Exclusive Interview: Pop Culturalist Chats with Subject to Review’s Theo Anthony

Theo Anthony is a writer, photographer, cinematographer, and filmmaker whose projects have premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, and SXSW. His debut feature, Rat Film, was released by Cinema Guild in 2017 to wide acclaim. He follows that success with the release of Subject to Review, a short for ESPN’s 30 for 30 program. The film tells the story of instant reply review in tennis, its history, its limits, and its place in our search for ultimate truth. Theo brought Pop Culturalist.com behind the scenes.

PC: How did you discover your passion for storytelling?
Theo: I always wanted to be a writer. My mom is a journalist. It’s something that I always wanted to do. I was an avid reader as a kid. I knew I wanted to do something as a writer or in storytelling. I was also a very visual kid. My dad is an architect. So I grew up drawing and creating blueprints and plans. In high school, I got into photography. That was a separate pursuit though. I never really thought about combining them. I just really liked playing with cameras. I was shooting on film and loved the process of it. In high school, I would create videos with my friends. We’d make sketch videos, and that was how I learned how to use a camera. In college, I moved into music videos. At some point, I was doing music videos full time, and that’s when I learned how to edit. I found a way to combine that in documentary filmmaking and nonfiction storytelling.

PC: Who or what has had the biggest influence on your career?
Theo: There are a lot of different moments and people that I could speak to or shout out, but I think the single moment was when I was twenty-two or twenty-three, I had the opportunity to work for Vice Magazine. I actually got to go to Eastern Congo, where I worked for a few months as a correspondent. I was an extremely naive kid who had done hometown music videos. I wasn’t ready to go into a war zone. It set up a more critical investigation of my interest and who I was as a filmmaker.

PC: Tell us about Subject to Review and what inspired the short.
Theo: More broadly, a lot of my work deals with the ways in which we organize the world and how our politics comes into play. Why does the world look a certain way? Who is advocating for it to look a certain way? Who does it benefit? Who does it hurt? I think you can see that through line in my work Rat Film. It’s my first feature, and it came out in 2016. For this film, ESPN approached me to do a 30 for 30. I had an idea about doing a film about instant replay and more broadly how this new video technology affected our engagement with a sport. But we thought instead of doing all these different usages of instant replay, it was a better strategy to home in on just Hawkeye and tennis. It seems like this really simple thing that gets more complex as you look at it.

PC: We heard in another interview that you brought an outsider’s perspective. What are some of the major benefits and challenges you faced having been a little less familiar with the subject matter?
Theo: Yeah! [laughs] I think I said I came in like an alien and not as a tennis fan. I know the technical knowledge of it. I think it’s interesting to take a sideways approach because you can see things in a different way than someone who grew up in tennis their entire life. I did everything I could to respect that and familiarize myself as much as possible. When you come in with a very precise approach like being focused on this one thing, sometimes when you zoom in on something, the more you can zoom out in the end. That was our strategy. It was to go to the most granular level possible. The heart of the film isn’t about tennis. It’s about questions about what we know. Are there limitations to our knowledge? How do we respect and coexist with that inability to know everything?

To keep up with Theo, follow him on Twitter or Instagram. Catch Subject to Review on December 22 at 3pm EST on ESPN and stream it on ESPN+ on January 13.