It just grew.
"We wanted it to be a half-hour film about playground basketball," says Steve James, director and co-producer of the brilliant "Hoop Dreams," which chronicles five and a half years in the lives of two inner city basketball players and follows them from 14-year-old phenoms, through high school and into their first year of college.
James, an ex-prep basketball player himself, was in the gym at Southern Illinois University, where he was in graduate film school.
"I was playing ball and I was the only white guy in the gym. There was something different about it. The game was somehow theirs. I had an epiphany of sorts. I wanted to get inside black basketball."
So excited was he, James dropped out of school to begin work immediately.
"I moved to Chicago to make the film. It was either New York, Los Angeles or Chicago. Given that Chicago has the richest basketball tradition, it seemed like the perfect place.
"We started out to do a shorter film. It was really going to be a snapshot of the dream -- maybe built around a new player, a washed-up player and a pro player."
But then the fortuitous stroke: "We discovered Arthur."
This was Arthur Agee, then 14 and already a playground legend, who was in the process of being scouted and signed by a suburban basketball powerhouse, St. Joesph's.
"He got us to St. Joe's and William [Gates, the other player they focused on] was already there. We decided it would be better to focus on the two of them."
The two young men were initially a little flabbergasted to be the center of so much attention.
"At first they were flattered. They were not used to anyone being interested with them. And of course basketball was a great ice breaker to get us over the initial hurdles of race and class. Eventually, some skepticism crept in -- what do they want, they wondered. But we were there through thick and thin."
James acknowledges that as the film crew's relationship with the young men grew more intense, it was difficult to keep the pose of objective recorder.
"We crossed the line in some places. It's fine for us to document but there was one point where the electricity was turned off in one of the apartments. So we paid to have it turned back on. And when Arthur's father Bo went to jail for seven months (for burglary), we knew that we could get devastating footage. But we just didn't want to show it. It was enough that you knew he was there."
And he acknowledges another component.
"Sheer luck," he says, "in the way some of the things worked out. It turns out that real life is the most profound dramatist. You're continually having your expectations turned on their head. We felt truly blessed. There was a time when it was all going bad -- we knew we'd have a powerful film but it wasn't the film we wanted to make. Arthur wasn't playing well and William was injured. But both kids rallied. Amazing."
He also disavows any muckraking intent, though the film has been tough enough on St. Joe's and coach Gene Pingatore to earn a lawsuit.
"We had no agenda of exposing sports. We weren't interested, we knew we would see illegal things, but we wanted to show people in sports as good and bad and we wanted to show that through it all, both William and Arthur still loved basketball. We wanted people to see the complexity of it all, without coming down on one side or the other."
The film, eventually completed, was the highlight of last year's Sundance Film Festival, and acquired a national feature distribution deal. It also had to be trimmed a bit, and subsequently was a huge success at the New York Film Festival.
"The trims amounted to about seven minutes. We wrestled with the length. It was a three-hour documentary without stars. But when we began, we knew a three-hour film would work. It would have been just as good as a four-hour film."
As might be imagined, the basic editing of five and a half years' worth of film was immensely difficult.
"We decided early on, there would be no narrative. We'd cut it like a fictional narrative and let the stories tell themselves. When we edited, it was a conscious effort to reinforce a dramatic structure. Early on, it was too ping-pongy. The breakthrough was when we decided to tell parallel stories, but let each one build."
As for the ballplayers, both are beginning senior years at college: William at Marquette, Arthur at Arkansas Central.
"Arthur's moment of truth is yet to come. His father Bo still believes he can make it in pro basketball, but I don't think either will get drafted, unless they have phenomenal years. They may get tryouts, if for no other reason than the celebrity of the film. The truth is, they're both still dreaming."