R.J. Cutler on Chronicling the Esports World Cup

A prolific factual filmmaker, R.J. Cutler is no stranger to discovering new worlds through his work, but for this avid sports fan, the Esports World Cup delivered an array of revelations that he didn’t see coming.

Cutler, a die-hard Mets supporter who recently worked on Fight for Glory: 2024 World Series, about the Major League Baseball tournament, headed to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to chronicle an epic gathering of video gamers in Esports World Cup: Level Up for Prime Video. The series premiered last week, with new episodes dropping every Friday, delivering action from last year’s tournament, which featured 1,500 players and a $60 million prize on the line.

“This is a perfect example of something that I love doing, which is floating into worlds that I know nothing about,” Cutler tells TV Real Weekly about the series, produced by his production company, The Machine. “While I surrounded myself with great producing partners who knew a tremendous amount about the world, it gave me a perspective I was grateful for. We said from day one that we wanted this series to work if you loved esports, if you were a player yourself, if you were a fan, or if you knew nothing about it and were wondering, Why are my kids always staring at a screen? I was excited to land in the middle of that world. It was, in many ways, unlike anything I have ever seen, and as you know, I’m a huge sports fan. In watching the series, you realize the global impact these games have and the incredible personal stories that range throughout the competition.”

Covering the Esports World Cup was akin to “making a film about Coachella,” Cutler quips. “It was weeks long. There were dozens of competitions. Every team was like its own Olympic team—a lot of people from a lot of different sports. The competition was won based on the teams’ collective point gathering over many different competitions. Boiling it down and making it as muscular as possible was the goal, the challenge and the opportunity.”

Whatever arena he’s covering, Cutler always approaches any project “curiosity-first, no expectations, with empathy and a sense of where the drama is and how lives are changing before your eyes. The approach lends itself to all sorts of landscapes.”

Cutler has been spending a fair bit of time in the booming sports doc landscape recently. “They have inherent drama. There’s a clock, competition and scores to settle. There are personal stories. There’s the team behind the team. There are so many elements. That goes for whether you’re telling the story of the Esports World Cup, the World Series or Vogue magazine. This documentary art form allows us to enter into these worlds and tell stories about people in those worlds with surprises, twists, turns and great drama.”

Among his biggest revelations while covering the tournament was that “players tended not to fit the loner stereotype that one imagines. There were big personalities, a lot of intense competition, people for whom the stakes were incredibly high and incredibly personal. There’s a tremendous amount of strategic skill and planning. As you learn, you see the brilliance involved, the strategic planning, the physical skill, the management of celebrity, how the teams are put together and the competition between the team CEOs. Those things are surprising in that they wouldn’t have been on the list of things I expected to see when we started doing it.”