The Man Behind Bigger, Stronger, Faster

Thanks for taking the time to talk to us! I throughly enjoyed the film. How did you get into film? Particularly documentary film making? Well it's interesting, I didn't want to make a documentary, but my brothers and I had been talking about the whole steroid issue and I was already a filmmaker at the USC film school. I was also probably the only filmmaker who is a power lifter (I can bench press 500 lbs) so between lifting weights and making movies and it was the kind of the time to put them both together I guess.

 

When did you decide that this was a documentary you wanted to make? Part of it came from talking to my brother Smelly about this guy in a locker room. He was laughing about this guy Andrew who was on the juice and we started think, well, maybe there's more to this. Before that, my producer Alex and I were discussing doing a film together about the subculture of bodybuilding and body obsession but we really didn't have our finger on what the subject matter would be, something to do with the gym you know? But it all kind of came together to be about steroids and American culture through talking to my brothers and talking to my producer.

 

Tell me about the process of making the film, how did you bring people on board? How did you initially finance the film? Well it's pretty simple, Alex Buono our producer worked out in Gold's Gym with me and we were talking about this project. I was actually selling memberships there just to pay the bills (as a filmmaker you're not always on the top of the world money wise) so it basically came about that he wanted to produce it. So I went over to his house basically every day and a friend Tamsin Rawady who is a documentary filmmaker got attached to the idea as well. We all started to develop the idea together as a team so we spent about 3 months writing the treatment and my producer Alex gave it to his agent rob who also represents Jim Czarnecki, the producer of Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11. Jim read the treatment and fell in love with it so he got on board to produce as well, but he lives in New York so he was more of a supervising producer. From there we basically went out and started raising money and Jim kind of served as our insurance policy to get the film done on time and make it all happen.

 

How did the film change from inception to the final cut? Are their interviews you wanted to get but couldn't? Any additional points you wanted to make? You know it's funny from the original treatment to the final cut the film changed a lot and I'll tell you the original treatment was so well written and thought out so the question was: how can we get this on film? So we went through this whole process of interviewing all these people and we thought a movie about steroids just wouldn't cut it so we set it up to be about cheating in general. After awhile we realized that the steroid issue was so big and complex that we had to come back to it so we ended up cutting the film back so it ended up pretty close to the original treatment. As far as interviews, we obviously wanted to interview Arnold [Schwarzenegger], Hulk Hogan, and Sylvester Stallone but a lot of times there are some things people don't want to talk about. It was something we just had to put our heads together and figure out how to tell the story without actually having those interviews.

 

This film puts you and your family under a lot of scrutiny, how did you initially pitch the film to them? How do you think they will be impacted by the film's release? Um, I used completely hidden cameras and they don't know that I made the movie [laughs]. Basically my brothers wanted to talk, they had a story they wanted to tell and in talking to my mom I just said, “Hey, you know I want to do this movie about steroids,” and she said, “Oh, so you want to involve your brothers, so I guess you're going to talk about how you guys are all natural even though everyone else is taking steroids.” I told her that there were actually a lot of things in the movie that she probably wouldn't like and she said, “Yeah, I'm fine with everything, I don't really care.” You know I would always ask my mom to be in my projects and if I told her I needed someone to play the crook she would be like, “No I'm not going to be in it!” Now that I finally get her to be in one of my movies it's actually quite a bit different different than she expected. I think in the end that if you really watch the movie, she likes the way it helps our family communicate.

 

I was really struck by how exhaustive the film was in terms of the number of interviews you did, the lengths to which you went to make one point another, are there parts of the film that you would have liked to include but couldn't for lack of time? What ended up on the cutting room floor? We had a cut that I thought was actually really good, it was 2 hours and 15 minutes which is really long for a documentary. You know I was watching Bowling for Columbine and noticed they could have cut a minute here and a minute there and put in other stuff. So when I tried to pack the documentary full of stuff at like an hour and 49 minutes it was way too full. Even now it's kind of a dizzying pace but it's just the right tone and you don't get too confused. What I didn't realize when I was first making the movie was that sometimes you just need to breath, you need a couple beats for people to digest the information.

 

What's next for you? Any more projects in the works? I'm working on a TV pilot about Gold's Gym basically, it's sort of the office with wacky characters that I've met in the gym over the years and the little situations that have come about. I'm also working on a documentary tackling the subject of obesity.