"'Hoop Dreams' brought us back to our roots in veríté filmmaking. What we saw in the powerful emotional scenes within it - at nearly three hours long and with no star power - was an outreach to a different and more important audiences. There were the similarly involved folks who saw it that were part of the struggle, but there was also a new audience that weren't empathetic or sympathetic to the people we were portraying. They would never watch a film about inner city families, but they watched 'Hoop Dreams.'"

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What I am most proud of with the book On to the Next Dream is how I turned an intensely emotional experience into art. Anyone can run up to a rooftop, tear off their clothes, and scream about how screwed up the world is. But for the people down below, all they see is a person losing their mind. I wanted to make something that channeled that emotion in a way that elicited an empathetic response from the reader. So that after you read this book, you would want to run up to the rooftop and scream about how screwed up the world is.

— Paul Madonna