Making a Production is Documentary’s strand of in-depth profiles featuring production companies that make critically-acclaimed nonfiction film and media in innovative ways. These pieces probe the creative decisions, financial structures, and talent development that sustain their work—revealing both infrastructural challenges and industry opportunities that exist for documentarians.Seven projects in production. Dozens more in development. And in the summer of 2024, three high-profile series about game-changing athletes: In the Arena: Serena Williams on ESPN+, Simone Biles Rising on Netflix, and Welcome to the J-Rod Show on FS1. Religion of Sports (RoS) is on a roll, having achieved a scale and consistency quite remarkable for a documentary production company. In a creative team meeting before its release, director-cinematographer Bryant Robinson and creative producer Omri Kruvi provided updates on editing Welcome to the J-Rod Show, a series on Julio Rodríguez of the Seattle Mariners. They beamed with pride at the work they had done, and Robinson hyped up Kruvi’s contribution. SVP of development and production Victor Buhler congratulated them, then reported on several projects his team had been pitching. Not all had been successful, and he gamely fielded suggestions for next steps. The vibe was relaxed and confident, with an open exchange of ideas on all sides. While Religion of Sports is an overtly commercial enterprise, its leaders have created a system where values like trust and curiosity are a help, not a hindrance to success. And success is making a living making documentaries.Religion of Sports has several strategies to achieve such scale and consistency, including a narrow focus and a talent-first approach. First is the focus on sports—and collaborations with major celebrity athletes. Though Religion of Sports is diversifying its subject matter as it grows, having a niche was important for the company to build a reputation. “We work with GOATs,” says Giselle Parets, who joined the company when it was founded in 2017 and now works as a showrunner. And the results are uncommonly handsome, sensitive portraits of these superhuman figures. Religion of Sports’ directors dig into their subjects’ emotional truth in pursuit of powerful storytelling. The interviews they conduct are intimate and revealing. Just as impressive are the meticulous, sensitive sequences of archival video, audio, and animated graphics that bring the subject’s inner world to life. In addition, Religion of Sports has figured out how to produce documentaries at ever-increasing speeds. See the release schedule of Simone Biles Rising. The first two episodes of the four-part series, now out on Netflix, were released on July 17, a week before the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. They cover Biles’s history, including the case of the twisties that caused her to pull out of the women’s team final at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, and her reentrance to the world stage at World Gymnastics Championships in 2023. The third and fourth episodes, released on October 25, cover the Olympic trials and the Paris Olympics. The remarkable speed of production required Religion of Sports to build out (1) a team to shoot in Paris, (2) a small post-production footprint in Paris, and (3) a system for U.S.-based editors to access footage moments after it is shot. It is a practice they used in the past for time-sensitive series like Tom vs. Time (2018) and Simone vs. Herself (2021).The company’s approach to sports is unique: founder Gotham Chopra, the son of author and guru Deepak Chopra, is fascinated by the quasireligious aspect of sports. To Chopra, athletes are like saints, even deities, that fans pilgrimage to see and venerate by chanting anthems in unison. And rather than sowing doubt through investigations or radical historical revisions, Religion of Sports documentaries are essentially celebrations. In telling the story of an athlete’s season or career, Religion of Sports films affirm the worth of their subject to fans. Thinking in lofty terms permeates the planning and pitching stages of each project. According to Buhler, “The central idea remains that when we come up with a story, we often think of what religious figure, mythical figure, historical figure, what mythical great imprint narrative does it remind me of.” But Religion of Sports does not practice blind faith: they don’t gloss over missteps or debacles in their celebrations.Building relationships with athletes is the cornerstone of Religion of Sports’ filmmaking. Relationships are intangible, requiring respect and emotional investment, but Religion of Sports proves that the intangible can move mountains. Chopra and Buhler first worked together in 2013 on The Little Master, an installment of ESPN Films’ 30 for 30 about cricket superstar Sachin Tendulkar. It was released in 2015, the same year as Kobe Bryant’s Muse, the Showtime documentary that put Chopra on the map. The result of a long-percolating friendship with the legendary Laker, this documentary was the first time Bryant publicly addressed the sexual assault allegations against him. This project propelled the formation of Religion of Sports in 2017. As Buhler puts it, “What it established for people, not just athletes but buyers, was that Gotham could get some truth out of athletes.” At first, Religion of Sports shared personnel and processes with other production companies before ramping up their own production capabilities. They worked with production partner Dirty Robber on early series like Tom vs. Time and Why We Fight (2018), then with Film 45 on Stephen vs. The Game (2019) and Simone vs. Herself. The Versus series are long-form verité shows, streaming on Facebook Watch, that established Religion of Sports’ skill at creating timely, exciting accounts of athletes’ careers. When producers Giselle Parets and Meg Cirillo joined the company, they each brought distinct expertise: Parets in the speed and unpredictability of unscripted content from her years producing The Amazing Race, and Cirillo in editing and graphics from her years as a postproduction supervisor. Chopra continues to be highly active on every Religion of Sports project, and he directs the biggest films and series. He performs the interviews and watches cuts. But he has stepped back from some day-to-day production tasks in recent years. Instead, he oversees projects, checking that the planned creative vision is coming to fruition. Other leaders, “trained under the camp of Gotham,” in Cirillo’s words, are capable of carrying out what he started, on more and more projects. On the most ambitious projects, with the most episodes, like Serena Williams: In the Arena, there will be a showrunner, a director, four editors, three story producers, three archival producers, eight graphic artists, and a finishing team. Teams will be smaller on less-involved projects, or those with a longer period to completion.Since the beginning, the way Religion of Sports makes documentaries with the biggest stars in the sports world is by thinking like a talent agency. It has a roster of high-profile protagonists-cum-collaborators, and those relationships are more important than any single project. By creating and maintaining trust-filled, mutually beneficial relationships, Religion of Sports has become a favored documentary production company for superstar athletes. Practically, Religion of Sports does not typically have exclusivity agreements. Most of their talent have existing deals with sponsors, brands, and content studios like Amazon and Apple, which preclude giving exclusivity to Religion of Sports. Parets attests to the primacy of protagonist relationships: “We build these relationships with these athletes that are long-lasting. Even when the project is done, the relationships are not done.” Religion of Sports is always open to continuing projects with athletes. And when they do so, they utilize the same crew and producers who already understand the athletes. For example, Religion of Sports’ first project with Simone Biles was Simone vs. Herself, a series on Facebook Watch in 2021 that followed Biles at the Tokyo Olympics. There was no plan to create another project with her until Biles made her return to competition. When they began the new project, Simone Biles Rising, Religion of Sports brought back Katie Walsh, supervising producer on Simone vs. Herself, as co-director, along with the same director of photography and story producer. Parets was co-executive producer on Simone vs. Herself and is now showrunner for Simone Biles Rising. “The fact that [Biles] was going for Worlds showed there was a lingering desire to keep going,” as Parets puts it. “ We talked with her, we talked with her team, and we talked with Netflix, because we thought it was gonna be the right home for it. The deal wasn’t even done, but in good faith we got on a plane with her to Belgium [for gymnastics Worlds] last September.” In continuing projects with athletes, Religion of Sports also wisely rewards the people behind the scenes who made the original project a success.Part of the reason Religion of Sports could fly a team to the World Gymnastics Championships to film Biles, even without a signed contract with Netflix, is because the company isn’t financed solely through production financing of projects. They also have venture capital investment. Under the guidance of CEO Ameeth Sankaran, Religion of Sports raised $3 million of seed funding in 2018, $10 million in Series A funding in 2020, and $50 million in Series B funding in 2022. Buhler admits that this level of investment changes the creative side in significant ways. He says, “In the early phases, we were trying to make the best project for the budget we had. We were sort of living from project to project.” Now decisions are more complicated because they are not directly constrained by budget. But there are also more stakeholders—the investors who are counting on the company to grow and reward their investment. Diversifying the slate of projects is also tricky. Buhler explains, “What’s hard about growing a business is to maintain the curiosity. We are trying to make sure everyone’s engaged and inspired by things that don’t require one of the best athletes in the world.” While documentaries on superstar athletes are their specialty, Religion of Sports is feeling the pressure to expand. In particular, they are looking to make a repeatable series they can make 100 or 1,000 episodes of. In addition, Religion of Sports is expanding into new territories, such as pop music. Their first music documentary is Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story. Produced independently, the series premiered at SXSW this year and found a home on Hulu. Religion of Sports’ prospects list showcases these new priorities. They use a large, shared spreadsheet to track and categorize a long list of potential projects. Columns include estimated budget, estimated revenue, likelihood, urgency, and status. A large section was devoted to the music initiative. Scrolling through it at a recent creative team meeting, Buhler pointed to projects and updated the team on status: making contact with a talent agent, pitching to a streamer, retooling a pitch. Most important was knowing who was buying what. The team discussed a recent pitch about a troubled former professional athlete, which Amazon had deemed “too serious.” They bounced ideas about where to take it next and how to bring the subject into pitch meetings so that buyers would feel the story’s potential more clearly. What remains certain is that Religion of Sports will continue growing its stable of protagonist-collaborators. It is this quality that makes the company a fascinating entry in the world of documentary. Studying Religion of Sports’ practices offers a glimpse at the benefits and quandaries of making documentaries about megawatt talent who already have sophisticated image management practices in place. Access to the subject is challenging, but relationships can have hidden benefits for the filmmaking process. Questions of creative control and ethics arise in configurations quite distinct from those facing filmmakers making investigative documentaries.***Access is a point of negotiation from the start. Busy, in-demand celebrities have a limited amount of time to dedicate to a documentary and control the amount of access given filmmakers. Cirillo, showrunner on In the Arena: Serena Williams, lists the expectations for access that Religion of Sports negotiates, using examples from an early meeting with Serena Williams. “Fees. How much time are you willing to give for each episode. She would sit down [to film an interview] for like 3 hours, she was so gracious. Figuring out the promotional terms, the speaking engagements. Archival from her personal life. How many cuts she’s willing to watch.” These upfront conversations delineate the talent’s responsibilities. They also help producers plan for episode arcs so story editors can best mold and shape the relatively small amount of footage.Religion of Sports creatives often come up against time constraints in working with athletes. But they are committed to finding creative solutions to make the series work, despite these limitations. At a recent creative team meeting, Robinson and Kruvi related the limitations they faced in making Welcome to the J-Rod Show. They had limited time to interview and follow Rodríguez, just 3 or 4 days, but they had come up with a new beat to augment the story. Robinson and Kruvi called it a “pleasant diversion” in the third act. They filmed with a kid who is a superfan of Julio’s and who also lives with cystic fibrosis. On Opening Day 2024, the kid ran the bases at the Mariners game, then ran into Rodríguez’s arms. It is a beautiful story that conveys the blessings of sports fandom—a pleasant diversion that brightens up a difficult life. Robinson and Kruvi were very proud of this solution, with Robinson saying, “It always makes me emotional. We couldn’t ask for a better final act.” While access to A-listers is important for Religion of Sports’ projects, just as significant is the team’s ability to innovate and find the heart in each episode’s story arc. On set during Welcome to the J-Rod Show. Courtesy of RoS Collaborating with esteemed subjects and their powerful teams also increases Religion of Sports’ leverage with powerful sports institutions for access to archival materials. Sports organizers actively manage their own brands by suppressing ugly episodes and redirecting attention away from mismanagement and ethical lapses. Take the Indian Wells episode. Often called the “fifth Grand Slam,” the 2001 Indian Wells Open was a signal moment in Serena Williams’s career. Serena and Venus Williams were slated to face each other in the final, but Venus dropped out because of a knee injury. The sisters were accused of match-fixing. Then Serena faced a hostile crowd as she played against Kim Clijsters. The boos grew louder, continuing as Serena defeated Clijsters. Richard Williams said he had heard racial epithets uttered amidst the boos. This painful treatment caused Serena to boycott the tournament for 14 years.Despite Serena agreeing to compete again at Indian Wells in 2015, the Women’s Tennis Association had never allowed a documentary to show footage from the final match in 2001. But after initial interviews with Serena demonstrated that Indian Wells remained a turning point for her, Religion of Sports producers were sure they needed to show the incident in their series In the Arena: Serena Williams. The redemption arc was too potent to skip. Cirillo and her archival producers asked the WTA to license the footage. According to Cirillo, “We were shot down immediately. They said they would not send us footage at all.” But they did not give up. Instead, Cirillo and her team took a risk: they continued putting together an episode with Indian Wells at the center of it, with the hope that WTA would relent.The WTA did relent, finally, with pressure not from the filmmakers but from Williams’s team. Cirillo recounts, “Ultimately it took Jill [Smoller], Serena’s agent, who went to the head of the WTA.” Religion of Sports got “a huge win” of 6 minutes of footage. The WTA could shrug off a documentary production company. But Smoller convinced them that licensing the footage was important to Serena. While working with megawatt stars means limitations on access and time, Religion of Sports’ experience shows how the partnership can persuade powerful institutions to cooperate.Ultimately, the limitations of celebrity access are more existential than mere production concerns. When you make documentaries with wealthy, powerful celebrities, who is in control of creative decision-making—the filmmakers or the celebrities and their teams? How do you make a documentary with strong truth claims when the subject is an executive producer? Lately, numerous critics have posed these questions, insinuating that celebrities are mainly interested in documentaries in order to burnish their own reputations, bury their scandals, and avoid the accountability that journalists (and the public) demand. The headlines are indicative: “Every Star Wants a Documentary Now. Is it just P.R.?” (Calum Marsh, The New York Times); “Who is the celebrity documentary for?” (Israel Daramola, Defector); and “Why is every celebrity making a documentary about themselves?” (Lucy Ford, Cosmopolitan).This concern is top of mind for Religion of Sports. Their work with celebrities entails necessary compromise. In agreeing to participate, the content is automatically branded by the celebrity’s brand. The company works to preclude the vanity project label by discussing sticky subjects with their collaborators from the very beginning. As Cirillo puts it, “Our subjects need to know that we are talking about tough topics, but to trust that we are telling the story and [that] we are going to make it really poignant without ever making somebody feel uncomfortable.” Cirillo points out that major benefits accrue from subjects’ willingness to be vulnerable. Addressing the ups and downs guarantees a better story, with greater emotional payoff. Even when a subject is an executive producer, as Tom Brady was on the 2021 series Tom Brady: Man in the Arena, there is no getting away from hitting hard topics. Cirillo recalls, “Tom Brady did not want to talk about Deflategate, but he realized he had to.” And if talent is uncomfortable discussing a tough topic in an interview, the key is to film them saying just that: “I don’t want to talk about it.” Then, in the edit, that line can be a catalyst to bring in other contributors and archival footage to tell the story the filmmakers want to tell. Journalistic integrity dovetails with aesthetic and commercial appeal, and Religion of Sports is expert at conveying this logic to subjects.Religion of Sports’ documentaries are profiles of newsworthy figures in context, not investigative journalism. They determine the story and framework, do extensive archival research, and interview people about their subject. Key to this process is selecting the right subject; otherwise, Religion of Sports runs the risk of elevating a problematic person. Parets testifies to the intuition involved in deciding who to work with. She says, “The projects we take on are because we feel like we can add and contribute and tell that athlete’s story, and we feel deeply inspired by the story. And that is a filter. We have our own internal rules, deep in your heart and in your gut.” Cirillo agrees that the creative team is usually of one mind about which projects are worth pursuing. And who is not the right subject for a Religion of Sports project? Cirillo is clear: “A person or people that don’t align morally with the ethos that RoS stands for. I’d hope we’re not doing projects on bad people.” According to Cirillo, while Religion of Sports has not rejected individuals outright who seek to work with them, they have turned down projects where the idea was not fully fleshed out. Translation: a documentary that whitewashes wrongdoing and hardship from the protagonist’s life is a half-baked idea not worth pouring time and resources into. That is, Religion of Sports frames this ethical decision in business terms. ***In the end, it all comes back to trust. Trust is not just a buzzword—it is the bedrock of Religion of Sports’ reputation. Athletes must trust that Religion of Sports will tell their story accurately and sensitively. Time has shown that Religion of Sports can do that, and that they can exercise an ethics of care in the process. Parets calls the filmmaking process “very healing, very therapeutic for them.” She points out that, for in-demand, globally celebrated athletes under high pressure to perform, “there is not a lot of time for them to stop and think and reflect. The projects allow them to be vulnerable, take the time to reflect and think. In doing that, you build this relationship.” Once again, Religion of Sports’ goals—creating great, saleable documentaries and building strong relationships with talent—fit hand-in-glove with their subjects’ needs.The payoff can be seen in the first episode of In the Arena: Serena Williams, which ably drills to the core of Williams’s emotional journey, cresting with the 1999 U.S. Open. Williams narrates her premonition about this Grand Slam. “I knew I was gonna win the Open,” she says dreamily. Animation of a sparkling night sky fills the screen, while her father’s coaching echoes on the soundtrack. We see her dream world and we hear the determination that has fueled her since she was a little girl. Through this internal, psychological context, we lock into Williams’s match against Martina Hingis. She talks us through her thought process during the match, reveling at her body’s ability to suppress the pain of a twisted ankle until she won. This combination of interview, archival, and animation offers viewers a fresh look at a decisive tournament from 25 years ago, revivifying the essential miracle of Williams’s rise to superstardom.Ethical concerns in documentary filmmaking usually surface when there is a significant power differential between the filmmakers and the people being filmed. Groups like the Documentary Accountability Working Group have tackled the problems of extractive filmmaking and advised employing an ethics of care when working with vulnerable or marginalized subjects. Religion of Sports confronts a different power differential. But their take is not cynical. Their practices and the resulting films acknowledge their collaborators’ innate humanity. They may be winners, All-Stars, MVPs, and Olympic gold medalists, but as Biles was brave enough to admit on the world stage, they are people, too.Religion of Sports’ success presents possibilities—that might become dilemmas—about the future of documentary. In some ways, Religion of Sports’ documentaries resemble a 60 Minutes profile or piece of branded content in speed of production and quantity of projects. Religion of Sports’ films lack the intention of definitiveness; instead, they join the churn of the present moment. Sports news powerhouses use Religion of Sports to stock their streaming service libraries, providing a reliable stream of new content on big names. As the speed of production on topical documentaries begins to trend toward broadcast news, what is the difference between the two?Throughout Religion of Sports’ evolution, their documentary films and series have retained high production values and a convincing empathy for their high-profile protagonists. Whether they can maintain those qualities when they sell a repeatable series is uncertain. But throughout the ups and downs of their journey, the pressure to perform has not resulted in a tense work environment or a toxic hierarchy that silences opinions. Instead, team members speak openly about successes and struggles. This work culture is the clearest indication that Religion of Sports may be able to preserve the magic—trust and curiosity—that powered its early wins. Outside the RoS offices in Santa Monica, California. Image credit: Bryant Robinson. Courtesy of RoS religionofsports.comThis piece was first published in Documentary’s Winter 2024/2025 issue, with the following subheading: In its work with superstar athletes, Gotham Chopra’s full-service documentary studio maneuvers through tricky questions of access and creative control.Nora Stone is Assistant Professor of film production at the University of North Alabama. Her monograph How Documentaries Went Mainstream: A History, 1960–2022 was published by Oxford University Press in 2023. She produced and art-directed the independent narrative feature The World Drops Dead (2024).Read More
Making a Production: Religion of Sports
