a SIFF 2008 interview

All in the Family

Chris Bell on Heroes, Steroids and Chasing the American Dream

I walked into my interview with Bigger, Stronger, Faster* director Christopher Bell at downtown Seattle W Hotel not exactly sure what to expect. While I liked his debut film (quite a bit, actually) I was still coming at it from a bit of a frustrating place. I’d played college athletics and had seen steroid use first-hand, and while I agreed with many of the central points exclaimed within his opus I still wasn’t entirely predisposed to think that performance enhancing drugs should remain anything other than what they are currently – illegal.

Director Christopher Bell Goes to Washignton in Magnolia Pictures' Bigger, Stronger, Faster*

I shouldn’t have been worried. The gregarious, intelligent and extremely well-spoken young filmmaker didn’t disagree with me. Instead, his point – much like the one of the many he makes winningly in the documentary – isn’t so much that steroids and human growth hormone should be put on the market for public consumption, he just wants to seem them scientifically tested and researched.

Hard to disagree with that statement and throughout our 20-minute conversation I was struck by both the man’s passion and his enthusiasm for both the subject matter and towards his justly lauded debut. The following are some of the highlights from the interview, brought to you without any unnecessary ingredients and virtually guaranteed to PUMP!... you up.

Sara Michelle Fetters: So, I’ve got to ask, while you do admit in the film that you had tried steroids in the past, after doing all this research and speaking with so many different people are you taking them now? Would you be open to maybe taking them again in the future?

Christopher Bell: Nah. I’m not taking them now. But I’d not necessarily take them again [in the future]. I think there has to be more research on the subject. I make this examination of dietary supplements in the film and if steroids are no more dangerous than a lot of these other things we have in our society, are the necessarily a thing that should be looked down upon? So, definitely, I think we need more research on the subject of steroids, but they’re definitely something I have in mind to do next week or anytime in the future or anything like that.

Fetters: So, before you even approached them and asked them about being in the movie, what did you family say when you told them you were thinking about making a documentary about steroids?

Bell: I actually always had an idea to do a movie about steroids because it was something I’d been around since I was like 16-years-old, I was a power lifter and saw people doing it all of the time. But, when I said I wanted to do a movie about steroids, their first immediate thoughts were like, this is going to be great, it’s going to be this big anti-steroid movie blah blah blah.

But then I when I start talking to people about this and I tell them that, what’s interesting about all of this, is that there are a lot of grey areas here. There is no real research to show that [steroids] kill people. There is no real research to show a lot of things that people think about them. And that’s what became interesting and is why a lot of people ultimate came onboard.

When I told my brothers that this was the real point of the film and that we were writing the treatment they became just so excited about being able to just come out into the open about the issue. My younger brother, Smelly, was just sick of lying to a lot of people about it and he was just like, you know, I don’t want to lie about but I live in a culture where you’re forced to lie about it, so if I tell the whole world in a film than, like, screw it, it’s over.

Fetters: But was it hard to talk about these issues?

Bell: I think I lot of people don’t want to talk about steroids because, and if you’re an athlete than you know what I’m talking about, and you come out and admit to taking steroids then they take away every single accomplishment you’ve ever had. People just think, no matter what, that the steroids did everything when in all reality steroids help great athletes train harder.

I just wanted to say the truth about steroids and come out and say that, look, if you’re going to say these guys are evil and you’re going to demonize them for what they’re doing maybe we should reexamine [the issue] because there are a lot of medical advantages to steroids, a lot of reasons why they are no different then a lot of other things in our culture.

Listen, I don’t condone the use of steroids but I definitely don’t want to condemn them, either, because I thin that it is such a grey area. We really need to reexamine the issue and do some actual medical research so we can figure it out.

Fetters: It seems like that’s a tough point to make, though. I mean, when I was coming out of Middle School and High School it was almost as if we were ‘scared straight,’ if you will, where it came to the issue of steroids. These things were evil. These things were bad for you. Most of all, these things would kill you or, at the very least, maybe make it so you could possibly hurt someone else.

Bell: It’s funny how we demonize steroids but we have not demonized alcohol and tobacco to the same extent. But there are lots of people making a lot of money off of those and testosterone is something you cannot patent, so a pharmaceutical company doesn’t have any real interest in taking it on as their new wonder drug.

We have now demonized [steroids] to a point I wanted to ask, is this just Reefer Madness all over again? We’ve taken the drug and demonized it to the point that it is almost laughable. It’s a joke, a punch line, and I wanted to figure out why.

Fetters: How surprised were you by just how little research there actually has been done on steroids?

Bell: I had one of the best medical researchers in the country working on this movie, and she came busting into my office one day and going, “Where are the studies? Where are the gosh darn studies? There are no studies and I can’t believe it! I’ve researched this up and down and I can’t find any information.” Which was totally true, because while there have been some studies on steroids there hasn’t been any conclusive long-term ones, and when you look at the studies that have been done the research is really old. And, in those [the drugs] don’t prove to be deadly.

Like I said in the film, I was always against steroids a lot, and making it I learned a lot. I was constantly like, oh my god, you’re telling me that’s not true, this isn’t true, ‘Roid’ Rage doesn’t really exist and so many other things that really blew my mind. I couldn’t believe it.

Fetters: But, juxtapose those revelations with the fact that the heroes you had as a kid that you talk about in the film, Hulk Hogan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, have all used steroids even though they urged kids to avoid them. Even if the drugs maybe don’t do all the things we were told in school they would, isn’t that still a terrible double standard children ended up emulating?

Bell: When Arnold says, “If you work had and play by the rules, you can achieve anything,” and you just look at him and think, did you ever play by the rules ever? And when Hulk Hogan is like, train, say your prayers, eat your vegetables, you’re like, is that really how you got there or is it something else?

But there is a lot that goes into making a superstar, a movie star, an athlete, whatever, and steroids are really a component of it, but it’s not the cause behind [their success]. It’s still an awful lot of hard work. So, while it was disappointing to discover that all my heroes did steroids, as an adult I can accept it a little bit more.

Fetters: All the same, you have to understand where the indignation comes from so many in the general populace?

I can definitely understand why people get up in arms about athletes using them because it sends the wrong message to kids, but I also question in the movie that we have a lot of wrong messages being sent to kids, not just ones about steroids, and we should question as a culture what we’re doing as a whole and not direct our fury at one specific drug.

Fetters: I think what really ended up touching me the most about this film was just how much it became a family story, your family’s story, and I wonder if you were surprised by just how personal all of this became?

Bell: I never actually did a count of the minutes, but I think it’s pretty even, close to half-and-half, where we use the family to demonstrate things. [My family] is like a microcosm of America. We’re an All-American family with an All-American problem.

Joseph Bidden was pounding his fists in a Senate hearing saying there was something just un-American about [steroids] and I was like, no it’s not. In my mind, there is really nothing more American than doing what it takes to be the best. I think that my brothers got that message as well from all the images we grew up on, and steroids kind of fit right in there. I wanted to figure out where [they] fit in to our society, and using the family, I think, was a great way to say, this is what happened to me and my brothers, we were all part of this culture, everybody is responsible for their own self, but this is how we felt.

If you look at the story of me and my brothers I say, if Mad Dog was the fat kid and I was the short kid and Smelly had a learning disability, those three things right there are big enough to say, “I’m not good enough, I’m not as good as everybody else.” And, I think, that was part of the reason for the steroid use and part of the reason that lead us all to talk about many of the things we talk about in the film.

Mike "Mad Dog" Bell, Christopher and Mark "Smelly" Bell in Magnolia Pictures' Bigger, Stronger, Faster*

Fetters: And you guys get pretty emotional. You, your brothers and your parents really dig into some tough, complicated issues sometimes.

Bell: It snowballed, though. It was a real snowball effect. You start talking to your Mom about stuff and next thing you know she’s calling you on the phone and she’s going we need to sit down and talk. Next thing you know she’s interviewing you and like flips the switch on you and it’s like, wait a second I’m supposed to be the interviewer here.

So, it definitely did get personal and also kind of weird sometimes but when something is really important as a filmmaker you just have to go for it and I got that from watching guys like Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock. One of my favorite documentaries in making this film was [Andrew Jarecki’s] Capturing the Friedmans. The let people speak their mind. People sitting in the same room go, “I know I saw him do it,” and then other people are like, “No, there is no way he did it,” and you’re sitting there trying to decide for yourself what’s going on and ultimately you don’t even know what to think anymore.

And that was a real inspiration to me in making this film. Not really the subject matter, but just the idea of keeping people guessing and making them question what is really going on.

Fetters: We question sometimes as a populace when it suits us, but it isn’t really like any real energy is being spent of the issues raised by both steroids and by their study except on a distinctly superficial level.

Bell: NBC spent a billion dollars for the rights to telecast the Olympics. Major sports are billion dollar entities. If they were all to contribute to some sort of fund to research steroids and for public education, I don’t think they even realize what it is they might discover. But they don’t even want to get involved. You can say one thing but do another and it says a lot. They say they want clean sports, yet there is no test for Human Growth Hormone (HGH).

And now you have the Olympics coming up. You have 15,000 athletes converging on China getting ready to complete and who knows if all of them are on HGH? The better question is, do we even care? Or, rather, how much do we really care if we just don’t know? I think those are interesting questions as well.