Davis Guggenheim is on a roll.  Ever since he teamed up with former Vice President Al Gore “An Inconvenient Truth”, Guggenheim has seen his Hollywood trajectory take off.  But it was in 1999 that Guggenheim began his career by taking on an ambitious project documenting the challenging first year of several novice public school teachers.  This endeavor produced two docu films “The First Year” and “Teach”.  Then came television directing projects in such critically acclaimed programs as “NYPD Blue”, “ER”, “Party of Five” before he became producer and director of the Emmy Award-winning HBO series “Deadwood”, and wracking up directing credits with “24”, “Alias”, “The Unit” and “The Shield”. 

  Along the way, he met and married Oscar-nominated (“Leaving Las Vegas”) actress Elisabeth Shue.  And that’s how Guggenheim came to love “Gracie”, an inspirational film based on the lives of the Shue family during the mid-seventies.  Elisabeth was the only girl playing soccer in her hometown of South Orange, New Jersey,  but the whole Shue family – including actor/brother, Andrew – played soccer making a local newspaper run a headline:  The Shues Get Their Kicks. 
 “Gracie” is really Elisabeth’s story, one which Andrew has wanted to tell for a decade, incorporating a tribute to their older brother, Will, who died in a car accident.  When Davis’ help was enlisted, it really became a family project.  Davis saw this film as a vehicle to celebrate his wife’s experience she had playing soccer with boys and growing up in a male-dominated household.  Starring Carly Schroeder as Gracie, Dermot Mulroney as the father and Elisabeth Shue as her mother, Lindsey Bowen, “Gracie” is a story about determination and the rules of soccer being changed forever. 

So are you always going to approach movies that deal with some sort of social issue?
DAVIS: Maybe. I mean, it certainly helps. More important than that, I want to make movies that I’m passionate about. That I can get fired up to do.  And a lot of those movies have social issues, yeah. I love going from a western like Deadwood to global warming to soccer. It’s fun.

Do you think this movie couldn’t have been made without the help of the State of New Jersey?
DAVIS: I think this is the little movie that could, and there was like a hundred reasons why it could have fallen apart at any given time. And Andrew…You know, that thing that Johnny says to Gracie? You know, "You can do anything"? That’s not just some fabricated Hollywood line. That’s the Shue family. That’s what these guys told each other.
And you look at Elisabeth and Andrew and John, their brother, and Will, who died - they were all these spectacular spirits. They were extraordinary kids because they all just believed they could do anything. So it took Andrew’s passion and the State of New Jersey. It fell apart a hundred times. It took all those things to make it happen. And it defied all the odds. It’s sort of a miracle the movie got made.
How did you go about writing the finale? Did you want to avoid things seen in other sports movies?
DAVIS: My process is, if you go and make decisions by the movies you’ve seen before, you’re in a trap because you’re constantly looking over your shoulder and worried. [laughs] You’ll never please everybody. And everything’s been done before. There’s nothing new under the sun, right?  Utimately, the story tells you where it needs to go. And so in this case, I think the movie is a really simple story. I don’t think it’s changing cinema. And I don’t think it’s going to win by its cleverness.  But I think it’s powerful in its very simple setup, and because these characters are real and you believe them. So when you do the end game, you say, "Here’s what’s happening, and these forces are colliding." And then you sort of work out where they would naturally go. I think…Well, I
don’t want to talk about the miss at the end because then it gives it away, but she had to win her own way.   She thinks she has to win for Johnny, but that’s not why she should win. She’s got to win her own way.

How did the soundtrack come together, and how did you get Bruce Springsteen involved?
DAVIS: Well, the ’70s are such a great time for music, and it was for all of us, because we all grew up then. And you can’t think of music in New Jersey without thinking of Bruce Springsteen. But we never thought we’d get it.  I was driving to the New Jersey shore to shoot the beach stuff and woke up at five in the morning.  The night before, I had bought his album “Greetings From Asbury Park” to get me in the mood.   It was dark, the sun was rising, and I was listening to "Growin’ Up," and I was like, "This is our movie." The song that’s in the movie, Bruce Springsteen’s, "Growin’ Up."   I put it in the rough cut.   I almost took it out because I thought we would never get it; that he would never give us permission, because he’s famous for not giving songs.  And Andrew really sort of fought to get it.   I actually think that if we had offered him a proper amount of money, he would have said no—that he gave it to us because he loved this movie, and he loves New Jersey, and thought we were the little guy.

So he actually saw the movie before he contributed the song?
DAVIS: Yeah. I think so.

You would have to have either Bruce or Bon Jovi…if looking for a Jersey sound.
DAVIS: [laughs] Yeah. It’s funny.  Last year, with An Inconvenient Truth, we were at a festival downtown, and Jon Bon Jovi played a pre-concert for an Inconvenient Truth screening. That was pretty weird. [laughs]   So I got both Jersey guys, yeah.

What was the casting process like for the role of Gracie? Was Carly one of many, many girls who auditioned?
DAVIS: 2,000 submissions, hundreds of actresses. We knew that the movie would succeed or fail depending on who that actress was, because if you didn’t believe her, the movie wouldn’t work. And Andrew thought that we had to find a soccer player who we taught how to act.  I thought we had to find an actor who we taught how to play soccer. And we fought about it.  We had a thousand conversations about it. And we were both wrong. What really happened, as I learned…You think you’re choosing, but you don’t
choose.   And when we finally realized that she was it, you realize that the thing we were looking for was her spirit. You know, she has this fight in her eyes, and this toughness that you can’t fake–you know, that my wife had.  And still has.  In the absence of spirit, you can’t create it. You can’t pretend that someone’s that way.  You either have it or you don’t. You can’t manufacture it. And she had it.

Elisabeth said there were some minor conflicts over some of her acting methods. What was your reaction to working with her?
DAVIS: [laughs] Well, it’s hard enough making a movie, but you make a movie with your family…   You know, Samuel Goldwyn, the great film producer, had the theory of relativity, which is "never work with your relatives." [laughs] And he was right. I mean, it’s really hard working with your family. Imagine you at home. "I’m not getting the milk. You get the milk. I got the milk last time." [laughs] Try making a movie together when it’s hundreds of thousands of dollars, and deadlines, and you’re making a story that’s personal in different ways to everybody.   It was really hard. And my wife treats me with less respect as a director than people I’ve never met before. [laughs] You know? And that’s because she knows me, you know?   .So I’d be like, "So I’m thinking in this scene, you should do this, this, and this." And she goes,  "I’m not doing that. What are you talking about?" [laughs] But that’s why I love her. She doesn’t take no for an answer. She’s tough and won’t bend.

Would it be fair to say that the whole family connection was one of the film’s strengths, as well?
DAVIS: I think so. I mean, yeah. The scene that people talk about the most in screenings is the scene where the mother comes and tells her daughter, "Don’t let people take your
dreams away from you."  We’re shooting the scene, and it’s Elisabeth is playing her own mother, giving the person based on her life story, the key lesson in life. And how beautiful is that, to somehow be your own parent and to make happen this seminal life moment?  When we watched that scene, we were like, "Wow, this is magic." Not for the
movie, but for us.  For Elisabeth. It’s almost like a kind of therapy to play your own parent and say to yourself what you would want your parent to say to you. That’s incredible. People got goose bumps. And I still love that scene.  It’s not saccharin. She comes in saying "I don’t care if you play." That’s great.

Have Elisabeth’s parents seen the movie?
DAVIS:  Yes.  They’re divorced now.  The father loved the movie. And I had to tell him ahead of time that the father character was not like him. They had their own issues–some heavy, heavy issues. But I changed him to be more dismissive of Elisabeth. So I wanted him to understand that. But he loved it, and was very emotional when he saw it. I think they all feel like Will will be remembered, and what the family went through will be understood.

What are you doing next?
DAVIS: I’m going to be happily unemployed. I’ve been busy, so I want to be a good father. And make more documentaries. I’ve got a bunch of documentaries cooking up.

An Inconvenient Truth was the filming of a presentation. Will the making of your other documentaries be a much different experience?
DAVIS: I think we were the #1 documentary based on a slideshow. [laughs]  I hope I never have to do that again.  I don’t know.  A lot of guys direct the same thing, and they keep doing it right, and trying to get it right.  I love doing different things. I’ve done so many different types of stories, and I like that.  So who knows what’s next? Maybe
I’ll do an alien comedy or something. [laughs]

What documentaries do you have coming up?
DAVIS: I wish I could talk to you about them. There’s two I’m really excited by. And they’re very sort of hard-cutting. They’re like Inconvenient Truth in [that] they’re tackling an issue. But I can’t talk about them right now. A couple months I’ll be able to talk about them.

Did shooting the action of the sports scenes in “Gracie” present any kind of logistical challenges that you don’t really encounter on other types of films?
DAVIS: Well, I’ve done a lot of action stuff. You know, I’ve done a lot of television–24 and The Unit. So action is not intimidating to me. It’s always very hard…

But sports in particular…
DAVIS:  I’ve done some sports. The hard part was soccer.  Andrew wanted to make a movie because he felt a good soccer film has never been made. And the reason why is soccer’s really hard to shoot.  I realized the reason why is that it’s continuous. First of all, the first answer is that football and baseball, there’s a lot of scoring.  The audience can know when a guy hits it or when he gets struck out. You know when a guy catches a
touchdown or doesn’t.  But the beauty of soccer is in its nuance, and that there are few goals. But it’s hard to shoot. The other part about it is soccer doesn’t stop. So when you’re shooting a football game, the play ends, you can cut to the character thinking about what just happened. "Oh, shit, I just got hit in the head. Coach is going to pull me out" and "What am I going to do now?" Or, you know, baseball,  "I’ve got to throw a strike or else we’re going to lose the championship." So you can have those moments where you stop and describe what’s in a character’s head.  And soccer, you can’t do that. They’re always moving, they’re always running. It never stops. So that’s why we put these artificial stops in there. That’s why we do the free kick. They stop, you put the ball down.  So that was really tough. Soccer’s tough.

Did Carly get hurt at all? Some of the shots she takes look pretty brutal.
DAVIS: Yeah.  And people had to remind me to be more careful, because I get very excited, and she’s so tough and wants to please.  She got knocked down. There was one time I thought we broke her ankle. And another time, I thought that she had been knocked out.  But she is so tough. We were joking around at the airport yesterday, and she punched me really hard, I punched her really hard back, and I realized that I had hurt her. [laughs]  But then she punched me even harder. She’s an equal.  She’s tough, you know?
And she’s a fighter. But I realized that we really could have really hurt her. There are a couple scary moments. Because I wanted to attack this feeling that I think audiences have, which is, "A girl can’t do that - Oh, that’d never happen." So I wanted to show how physical it was, to show her get knocked down, and her having to get up so that you
didn’t feel like, "Oh, that was just too easy." So I put the harsh physicality in it on purpose.

Is there an overall message that you want to get out with this movie?
DAVIS: You know, when I fell in love with my wife, there was this magic that she had in her spirit. And her brothers had it, too.  They grew up in this family, this household, that was kind of falling apart. There was never enough money, life didn’t come easy for them. But they all had this thing, this feeling that they could do anything. And that’s what we
put in the movie. Johnny whispers to her, "You can do anything." And they still feel that way. Andrew said, "I’m going to make a movie about soccer, about our family, I’m going to raise the money from the State of New Jersey." And it’s like, "Yeah, right." And he did it. I mean, you can do anything. And the fact that girls still, today, feel like they’re a little
bit less, that the playing field’s a little tilted against them…to inspire them that they can do anything. That would be a great thing.  To inspire anybody who feels like life is a little rough, that they can do anything. Because if the Shues can do it, anyone can.

Have you thought about any plans for the DVD?
DAVIS: There’s some home movies in it. The more recent version of the movie has end credits of the footage of them.  We made a little "making of" for it. We deal with Title IX. I mean, one of the things that I think would be great to write about is Title IX. Let’s step back. A huge phenomenon has happened since 1978, when this movie took place. A huge social phenomenon that we don’t even know about.  But you go to a soccer field now on a weekend, and you see thousands of girls playing soccer, and other sports, too. It’s happening all across the country.  I didn’t even know it was happening till I went to the Women’s World Cup and there’s 60,000 girls and their parents there, with their faces painted, and they’re screaming.   So the whole social structure has changed, where girls feel like they are equal and they can play sports like anybody else. Title IX was the law that changed that. They passed it, and said if you’re going to spend money on a boys’ sport, you gotta spend an equal amount of money on a girls’ sport. And that’s the reason why women’s basketball, women’s soccer, all these sports are flourishing.  That’s amazing, you know? That’s extraordinary. You go to these games and these coaches on the girls’ team are just as fired up. And the families care just as much.  That’s really great.