Straight Out of Sundance: King Richard' director Reinaldo Marcus Green recounts his path to the Sundance Film Festival

-- By Vanessa Zimmer

Reinaldo Marcus Green thought he was just being a good brother helping out with a homework assignment. As it turns out, he wound up getting sucked into the world of filmmaking. Witness King Richard, his buzz-generating new film about the rise of tennis legends Serena and Venus Williams under the guidance of their father, played by Will Smith.

But let's get back to that homework assignment: Rewind a decade or so, when older brother Rashaad Ernesto Green was a film student at New York University Tisch School of Arts and Reinaldo was working a Wall Street job at AIG. On weekends, Reinaldo helped his brother shoot short films for class.

One in particular, Choices, was shot in Reinaldo's bedroom and featured Reinaldo in a lead role with no dialogue. It cost maybe $2.50 to shoot. Rashaad submitted it to the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, where it was welcomed for a screening.

The younger Green took time off from his Wall Street job to help his brother present the short at the Festival. My brother says, Wrangle cables,' I'm going to do it, the younger Green explains. I was going to do whatever he asked me to do.

The New Yorker had no idea where Sundance even existed on the map, but he soon found out that Park City, Utah, was a hotbed of film and talent. I remember that was the year of Precious. I remember going to a party and seeing Lenny Kravitz and was like, That's Lenny Kravitz!' So I [said to Rashaad], Bro, what do you do again?'

The experience made enough of an impression that Green eventually took a self-described leap of faith and went to film school himself, also at the NYU Tisch School of Arts.

Green graduated from cable-wrangling to directing when he took his own short, Stop, to the 2015 Festival. It also was a homework assignment. Although he estimates it cost him $500, pricey compared to his brother's, but amazingly cheap for a film festival-caliber short film.

Stop, about a Black teenager being stopped and frisked by police for no reason, seemed to touch a nerve, drawing interest at other film festivals across the United States. It was allowing people to sink into a subject matter that was controversial but also of interest, and I just leaned into that feeling, Green said. I think that the film played over 50 festivals in the middle of the country, and places that I never thought that they would be receptive to this type of filmmaking. That gave Green the confidence to expand the subject matter and develop his first feature.

LINK:	https://www.sundance.org/blogs/king-richard-director-reinaldo-marcus-g...
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