The Last Dance Director Jason Hehir Spent 28 Months with “the Holy Grail of Characters”

Toward the end of the 28 months he spent working on The Last Dance, ESPN’s supersize Michael Jordan documentary, director Jason Hehir let himself start thinking about how he and his team would celebrate once they were finished. They were editing the episodes in lower Manhattan. Not far away, a big bar out on the Hudson River beckoned. “We all pictured ourselves in shorts and T-shirts and sandals and sunglasses, clinking champagne glasses,” he tells me by phone from his Manhattan apartment.

And then, of course, everything changed: The spread of the coronavirus led ESPN to bump the series premiere from June all the way up to April, forcing Hehir and his team to radically compress their production schedule—all while figuring out how to put together a 10-part, eight-hour film with a series of knotty, converging timelines, without his team physically occupying the same space.

That outdoor toast was replaced by a glass of champagne over Zoom last Sunday, ahead of the premiere. And Hehir had plenty to celebrate: The first two episodes of The Last Dance averaged 6.1 million viewers, breaking ESPN’s record for a documentary—and, perhaps more importantly, catching like wildfire on Twitter. He spoke to GQ about wrapping up production, why the world-beating Bulls were actually underdogs, and trying his best to stay off Twitter during the premiere.

GQ: Where am I getting you from?
Jason Hehir: I am in my apartment, where I've been holed up, like the rest of us, for the past five or six weeks.

And I would imagine that all of those past five or six weeks have been devoted to working on the film.
Yes, which is not really an aberration. We were working pretty much every waking hour on this thing for a very long time. But now it's confined to our homes, where we're by ourselves, rather than in a group.

Where are you in the process now?
At 11:15 this morning, I just gave the final sign-off to episode seven. We finish editing [episode] 10 tomorrow. The final picture lock is done, but we're working with low-res screeners, so all the master footage has to be put in. And then, for Netflix, it's going out to 185 countries, so it has to be translated into dozens of languages. Then they have to subtitle it, they have to closed-caption it. And then we do sound design, audio mix, and color correct on that as well. So it's a weeks-long process after we finish editing. So tomorrow's our last day of editing on the whole entire series, but we still have two weeks to go to finish 8, 9, and 10.

How does that feel, knowing that tomorrow, from at least one angle, is going to be it?
It's huge. It's basically, if you were chopping down a redwood tree for two years, there will remain one sliver of wood after tomorrow, which is just screening the final copies. And really, it's just quality control at that point, making sure that nothing goes out on the air that doesn't sound and look exactly the way that we want it to. But the hard, hard, heavy lifting is done. It's like the last few steps to the top of Everest.

Did you have a sense, going into night one, of what viewers might latch onto? Or were you surprised by what people enjoyed?
There were things that were a little more subtle that I didn't expect people to appreciate as much. The “former Chicago resident” with Barack Obama was a bit of an inside joke in the edit room, because I was adamant from the outset that we're not going to have famous people in this just because they're famous. And we've gone back and forth with a lot of the partners about that. And I said, "Well, the reason that he's in this thing is not that he was the 44th president of the United States, it's that he was a former Chicago resident and he was there to witness the rise of Michael Jordan in the mid-'80s.” So that's, organically, the reason why he's in it. I saw a meme—the one that said, "Jesus Christ, former Nazareth resident," that was my favorite. I laughed out loud at that one.

And then Michael laughing at the “cocaine circus.” I've seen a T-shirt online now that says "Traveling Cocaine Circus." That was really fun to see, because I asked that question 20 minutes into the first interview. And it would've been very easy for Michael to say, "Yeah, those were crazy days,” and then just kind of demur and avoid a question. He certainly knows how to bob and weave through a question that he doesn't want to answer. But for him to lean back and belly laugh like that, that was as big an indicator as any that he was going to actually share. When I say that to him and he laughs like that, he's acknowledging that it's true. And then for him to follow it up and offer that anecdote, that just really gives you a sense of how invested he was in this project, and that when he agreed to do it, it wasn't just lip service. He actually came to play.

One of the things that I was struck by, with Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman and Phil Jackson, was the way you really linger with these figures who were central to the story, but who are obviously not Michael Jordan. How early on did you realize that you were interested in devoting large chunks of time to the supporting cast?
From day one. As captivating as Michael is, I don't know if anyone warrants a 10-hour examination. I think that people would eventually tire of that. So you have to find a B story and a C story. Now, luckily, with this team, some of the most captivating people might be the guy behind the guy behind the guy. Hopefully, this occurs to people when they're watching the series, but from 35,000 feet, it's easy to say: This came easy for them. They assembled a great team. These are all great players. And they ran roughshod through the NBA for almost all of the '90s. But when you get down to a ground level, each and every one of the people who made up that team, even Michael, you could look at it as an underdog story.

When Michael was a sophomore and famously cut from his team, he had no business having aspirations to be the greatest NBA player of all time, but he persevered. Steve Kerr was barely recruited to go to play college basketball—he says in episode nine that he didn't get a lot of attention from girls or college recruiters when he was a senior in high school. He had no business having NBA aspirations. Scottie Pippen had no business believing that he would be considered one of the greatest players of all time, coming from a family where 14 people lived under the same roof in abject poverty, and not being a great basketball player in his youth. But he believed it. He persevered. And the same goes for Rodman and for Phil Jackson and so many of the people who comprised that team, Jerry Krause included. This is a band of underdogs who wildly overachieved, and they were just in sync with each other and meshed so well. So that was the interesting part of the story to tell. It's not that interesting a story if there's no challenges, and these guys all were just naturally gifted, and happened to come together at the same time and play tremendous basketball. There's a lot more to it than that.

Did you have a question that you were interested in either asking or answering about Michael in this whole process?
In any project that I've done, especially if it's an iconic figure, I am very interested in humanizing that person. Not propagating their mythology, but actually peeling back the onion and seeing who the human being is under that, behind that bronze statue. And with Michael, that's the ultimate cultural icon of my lifetime. That's the Holy Grail of characters to sit down with and to try and find out not just what makes them tick, but what made them, what drove them, what the roots of that passion were that resulted in their greatness. And these guys, they all have tremendous backstories. With Michael, as the series progressed, there were questions that I really wanted to ask him, and I thought that maybe we'd get into it in episode two or three, whether he's ambivalent about the reputation he has for being this ruthless competitor. Or what his feelings were about the rumors that surfaced after his dad was killed. What it feels like to lose your father, who is also your best friend, but then be baselessly accused of being responsible for his death.

I wanted to get it from his perspective—even to ask him how he felt about the SI cover. [Ed. note: During Jordan’s baseball-playing hiatus, Sports Illustrated ran a cover story about his struggles to adapt to the new sport. On the cover: a photo of Jordan swinging and missing with the line “BAG IT, MICHAEL.”] I've never seen him answer that question. And with Michael, it's kind of like when you hear a supermodel say, "I don't go on many dates because nobody will ask me out." I think with Michael, it's that he was willing to answer those questions. Like the “Bag It, Michael” cover, he said they never spoke to him. He would've spoken to them! If you talk to any reporter from old-school Chicago, they say that Michael was the guy who, by far, was the most apt to sit there and bullshit with the reporters before and after practice. Just to talk to them. Because he's a gregarious guy, and he likes being around people.

So I think he is willing. He's a very articulate guy, and certainly engaging and charismatic. So to sit down and be able to ask him not only the questions that I wanted to ask him as a fortysomething filmmaker, but also as a fourth-grade Michael Jordan fan, it's really once in a lifetime.

I grew up on that stuff, too, and I didn't think there was a Michael image I hadn't seen. And then, I forget if it's at the end of [episode] seven or eight, when he wins the first title after coming back from baseball, there’s that image of him on the ground in the locker room, just crying, by himself.
Yeah. That's the end of eight.

It stopped me dead in my tracks. I had never seen that.
Yeah, there were a couple of moments that we built far before we started building the episodes—that were just going to be tentpole moments for the entire series. And that was one of them, because to me, when he came back, it was all about: He plays to win for himself, for his teammates, and for his family, and his closest family member was no longer there. So you see that elation when he wins, and then you see the immediate devastation, on Father's Day, of all days, when the reality's in front of him, that this guy who’s been with him every single step of his basketball journey is no longer there with him. I knew that that's probably the most powerful piece of B-roll we have—that exists of Michael Jordan—that I've ever seen. That's the kind of shot and story that you build around. You don't let that come to you. You put that off in the distance and you figure out how you're going to get there.

This one's easy. What's MJ's drink of choice?
I don't know. You'd have to ask Michael that.

Really?
Yeah. I do not know.

Because in the first couple episodes at least, that glass by his side is almost a supporting character.
It's certainly gotten a lot of attention. I'm surprised that that glass doesn't have its own Twitter account by now.

What was the experience of watching those first two episodes Sunday like for you?
It was more than a bit surreal, to see that final product on my own home television screen, because I'm only used to seeing it on screens at work, and I'm only used to seeing it and wondering what people are going to feel when they see it, and how they'll receive it.

Were you following along on Twitter, as everyone was watching?
I promised my girlfriend that I wouldn't do that, because she has been with me from the inception of this project—we started dating the day after I started working on this project. She's only known me as singularly obsessed with Michael Jordan and the Bulls dynasty. And she sees the amount of pressure that me and my team were under these days, and I think that she just cares about my mental health, so she's probably a bit afraid of me bleeding out the ears if I watch this thing. So she asked that I just put the phone down during the show, and be present and watch with her, because she hasn't seen it and she wanted to experience it with me. During the commercial breaks, I would check my texts, and there would be dozens of texts that I had gotten during the showing of the actual show, people sending me memes and retweets and things like that. But afterwards, she went to bed, and I watched all that stuff. I kind of went back on the timeline on Twitter and re-experienced it, and saw what people were saying.

And how did you judge the response?
It was great to see people connecting with it. The interesting part about the time that we're living in, and the time that this is being shown, is that the internet is not known as a place that's unanimous, especially in their enthusiasm for something. If they're unanimous for something, it's normally to criticize it. I'm going to refrain from naming any projects that have come out lately, but I feel for people who put their heart and soul into something, and then it becomes kind of like the in-joke to tweet about it, and to make fun of a movie or a book or something like that.

But I think we're living in a time right now where cynicism is at an all-time low, because this is a communal moment for everyone. This is the great equalizer. We're all quarantined. We're all unsure of what the future holds. Michael Jordan's quarantined in a mansion in Florida, the same way that my girlfriend and I are quarantined in a small apartment in New York City. So I think that there was less of an instinct to criticize, and to immediately compare Michael and LeBron. And I think people just wanted to sit down and enjoy this. We haven't had that kind of monoculture moment during this shutdown. When the Game of Thrones finale aired, I feel like everyone gathered around their TVs and watched that, and we haven't really had that moment during the shutdown. So it was really gratifying to see people enjoying it and to get notes from strangers saying, "Thank you for this. I watched this with my sons. I shared MJ with my sons. I've been talking about him for years."

Have you heard anything from Michael's camp?
I haven't. He has seen all the episodes. I've heard from their camp, because I'm still actively talking to them—we had our big notes call last night about episode 10, so we're still very much in production on these episodes. Obviously, everybody's really thrilled with the ratings and the response that it's gotten critically, and from viewers as well. So there's a lot of goodwill. I think there's a lot of long-distance high-fiving going on, because we all put so much into this over the past couple of years, that it's amazing to see. People are enjoying this exactly the way that I had hoped that they would enjoy it. And that is just a really gratifying thing.

Some filmmakers say, "Oh, I try not to read the reviews," or like, "I try not to look at the ratings." It seems like this would be basically an impossible time to ignore anything like that.
If I wasn't working around the clock, then it would be tough to ignore it, because I'd otherwise just be sitting at home, staring at my phone. Normally, you have a routine where you wake up, you go get coffee, sit at the coffee shop, and play on your phone. This is: I wake up and my office is eight feet away from me, it's a desk with a desktop computer and a 32-terabyte drive. It's got thousands of hours of footage on it, through which myself and my staff, scattered throughout New York, are still editing this thing. My office is steps away, so I just have to walk my dog, come upstairs, and then sit down and buckle in. It's been a welcome distraction, but everything that I've seen has been great, so we've been blessed in that way.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Originally Appeared on GQ