ESPN’s ‘The Captain’: Director Randy Wilkins On Getting Spike Lee’s Blessing To Tell The Story Of New York Yankees Great Derek Jeter

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Randy Wilkins connects with Derek Jeter, subject of his seven-part ESPN documentary series, The Captain, on a few levels.For starters, Wilkins is a lifelong New York Yankees fan, and Jeter was the linchpin of five World Series championships captured by the team between 1996 and 2009.

In his filmmaking career, Wilkins also can relate. While he wasn’t a teen-ager like Jeter when he got his big break, getting the chance to tell the story of his hero resulted from a surprise endorsement from Spike Lee, who is an executive producer of the series.“In June 2020, he called me to check up on me,” Wilkins recalled in an interview. “He asked me who my favorite Yankee was, just out of the blue.

I said, ‘Well, Derek Jeter.’ I was very confused as to why he was asking me that. And the next thing he said was, ‘Derek Jeter wants to do a documentary and I’m putting you up to direct it.’ I almost dropped the phone.”While Jeter had wanted Lee to direct, the filmmaker was juggling a few other projects, so he decided to steer Jeter to his protégé, who had once been his film student at NYU before going on to climb the ladder in the editorial department of several Lee projects.

Most recently, he was an editor of the Netflix series She’s Gotta Have It and director of the premiere episode of Dear … for Apple TV+, which focused on the impact of Lee’s 1987 film School Daze.ESPN, via its flagship 30 for 30 franchise, has specialized in in-depth portraits of athletes, with the bar being set by 2020’s The Last Dance, the story of Michael Jordan’s final season in the NBA.