An amateur wrestler gains international stardom in Director Roger Ross Williams’s biographical sports-drama, Cassandro.

Set in the early 1980s, Williams’s film tells the true story of Saúl Armendáriz, a gay amateur wrestler from El Paso who rose to fame and became an LGBTQ icon after regularly crossing the border to Ciudad Juárez in Mexico to participate in lucha libre wrestling matches as “Cassandro the Exotico.”

On September 23, after the DGA membership screening in New York, Williams discussed the making of Cassandro during a Q&A moderated by Director Dee Rees (The Last Thing He Wanted). During the conversation, he spoke about taking advice from a legend.

“I did the Sundance Directing Lab and it’s very intimidating. Even though I made a bunch of documentaries I was terrified of actors and terrified of making a scripted film. [Sundance founder Robert] Redford picked my project to mentor and I was sitting with him at lunch and he storyboarded the sex scene. He said, ‘It’s really choreography and storytelling’ and drew it out in the back of my script pages which I framed and hung in my office.” Willams also spoke about learning to use his documentarian skills adding, “Something I learned from Bob is that I had to lean into my documentary skills because I’m flexible as a documentarian. I’m shooting real life, I have to go with the flow. So, on set, I can sort of feel the emotion of how a scene is going and change things right there according to how the actors are interacting. I was very flexible in changing things all the time so in a way it felt a little bit like I was making a documentary. Because I had already made a documentary version, I knew all the details of the real Cassandro in my head, but I had to throw them out.”

Williams’s other directorial credits include the documentary features The Apollo, Stamped from the Beginning, God Loves Uganda and Love to Love You, Donna Summer; episodes of the documentary mini-series The Super Models and The 1619 Project; and episodes of the documentary series High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America and Freedom. He was nominated for the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary for his 2016 film, Life, Animated. In 2010, he and Director Elinor Burkett won the Academy Award in the "Best Documentary, Short Subjects" category for Music by Prudence. Williams has been a DGA member since 2016.