where it wants to take you and where the story wants to take us. That’s the reason documentaries are so exciting to make because you’re not working off of a script. You have ideas about what you need to get, you have to, but it’s based on what we’re seeing and capturing, not on what we think it should be.”