“I really saw Emily grow up a lot, and I think it really comes through in the film,” Johnson said. “I think the person you see at the end of the film is very different than the one you see at the beginning. When she went up for the question-and-answer [at the Outfest premiere], you could really tell that this was a much different girl than I’d met when we first started this whole process. By the end of the question-and-answer period, she was cracking jokes and not giving the microphone back. She saw that these people wanted to celebrate her.”
The film also depicts the close-knit friendship between Rollins and Tay, which was sustained throughout Harvard and their post-graduate basketball careers in Germany.
“[Our] friendship was very unexpected,” Rollins said. “We are polar opposites. I’m tall, from the East Coast, crazy, straight—we can even go that far. I’m boy-crazy. She’s reserved, Asian-heritage, West-Coast, lesbian, likes girls. How we became best friends, I don’t even know. We just connected instantly the first week of college and were kind of inseparable all four years.”
Rollins and Tay even took every class and section together—a choice that, looking back, Rollins jokingly called “creepy.”
“I think we just had a mutual understanding and respect for each other,” Rollins explained. “We balance each other out. I would try to get her to be a little wilder, and she would tame me a bit. At the root of it, we’re both hard-working people just trying to figure it out in life. That’s where I think we bonded.”
Ultimately, when the film premiered on July 9, Tay not only had the support of Rollins and Johnson but also of her entire Crimson team. As Tay flew in from Germany, and Rollins from New York, the rest of the team members traveled from across the country to view the film as a single unit.
The film proceeded to win the Special Programming Award for Freedom following its two initial showings, both of which were completely sold out.
“It was amazing,” Johnson described. “It was so powerful and fun, and I know that Emily was very nervous because she really put her life in front of these people. The film had a big payoff when we heard people laughing at the film and gasping at all the right moments. You could really tell that they were really into it. I watched the film sitting next to Emily and, on the other side, Katie. They were also just so into it and were just having so much fun remembering all these key moments in their lives growing up … That made it all worth it.”
The film will continue its world premiere next month at the DOC NYC Film Festival in New York, followed by a trip to the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam, which is one of the most highly-regarded documentary film festivals in Europe.
The overall structure of the film, one of a star athlete who must overcome several challenges in order to be a more complete player and person, has themes found in the other sports movies of this generation, such as Rocky and Hoosiers. But where “No Look Pass” separates itself from the crowd is in the fact that Tay does not use just her skills to dazzle both the defense and the viewers. Instead, she became what Rollins called “the go-to person that everyone could look to and look up to.”