“Football doesn’t build character, it reveals it.” Not sure who said that first. In the Oscar-winning documentary Undefeated Coach Bill Courtney has adopted it as a motto. He expresses it to his team over and over again. What he really means is: win or lose, it’s up to you to become a better person.

Undefeated is about how a group of underprivileged, ignored teenagers become men of integrity. Football doesn’t really matter, especially below college level, but to the Manassas Tigers it’s the best opportunity they have to test their physical, mental and emotional toughness without worrying about bullets and blood.

In the urban unrest of North Memphis directors T.J. Martin and Daniel Lindsay found one of the most inspiring movie stories in years. Undefeated is funny, unsettling, thrilling, and deeply moving, qualities brought out by Martin and Lindsay but found in the hearts of their subjects. Just a few days after winning their Oscars we spoke to the team about its creation.

Like a lot of classic documentaries Undefeated finds a great story in a place we might never expect. Why did you bring your cameras to Manassas?

LINDSAY: Our producer found an article about [player] O.C. Brown, about how he split his time between living with his coach and getting tutored in a very affluent part of Memphis and with his grandmother in North Memphis, where the film takes place. It was interesting enough to us that we thought a film could be made about living between those two disparate worlds. 


Once we go to Memphis we met Coach Bill Courtney and realized we had found a very interesting character. Really, we never knew what the story would be but with the [principal subjects], the emotional candor and honesty they gave us, it just felt like an opportunity for an interesting story to be told through the lens of football.

You use a very unobtrusive, fly-on-the-wall style. Were these kids weary of having you enter their lives?

MARTIN: Earning their trust was a process, but they were very open and emotionally honest on-camera [from the beginning.] I just don’t know if they understood what we saw in them. That said we earned their trust pretty quickly. If anyone was weary it was the greater community. They maybe didn’t know what our intentions were so we had to support them by showing up every day at the football practices, showing up at the school, at talent shows, everything we could to prove that we wanted to [depict] their lives honestly. Eventually we just kind of blended in.

It helped that we didn’t have much of a crew. Dan and I shot everything ourselves, we didn’t have big boom mics ...

LINDSAY: It’s not that we stood back, really, but our presence wasn’t very apparent. The team just got so used to us we became like an extension of it.



Besides O.C. and Coach Bill the film has a few other important subjects; Montrail “Money” Brown and his academic struggle, Chavis Daniels overcoming his personal demons. Did you find them, so to speak, right away or did their importance emerge in the editing process?

LINDSAY: We met Money on our second exploratory trip to Memphis. We knew we had to keep talking to him. We were thinking of just juxtaposing O.C. and Money’s stories but on Chavis’ arrival it was clear his actions would impact everyone. He became a character that way. Bill has said “There’s a story under every helmet” and that’s so true. Every guy on the team was just so fascinating but for us it was about finding those with potential for dramatic change. We wanted [viewers] to forget they were watching a documentary and see something that played like a quote-unquote “movie.”

It’s amazing that the same year you happened to film them, the Manassas Tigers had their best season ever. Do you think your presence motivated them to win, or even to become the better people they seem to be at the movie’s end?

MARTIN: Honestly it’s hard to quantify what kind of effect, good or bad, we had. The most amazing moments, like Chavis standing up and dedicating his award to [former rival] Money, are a testament more to the support programs set up by the volunteer coaches.

How have players reacted to the movie?



LINDSAY: The universal reaction has been that we got it right, in terms of their experience. They gave us total control over how they were presented, and for them to say we got it right is the biggest compliment.

One of the things Undefeated does get right is the way high school football can consume the lives of its players ...

LINDSAY: I wouldn’t say it’s the most important thing in their lives, but it’s possibly the most consistent thing. A lot of them hop around houses, from grandmothers to moms ... the consistency of the program is very important. That’s why they feel their wins and loses maybe more than their peers in county schools. That was the most important thing to Bill: that he deliver on his promises to them.

Were the players interested in what you were doing technically? Did they ask you about the movie itself while you filmed it?

MARTIN: For a while they didn’t understand what we were doing. Three-quarters into the season one of the players came up to us and said “Who’s going to play me in the movie?” “No, man, this is the movie! You’re playing yourself.” We had a minimal crew and these small cameras so when they would see O.C. doing interviews for television it looked a lot more professional. There were a couple kids genuinely interested in cinema and photography so we kind of demystified the process for them but for the most part we tried not to draw attention to what we were doing.

Oftentimes in documentaries if you miss a moment for b-roll, you’ll ask [the subject] like “Can you walk down the street for me to get this quick shot ...” We never did that. If we weren’t there to see them enter the school to get to class, that was it. We never asked them to do something which would draw attention to the process. They were always themselves.

Undefeated opens in Toronto today, March 2, via Alliance Films.