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Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel first championed my film, 'Hoop Dreams,' which was essential to its success. Roger remained a great supporter of my work throughout my career, and I'll never forget him tweeting about 'The Interrupters' right before its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011.

I wanted to make a film that wouldn't just appeal to Formula One fans. That's what the great sports documentaries do - 'Hoop Dreams,' 'When We Were Kings' - they're human dramas first, sport second, if at all.

My childhood dream was to play basketball, actually.

It never occurred to me that I'd be on a television show or in feature films but when those came into play my dreams changed along the way.

I secretly liked acting, but I wanted to play football. It was an enormous dream.

From a young age, I wanted to play in the NBA. Oh well... It was when I was a senior in college that I fell for film, but even then, it wasn't documentaries. It wasn't until I ended up in graduate school at Southern Illinois University that I really discovered documentaries and thought that maybe that would be my calling.

I'm a sucker for sports movies.

I always dreamt of being a basketball player. A dream that only I believed in.

From the age of three to 15, I wanted to be a ballerina and trained really, really hard. Then I had that classic movie story moment, where I had an injury and had to give up my dream.

Once I got a bit older, and we could see there could be a future in football, it was everyone's blessing to chase that dream. And it did me a lot of good: It put me through college, it gave me an education, it got me a little taste of pro ball and a lot of good memories. I don't regret any of it.