Reel Racing: A Conversation with ‘Earnhardt’ Docuseries Director Joshua Altman

If you head on over to Amazon Prime on Thursday (May 22) at some point or another you’ll see the mustachioed face of Dale Earnhardt gracing your screen.

Ahead of the first NASCAR Cup race broadcast on the streaming service — the Coca-Cola 600 this Sunday (May 25) — Prime has debuted Earnhardt, a four-part docu-series tracing the life, career and legacy of the ‘Man in Black.’

I was given a chance to see screeners of episodes and also chat with Joshua Altman, the director of the series. He also worked as editor on Minding the Gap, a highly-acclaimed 2018 skateboarding documentary that was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the following year’s Academy Awards.

Altman discussed his approach to the documentary while not being a NASCAR fan, working with the Earnhardt family and more.

Adam Cheek, Frontstretch: Can you walk me through the genesis of the series and how it came together?

Altman: I’m good friends with Dan Lindsay and [collaborator] TJ Martin, and we’ve been wanting to work together for a while. About three years ago, Dan stumbled on an idea. … As he started diving in deeper, he realized there was a really rich story there. He came to me with it and we were sitting down workshopping it one night.

He started pitching the ending — this race, and it comes down to this climactic moment with these three racers all on the [track] at the same time. And there’s a tragedy that hits with Dale Earnhardt dying. It was very fascinating. I went home that night and went down a rabbit hole, sort of started watching footage and then watching Dale [Earnhardt] Jr. in interviews that he had had. I was hooked and was like, ‘well, this is that this is certainly something I’d like to do.’

Cheek: Were you a racing fan before this project?

Altman: No — that’s the interesting thing. None of us were racing fans. For me, I tend to gravitate towards projects where I’m not a fan, where I don’t know much about the world. I like things that I don’t really know much about the world, sort of learning and sort of like a sponge to soak it up. I think that’s a good way to communicate things to an audience.

Cheek: Was Earnhardt initially intended as a documentary film, but then turned into a docuseries?

Altman: Initially, I probably wanted it to be more of a film than he did. Dan initially was like, ‘I think it’s a series.’ I was like, ‘well, I don’t know if I’m gonna watch four hours of NASCAR,’ not being a fan; nor do I know that somebody else is going to watch that. So then we started laying it out.

The deck that we started making to pitch it slowly got bigger and bigger. By the end, it was like 56 pages and it was pretty clear that we can’t contain this in an hour and a half, or even two hours. Then, as we started breaking that out, it became four. As we got into the edit, more stories came up, which I think is just the nature of the process of talking to people and starting to get more of the details and understand more of the story.

Cheek: I remember watching Minding the Gap and absolutely loving it. Can you take me through making that and if you were able to apply that experience to Earnhardt?

Altman: For sure. [Minding the Gap director] Bing [Liu] had come to me before we made All These Sons together. … Bing and I met, started hanging out and talking and he roped me in. He was like, ‘hey, do you want to watch my rough cut of my film?’, which was Minding the Gap. At the time, I wasn’t available to come on and edit it, so I came on initially to do consulting. Eventually, [I] just basically started editing it alongside him. The two of us sat in a small kitchen in Venice, Ca., and just edited the thing back and forth and then brought it around to what it was. Actually, we’re moving on to another project together right now.

But so how does that relate to this? In a way, I think all of my story experience builds on itself. How do you make something that takes people into a world — like I said, I wasn’t a NASCAR fan and a lot of the people on this project were not NASCAR fans. How do you make something much like [Minding the Gap] did, where it wasn’t meant just for skaters? How do you make something that appeals to a wide audience and taps into something universal?

Cheek: Obviously, Prime is broadcasting some Cup Series races. How did it come about for Earnhardt to be on Prime as well?

Altman: I think [the broadcasts were] a big part of it. … They were really passionate about expanding this, getting into this market and having Dale Jr. be like the head of it. That definitely factored into it. The reason we got it done as fast as we did was to make sure that we hit this premiere window for them.

But I think at the end of it, the Earnhardts themselves are kind of the most down-to-earth, salt-of-the-earth people. I just fell in love with them very quickly — Kelley, Dale and the entire family. Despite having this name and this place in the industry, despite having everything that comes along with it, they still had humility and were, like, normal people. Hopefully, that will resonate with audiences as well.

Cheek: What was it like working with Dale and the rest of the Earnhardts?

Altman: Working with them was amazing. I can’t thank them enough for the trust that they put into us first, into making this, but they also just opened up themselves completely and were open to be honest about everything: the good, the bad, the ugly. In addition to that, Dale would sit with me for, like, four hours in interviews sometimes. [He was] very ready to talk and help us get our story straight and understand everything, and also just go deeper with us with a lot of things that we, as filmmakers, had questions about.

All the other people seemed very similar, like Darrell Waltrip. We went to Tennessee to hang out with him, and he just welcomed us into his house. They were just sweet, loving people who also come from this incredible [background]. He took us to his dealership, and he’s got all these trophies. Like an incredible amount of success that you can have and still be humble. I just don’t know how many other sports have that.

Cheek: NASCAR has been doing more media recently, with the Netflix series and more TV documentaries. What was the initial approach to Earnhardt? Senna completely uses archival footage without cutting to interviews, whereas others rely more heavily on that.

Altman: Senna was definitely an inspiration for us. We love Senna. I think [director] Asif [Kapadia] did a great job with that. Though, in a lot of ways, we didn’t want to limit ourselves to not being able to show interviews, specifically because some of our characters [are] the emotional pieces. … We wanted to transport people back in time, which I was just talking to somebody yesterday about that, and they sort of said that back to me, which was nice to know that was working.

But we have this time capsule. We were given access to 15 petabytes of footage. That’s with a P. I don’t even know what that really means. … We were like, how do we dissect that? How do we get as much of it as possible that we need for this and really allow the audience to live in that world and to experience this — to be in a time capsule, to go back to the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, and really live in there?

That was a big part of our concept from the jump — to really use the footage to transport people, use that primarily to tell the story and allow the interviews to sort of elevate it and sort of give that human touch to it all.

Cheek: Is there anything you want viewers to know going in or anything special about the series you want to spotlight?

Altman: It’s like you want people to just experience this, … but to come in and know that whatever expectations they have, it’s not that. A lot of times, you could sit down with people to interview them, whether family members, NASCAR drivers or whomever — and they’d be like, ‘what are you guys doing this for? This has already been told.’

And we’re like, ‘in our mind, it hasn’t. Not properly.’ We’ve made something that I think is very different than anything out there that’s been made about Dale Earnhardt. On top of that, for people who aren’t fans, people in the NASCAR world know the name and they look at him as this icon, right?

People outside the sport, from what we learned, only know his name. They kind of know that he died on the track, but have a very limited knowledge. For us, after researching this, we were like, wait a second — Dale Earnhardt should be seen next to Babe Ruth, next to Michael Jordan, even next to Elvis. He’s an American icon. He’s someone who completely transformed the sport.

He wasn’t just an incredible athlete, the best in the game; he was also someone who completely transformed the sport. He changed everything, down from the way that you market yourself and make money off yourself, with a ninth-grade education. It’s pretty profound. In my mind, I just want people to see that and really understand what an incredible person he was.

Cheek: You worked on a 30 for 30 a while back and did a project on Pat Tillman. The latter obviously has a side beyond sports, but how did this compare to other sports projects?

Altman: Every sport is different. Cutting a NASCAR race is very different than cutting football, or any other sport. For us, it’s trying to figure out … how to make those things powerful. Senna did a great job with that.

It all came back, in a lot of ways, to [how] we were pitching this: we’re making a family story. Much like in the way of The Godfather, where it’s not a mob story; it’s a story about a family that just happen to all work in the mob. That’s how we saw this. We’re making a family story; it just happens to be centered around people who work in NASCAR. That’s the way we embraced telling it.

One of the early pitches that I had for this is like David O. Russell’s The Fighter. Great film. Part of it is that every scene you cut to the family connects to the fight that’s coming. Everything is interconnected in that way. I think that’s the way that we looked at how to approach this, in a way where the drama off the track is intertwining with the drama on the track.

Cheek: Did you get a chance to go to any races while working on Earnhardt?

Altman: I did. Man, I went to my first race at North Wilkesboro. Strangely, our first race ended in a fight, between Kyle Busch and Ricky Stenhouse Jr. That was fun. We had a blast. That was one of the things too for us, in experiencing a race for the first time — how do we communicate this to an audience? The feeling of being at a race, the guttural sensation of the engines. It’s not just loud. It’s something else.

We had an incredible sound mixer, Lawrence Everson, who did a film called Wildcat that I was a part of. He went out to the jungle for the film and recorded sounds. So we sent him to a race — not necessarily to record, because we’re not gonna be able to use a lot of it, since present-day engine sounds are different — but I was like, ‘I just want you to experience what this feels like.’

Cheek: Since you didn’t come into the project as a fan, did you have any takeaways of NASCAR itself or Earnhardt’s story?

Altman: I think the craft of it all was something I didn’t fully understand and embrace, until talking to those drivers and watching the footage that we got last year. Just how hard it is to be that good, let alone be in the sport. There are 43 drivers, whatever the number is, that get to drive cars every Sunday.

To be in that group, there’s no other sport that compares to that. To play basketball professionally, to play football professionally, the number’s so much bigger. It’s such a narrow window to be one of those people, let alone to be one of the greats. I didn’t quite get the appreciation that I had for that until this.

And the filmmaking is very much like a team sport. I would never be able to do this without the team that I have behind me. All of us — from Dan and TJ down to the PA, DP or the editors — it was very much a collective unit to make this thing.