Halfway through an interview that can only be described as an excitable stream of consciousness rant, I realize I might have next to no idea what Dana Brown is talking about. Animated, sharply funny and engagingly spontaneous, I know what he’s saying, of course—but the way he says it…well, it’s an earful all its own. And that’s a great thing.

With his second film Dust to Glory, the Step into Liquid filmmaker’s inspiring record of the grueling Baja 1000 is a human portrait of a diverse group of drivers—some professionals, many amateurs—chasing the glory of individual bragging rights at the intersection of extreme sports and deeper personal meaning. For a race as intense as the Baja 1000, chatty Brown personifies the term ‘laid-back.’ But then that’s part of his special talent for disarming his interview subjects—and this interviewer.

Lee Shoquist, ReelMovieCritic.com: Why the Baha 1000?

Dana Brown: Well, "Mouse" (Mike McCoy) came up to us at the first public showing of Step into Liquid and said, ‘Dude, you’ve got to do something about the Baja 1000!’ My dad had shot it in 1968 for Wide World of Sports. So it kind of sank in. I thought, that’s a pretty cool race—beginning, middle and end, just there—the structure of the movie to fall back on. We went down to the Baja 500 in June, and it’s like, wow—if you take the lens cap off the camera, you’re gonna have stuff. There’s a lot going on down there; a lot of stories. So it became pretty obvious.

LS: The interviews are surprisingly frank. How did you gain the confidence of the participants?

DB: That’s a good question! You kind of go with your best intentions. Step Into Liquid helped with this because we told them to go see it! It was in theaters at the time, so we said, ‘When you go home, go the movies!’ And they could tell we were professionals and we didn’t plan on exploiting anybody, and that we’d actually made it into theaters, rather than the classic Hollywood (line), ‘Dude, I’m the biggest!’ ‘Anything I’ve heard of?’ ‘They’re coming. I’ve got things all over the place. They’re percolating everywhere!’ I knew Ricky Johnson. Malcolm Smith knew my dad. So there was that, and once you treat guys nice, it was like, ‘He’s okay.’

The cameras are big, but you don’t muck around too much with lights. You’ve got to let somebody kind of get going and going, instead of trying to get an answer out of them. Sometimes people go, ‘What’s the answer he wants?’ A camera makes people worry that you’re wasting film, like ‘I’m sorry,’ and they’re sitting there apologizing. You just let them know that there are no wrong answers.

LS: What is it about this particular race that differentiates it from other sporting events?

DB: A lot of it for me is that it’s open to anybody. You can participate in it—it’s very democratic. It’s like, ‘Come one, come all, your brave, your tired, your poor!’ It’s the Ellis Island of races. I don’t know of any other where you can be the biggest rank amateur and come and do it. And the fact that there’s no money in it!

They’re competitive with each other, but they don’t- you see it when Robbie (Knievel) craps out in the movie. Here’s a guy who literally races more than once a week. He does the Nascar thing Saturday. Sunday he’ll go do the Indy 500 and the Coca-Cola 600 in the same day. He’s a racer. He’s going to finish that race. When he craps out, the winner in his division had crossed the line two hours earlier! He was nowhere close to winning that thing and he’s just bummed as hell.

LS: There’s a lot of other stuff going on here than just a race, and the human element is what gives this film its heft. At one point, someone calls this a ‘mystic’ experience.

DB: Yes. To be honest, that’s what helped us to want to do it. It became that way for us—it was so weird—like hyper-real. If one of our camera guys got eaten by a giant sandworm, I’d go, ‘Well, that’s Baha! What can you do?’ It reminds you of all these things. It was mystical. I couldn’t explain to you what it was, and if I could then it probably would be a cheat, and I’d be lying to you. It’s different for different people. It reminds me of the Tarantino deal with the suitcase! If anybody is watching it, it’s like, ‘What is it?’ There’s just a bit of that there. It’s ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Following that passion. The pursuit of happiness.

LS: I went through a phase where I jumped out of planes, and swam with sharks, and flew a glider over the Rockies. To me it was about going to an extreme to find something that is almost unknowable. The answer is out of the finite limits we have to live within every day.

DB: Absolutely! I think a lot of people we know test it that way. But I think you can test it in other ways. You want to get outside the box. What else is there? Is this all there is? You want to look at it like, ‘Hey, this isn’t all there is,’ but in a way that’s quantifiable, like jumping out of an airplane, and you can say, ‘I jumped out of a plane! I don’t know what it means, but I feel a lot better about myself that I jumped out of a plane!’ You’re just this little thing on a spinning orb, but all of a sudden, you’re empowered.

In this country, it’s about liberty. Yea! And the pursuit of happiness—what is that? You can try to capture it. Whatever makes you stoked. It’s one of the tenets of the damned country! Have a good time. Pursue what makes you happy. The people that race (the Baja 1000) don’t have to prove anything. They’ve proved it to themselves. They’re not walking about with, ‘Yeah, I make more money than you. I’ve got a better car than you.’

LS: One sequence in the film that really struck me is when you explore Malcolm Smith’s commitment to the Mexican children of the orphanage. Can you talk a little bit about what the Mexican people get out of this race?

DB: Well, they love it. When we first thought about it, we thought it would be ugly Americans throwing a few bucks around, blowing through town. We’re from California so we’ve all spent time in Baja. It’s dirt poor in the villages. They come down in these trucks that are worth more than villages! How are you going to get around that? When you get there, they’re super-cool. They’re proud as hell, they race in it and participate. It’s a generational thing with the Volkswagen guys: ‘I will race in it, and I will take my son.’ It’s very much part of their culture. The dichotomy of our country and Mexico—you’re a moron if you act like that’s not there. Instead of dwelling on it, it is what it is. They’re such nice people. They’d give you the shirts off their backs.

LS: If Dust to Glory were a Hollywood movie, it would have a cocky American driver with a father complex, an archenemy he is racing against and a Mexican peasant girl who loves him. Oh, and her father would not approve.

DB: (laughs) I heard two pitches on the Baja 1000—all drugs! It’s always a drug deal! You say, ‘Can’t anybody go to Mexico without the drug deal?!’ In (non-fiction), there’s something…true. It’s magic to me. We’re all worthy of a story. We don’t all have to be on the cover of "People" magazine. We live in a society where, ‘They’re sexy and worthy, and you’re not one of them!’

LS: You’ve obviously got considerable gifts for mounting a character-based film that is driven by action. Seems like you’d be a natural to direct a Hollywood action film.

DB: You think about that, sure. I could do fiction, but it’d have to be something I knew I could deliver. Non-fiction is awfully fun! Real stories. We could go down to the lobby right now and come up with a screenplay. It’s hard not to be compelled to love non-fiction for that reason. With fiction it’s like you’re telling this great tale to manipulate all of this. With non-fiction, it’s like, ‘Let’s go discover something!’