Exclusive: Director Chris Robinson on How He Helped Get Shooting Stars to Soar

As a teenager, LeBron James was one of the most gifted high school basketball stars in the nation and, like Kobe Bryant before him, he too skipped college and went straight to the NBA. A four-time recipient of the NBA’s Most Valuable Player award and a four-time NBA champion, the 19-time All-Star is also the league’s all-time scoring leader, recently exceeding Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s previous record of 38,387 points.

The man affectionately referred to as “King James” by fans and the media alike could bask in the glory of his global hierarchy, but that’s not his style. James is immersed in production and other work outside the NBA, and co-wrote (with Buzz Bissinger) a bestselling book about his life and friends, his “Fab 5” teammates. In addition to producing great films and series (Hustle, Naomi Asaka, Black Ice, Say Hey, Willie Mays!), he has now produced the film adaptation of his own book, Shooting Stars.

Now streaming on Peacock, Shooting Stars explores the challenges and triumphs of coming-of-age in Ohio and how a group of friends achieved state and national recognition in high school. Lebron has made one message very clear with this production — what matters most about the game of basketball is the people playing beside you.

The movie’s director, Chris Robinson, is a Grammy and Emmy Award-winning music, TV, and film director. Having worked with artists like Alicia Keys, Drake, Lizzo, and Jay-Z, and as the director of the classic feature film ATL and TV series Black-ish, Robinson sat down with MovieWeb for an exclusive interview about what inspired him to work on the film and how his vision for the script was brought to life.

Tip-Off – How Shooting Stars Began

James and producer Rachel Winter, who earned an Oscar nomination for producing Dallas Buyers Club, had been developing Shooting Stars for 10 years with James’ SpringHill production company when they approached Robinson to become attached to the project.

Robinson explained what happened next. “Well, it’s the script that drew me in. I read the script by Frankie Flowers — and then Jewel Taylor came on, later, to punch it up — and I was intrigued by the themes. Brotherhood, loyalty, and obviously we’re all fans of LeBron James, right?” Robinson continued:

Robinson’s connection to the material was deeper than just that, however. “Those themes reminded me of my own life, my own kids, and coaching my son in basketball. And I thought back, and some of those moments were some of the greatest times ever in the development of our connection with and in my son’s growth.”

“So,” continued Robinson. “As I was reading the script, it felt like I was reading a story about people that I know. I was reading a story about fathers and sons and brothers and moms and aunties. And then to realize, like, wow, this is LeBron James. He’s like a superhero, but you can’t skip all this stuff to get to the place where he is today. This story is the foundation. It shows how much you need a strong foundation in your home and in any building. And I think the strong foundation explored in Shooting Stars, at the very least, helped LeBron be the man and the hero that he is today.”

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Today, Lebron is still close with his group of friends who he played basketball with since they were nine years old. They were able to grow and be collectively supported and in some ways raised by the village of their community. This is most notably true of Coach Dru (Lil Dru’s father, who is played by Wood Harris from the Creed franchise) who led the teams to win the state as well as national championships.

Game Time – Gearing Up To Film

Shooting Stars is about solidarity in basketball and Robinson said that he knew, going in, how important it was to consider how he was going to go about filming it in order to visually achieve that cohesive message.

With an aesthetic style that is reminiscent of cinematographer Ernest Dickerson (She’s Gotta Have It and most Spike Lee films) and director Jeremiah Zagar (Hustle), Robinson clearly wanted to make sure that the games, themselves, in Shooting Stars were filmed with intentional eloquence. Insert the sound of a three-point shot, swish, and count the points, all-net, for that goal.

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To further help bring the look of the film to life, Robinson recruited the talents of his long-time director of photography, Karsten “Crash” Gopinath. Together, they decided that they wanted to elevate the actual look of basketball-themed movies and did just that. As a result, the game scenes are effervescent and electric, as if you, the viewer, are actually there. There is so much energy on screen and yet every game scene is grounded in emotion and pulls you in by the heart. Not too stylized, not too artistically boisterous, just magnetic.

The Shooting Stars Themselves

None of this would have worked, however, without actors credible enough to play high-level basketball. Essential to the excellence of this film is that all the young male actors can actually play the game well.

The five actors who play the Fab Five, Marquis “Mookie” Cook (Lebron), Caleb McLaughlin (Lil Dru) Avery “AJ” Wills Jr. (Willie McGee), Khalil Everage (Sian Cotton), and Sterling “Scoot” Henderson (Romeo Travis), were fortunately athletic to varying degrees. As part of their preparation for the film, they each participated in a two-week-long basketball camp where they were taught plays, something which did more than produce some on-the-court skills — it inadvertently cultivated immense bonding between the leads of Shooting Stars, creating team chemistry and authentic friendship.

“It’s amazing,” said Robinson. “I feel like these guys are going to be friends for life. And you don’t often get that after a production. So often actors come in, they do your job, they say goodbye, and, you know, that’s about it. But I think these young men will remain attached at the hip as they all become men and move forward in life.”

Robinson continued, “The combination of these guys being able to act and understand their lines, that was one thing, but it was beyond delivering the lines. They had to be connected to emotion and they were. They had to understand where their characters were, where Lebron was, when certain things happened to them emotionally as well as physically. And, although it was challenging, we couldn’t have done it without our whole team, like our basketball team. We had amazing choreographers and just amazing people. But, especially, we had the young men who really dedicated themselves to telling this story.”

Produced by James’ The SpringHill Company, Tangerine Productions, and Cold Front Productions, you can find Universal Pictures’ Shooting Stars streaming now on Peacock.