Amazon Prime’s docuseries Earnhardt premieres this Friday, May 22. It’s the most in-depth look into Dale Earnhardt’s life and career that we’ve ever seen to this point, with footage from the furthest corners of NASCAR and Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s infamous archives.
The Sporting Tribune sat down for a 1-on-1 with director Joshua Altman last week, where he gave insight into his creative process and what he hopes fans take from the series.
This is probably the deepest collection of archival footage we've seen on Dale Earnhardt’s life and career. What was the process of gathering all that material like, and how far did that search for never-before-seen footage go?
Josh Altman: Coming into this, NASCAR told us they had 15 petabytes of material, just in terms of their own archive. Our task was getting through those 15 petabytes of material and finding what we really wanted to get and what was needed.
As filmmakers, we typically want everything as documentarians. We're not like, ‘Oh, give us the clips. ’ We want the things outside of the clips, where we tend to find some interesting stuff. We had a great team over there at NASCAR, and they were just really good about all of the questions we would ask. And then our team, the editors, were really good at researching. They would go down rabbit holes and find things we weren’t even sure existed on camera. Going back and finding all that stuff was just fun for them. We all sort of found it like an engaging, fun process.
This series dives into Dale's personal life and his family relationships in a way that most fans have never really seen. How important was it for you guys to tell his story in a way that humanized him, for both better and worse?
JA: All of us producers coming into this, myself included, we didn't come in as fans. Most of us had never been to a NASCAR race before. We hadn't watched much NASCAR, so we really were attracted to this story from a family perspective more than anything. I think outside of that, there is this incredible mythos around Dale, there's a lack of knowing who Dale is to the general public.
Most people may not put him next to a Babe Ruth or a Bob Dylan, people who were also American icons. For us, we thought that was important. We want to make sure that he is seen on that level. At the same time, underneath that was the family story that was key to all of that. We thought and we hope that people outside of NASCAR will connect with the story like we did.
What role did Dale Jr. play in the creation of the series, and how much did you lean on him and other guys who experienced this in real time when putting us all together?
JA: First off, Dale Jr. and Kelly were both just incredibly gracious in trusting us to tell this story and opening their doors to us. Dale Jr. has a treasure trove of archives himself that he opened up to us, but then also sitting down with us for very lengthy interviews, I think we probably sat down with him for four hours at a time each session, and just really talked.
It was great. He was extremely down-to-earth and willing to delve into things. We leaned on him in that way throughout the process, obviously, with every interview, really trying to understand the story. His story, as well as his father's. Same thing with Kelly and all of the other participants. They opened up to us. They pointed us towards other people that we might not have spoken to before, like (bass fisherman) Hank Parker, who became a very important part of the series. Hank was not someone that we had even thought about interviewing before we had spoken to him.
Clearly, Dale’s relationship with his father and his own children, especially Dale Jr., were core themes in the series. How important did you feel the portrayal of those relationships were when painting the whole picture of Dale as a man?
JA: They're vital. They're everything. Coming into this, we all sort of knew that Dale Earnhardt was the gravitational center of the universe, both in terms of his family but also the sport.
In the editing process, as we started to dive into it, we started to realize that meant that he also had to be a part of almost every scene. Even when he's not there. Even when we're telling the story of Dale Jr. or Kelly, in a way, they're also revealing something about Dale Sr., so everything's sort of reflecting back on him, even after his passing.
A lot of that is talking about him and the legacy and the shadow that he left behind and how to deal with that. I think it was key. I think we also entered into it with this notion that Dale Sr. is sort of on this arc of chasing success on the track that takes him away from his family, while Dale Earnhardt Jr. is on this track chasing the opposite thing, he's racing to try and get closer to his father.
Darrell Waltrip, one of Dale's main rivals, is interviewed in the early episodes more than almost anyone else. What made his perspective so valuable, and how did his insight shape the way you wanted to tell Dale's story?
JA: There are a few facets to this. I think we always thought that the Waltrips were key to this story. Both Darryl and his brother, younger brother, Michael. Dale and Darrell are friends early on, but in many ways, you have this rivalry that develops on the track between them that shapes the persona that Dale becomes.
Then to later on, to have Darrell calling the race where Dale died, with Michael racing for the win, there’s this connection between them, this evolution of their relationship. I think, was important to us from the start. How can you not tell that story?
They were great, too. It was really nice. We went to Tennessee and hung out with them. They were very gracious. I didn't quite realize the level of their rivalry early on, to be honest with you, I had some inkling of it, but as we started to put together and sort of unearth that episode, it sort of became clear that it had to be centered around it.
Dale's public image was built on toughness and intensity, but this series shows a more layered and sometimes vulnerable version of him. Was there a moment or a piece of footage that you believe could shift the way people think of Dale’s personality?
JA: One of the central themes, I think, is suppression. As humans, I think we’re always trying to suppress certain feelings, especially sadness and stuff like that. He was just next level with his ability to do that. To me, getting at that vulnerability was key. There’s this footage that we have that comes at the end of Episode Two, after he's lost his best friend, Neil Bonnett.
He’s sitting there, having to give this prepared statement that he's written, that's going to play at the end of the year. You could just see that he has struggled to keep all those emotions inside, like he was working very hard to get it across. In terms of his most vulnerable moments, that was up there, but I think a normal person would be breaking down in that moment.
As someone who grew up in an Earnhardt household myself, it seems like you hit on all the crucial parts of his story. Was there anything that you had to leave out that you wish you could have included?
JA: There's just so much that ends up on the cutting floor. I think we had like 10,000 hours of footage. There’s stuff that Dale Jr. had never even seen of his family. To bring that stuff back for him was great. Stuff of Ralph, his grandfather, that he had never seen. In terms of stuff that's left on the cutting room floor, man, that's hard, because there was a lot.
We also shot a lot in the present day that we weren’t able to include. We went with Kelly to Millbridge a dirt track in North Carolina, and got covered with mud filming her three children racing together. I thought that was amazing to see them all racing together. Watching that, I was like, ‘I want to do this. That looks like fun,’ and I hope the outsiders who don't come in as fans leave wanting to go check out a race or even potentially getting in a go-kart themselves.
The fourth and final episode obviously dives into Dale's death at the 2001 Daytona 500. How did you manage to tell such a tragic story while also giving viewers a perspective that they haven't seen from that day?
JA: I don't know. I'm curious what your take on that is and everybody else's. We had a lot of iterations of how far we went on the day of. It sort of had to revolve around the family. We thought we couldn't go beyond that, we didn't want to involve people who were sort of in the peripheral. It had to be central to those people.
The first 20 minutes of the episode got locked in relatively quickly once we had the interviews, whereas the rest of the episode was constantly changing, because at one point, we were taking it all the way to Dale Jr.’s retirement. We weren’t going to be able to fit all that into an episode, but I think at the core of it was just figuring out how to keep the family at the center and making sure that we were unpacking what that was like for them to go through that.
We're sort of in a golden age of sports docuseries. I feel like Earnhardt stacks up with the best of them, including The Last Dance, but was that the bar you were shooting for here? How do you feel this piece of work stacks up, yourself?
JA: For sure. The Last Dance was in our minds early on and something we looked at as a comparison. Obviously, just the success that it had, but really the way that it was able to tell a story that some of us might have heard before, but in a way that we hadn't, and delve deeper.
I think also in my mind was David Russell's The Fighter. That was something that I referenced early on when we were talking this out, how it was a scripted film, but really told from the family's perspective. I wanted to always make sure that the family storie is intertwined and connected back to it. I don't know how it stacks up. As a director, I watch these episodes countless times. Over and over and over again. It's very hard to gauge what's working now and what isn't.
You've touched on this a little bit, but what do you hope viewers take away from this series? Both hardcore fans and casuals who don't really know much about NASCAR, what do you hope they learn about Dale?
JA: I hope they come to understand just how important he was for the sport. More than anything, I think most people might know the name, but they don't quite realize that he was this transformational figure. He was a person who took the sport from the backwoods to this huge, national thing. In a lot of ways, I don't know how much he gets credited for that, outside of the people who are NASCAR fans. He is an American icon, I'd like people to take that away and really look at him as such. I think outside of that, hopefully it opens people's eyes up to NASCAR. People who weren't fans or aren't fans, maybe it will get them to check it out a little bit more and to have a little bit more of an open mind about it.