AFI Dallas Interview: Darius Goes West Director Logan Smalley

Darius Goes West is a documentary about 15-year-old Darius Weems, who has Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD), a progressive and terminal illness that takes the lives of its victims in their late teens to early 20s. The film follows Darius and his 11 closest friends on a 7,000 mile RV road trip as they travel from their hometown of Athens, Georgia to California, to show Darius the world outside of Athens and, they hope, to get MTV to fix up Darius' wheelchair on the show Pimp My Ride. Logan Smalley, the director of the film and Darius' close friend, was kind enough to take time out of a busy fest schedule to talk to Cinematical about the film.

Cinematical: When did you decide you wanted to make a film out of this road trip with Darius? Was that the plan from the beginning?

Logan Smalley: I was there the first day Darius got his wheelchair at the summer camp we'd originally met at – we first met when he was five years old. I first met him through his brother Mario, who had DMD as well, and Mario was in my group. So I've known Darius since he was five. And around fifth grade, he was making the transition from a walker to a wheelchair, and it was during the summer that he was making this transition and I was there. And as his counselor at the time it was my job to help make him feel good about it. It's kind of like a kid getting glasses, times a hundred. It's a big physical change for all his peers. And it was my job to make him feel cool about it, and one of the things we thought about was putting chains on the wheels and spray-painting them, you know, make it look cool. But way before we got around to doing that, he accepted it, being in the chair. It was way easier for him to get around.

More after the jump ...
Cinematical: In a way it was probably liberating, to be able to move around more freely.

LS: It was, yeah. It's more independence, exactly.

Cinematical: And he'd been through this with his brother, too, and he knew what was coming.

LS: Exactly. Most of the kids who have DMD resist the wheelchair for way shorter of a time than anyone would imagine.

Cinematical: Do you think that's because they've always known that it's an inevitability, their parents have always prepared them for it?

LS: I think it's simply, Darius was so frustrated falling down on the playground, he'd walk 10 steps and fall down. And he was heavy then too, and he couldn't even get up by himself, the teachers had to help him. And so the wheelchair, even though there are still accessibility issues, gave him a lot more freedom and independence.

Anyhow, the second piece that led to making this film, was I went to the Cannes Film Festival to their study abroad program, and I saw Tarnation, which was made for like $130, and it got all kinds of critical acclaim. And that got me thinking, you can make a good film without having a lot of money, you can tell your story. And then the third piece of the puzzle was sitting down and watching Pimp My Ride with Darius at his house, and then we were like, man, we should get your wheelchair pimped on that show! Then, it was, man, we should take you out there in an RV, because you've never seen the world outside Athens. And then, man, we should take a camera and film it ... and then suddenly we realized, hey, we could make a real movie about all this. From the point that we said we should do it to the point that we decided to make a documentary was probably a minute-and-a-half.

Cinematical: And Darius was all for the idea from the beginning?

LS: Yeah, because you know, that was back when he barely even got out of his house. He lived a mile from downtown Athens, but he hadn't even been to downtown Athens in five years. His wheelchair can't go a mile, so he's just stuck in his house.

Cinematical: So getting him anywhere means getting him in a car, getting the wheelchair in a car ...

LS: And they don't have a car, his mom can't drive, she has limited eyesight. He can pretty much only go where the schoolbus takes him, and occasionally public transit.

Cinematical: What about public transit for the disabled?

LS: It's just now getting a little more accessible, but there was a time when even they wouldn't accept Darius because they said he was too big. And also the hours that they operate are only like 11AM to 5PM, and that's mostly when he's in school. For a high school student, 11 to 5 doesn't do anything for you. Kids like Darius want to be able to get out to the mall or whatever with their friends after school. So the transit has only recently gotten a bit more acceptable with that.

Cinematical: So this trip, in addition to being an opportunity to raise awareness about DMD, was really about showing Darius the world.

LS: Yeah. It was about getting Darius out into the world, to see all the things his brother didn't get to see before he died. And this disease, it has a predictable path. He's going to die.

Cinematical: How do you deal with that, as his friend? That has to be hard, to have this friend that you love, and no matter how much you wish it away, this disease is there and it's killing him.

LS: It is, it's just crushing. He's ... he's our brother. All of us have brothers, we think of each other as brothers. And Darius is simultaneously the big brother and the baby brother. And losing him will be ... it will be like the emptiest seat of all time.

Cinematical: Tell me how all these other guys got involved in the trip. How did it evolve into all these guys in an RV going on this trip?

LS: Darius and I were sitting there, and we knew we were going to have to have help, we couldn't do it just him and me, he is a big boy. At the time he weighed close to 300 pounds, he's heavier now. The majority of us already knew Darius from summer camp – I'd worked there for ten years. They didn't only know Darius through the camp, though. Whenever we could we'd take him to basketball games, to movies, wherever we could.

Cinematical: One of the things so many people were talking about after the screening, was how remarkable it was that this group of young men were all volunteering at this camp for disabled kids. It's just not something you seem to see a lot of teenage guys doing.

LS: See, I wonder if that's true. I wonder if it just doesn't get covered. Because it's not strange to us. I know not every town has a camp where kids like us become as close as we have, not every camp gets a documentary made about it, but one of the thing we're realized is that a lot of people don't have the highest opinion of the "MTV" generation, so we are excited to portray that there are motivated young men out there. We try to get a little more balance. The camp is an amazing camp, and my mom made me volunteer there, but my house is kind of like ... my mom has two biological kids and a hundred surrogate kids, my friends are her sons and daughters too. She made a lot of them work at the camp too – not made them, but ... suggested it strongly (laughs).

Cinematical: The film has a lot of really funny moments, and just in watching the film I was wondering if part of that need to laugh is coming from a place of trying to relieve the sorrow you all feel about the inevitably of losing your friend.

LS: Yeah, yeah, for sure. But you know, the person who taught us to laugh, is Darius. He has the biggest sense of humor in the world, and it matches everything about him. Everything about him is big.

Cinematical: His attitude is so infectiously positive, more so than you might expect from a 15-year-old kid who watched his brother die and knows he's dying too.

LS: Right, and you meet someone like that, and part of it is being honest, too. At the same time that Jason would crack jokes with Darius, Jason would also tell Darius, if Darius was struggling with his mortality, deeper stuff like that, Jason would speak to him about that as well. We tried to represent both the comedic moments and the not so comedic moments as well. Everything's a comedy and a tragedy as well. But it's so important to me that people not leave this story feeling that it's a sob story, and they would if we'd only focused on the tragic parts. That would have totally misrepresented Darius and who he is.

Cinematical: So it was a deliberate decision in both the shooting and the editing to balance the sorrow with the humor in the film.

LS: Absolutely. Our goal was to reflect Darius' personality in its entirety. And of course there are sad parts, but he doesn't cry – the people around him cry. He's had a great life and he's having a great life, and he will continue to have a great life for as long as he has it, I can guarantee that.

Cinematical: There are touching moments in the film, like when he sits in the ocean for the first time and he's so filled with joy. And in watching the film, one of the things that shone through was the tremendous effort all of you pulled together to make sure that Darius was able to get to all these places. You couldn't have gotten him safely into the ocean yourself, it was a group effort. But by the end of the film you realize, that as lucky as he is to have these friends helping him, he's also uplifting them.

LS: That's what's so cool, that's true friendship, you know, where it's mutual support. None of us got paid to do this, we raised money around a cause .And it's one of those things where you know he would do it for you, and you can do it for him, and he does what he can for you. It's one of those things, you know – driving 7,000 miles and making this movie, that's the kind of thing where these feats of humanity come from, and that's how deep friendships are made.

Cinematical: If you had approached the film from the angle of, oh, this poor guy, it wouldn't have had the same impact.

LS: It's completely true – no one on the crew for one minute would say that Darius didn't help them as much as they helped Darius, I guarantee you that. That's one of the reasons why we kept total post-production control, because there is such a temptation in films about people with disabilities, for the disability to become a way to promote pity, or misunderstanding. And anyone who's met Darius, and who knows how happy he is – it makes no sense to pity him, you'd be better off asking his advice. He would absolutely let you know with his loud mouth how he feels about you pitying him. So we wanted to make sure we controlled the story so the best parts about Darius and how he really is would be portrayed accurately. People might read about our film and think it will be fluffy, and it's not a fluffy film – it's raw and it's honest and it's real.

For more about Darius Goes West or Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, read the review of the film from AFI Dallas, and check out Charley's Fund, the not-for-profit foundation to which all proceeds from this film will be donated.