Jason Hehir, the director of The Last Dance, on his newest film — Novak Djokovic: The Wolf in Winter.

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2:00Welcome to the Sports Media Podcast. I'm your host Richard Deitch. My producer is James Jackson. One guest on this episode he's been on before is one of the preeminent sports documentarians in the United States. Jason Hare is the director of Novak Djokovic, The Wolf in Winter. That is a 90-minute or so doc that will debut on Prime Video. On August 20th, documentary examines what has driven Novak Djokovic to his, I think it's 24 at the moment, 24 Grand Slam titles. Is it 25, Jason, or 24? 24, okay. All right, research department coming through so far. But the piece is really like an examination in time in terms of what drives Novak and the price one has to pay in order to find greatness in any sport, but in this case tennis, and what you sort of have to sacrifice, including your family.

2:54Jason, of course, you're in a sports documentaries, the director of The Last Dance, Andre the Giant, Murder in Boston, Roots Rampage and Reckoning. And as he informs me, he's just completed a doc on SCTV, which will run on Netflix, the amazing Canadian comedy troupe, no date yet specifically for that. And I will ask him about that. And with that long introduction, Shin. Welcome, Jason. Welcome back, I should say. Thanks for having me, man. Good to see you. Good to see you as well. All right. This will be the traditional start of the NPR interview, Jason. Why was this an interesting project for you, Novak?

3:36Well, he's an interesting character, obviously. As someone who's a huge sports fan, but not a rabid tennis fan, I knew of him, obviously, and I knew of his greatness on the court, But I also knew that he was outspoken and opinionated and sometimes stubborn and controversial off the court. So that was intriguing to me. But I think we put it over the top in terms of really wanting to engage and see if there was something there is the opportunity to follow a goat in real time. Most of the time when we're talking about profiling athletes, great athletes, we're doing it retrospectively. So they're telling stories about stuff that happened in the past and their story on the field or on the court is largely done.

4:22This is a case where this guy is now 39 years old. He was 36 when I started working on this project. But he's 39 now and he's still dominant. I mean, there's all but maybe two guys that he really has their number. And when it comes to Alcaraz and Sinner, he could beat them on any given day as well as he's proven in the last year or so. So this was an opportunity to get in on the ground level with someone as they're at this crossroads late in their career where they're deciding between family and their sport and a host of other pressures. This documentary, or at least the idea of one, has been around for a while.

5:03Not surprising, given that Novak's 39, I'm sure people have been talking about a documentary for a while. And I know that there had been stops and starts for this documentary for a number of years. Can you take my listeners just through when his team started thinking about a documentary and then how you came to this project? I know very little about the phase between 2017 when they first embarked on this and 2023 when they first approached me about it. But in 2023, they told me that there had been, as you said, stops and starts. And I think COVID had a lot to do with that is that the world kind of stopped and started.

5:43But they were looking to re-engage and Novak was looking to re-engage to pick up where they left off and figure out how they were going to tell this story that they started to tell in 2017. So I met with them during the U.S. Open in 2023. I officially engaged with them and we signed the contract and started working in 2024. so the first time we shot with him was the summer of 2024 and the first tennis that we shot of his was the U.S. Open in 2024. Interesting do you I know that um in your world obviously like the producers of a project have to sign off on you or try to you know uh recruit you for the project but like was there a point before you signed on like do you talk to Novak Djokovic and does there have to be a chemistry between you and the subject?

6:30Yeah and you know in my case, I just want to gauge what their enthusiasm is, what their level of control they're going to want is, what they expect this thing, what they expect the process to be, and what I would prefer the process to be, which is not totalitarian. It's not to say like you're not allowed to have any input in the story. But also there are athletes who I've met with before who they or their team say that they expect to be the storytellers. And I'm just kind of a vessel through which they tell their story, which is not that appealing to me or any director, I can imagine. So I met with him a few times over Zoom.

7:08We met in person for the first time in Montenegro before we were to begin shooting. And that was really just that shoot was kind of dipping our toe into the water. But I was immediately struck by how curious he was about the process of filmmaking, asking questions about like, how do you do like as if he was going to make a film himself. He's just a really curious, intelligent guy. So that was encouraging. And then when I met him and met his family and was on the ground with them, that was even more encouraging that this is a guy who's in it for the right reasons. The documentary, as we're taping this, the documentary will be out in two days.

7:45And by the way, just to people listening, I thought it was fantastic. I highly recommend it. It's well worth your time and not surprising given Jason's previous work. But I wonder like for you, even at your stage of your career, and you've had a lot of accolades, like is it nerve wracking still before the public, the larger, broader public see, I know that people have seen it, obviously, there's been Novak had a screening or like a party for it. And I'm sure there's other places where they get like people like me, you know, who like get an advance of it. So people have seen it. But what is it like for you like before the actual debut when like in theory millions of people can see it in two days from now it's very nerve-wracking um because this is the phase where you hate the movie the most because you've seen it so many times so there's nothing new to me in this whatsoever i could lip-sync the film at this point and we've been living with all of the best moments that i hope people take away from it their favorite moments they'll probably only see once in their entire life.

8:51And we've seen these things hundreds of times going back for years. So every time I see it, you know, it's 92 minutes and it feels like 920 minutes to me when I watch it now because it's, you know, it's a painstaking process. And it's, you have no idea. Like we gave this out to critics like yourself and writers like yourself. I think weeks ago, Amazon did that, but all the user embargoed until Thursday. Now, if it was panned universally, that would be really disappointing and embarrassing. If some people liked it and some didn't, that's a little bit easier to take. But normally, you know if your work is good and you know if you've done the job that you wanted to do.

9:33So I can sit comfortably with that. But yeah, it is especially the biggest critics are always the people who know the story the best. So like the Andre the Giant, like the wrestling fans would come out and say, well, they didn't talk about this in 1978. So you have to really decide who your audience is. And this was for a global audience. So this is a little bit different than the typical doc that audience that I'd be picturing, you know, I'm picturing now. And we dealt with that a little bit with The Last Dance. But this is really, I think that the US audience is almost ancillary in Amazon's eyes, because he's such a global figure and tennis is such a global sport so it is i'm curious to see how how fans are going to take it and i'm sure there's going to be the people who criticize it the most are going to be the ones who love novak the most probably so and and from my experience having um even though i you know i'm mostly sort of at least in my later stage of my career i've done media i did cover tennis for a while at si tennis fans like soccer fans and maybe a little bit of college football fans they're kind of the hardest graders of everything like they are hard as i'm sure you've seen they are hardcore so to expect universal acclaim among the tennis community would be insane jason but i think you probably know that just because they are um they are a hard bit of graders that said i do think that um unless i've missed it he hasn't really been chronicled by any No, I mean, there's some docs out there, but nothing that he has participated in.

11:05Yeah, which gets me to the next question. Again, from watching the doc, I was blown away by the access that Novak and his, quite frankly, his family gave you. Like his wife is very prominent, incredibly honest. I actually thought she was the best interview. She's the MVP of the doc. Yeah, I agree. She sort of really lets you, gives you insight into what makes him tick and his genius, his stubbornness, his like why, how growing up in Serbia as a kid like sort of fueled him. And we'll get into that in a little bit. But there's access of Novak at his home. Like there's access of Novak with his children.

11:47For you as a documentarian, this must have been awesome. But was Novak always all in on that or did you have to sort of push to get the kind of access you ultimately did? It's a slow process. There's no shortcuts when it comes to gaining the trust of someone like that. When you're asking to come into their home, I mean, people are understandably a little bit reticent to show their kids and to show private moments like that. In Novak's case, we're showing him getting physical therapy the night before a big match in his home. really vulnerable moments that I think if I came in at the outset in our first meeting and said, hey, I'm going to need access to your family.

12:20I'm going to need your wife to be a thousand percent honest about all the ups and downs of your career, both on and off the court. I'm going to want to show you and your son playing tennis in your backyard. That would have been really off-putting, I'm sure, to him. So you have to build that trust brick by brick, meeting by meeting. I mean, my favorite scene, my two favorite scenes in the dark are when he's playing tennis with his wife and his son in their backyard, which was at a rental house in Melbourne during the tournament. We just can't we just went to the house and I texted him and said, hey, we're outside.

12:58You mind if we come in for a little bit? It wasn't like tomorrow they're going to play tennis like we're going there at four o 'clock. This was just you just have to stay in the area. And there were days when like he didn't want cameras there and you have to respect that as well. So they know that you're not just you're not going to barge your way in every time, whether they give you permission or not. So it's a slow process. But and it's we're talking about a two and a half year process to make this movie from my standpoint. And if you go back to 2017, it's almost 10 years. But two and a half years, that's longer than it took us to make The Last Dance.

13:32It's amazing. Yeah, go ahead, please. I didn't mean to do it. So you're seeing those moments, but they're few and far between. It wasn't like we were with him all the time. We shot at his home in Spain in December of 24, and we shot in Melbourne in January of 25, but we don't have the money or the resources to sit there with him for two and a half years and follow him around. But when you get those little moments, they're golden. Did you do all the interviews with Novak, or did you have other people who were – there was, there's one scene, if I remember correctly, where I think he's answering a question in Serbian.

14:09So that probably was another staffer who did it, or am I misremembered? Not from, I mean, he may be speaking Serbian in the doc at some point. I think there was archival, but Nina Kerstich, who was a producer on, I first heard of her because she was Ezra Edelman's producer on OJ, or one of them. She was an archival producer on OJ Maine America. Connor Schell, when they assigned me the last dance, called me and said, I'm not going to tell you. And Connor was basically running ESPN at that point. He said, I'm not going to tell you who to hire or build your team, but I am telling you, you need to hire Nina Kerstich.

14:45She's that good. And you'll thank me for it one day. And I still do because Nina is the best. So she was on the last dance with me. She went straight from that to the ill-fated Prince documentary for five years. And then she came over to this and Nina is Serbian. So she was almost like an archival resource, a living, breathing archival resource for me, both in terms of Novak's history, but more importantly, Serbian culture and the Serbian, you know, the war, which is just, you know, the labyrinth of the war and the struggles over there. She could kind of put that in layman's terms for me very easily.

15:21And then she's a very skilled producer and director herself. So she went out and did she did the Agassi interview. She did the Rafa interview. She interviewed Howard Bryant, who's fantastic in this. I did the Novak interviews and Novak's wife and kind of those closest to him. And then some interviews you see are from the old shoots. So his mom and his dad were interviewed at the outset of this. But the bites that we needed from them were them talking about him as a kid. And those bites aren't going to change, whether it's in 2026 or 2018. So it was a mishmash, but Nina was vital to this entire process.

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16:56The bar is open. It's Fantasy Football Happy Hour with Matthew Berry, wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, the Agassi was phenomenal, I thought, in this. Just really, really thoughtful. There is obviously a part of this doc where you let the viewer know how Novak became Novak Djokovic in tennis and importantly, sort of the impact of what was going on in his country and how it affected him. There's a, um, there's a moment in there where he talks about, uh, when the NATO strikes are happening, I think that's 1999. And he's telling a story. It's really like harrowing about how he's a, he's a kid.

17:37He's running in the streets cause his, his, um, his building did not have a bomb shelter and his family is running ahead of him and he trips and he sees his family way in the distance and he's like, he's yelling, he's screaming, they can't hear him. And there's, you know, the building behind him is about to get bombed. Um, you know, you could obviously do an entire documentary or a docu-series on that war. Yeah. As the filmmaker though, you have to get this in here somehow because it's obviously clear that what happened to him and all Serb kids in childhood, right. Um, would affect them. So what was your thought process on like okay how do i tell this part of novak's story and get it in the doc but at least to a point where it doesn't become you know 30 minutes of that and you're getting away from the tent as a filmmaker that was one of the parts where i thought for you that would be the biggest challenge is like this has to be in here but how do i how do i make it so it's sort of a narrative structure wise sort of works with the rest of the doc you're right that if you go too far off the beaten path and you lose your, you lose the plot.

18:42I like to tell our editors, and I probably told you in past interviews, that the story is the highway and you go off on these exit ramps to tell the sub stories, but you got to get back onto that main highway before you lose the audience and go too far off here. So I like to say, you can go off the highway, you can stop to eat, but you can't stay overnight. If we did 20 minutes on the Serbian conflict and the NATO bombings, that's staying overnight. That's probably staying overnight a few nights. But from the outset, I wanted this to be a feature length doc. I did not want to do a series. I wanted to tell because what I mentioned before is that we had the opportunity to profile a goat in real time.

19:20I really wanted to drill down on this moment in his life when he is hearing everyone say, when are you going to retire? He's resisting that on some level every day and also feeling the push and the pull of the notion that you cannot be the best dad in the world and the best tennis player in the world at the same time. And he wants to be both. So we have access to someone in real time as they're making these decisions and grappling with these kind of tough subjects. The decision on what we were going to include from his backstory was what if his backstory informs how he's behaving now and how he is making these decisions he's making now.

20:01When it comes to the Serbian backstory, his childhood, I don't want to say it was ruined, but he had a traumatic childhood, much more so than his kids now. and part of what Jelena and Agassi too articulated is that if he were to stop playing now he would have the opportunity to give his kids even more of a childhood that he never had he already is giving them that um and he's a he's a fantastic dad and it's one of the things that's the most endearing part of Novak to me and I could see that immediately when I started spending time with the family um but that was important for me to get in there but it's also how do you boil this down.

20:37You know, our early rough cuts had much more about that conflict. But it's if you were at a cocktail party and you're telling someone about the Serbian conflict and how that influences Novak the man, what he experienced as Novak the boy, you'd say just kind of in generalities that there was a huge military conflict there. And the so-called good guys, NATO, were bombing civilian targets in Serbia. So these people didn't know who to trust. It also informs a lot of the stuff that came along later with the vaccine controversy and Novak's kind of maverick attitude and questioning authority, which he loves to do.

21:17I mean, you grow up in a country where your leader, Milosevic, is a convicted war criminal. The good guys come in to save you from this leader, and they're bombing the hospital next to your apartment building, so they're not the good guys to you. And then he had a great relationship with his dad, but his dad also sent him away to Germany and put 10 bucks on the table in front of the whole family and said, this is all we have left. You better come back a champion. So he had to be the breadwinner and kind of the parent in that family from the time he was 12 or 13. So of course, when you grow up, your idea of who to trust in authority is going to be warped.

21:56So I was trying to convey that to the audience, that this is not a guy who just chooses to be contrarian for sport. Like he actually, this is deep seated. Yeah, that's really well said. You mentioned essentially the 2022 Australian Open, which I think even maybe non-hardcore tennis fans know. Novak Djokovic was ultimately banned from entering the country by that current Australian government. this is really at the height of COVID and in particular Australia was a very very hardcore country in terms of its COVID rules I thought that I thought you got really great stuff out of him in terms of him explaining his thought process I think this will ultimately be something that's aggregated and clipped and people will talk about and I mean both of us now live in the real world, Jason, those who want to use Novak as an avatar.

22:57And he talked about this are going to use him as a, you know, the, the, the, the face of anti-vaccines, you know, the, or against vaccines. He sort of explains that, that he's not, he's not that he's not, he, for him, it was a very much an individual body decision, but I wanted to ask you as the filmmaker, you knew you had to approach this. It seemed to me that he was willing to, to talk about it. But you also must know that if there's one hot button controversy in the doc, it's going to be this because of how, particularly in the United States, just how visceral this topic continues to be. Yeah.

23:34Yeah. I mean, it would be conspicuous if we avoided it. We would immediately invalidate the doc if we did not mention that, because that's the number one way that people know of him now. The average person on the street who may or may not be a sports fan, certainly may or may not be a tennis fan, can say, oh, yeah, that's the guy who got kicked out of Australia because he wouldn't get the vaccine. And he knows that that philosophically we see this in different ways. I don't agree with with his stance here. And I think it's a really blurry area to say, well, I'm not anti-vax. I'm just pro-choice for what you put in your body.

24:13That's but he is very meticulous about every single drop of anything that goes into his body. And it's the reason why he's still playing at the highest level at 39 years old. So what he was eager to articulate, though, was that I have no problem with abiding by the rules when they say, if you're not vaccinated, you can't play. He passed up playing in Grand Slams. He passed up playing in just about every American tournament for a year or two because he respected those rules and said, I am not going to bow to this. I mean, he could have his 25th major by now if he didn't stand strong on that. I didn't realize the circumstances under which he was deported from Australia.

24:58And really, it was that they invited him to come under a medical exemption. He satisfied the rules in that he had had COVID within the last six months. And they invited him to come without saying you have to be vaccinated. The problem, as you saw in the doc, and this is Novak, this is the enot that we mentioned in the doc, which is the Serbian word for stubbornness. He felt it necessary to post on Instagram before he got on a plane to go to Australia, I'm traveling over there with a medical exemption. And by the time he landed in Australia, the country was in an uproar because most of the people in that country knew friends or family who they could not see for years because the country's restrictions were so rigid.

25:44And here comes, you know, a world-class celebrity athlete waltzing into the country. That's what the media made it look like. But actually, he abided by all of the rules. He checked every box that he had to. And because of that uproar in the media, then he was asked to leave. But he's right when he says it was a political move because there's other people who were not celebrities who were allowed to come in under the exact same rules. Yeah. I mean, again, and I think how you feel about his answer probably is going to depend on how you felt at the time. It's also just to be very, very fair. It is very easy to talk about it in 2026.

26:21We're not in a pandemic now. Decisions were being made at the time, in theory, and I think in actuality, in many places, based on the larger safety of the public. But I give you credit for addressing it. I certainly give Novak credit for addressing it. And I can just tell you as someone who's an observer of it all, the doc doesn't shy away from it. Like you may not love his answer. And some of you will hate his answer. Some of you will cheer him, you know, on. He's like, you know, like he's the hero of all time. But it's addressed. And I, that was as a viewer, that was something I was looking towards.

27:00And it's important also for his tennis career because the next year he goes and wins the Australian Open. And that's a very big thing. And that speaks to his personality. Exactly. And he in the doc says, like, I had to win that. Like, that was a very important Grand Slam for him. We are taping this, Jason, in the week where Novak was playing Cincinnati to get ready for the U.S. Open and lost in the first round. And one of the things that the documentary addresses, because it has to, because he's 39 years old, is like when the end is coming. And, you know, Novak, very, very steadfast. Like, why should I be retired?

27:38I'm still top five, top ten. I'm beating everybody in the world, essentially. You know, like you just said, essentially regularly except for Sinner and Alcaraz. But Andre Agassi said something that was really, really poignant to me. I'm paraphrasing here, but he said something to the effect of, I hope Novak can go out in his own terms because it always – The end comes faster. Yeah, the end comes faster than you think, which came for Agassi, and it essentially came for all these guys. Unless you're Sampras, who just walks away after winning and you sort of never return. But I wanted to get your sense as the filmmaker.

28:16I got the sense that he at least believed when he was talking to you in the film that he was going to try to continue and get every last drop out of it. But then you see what happened in Cincinnati this week, and you're like, hmm. He's also been bounced early. I mean, he was bounced early in a bunch of non-Grand Slam tournaments as we were filming with him. Yep, fair enough. And the season that started in 2025 where we're shooting the Australian Open, he ends up making the semis in every single major that year, which has only been done a handful of times in the history of tennis. I understand his frustration with having to answer this retirement question over and over again.

28:58Because if you took player X and I told you player X, I'm not going to tell you all they are, how long, how many accolades they've won. Just I gave you their last two seasons and what that player X has accomplished in making the finals of all these grand slams and continuing to break records. you'd say why would you even discuss if if that player x kid was 21 years old you'd say well no one's going to ask him if he's retiring they only asked novak that i i think it's a compliment i was trying to tell him because he said i don't want any mention of retirement in this doc i'm sick of addressing it i said well we have to address it because but it's also a compliment to you that people want to talk about it because i think people are fascinated by how long you can continue to do this?

29:42And are you amazing yourself? The irony here is that I think that his career is going to be elongated because of the skepticism surrounding his retirement. I think that's one of the things that drives him now. He's kind of like - That's the E-nuts, right? He's going to - Right. It's kind of like Jordan at the tail end of his career ran out of opponents to vanquish. So now he was going to conjure other challenges or other things people to prove wrong. So all these voices out there, I'm sure after Cincinnati, who said, well, here we go. Is this the beginning of the end? Well, they've been asking this about Novak for five years.

30:17Is this the beginning of the end? I wouldn't be surprised at all if he made a deep run at the U.S. Open in a few weeks. He's had a lot of time off, obviously. And this is one of those things where those voices, I'm sure he's going to have to answer these kind of questions the first press conference that he's there, I do think the irony is that this buys him more years or this buys us more years as tennis fans to watch him. And I think every time he beats Alcaraz or Sinner, you can add another six to 12 months onto that career because he thinks on any given day I can beat him. So why not? DraftKings, an official partner of the NBA, is now available in all 50 states.

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32:47Andre Agustin is in the doc. And I think he's now passed Federer and Nadal in the argument. Do you agree? I do, and ask Nadal. Nadal just said it as well. And I don't think those guys would give it up while they were playing against each other. But I admire Nadal for for for having the humility to say that because it seemed genuine, at least when I heard him say it. So I think, yeah, I mean, certainly statistically, it's inarguable. But there's always going to be, as you said before, the tennis community is really provincial and protective. And there's Roger guys, there's Rafa guys, and there's Novak guys.

33:26There's very few people and women. There's very few people who I, in the last two and a half years, if someone said, what are you working on? And I said, Novak Djokovic, Doc, who said to me, oh, I'm a Novak guy. People almost unfailingly said, oh, I'm more of a Rafa guy or more of a Federer guy. But you can tell a lot about the person based on who they say their guy is, which I found really interesting as well. But I think he's also in a point now, he's at like a Brady, Tiger, Jeter level of his career where it's undeniable that he should be respected. And that's starting to be reflected. But this happened as we were shooting.

34:04So many things happened as we were filming this doc. You know, it's the blessing and the curse I mentioned of trying to or going into something in real time, seeing how a goat navigates this phase of his career in real time. He hired Andy Murray and then they parted ways while we were shooting. So there were months in the edit room where we thought the whole doc is going to be about the first eight weeks of the Andy Murray experience with Novak and how that is microcosmic of his entire career. before we could even really cut a lot of those scenes the relationship ended amicably i think um but this was and every time we thought we were done he would threaten to win another major and it was like well do we just have a little footnote at the end that says he won his 25th major that seems like it's it's it's not sufficient yeah so we got i i like to say we got lucky in terms of that because now it's going to come out and it's still current he could win his 25th in in four weeks who knows but right now it's current yeah all right a couple things before i let you go that are uh uh about um related more to your previous work the last dance obviously i don't know a sports fan who hasn't seen it i'm wondering um with lebron james getting close to the end now in philadelphia great story by the way i think he you can correct me if i'm wrong or the listeners can't i believe lebron has said he's gonna do a documentary on his last year or maybe have cameras around and whatever anyway i wanted to ask you because you were coming on today like would that be interesting to you in the same way you pursued the jordan doc now i know michael had retired so you're looking back on this but it's like like the last dance for lebron in terms of a singular season you find that an interesting story as a sports documentarian to make it yeah if you were going to be there yeah i'm an unfair answer of that question because i i i went through years of making a similar story with a similar structure if if you're gonna if you're gonna use that final season if this is even is lebron's final season right as a jumping off point to look at everything that led up to this with conversion timelines and all that so i wouldn't be interested personally in that style of documentary i am really interested especially after this novak thing in drilling down smaller and smaller and smaller.

36:24So if it were just a season in his life or even a week in his life or just a priest, like I am a 10 hour, eight hour, whatever it's going to be, Doc, doesn't interest me right now as a filmmaker. Frankly, just due to the daunting exhaustion of it. When I made The Last Dance, I would not be able to make that now. I have a two-year-old and a one-year-old who are currently napping upstairs from my basement office here. I wouldn't have the energy or the bandwidth to do that. By the way, when we started this Novak project, I had no kids. Now I have two. That's how long this process has been. um novak is a i mean lebron is is a fascinating guy the other the other aspect of it is that with jordan the allure was the scarcity people hadn't heard from him in so long and when he was at his peak social media and all those things didn't exist and certainly documentaries were not nearly as pervasive as they are now he had michael jordan to the max and come fly with me and those kind of things.

37:37But now it's the golden age of sports docs. It's sports docs on everything. So I don't know. I think that there's value in waiting 10 years or so after you finish playing to kind of see how all the dust settles and how the relationships evolve. But on the other hand, it's fascinating to watch a guy who is a co-goat. If people want to call him that, this is a guy who is a legendary athlete. I think in time, just name him the number one athlete of the generation. Something like that. Welcome cameras in, and we get to see it kind of in real time. But just the fear of a long project like that would make me shy away, I think.

38:21All right, last two. You mentioned we are in a golden age of sports documentaries, and obviously with the streamers, there's just so much opportunity between the Netflixes and the Prime videos, Apple TV, et cetera. Are there any sports out there that you think are particularly unchartered? Like I'll give you an example. Like I have not seen like the preeminent documentary for, let's say, like women's college volleyball or something like that. And I'm sure there's many others on that. But off the top of your head, anything come to mind that you think like really like hasn't been explored at all and you can maybe get in this space?

38:56and especially if there's some young people listening to this who are interested in this, we're like, you know, it's not another Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, you know what I mean, Drew Brees talk. I wish I had a better answer for you. I do think that there's a lot to mine in volleyball. I think volleyball maybe just from a pure enjoyment standpoint, like that's my favorite thing to watch when the Olympics come around. It's not as readily available on TV in non-Olympic years. I'm sure I could go find the NCAA tournaments and things like that. But I gravitate towards singular sports like boxing, MMA, tennis, golf.

39:37I love those kind of journeys because they're so solitary. The pursuit is so solitary. Once you're in the arena, you're out there by yourself, and you can't really call a timeout and rely on another teammate. I came up, but my first documentaries were in boxing. So I love that environment. I love being in gyms. And as a trainer I know once told me, no one ever got into a boxing ring because everything's going right in their life. A lot of those backstories are just, you know, rife with with challenges and hardships and really steely determination by exceptional athletes. So I don't know. I go I go to the person before the sport.

40:20I think you can make an interesting story out of any sport if you have an interesting person. Makes sense. Last one for me. You you just finished up a documentary on SCTV, the legendary Canadian comedy troupe, John Candy, Eugene Levy, Catherine O 'Hara, et cetera. um the uh and netflix will be doing this there's not a exact date yet so uh yeah the fall keep your eyes open to that um that must have been an amazing experience i don't know how much time you spent in uh in toronto to sort of like track down their beginnings but you know as i as i um as i end with you on this give the listeners just like a like a kind of a quick broad overview of that experience because those of us who watched SCTV, you know, I was young enough where I saw some of it.

41:10It really did feel groundbreaking. Like I was like, you know, you, in many ways, I actually liked it sometimes more than Saturday Night Live. It was just so interesting and different and a different kind of stylistic humor, Canadian humor. So that must've been an awesome project. John Candy, just given all the famous people who were part of it. It was awesome. And the brief backstory on that is that Scorsese started out doing this. Wow. And then the, and they actually shot some material before the pandemic, the pandemic came along and I think he did killers of the flower moon around that time.

41:41So it just kind of died on the vine. And then Jimmy Kimmel's company, Kimmelot, um, revived it. And Martin short was, was a kind of a key cog in this machine to get everybody back on board. And, uh, the guy who runs Kimmelot's company is a guy named Scott Lonker. and he used to be my agent. So he knows my affinity for comedy and he knows that I'm a child of the 80s and that SETB was on reruns. And he was like, hey, do you remember that show? And I said, of course. And I started kind of like quoting chapter and verse, my favorite sketches. And next thing you know, I'm on a Zoom with Martin Short and Kimmel and then Andrea Martin and Catherine O 'Hara and Eugene Levy, all of whom were very protective about their story and who was going to be trusted to help tell it.

42:27it's the it's my favorite experience of my entire career nice um it was it was pure joy the entire time really because there wasn't there was no kind of like covid 2022 scandal to to to talk about they had a rise in the fall that show and we did talk about like why the show broke up and what happened but it's really a story about a family of creative geniuses who have been friends for over 50 years. And as the years go by, as we see, Catherine passed away as we were making it. So they start to lose members of this family, but it's really about the bond between these people. But with a ton of just legendarily hilarious clips woven in between.

43:09And we had Bob Odenkirk and Tom Hanks and Bill Hader and Fred Armisen, just a murderer's row of talking heads to talk about what they loved about the show. So it was some of the shoots on this show were the favorite, my favorite days of my entire career was, it was a joy to make. That's awesome. And this will, is it a, uh, is it, um, one feature? Okay. Yeah. Okay. So not broke. It's not a, it's not a docu-series or anything. No, it's almost exactly the 90 minutes. Oh, awesome. All right. Well, I totally be looking forward to that. Um, Jason Hare is the director of Novak Djokovic, The Wolf in Winter.

43:48As he said, 92-minute doc on Novak Djokovic, one of the more interesting figures in professional sports. That debuts on Prime Video on August 20th. Check that out. And obviously you can check out Jason's previous work. Jason, it's always good to catch up with you. I'm a great admirer of your talents. And best of luck with the film. But more importantly, best of luck with your two very young children because that is much harder, quite frankly. It is. The hours are longer, that's for sure. The hours are longer. Jason Hare, everyone. Thank you, Jason. Thanks for having me, man. It's a pleasure. All right, Jason, stick around here as I will keep you on as we finish this up very, very quickly.

44:30If you like these kind of conversations, head to the archives. Right before Jason, we have Pierre Moosa, who's a coordinator producer of NBC Sports, as coverage of the Premier League as well as director of their NBA games and Netflix's NFL games. We've done, obviously, a ton of stuff on Tony Romo, like multiple roundtable podcasts. So if you are jonesing about that story, please check that out. Linda Cohn and Neil Everett on this podcast July 30th.

44:59And Derek Ray on this podcast in July. Gino RM as well. So, again, if you like the stuff, leave us a review and a note. That's how the podcast continues. I want to thank James Jackson for all his hard work producing this podcast. Thanks to everybody at Odyssey for their sport. Thank you for listening. We'll see you soon on the Sports Media Podcast.

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