Everyone is talking about ESPN’s The Last Dance. The docu-series is routinely pulling down big audiences and drawing interest across a wide spectrum of media. Richard Deitsch of The Athletic sat down with director Jason Hehir for a column that came out on Monday to discuss how the interviews with Michael Jordan came together.
Hehir revealed that a lot of the way the film was made was influenced by a conversation he had with Ezra Edelman, director of the Oscar-winning 30 for 30 docu-series OJ Simpson: Made in America.
“He asked me why I wanted to interview Michael first and I said that that’s just what I normally do,” Hehir told Deitsch. “I told him I get the first big one out of the way and then kind of have all these other interviews rotate around them like a satellite. Ezra said that’s not the way he would do it. By the end of that dinner, I decided that he was right for a story this big. I needed to get certain basics down first before I went to Michael.”
One device Hehir has used that has become a favorite of the audience is Jordan reacting to video of other people talking about interactions with him. The director revealed that it was a practice designed to make sure The Last Dance featured new quotes and perspectives from someone that has had every moment of his basketball career dissected and fawned over.
“My goal all along was: He’s been asked every question so let’s deviate from the format in which he’s been asked these questions in the past. And that might mean pulling out an iPad or showing him the clip on an iPhone.”
Michael Jordan sat down with Hehir and his crew for three separate interviews during a span of 15 months in the making of The Last Dance. The first conversation and the final one each lasted three hours. Hehir told Dietsch that spending that much time with the main characters of a documentary is a common practice. In fact, in comparison to some of his past documentaries, the total time Hehir spent with Jordan was minuscule in scale.
“To put it in perspective: Andre the Giant (which Hehir directed for HBO) was 80 minutes long and we got Vince McMahon for five and a half hours over the course of two days,” He told Deitsch. “The Fab Five was 100 minutes long and I got Jalen Rose for seven hours. So I wasn’t asking Michael to have those same proportions. I wasn’t going to ask him to give me 80 hours to get 10 hours.”
The full interview sheds light on how Hehir approached difficult subjects including Jordan’s gambling, the death of his father, and the rumor that his 1993 retirement was a way to cover up what was really a suspension.
