Without knowing it, it turned into a Flaherty film. I wanted them to feel the life rather than have the facts about it. Haile's own family played many of the villagers, and they all improvised the dialogue. I wanted them to say things as they saw it, rather than as I saw it. They replicated their own lives that way.
Endurance is really a biography rather than a documentary.
There's no script. When Gebreselassie won the race, we just followed him back to Ethiopia, and he gave his life story back into a tape recorder. We just used headlines into which the locals improvised their own story. It was like filming a documentary, just observing them living their lives, gathering the harvest, tending cattle, and such. Just life going on.