I have dreams of having a crew to help us. But the budget, and me being a cheap idiot, has kept the workforce down to Doug and I. He asks the questions and I press all the buttons on the equipment.

Fortunately for this trip, we didn’t have to leave the United States and I wasn’t going to have to drive from Los Angeles to New York and back like I had to for The Last Captain. I figured a way to pack the gear tight and we were able to fly to our destinations.

Before, we officially began our shoot, I dragged Daniel Costin and his son Mikhail to a small green screen stage in Los Angeles to do some fencing footage I hoped to plug into the final production.

Our first interview was with Mr. Gene Ching at Tiger Claw Headquarters in Fremont on October 3, 2017. Doug and I would run around the Bay Area for the next two weeks and interview 15 people for Stro. We would have a cast and friends screening of our film The Last Captain during that time at the Albany Theater just north of Berkeley.

We took a short break to drive to Oregon to interview John McDougall at the Selberg institute. Mr. McDougall was in the Last Captain because Piller taught him the methods of Hungarian Saber. He was in Stro because he gave D’Asaro his first coaching job in San Francisco.

Doug and I returned to the Bay Area to do three more interviews before taking a break to regroup and assess.

For the second half of October, we flew to Newark to spend two weeks traveling the Eastern Seaboard to learn about D’Asaro’s early life from the people who knew him during that time. We were very fortunate to find three people who fenced on the NYU team with him as well as a gentleman who fenced with him on US Pan Am team.

One of our interviewees, Soren Thompson was kind enough to let us use his membership to stay at the New York Athletic Club. The NYAC sits in a great location just across West 59th st from Central Park. One of the downsides for me being a lifelong shorts aficionado is the club has a mandatory suit and tie dress code in all the public spaces.

D’Asaro was on the NYAC fencing team in the latter half of the 1960s and competed in the Martini and Rossi competitions held there. It was also a great meeting spot to screen The Last Captain for the people that were in The Last Captain as well as people we were going to interview Stro: The Michael D’Asaro story.

All told, we interviewed 13 people in four different states. We put a lot of miles on the rental car. We also even picked up a few interviews by meeting people who pointed us in the direction of others. I spent a chilly night flying my drone at the Brooklyn Bridge for some B-Roll footage. I also spent the day following in D’Asaro’s childhood footsteps by going to his High School and the project in Redhook where he lived.

D’Asaro lived the final years of his life in Southern California so that was the next itinerary on our joureny. We spent a week in Los Angeles and San Diego interviewing another nine people, everyone from friends to former students and rival coaches.

That should be enough, right. Forty interviews? 100 hours of recordings all to tell one life story. Nope. There were still a couple of key people to grab.

We traveled to Florida to interview three people. We went to Texas and Louisiana to interview a former student and the dean of The Museum of American Fencing, Andy Shaw. We finished up December by going back to the Bay Area for another five interviews for people who’s names had come during the course of research. I also took some time out to film D’Asaro’s office and gym on the campus of San Jose State. I flew the drone again at a bridge only this time the Golden Gate. And I filmed some locations around Haight-Ashbury.

Doug and I took two one-day trips to get some unicorns. During pre-production and production, Doug had been talking to D’Asaro’s second wife, Gay. She was reluctant to appear on camera but she also she needed to do this to help out Doug. We flew up to Portland for the day to hear her stories.

I worked on the other unicorn, Al Morales. Through the research, he seemed like a seminal figure in the story of D’Asaro’s fencing career. He was D’Asaro’s main rival as well as his teammate on a few international US teams. But every number or contact information I had for him was wrong or disconnected. He had not social media presence. I finally tracked down his lawyer through a newspaper article.

After some back and forth with the lawyer, I was given Mr. Morales contact information. I contacted Mr. Morales and he agreed to the interview. Doug and I spent the last Tuesday in November in Phoenix interviewing him. When we showed up at his door, the first thing he wanted to know was why they weren’t making a film about him. The competition between saber fencers never ends.

Production wrapped the week before Christmas in December 2017. Now would come the fun part of transforming over a hundred hours of tape into a cogent ninety minute narrative.