Chutin’ The Bull
Jen Scoville interviewed documentary filmmakers Harry Lynch and Jeff Fraley.
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HL: We really wanted to make sure we went out smart. We didn’t have enough time, we didn’t have enough experience, we didn’t have enough money to go and shoot tons of stuff and just hope it came together. So we set out with a plan where we knew we had to touch on certain issues of bull riding—the risks, the dangers, the bulls, the techniques—and we knew we had to capture shots to support those things.
Ranch: Was it difficult to work in a partnership?
JF: Before we met each other I think we were both the type of people who thought we could do a project like this better than anyone else, and getting together didn’t change that a bit. I feel completely confident in Harry; there are some things he should do because he’s better at it than I am. And I can see that, and vice versa. It’s nice to know your faults and your weaknesses, and also to have complete trust that your creative partner can compensate for them.
Ranch: The editing is important in any film, but it can make or break a documentary. How did that process work for you guys?
HL: The way that we did the editing was kind of unusual. We shot a little over 30 hours and then we got Don Howard involved, who is a very accomplished editor. But the only way he really had time to work on it was for us to do a pre-edit. So we wrote an outline that fit all the footage into it, culled it down to about 8 hours, and then took that to Don.
JF: That was one of great things about Don, he taught us that you make a film what it is, no less and no more.
Our outline was actually interesting because we tried to create it from an audience standpoint. It was centered around what we called “conversation points,” like if you left this movie, what would you go talk about over coffee somewhere? And we thought, well, you’re going to talk about Bodacious, you’re going to talk about Kay Thurman (the woman whose son was killed). So we had all this material—it was very daunting—and we were scared to death to do the outline because in a documentary that’s where it’s made, I mean that’s your film. So we tried to predict what the audience would find interesting. When you shoot that much footage you get attached to it, but it’s fun to think in those terms and I think we’ll continue to use that editing process.
Ranch: What advice do you have for novice documentarists?
HL: Most of all: Start with a very concrete idea, and know what you want from every interview subject and where they will fit in your script or outline. Pay close attention to plot. I think there’s a misconception that you just turn on a camera and go out and film stuff, bring it into the editing room, and then try to make something out of it. Next time we’ll probably have even more of a script than we did for Chasing. You have to think it through almost as if you were writing a screenplay. Also, filmmaking is a lot more of a business then we ever thought it was. The actual production part is creative, but organization and fundraising and having to deal with rights issues (music, footage) is a lot of red tape and accounting which shouldn’t be discouraging—I just wish we had known just how much it would take to support the film.
Ranch: As filmmakers you obviously have a lot of respect for bull riding as a sport, but what role do you think it plays in Texas culture?
HL: Like we said before, we wanted to do a Texas subject, and there are few that are more Texan than bull riding, really. These guys are like the frontiersmen. They’re constantly traveling; they are hard, tough, tough people—physically tough, mentally tough. In order to ride 100 rodeos a year, travel 300 days a year, always ride injured, you have to have incredible self discipline, and these guys have it. They’re like the people who won the west, they really are.
And most of them live a quintessential Texas lifestyle. Most of them live on ranches, most of them ranch cows, and they plan to continue to ranch when they retire from riding. Most of them drive pick-up trucks, most of them wear hats, wear boots. I mean, most of these guys are old Texas, they’ve been schooled in the old Texas way of being courteous and mannerly— “yes sir, no sir”—type stuff. They have a lot of integrity; they’re good for their word. We admired these men and their personal culture—the way they choose to live their lives—as much as we admired this Texan sport.
JF: And it’s something that needs to be preserved. To me, bull riders embody a Texas spirit. They do what they say they’re going to do and if you get in their way they’ll knock you down. There’s something very admirable about the “faith, family and friends” maxim that seems to guide their lives. It’s a Texan thing.
Ranch: I noticed there was some golf bashing going on. Donny Gay kept bringing it up and he came off as kind of bitter that bull riding doesn’t get the recognition or money that a mild-mannered sport like golf does. Is that a predominant sentiment?
HL: He’s a little bit bitter, yeah. He’s the eight-time world champion, the most winning bull rider there is. Yet he walks down the street and nobody knows who he is and he never made very much money in his career.
JF: Yeah he thinks golfers get a million bucks just to walk on grass. They just don’t see the justification, and that’s partly why they started the PBR. They feel like they do one of the most dangerous sports in the world and they want to be paid accordingly. But yeah, all those golf jabs, we kept coming across them in the editing.
Ranch: The soundtrack to the film is full of Texas music—Don Walser, Tony Villanueva of the Derailers, Chris Wall—some of the songs even have bull riding lyrics. I see you both co-produced the music. How did you get that to happen?
HL: We knew we wanted to have good music; good music is important to good movies. And we wanted to use local musicians without major label contracts. Jack Ingram, who is an Austin musician hooked us up with his tour manager John Riedie, who was interested in the idea and had a bunch of connections. And he had ideas about what bands to use. We put together a list and he approached them. Then we put together sheets of bull riding terms, things that might be appropriate in the lyrics. The musicians wrote their songs and we approved them or in one case helped do a rewrite. All the music was recorded at Omni studio here in town. We plan to release a soundtrack CD around the time that this thing is broadcast.
Ranch: What’s the next project for you guys?
HL: Another Texas documentary. We’ve learned so much from doing this one, but the next one is going to be better, more cohesive.
JF: There’s a lot here.
HL: There is a lot here. Texas has it’s own kind of culture but it also has some real anomalies that make for good subject matter. There’s some real strange stuff that goes on in this state.
Ranch: What’s ahead for the film? Are you going to take Chasing the Dream on the festival circuit?
HL: Right now we have plans for the New Orleans festival, and the Amsterdam International Documentary Festival. It ran at the Dobie for a week already; we’re going to continue to get theatrical runs in hopes of continuing the buzz and making it a viable purchase for a domestic cable movie channel, which we think would be the best domestic avenue for it. We’re also going to try to sell it to international television. We’re going to be represented at MIP COM which is the big international TV market, on September 24 in Cannes.
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