Every year, the Sundance Film Festival premieres dozens of great independent films, many that often have to struggle to find an audience in theaters. When James Strouse’s Grace is Gone, starring John Cusack, won the coveted Audience Award in 2007, it was thought Strouse would be a filmmaker to watch. For whatever reason, the movie failed to make a mark when The Weinstein Company released it later that year. Undaunted, Strouse returned to Sundance in January 2009 with his follow-up The Winning Season, a very different movie that involves sports and even a bit of humor.
It stars perennial Sundance man Sam Rockwell as Bill, a divorced alcoholic working as a busboy in a restaurant until his friend, played by Rob Corddry, asks him to coach his high school’s girls’ basketball team, because he thinks Bill could turn them around. Before you can say “Bad News Bears,” Bill is putting the team, made up of Emma Roberts’ Abbie, Shareeka (Half Nelson) Epps’ Lisa, as well as Rooney Mara, Emily Rios and Meaghan Witri, through rigorous paces to try to make them the best team in the league. Along the way, he helps the girls with their problems and they do the same for him.
Last year at the Sundance Film Festival, ComingSoon.net sat down with James Strouse, Sam Rockwell, Rob Corddry, Emma Roberts and Shareeka Epps for a rousing interview. It was easily one of the oddest combination of actors we’ve ever interviewed at the same time, but we did the best we could as Corddry had everyone cracking up so much it was hard to maintain any sort of decorum.
ComingSoon.net: I guess we’ll start with you, James, since as with most movies, this started with you. “Grace is Gone” was a big hit at Sundance a few years back. Why did you want to do a basketball movie and a comedy and go in such a different direction with this one?
James Strouse: I just wanted to go in a completely different – not that it’s completely different direction. I think this film has a nice balance of both comedy and drama but I really wanted to do something funny. It was great to take the drama and go through that, but the whole time, I was thinking, “Man, I want to do something a little more comedic, more like a comedy/drama.”
CS: But why did you want to set it in the world of basketball, since that’s a whole new set of challenges?
Strouse: (”Grace is Gone”) was just three people and that story was really simple, just three characters for the whole time, and I wanted to do something with more characters, more plots and subplots, and more action. That was a very restrained people, and the whole time I was like, “I would like to move the camera more, that would be fun I think.”
CS: Emma, you had done a bunch of studio movies and this is more independent for you, so what was it about this that made you want to do it?
Emma Roberts: I thought the script was really cool, and it was a movie that had basketball in it, but it’s not like a basketball movie. It’s about so much more than that. I met Jim and I really liked him, I thought he was a cool guy, and Sam was attached to do it, and I’ve known Sam for a very, very long time, and I definitely wanted to work with him. It just seemed like it would be a really great project.