Spend enough time in NBA locker rooms and you’re bound to hear the same questions (and answers) over and over: “How did you feel after that win/loss?”, “What percent did you give out there?” To change it up every once in a while, we sit down with NBA players to ask the important questions in our interview series, Free Association.
Elton Brand got his start in the film industry while starring for the L.A. Clippers for seven seasons beginning in the early 2000s. Amazingly, his first foray as a producer came with Rescue Dawn (2006), a feature film version of the 1997 Werner Herzog documentary Little Dieter Needs To Fly, starring Christian Bale and directed by Herzog himself. The 15-year NBA vet—and former No. 1–overall pick—joins Free Association to talk about how he got his start, lessons from the set, and the evolution of his production company, Milk & Media.
Sportsnet: I’m going to go out on a limb and guess your career came to fruition in L.A.
Elton Brand: Right you are. I met Werner Herzog when I was in Los Angeles—he was a friend of a neighbour. He had just made a short, Little Dieter Needs to Fly.
Which is pretty great.
Yeah, I thought it was great, it’s about a prisoner of war. So he was looking to make that into a feature full-length film. He needed financing and had heard through this friend that I was thinking about getting into the business.
I didn’t know anything about making movies, but he was pitching us and was saying [in Herzog voice], “Look, the head of MGM used to be a hairdresser. You can do this, Brand.” So we were talking and he was telling me all these stories and I thought, “You know what, I’ll give this a shot.” Later on, after we watched Little Dieter, he sent me some of his older films, too—this was before Grizzly Man and all that stuff.
Did you see Burden of Dreams? About the making of Fitzcarraldo?
Yeah—two or three people actually died on the set of that. It’s crazy! So anyways, we’re in the early stage of getting the Little Dieter feature off the ground, and Christian Bale is attached to star—and I hear he’s going to be Batman. I’m like, “Batman?!” Again, I didn’t know anything about the business, but I thought “This could be a good thing…” And that’s how I got my start—Christian Bale, Werner Herzog. Good people that knew the business who were encouraging. We ultimately raised the funds, and I invested a little bit, and that was my first movie and it allowed me to start my own production company.
So when we fast-forward to today, what kind of stuff are you and your company working on?
We recently did another movie with the WWE, starring Luke Evans, called No One Lives, that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
So what do you look for when someone is pitching you an idea for a movie?
I like story-driven, character-driven movies. I read it and if I like it… You know, that’s the best thing for me, is seeing an idea, a story come to fruition—from the script to the big screen, to be able to point to it and say, “We did that,” is a great sense of accomplishment.
What have you learned about the film-making process that you could have never known had you not been a part of it in some way?
It’s tedious. Real tedious. People that do it love it. But it’s hard work—long hours, and I mean really long hours. You know, when you’re a producer or executive producer like at my level, if a film is shooting for let’s say two and a half months, I’m there for a month—maybe. I’ll spend a half-day on the set, you know what I mean? But these guys who are doing the day-to-day work are there all the time. I don’t think people realize how hard the work is to make a film. Your life is shut down, and I don’t think people understand that. I know I didn’t.
