“There’s a reason there weren’t any before you [when you’re first at something],” Renee Montgomery says at the top of “A Radical Act,” acknowledging that often the pioneers are the last to know they’re the first to do something when otherwise it might intimidate them. Montgomery didn’t think she was doing anything all that out of the ordinary when she first took a year off from the WNBA where over an 11-year career she had amazingly fulfilled the promise of the high hopes that accompanied her out of a college career at the University of Connecticut, which she graduated as a national champion. Two titles, an All-Star selection and a Sixth Woman of the Year Award meant that there wasn’t a lot left to play for, but nonetheless as Montgomery’s conscience called her to take a break to join the Black Lives Matter protests that began in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, she didn’t think of it as a retirement, nor could she even begin to fathom that when she returned to the game, it would be as an owner rather than a player as circumstances led to her taking a stake in the Atlanta Dream, the last team she played for.
Part of a generation of professional athletes discouraged from bringing up their beliefs about anything outside the game, Montgomery was unusually poised to be a leader for the WNBA, enlisted into a franchise that was sold off when its owner had been vilified for opposing the Black Lives Matter movement while running for Congress, and “A Radical Act” shows that while it was a changing of the guard as far as the WNBA was concerned, such a position was nothing new for someone so prepared to run point on and off the court. In recounting how Montgomery’s parents’ Ron and Bertela “Snook” Montgomery hand built a basket for her to play on as a child growing up in St. Albans, West Virginia, director Sandrine Orabona presents the skills she accrued as a player in tandem with a steady accumulation of strong personal values.
Patience and perseverance may have served her well personally when she became a star in her home state in spite of a traditionally unpopular sport on a team where she was often seen as the second best player, but “A Radical Act” reflects how it helped lift up an entire league when Montgomery first challenged them as a player for the Minnesota Lynx as the team publicly protested in the wake of the police shooting of Philando Castile and became a voice of conscience when she first left to do social justice work. As Montgomery learns the ropes of being part of the management and accommodating a number of different demands, with her wife Sirena Grace describing the entire city of Atlanta as a new basketball court for her to run around as she performs various duties for the team from marketing meetings with ownership to personal appearances as its best public ambassador, Orabona matches her every move at a particularly busy time and shows how each step before this moment has enabled her to take more forward, pulling everyone involved along with her for the greater good.
After the film’s premiere this week at the Uninterrupted Film Festival in Los Angeles, the director spoke about she remained true to her main subject’s desire to create something bigger than herself with the lively biography, telling a story in the present tense even after learning of such rich archival material and the cinematic touches that give Montgomery the big screen treatment she’s earned.
How did you get interested in this?
SpringHill reached out to me through my agent and a lot of people were interested in Renee’s story, but I had a chance to speak to Renee and Sirena, her wife, and one of the executive producers on the film and we got along really well. [With these] higher profile stories of people that are well known a lot of times, the film isn’t about what it seems to be about. I like to say that this is a social justice film posing as a sports film, and the ability to tell a deeper story inside of what would also be a dynamic sports film was really interesting to me.
It is quite interesting that you can make a compelling film without really getting into Renee’s playing career until 40 minutes in and then her work with the Dream later. What was this like to think about structurally when you really see the accumulation of things in both her life and culturally that add up to have such an impact?
[I look for] the details that make this story different from every other story and exciting but at the core what’s going to resonate to resonate with me, and therefore with an audience, [which] may not even look anywhere near what Renee looks like or [who have] had the exact same experiences, but feels like they can still relate. There was a lot of content around Renee after she opted out and she became co-owner and vice president of the Atlanta Dream, and it was all great, but it was all very similar, as it would be with something that’s five to 10 minutes long. And when they came to me, [I thought] “Well, we know Renée is an incredible person for opting out and being part of this movement and being involved in the politics of what was happening at the time and breaking ground, but what happened in her life that brought her to this point? What are the building blocks that makes someone ready to do something like this, even though they have no experience, and that has the belief in themselves to do that, [being] ready to change their entire life that they’ve been working on since they were five, six, seven years old?”In general when I make documentaries, I make documentaries about people, and a lot of it is in the present tense, but [I thought] we have to go back in time to understand what makes that person, and the ability to have a [simultaneous] past/present structure to the film was building towards the crescendo, which was this pivot in her life, so I thought you have to do that by building it throughout the film. The past was always going to be a part of it, but we weren’t sure how big a part and as we started digging more and more, that’s when I realized there’s actually a lot of information and emotion in the past that we have to bring forward. Probably about halfway through production is when I realized that this was going to be a 50/50 split and thankfully, her parents are great archivists. We were very fortunate in that sense — the super 8 mm film that we had, a lot of broadcast stuff, that was a goldmine. Her mom had binders and binders of newspaper clippings and people apparently had dropped off boxes of tapes, so we were able to do that as a result.
It was mind-blowing when you see film footage of what looks like her parents on an early date.
I remember when her mom handed me the box of Super 8 film, she’s like, “My sister had a Super 8 camera and she filmed all this stuff. I have no idea what’s on these reels.” And I was like, “Thank you!” [laughs] And again, I’m known as more of a verite doc filmmaker because I throw my camera on my shoulder and I follow people around, but once I get out of that mode, I put my editor hat on and digging into any kind of material that’s going to help you tell the story is really exciting.
Also the great thing about that is to be trusted by people with that material is invaluable because this here is something that they’ve kept as a treasure their entire lives and they’re like, “Here you go, we trust you with this.” So that’s a big deal, [and in this case] they had no idea what was on those [film reels]. Outside the family stuff, that also gave us an opportunity to go into her parents and the HBCU piece and Black excellence, which I think a lot of people are resonating with. The other thing that we found on these tapes that we were not expecting was the news segment about the KKK group burning a cross on the front lawn of their neighbors and her mother being on camera. That was really important to lay the groundwork early on for this dual theme that Renee had through her entire life — there was the sports piece and the community piece that were pushing her forward, but then this also the racism that was happening in the background and why it all came to a crescendo in 2020.
I have to pick up on the HBCU section, because it’s one of my favorite parts of the film also, and because Renee didn’t actually attend an HBCU – she went to the basketball powerhouse UConn, was it much of a conversation to include? You draw a connection beautifully when West Virginia State was obviously so important to her parents, but I can imagine someone saying during the edit, “Do we need to have this in the movie?”
That did happen, and I understand because this film is so dense. But I think sometimes people who are involved in making these films tend to forget that audiences want deep stories. And there was a moment [where] people were confused while we were making it because there was the UConn piece and then the HBCU piece, but the reason why it was so important to protect that is because [her parents’ connection at West Virginia State] was the cornerstone. I obviously never went to an HBCU, but when I first met Renee, our first week together, that’s when we did that work with Killer Mike and they started talking about [HBCUs] and then she was talking to me about it, and [I thought about] what makes someone capable of doing great things is being raised to be great and I think that anyone who’s ever gone to or has been around an HBCU will tell you that that’s one of the large tenets of going to an HBCU, is to be great and that was one of the main themes for the film.
At one point in one of the interviews, you bring up something to Renee that Geno Auriemma told you, which made me wonder at what point you actually did interviews with her – did you have to do a lot of other interviews first?
This isn’t the easiest way to make a documentary in terms of waiting for the very last moment to do interviews, especially your main subject interview. I also have an over two decades long career as a nonfiction editor, and from that point of view, it’s actually significantly harder for the edit, but that’s the way to get the most depth out of it. Pretty much all the interviews were done in the back quarter of production and you get to experience everything with the person — you talk to everyone else prior to that, so that you can also be like, “Here’s what this person said about you.”
You’re also able to get a great deal of emotion out of these portrait shots that you film of Renee in important places in her life. How did those scenes come about?
I knew that the film was going to have a lot of mixed media in it and we were going to get some great content from Renée and Sirena’s iPhones, so from the jump that meant that there was going to be a lot of different visual signatures and I wanted to make sure that the film had a heightened visual signature. I also knew that there were going to be moments where we were going to elevate the themes a bit more philosophically, rather than just on the nose, so again, having been an editor for 20 years, I had all that stuff built in my mind already and fortunately, my producer Anke Thommen, who’s also my partner in life, comes from high-end filmmaking. She’s done music videos and commercials and features her whole life, so when I felt like the need structurally to do these pieces,she immediately understood and was able to help me coordinate that because it’s not given to every documentary filmmaker to be able to include cinematic moments in the film, but I was able to make a case for it.
I knew structurally that would help the film along in these vignette pods and it would also elevate the look of the film, which was really important. You’re dealing with a market now that is expecting premium documentary filmmaking, [especially] when you’re in a sports space and you’re dealing with Uninterrupted, SpringHill [with] LeBron [James] and Maverick [Carter], Procter & Gamble, who come from branding, and Roku, and you have to make sure that outside of just your story you elevate your visual style as well, and I think Renee’s story deserves it to have it look like that.
Since you brought it up, what’s it like to ask Renee and Sirena to hand over their iPhones or perhaps just gather material for the movie?
They were already doing that. And during the pandemic, Sirena is a singer, but she’s actually went back to school for broadcast journalism and she had assignments, so she turned her camera on her partner as everything was happening around her, because she realized this is going to be a moment in time and she was there, so that’s another reason why we were able to build the emotion towards the back third of the film because Sirena had already been filming everything. But it’s natural to them. They’ve created their own brand — they’ve had to in order to say what they want and to be able to monetize it as well. So it’s not unusual at all for them to hold a camera. The only thing that did become a conversation was how to film certain things, which they were very open to, and what not to release into the world while we were making the film because they had a lot of ideas and it was just like, “Hey guys, can we just pump the brakes a little bit on this stuff, so that we can keep it for the film and it doesn’t feel like people have already seen it?”
The film is all the more powerful for it and now that the film as a whole is starting to make it out into the world, what’s this like for you?
We had a little event scheduled after the premiere and Renee and Sirena showed up a little bit later and they’re like, “We’re so sorry we’re late because we got caught after the Q&A for an hour with people coming up to us, talking to us and sharing their stories that they felt resonated with their story in the film.” And I was like, “You know what? If people are feeling that way and they’re holding Renee back to talk to her, then we’ve done our job.” I know from past experiences having made other films that people are going to take to different parts of the film, depending on who they are and what their experiences have been. But if they’re touched in some way, then we’ve done our job and that for me is the biggest relief because that’s why you make documentary films. There are plenty of other ways to make a living, but ultimately that’s why I do these things because I love reaching other people and bringing people together and I think this is a good way to bring people together.
“A Radical Act: Renee Montgomery” will continue to play on the festival circuit and was picked up for distribution by Roku.