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monday q & a

Steve Jameshandout

In Chicago's roughest neighbourhoods, you'll find the Violence Interrupters - not a superhero team, but real heroes who physically put themselves in the middle of violent confrontations and try to talk both sides down.

Filmmaker Steve James, the director of 1994's critically acclaimed Hoop Dreams, follows the non-violence workers in his new documentary The Interrupters, which is screening at the Hot Docs documentary festival in Toronto. Many of them are former gang members. Some view the media and its sensationalism toward crime in African-American neighbourhoods as part of the problem. At first, they were a little leery of James's intentions.

Were there similarities in how you gained the Interrupters' trust and how they have to gain the trust of violent young people and gang members?

It was a combination of being around, putting in the time, and earning the support of the Interrupters we were following, which allowed them to be comfortable enough to let us follow certain situations.

Was there concern, given that you're not from the same background, about you not getting it right?

Initially Ameena Matthews - the daughter of prominent gang leader Jeff Fort and a former gang member herself - wondered, "What do they really want here?" She was used to dealing with local media doing a news story about a murder or something, and she might get interviewed. So she had a certain expectation of what media's interested in and not interested in. So there was this process, and I think she finally got that... we didn't just want mediations, we wanted to understand what led people to this place. It went a long way to building that trust.

And presumably the Interrupters wanted to get the message out about what they are doing?

Absolutely. The thing they are most proud of is to push this issue a little more front and centre in the public eye. There's been this sense that murders in the United States in major cities have declined since their peak in the 1990s, which is great news. But there's still a persistently high murder rate, and there's been a sense that we've done all we can do. And they think there's still a lot more work to be done. It's complicated in terms of what else is going on in these communities. It's not a hopeless situation.

Are you ever surprised by the ease people have, letting their life spill out in front of a camera?

I get that question a lot: There's one school which is that you try to be as completely unobtrusive as possible, like the old adage "a fly on the wall." You hang back, zoom in and try to make people completely forget about you. My approach over the years has been of a different camp: I believe people never forget the camera's there, but if you get to a level where you're not treating it like a big deal and you keep yourself as humble as possible, people have a level of comfort that allows them to be themselves. In these situations in the film, people are so upset that that trumps all those other concerns. There's no question the camera changes reality in some way. How can it not? I like to think, though, that what you get isn't any less true.

Do some people play up more for the camera? In one instance, you film a violent young man who is held back, as the sisters of a man he beat up become threatening.

I don't think that was for the camera, because that behaviour he's exhibiting is exactly the kind of behaviour the Interrupters will tell you is the biggest problem on the street - which is that people feel like they can't back down from anything, that whenever they are challenged they have to meet that challenge. And of course, that guy, who's a big strong guy, he's not going to let some women, in his view, have the last word there. I mean, how would that look in his neighbourhood?

Bad stuff happens to people, and it doesn't seem to matter if we're making a film about it. Institutions stick-kick a kid out of high school, or a kid still goes to prison. The social forces are so great in people's lives. I think where the camera's most powerful with this film is in making the police disappear. When we were out filming The Interrupters and the police were very curious about what we were doing, if I pointed the camera at the cops, they'd just leave, because they didn't want to be on camera.

Really?

We had a situation, which we didn't get into the film, where we were out filming in the neighbourhood with two Interrupters, and we stopped at a gas station. And we were sitting outside the car, two white guys and two black guys. And a cop pulled up, and he made an assessment that something illegal was probably going on, probably one of these stolen credit-card frauds at the pump. So he pulls up and another cop car pulls up, and they are going to arrest us, saying there's some disturbance at the pump. But nothing had happened, we were just talking.

I went and got the camera out of the truck. They said, "What's going on?" And I said, "Well, we're doing this documentary. If there's a problem here, I want to document what's going to happen." And he immediately got back in his car, the other car took off, and that was that. The joke was that the Interrupters need to have a camera in the trunks of all their cars.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

The Interrupters is screening on Thursday, May 5, at 6 p.m. at the Cumberland, and Saturday, May 7 at 5:45 p.m. at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto.

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