I make films about people.
Not action heroes. Not celebrities. People. The ones sitting across from you at Thanksgiving who you have never actually asked about.
We have filmed political figures and professional athletes. When we do, the film is not for the public. It is for the twelve people in that family who need to know who this person actually was. That is always the audience. The people who matter to them.
Here’s how this started.
Michael Berry, nationally-syndicated radio host, called me up one day and said he wanted to film his dad. Nothing special. His dad was 75, retired, same guy Michael came home to in high school. He just wanted his kids to know him.
So I showed up with my gear. What was supposed to be a 45-minute interview turned into a full day of conversation. By the end of it, I knew a company had been born.
Since that day, Heritage Films has proven, over and over, that there are extraordinary stories in ordinary lives. Here is a small sample of what I mean.
A man crossed a minefield on foot at 21 years old to escape communist Hungary. A Russian soldier had shot him in the legs when he was five. That same soldier came back later to apologize and show him pictures of his own kids. He made it to America speaking almost no English. Within a year he was earning what would be six figures today. He spent the next four decades making sure no defective nuclear fuel ever reached a Navy submarine reactor. He had a few things to say about freedom.
A West Texas cotton farmer lost his right arm to a machine in 1972. Spent a decade blaming himself. Then in his sixties he walked into a Manhattan finance conference in boots and Levi’s, the only man in the room not wearing a pinstripe suit, cold-called his way to an Irish wind energy company, organized 34 landowners, and built a project that put $40 million into local schools. He opens every interview by reciting his own aphorisms. One of them: “Nakedness of body has no depth. Nakedness of soul is all depth.” He wrote that himself.
A 98-year-old Texas contractor married his wife on the night he received his orders for Okinawa. Decades later, when she developed Alzheimer’s, he became her around-the-clock nurse. He slept upstairs because his snoring bothered her. He used a bell system so she could summon him. He never put her in a facility. His philosophy on most things: anything worth doing is worth doing right or don’t even touch it.
A man from a small village in India arrived in Lafayette, Louisiana in 1961 with one semester’s tuition, almost no English, and a diet of orange juice, apples, and peanut butter. He met a woman named Nancy at a social club. Six months after they married, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She died at 28. He flew back to India, remarried, brought his daughter home, and spent the next several decades building a commercial real estate portfolio across Houston. He paid back every debt, including the ones that were not his to carry.
A barefoot kid from a place called Goober Hill in East Texas hopped a freight train out of Center to buy himself a 1948 Mercury Coupe. He ended up running the most famous fishing lodge on Toledo Bend Reservoir in its first boom year. When Terry Bradshaw borrowed an icebox and kept forgetting to return it, he just said: keep it, I’ll get another one. He was that kind of man. Some people are.
Chance McClain
I’m a filmmaker, an Army veteran, and a Gen-X guy from Houston who has been sitting across from remarkable people for going on two decades now. I’ve gotten pretty good at knowing which questions open the real story and which ones just fill time.
The people I film are not famous. Most of them do not think of themselves as interesting. They are almost always wrong about that.
Heritage Films combines Hollywood-level production with a researcher’s obsession and a filmmaker’s eye. We spend time with you before the camera rolls. We read the documents, look at the photographs, talk to the people who knew you before you were who you are now.
When interview day arrives, we are not reading from a list. We know exactly which moment we’re after.
Start the conversation when you’re ready.