Duke basketball in Cameron Indoor: It’s what every sports-conscious Duke student loves. But to documentary filmmaker Gary Hawkins, a son asking his father why the people in the bleachers painted their faces blue is just as interesting as Nolan Smith shouting out a set play to his teammates.
Hawkins, a visiting lecturer at the Center for Documentary Studies and the Sanford School of Public Policy, is currently working on One Night In Cameron, a documentary about the different elements that compose watching a game in Cameron. Equal emphasis is given to the actual game and the fans, food vendors, towel guys and all others who make Duke basketball unique.
An Emmy winner and Sundance Fellow, the North Carolina native has also taught filmmaking at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, where his students included David Gordon Green, director of Pineapple Express, and Danny McBride, star of Eastbound and Down. In addition to One Night in Cameron, he recently filmed a concert by Outkast rapper Big Boi and electronic duo MSTRKRFT during the annual Yorktown Throwdown music festival in Charleston, S.C., and a documentary about the American Dance Festival held every summer in Durham.
Hawkins derived the inspiration for One Night in Cameron from Federico Fellini’s Satyricon and his own Thelonius Monk documentary, In My Mind. In Satyricon, Hawkins saw the gladiator fight scenes and was entranced by the audience members.
“I always wondered how it must be like to be in the Coliseum,” Hawkins said.
His musing gained traction when he and a group of his Duke students flew to New York City to film In My Mind, a tribute to Monk’s famous 1959 Town Hall concert. His goal was to deconstruct the concert, and after compiling the footage his student crew had taken, he decided there was enough to create a compelling film that captured what it was like to watch the performance live.
For One Night in Cameron, his army of camera operators filmed the action from two hours before the Jan. 27 home game against Boston College until an hour afterward, focusing on the fan experience as being the core of what defines a Duke basketball game (they will also film additional games). A fan of Eisensteinian montage, he prefers to show the result of a Seth Curry free throw by a quick cut to the audience’s collective “swoosh” rather than a shot of the drained bucket itself.
Hawkins strives to encapsulate the true experience of being one of the Cameron Crazies, where verbal exchanges like the one between that father and son are just as important as the crowd’s chanting and screaming. He is interested in exploring the minute details, the often unseen elements that compose the bigger picture and make it what it is.
“Gary always asks us ‘to deepen the mystery of life,’” Ronja Dittrich, a graduate student in public policy and a member of Hawkins’ Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking class, wrote in an e-mail.
Both One Night in Cameron and his Yorktown Throwdown concert film are shot with mostly student crews and no additional funding.
“It is unique how readily he is willing to incorporate learning students into his big shoots,” junior Roberto Rivera, also a student of Hawkins, wrote in an e-mail. “The on-the-job training was great, and it allowed me to learn much faster than if he had forced us all to take baby steps through the process.”
This hands-on training comes with its own travails, as many hours of footage have been lost to inexperience. Luckily for his students, Hawkins takes these errors of naivete in stride, believing that the only way to get better at filmmaking is by making more films. And in the same way, even with the countless hours of footage already amassed, One Night in Cameron has still not developed into its final form.
“We still don’t know where it’s going,” Hawkins said. “[The experience] is way more complex than I thought.”
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