How did that perspective come into play in the making of “Rize”?
When I saw these kids dancing, I said, hey, this has got to be documented. I never thought I was going to be a documentary filmmaker, but I loved documentary films growing up. So here I was doing a documentary because I fell in love with this dance, and then that led into their lives. I thought, this is something that people need to see, something we need to celebrate. How did you find out about these kids? I have some friends from South Central, and they said, “Dave, you gotta see this new dance that these kids are doing, you’re gonna love it.” This was in 2002. So I went down there one night, into the ‘hood, and I saw it, and I met Tommy (the Clown) and that was it. I went and bought a camera and we started going back and we started filming, and every free day I had off from work, I would just go into the ‘hood with my little crew together, just me and some friends. And then it grew. Then we came here last year with the short [“Krumped” played at Sundance in 2004]. We realized we had
