JIM MCKAY

I am playing with the assumptions that we have in our everyday life when we are tripped up or fooled and we learn something, that makes things exciting - I am having fun with that stuff, but you have to manage it so it doesn't get too cute, that's what I trying to work toward.

I still haven't figured out how to have fun on a shoot.

Initially, it was about kids at the bottom rung of the social ladder, due to their looks and their class background. But they're also outsiders in terms of their peer group.

One day I had an idea for a movie. Everything came after that.

I think there are some very evil things about gentrification.

If you're a kid who's not necessarily attractive, and you don't have money, and you're not hip and cool, chances are you're not going to feel good about yourself and want to be an actor.

Kids - in a really good way - can talk about their differences without the baggage that adults have.

But what I did think would be interesting is if we created a fictitious story of our own, and then took these stories that we had collected and assigned them to characters who would be played by actors.

Here were these college kids beating the Soviets and going on to the Olympic Gold Medal. To me, that's the greatest upset of all time in any sport that I can think of.

So, when you see a kid with ratty jeans on, wearing sneakers that aren't clean, you know they're in a certain place economically. I was interested in that experience.

I studied secondary education.

Working on the film really made me confront my opinions about change and gentrification.

Right now the thing that I have learned the most is to be grateful that I have finally gotten to a point where I am being paid to make films, after eight years.

Well, this is the second time I've done New Directors.

Dick Enberg is still around and still being as good as he ever was.

This thing that Colin Powell's son is expected to do is kind of scary when you think that television and radio and newspapers are what make people think what they think.

Kids who have no money are still figuring out a way - somehow - to dress nicely.

Of course the Munich tragedy was the biggest event in my career and the most terrible.

I like the way Wiseman builds a story in an unconventional way.

How you define yourself is a major issue for young people and adults alike.

I think Bob Costas is terrific. He's so knowledgeable. He can talk about any subject, not just sports.

There are a lot of people who like to think they don't have prejudices and that they're open people, and yet, we all have that in ourselves, oftentimes against people of our own race or our own gender or whatever.

I was the first voice of Baltimore television in 1947.

On one hand, as a filmmaker, I don't want to make a movie with guns everywhere.

Toward the end of school I started watching movies. Got a job in a movie theater in Brookline, Massachusetts.