Kelly talks with Erik LeDrew, a photojournalist and US Army veteran who transitioned from the chaos of combat to the chaos of filmmaking. He wrote and co-directed “Alex vs. Arod” for HBO, a fantastic documentary that looks at the life and career of baseball great Alex Rodriguez. 

You make documentaries now, but you were a photojournalist in the US Army. Did this path make sense at the time to you? It feels very improvised – mostly unplanned. 

“Yeah. No, it’s like breadcrumbs. I think this is very much probably in the spirit of what you preach, but I was humbled very early getting out of college thinking like, ‘Okay, I’m a combat veteran and I like whatever, got two degrees and X amount of years and wow, I’m just king of the world.’ And then the real world just really did not give a shit. It was very humbling for me. Of course, I have to continue to relearn that every day. It was hard for me to get a job as a security guard out of college. You know what mean? It was kind of like the depths of the recession after 2008. So this is like 2010, it was just like a horrible time in the job market. And then the first sort of gig that was tangentially related to filmmaking that I got, it required a degree of like mental flexibility. And I had to adopt a, necessity, a sort of go through the door that opens mentality, you know? And as long as that door is moving me one step closer or pointed in the direction that I hope I am going, you know, then that’s good enough.“

You quit a gig at Microsoft to devote yourself to learning to be a writer and that seemed like the move that you got you where you are now. 

“I said I had copywriting experience with brands and that wasn’t true. It was basically true. I had worked with brands and I had done writing. I hadn’t done copywriting, but that was the thing that really launched me on this path. Once I sort of made that decision and kind of went back into the incubator and took my medicine, this is where the path has led to directly from that moment. And if I had not sort of quit with a capital Q and committed to humbling myself in the face of already thinking I was a pretty good writer, I definitely wouldn’t have made it here. I don’t know where I would be. I mean, hopefully I’d be somewhere happy, probably definitely not here, you know?” 

For the documentary on Alex Rodriguez, did you have to get him agree to open up and be fully honest about the PED scandal? 

“I would say certainly to answer your question about his honesty, that was a prerequisite. That was what was intriguing about him – that he had a bit of a reputation as an unreliable narrator. I’ll use the literary term because I think that’s – certainly from my point of view – that’s how we approached it. And, you know, that opens up a whole suite of devices that have been thoroughly vetted by brilliant storytellers for over a century, about how to deal with the unreliable narrator as your point of view. We knew that the audience would perceive him as an unreliable narrator and that was like a part of the challenge that intrigued us.”