eSports have come a long way over the past few years, generating millions of dollars through tournaments, gaining more viewers online than most popular sporting events, and even making their way to television with Heroes of the Dorm on ESPN 2. Later this month, they’ll be headed to the big-screen with the movie All Work All Play, which follows a number of popular players around the world.

The movie, which will show in select theaters on July 21, will feature the film, along with a first look at a new mode in Activision Blizzard’s StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void, as well as a Q & A with the film’s director, Patrick Creadon, along with the head of the ESL gaming league and several popular players.

However, we were able to sit down with Creadon before the event to discuss a number of topics surrounding the film, as well as how far eSports has come.

First off, what do you think about the state of eSports in general It’s certainly come a long way over the past few years, hasn’t it?

When we started this project 18 months ago, in early 2014, I knew very little about eSports. I had a vague understanding that some people played video games professionally, but beyond that I knew very little. What we quickly came to appreciate was that eSports was very much a mainstream industry throughout much of the world, especially South Korea, China, and Europe. What’s been most exciting for us as we made the film was to see that eSports is finally having its moment here in America. It’s poised to become every bit as mainstream as golf, NASCAR, the NHL…you name it. With All Work All Play, what kind of focus did you want to take in terms of eSports The players, the vibe

As we were making the film, I started thinking of eSports as an entire galaxy, and inside that galaxy, there are hundreds of planets. These planets consist of various video games, different tournaments, different video game leagues, etc… and instead of making a film about this whole galaxy that is eSports, we decided early on to focus on one planet, so to speak. In other words, we made the movie about one tournament, several different teams, one primary video game, (League of Legends) and by doing so we got to know a small group of characters very, very well. The main “star” of the film is a tournament called the Intel Extreme Masters, which is the longest running international video game tournament in the world.

What kind of players do you follow in All Work All Play?

We shot the film on three different continents, Asia, Europe, and North America. And along the way, we captured a behind-the-scenes look at some of the best professional League of Legends teams in the world. We fell in love with the GE Tigers from South Korea — and who wouldn’t, they are easily one of the most charismatic and popular professional teams in the eSports world. They also happen to be extremely good at League of Legends. In fact, at the time we were following them, they were considered by most to be the best League of Legends team in the world. We also spent quite a bit of time with Fnatic outside of Cologne, Germany. Fnatic and their team leader xPeke, are considered by many to be the first real League of Legends superstars. xPeke and his teammates were very welcoming and gave us unrestricted access to their world. And it was during this shoot that we met one of the brightest young standouts on the League of Legends scene — Rekkles. But perhaps more than anyone, we really got to know Cloud9 and Team Solomid (TSM), the two top North American teams in League of Legends. These two teams offered a great storyline for us, because not only were they fighting to prove themselves on the international stage, they very much wanted to prove that the North American region is every bit as good as teams from the rest of the world.

What was probably the biggest challenge in putting the film together?

This was a very challenging film to make for several reasons. First of all, we shot the movie literally all around the world including stops in Seoul, South Korea; Shenzhen, China; Taipei, Taiwan; several trips to Cologne, Germany; Toronto, and San Jose. We’ve never made a film on such a grand scale before, and it was really fun and really exhilarating to do so. But boy was it a lot of work!

Another challenge for us was we decided early on that we wanted to release the film and to do so quickly. Let me explain: typically for our other films we shoot for a year, we edit for a year, and we do the festival and release over the third year. For this film we condensed all of that into 18 months. The reason we chose an accelerated release schedule is simple – the story is very timely, our target audience (gamers) is growing rapidly, and our distributor wanted this to be a big theatrical release over the summer. So from the time we shot the final tournament in Poland on March 15 to the time we locked picture on June 15, it was only 90 days. Yet when I watch the film now, I can’t believe how quickly and how thoroughly we were able to tell the story. We wouldn’t have been able to do all of this without our excellent edit team — editors Daniel Clark and Nick Andert and our assistant editor, Tiffany Dixon.

The final challenge was maybe the hardest one, which was trying to tell a story about eSports that on the one hand gamers would love and embrace, and at the same time the non-gamers could also enjoy when they see it. It was challenging to do so, largely because the game we feature in our film (League of Legends) is an extremely complex and fast-moving game. For those of you who have never played League of Legends, imagine combining the teamwork that exists within the NBA, the strategy of chess, and the speed of NASCAR, and you’ll begin to understand what it’s like to play. Translating that story to a general audience was very challenging, but also very fun and rewarding for our team.

What do you think will be the most exciting factor that fans will see in All Work All Play when it makes its debut in theaters later this month?

I think what never ceases to amaze me and what I think is one of the best things about the movie is just the sheer size and intensity of the fan base surrounding eSports. We’ve grown accustomed to walking into an arena and seeing 15,000 fans screaming their lungs out at a hockey game. What we see in the film are audiences just as big and just as intense, rooting for their favorite eSports teams. I have no doubt that eSports will become a mainstream pursuit in America over the course of the next few years if it hasn’t done so already.

Tell us the process of putting a film like All Work All Play together. You worked with a lot of talent in this film.

For All Work All Play, we used the same process that we do for any of our films. You look for a great story, then you look for great characters within that story, and you slowly, day by day, earn their trust. By the time you’ve been working together for awhile, the people in front of the camera start to forget about the cameras and the microphones and they just continue to live their lives like they always do. That’s when we do our best work: when we can become a fly on the wall in the lives of really interesting people doing really cool things. That’s when we know that we’ll be able to tell a really good story, and that’s what we did in this film. We’re really excited to share this with audiences later this summer.

Do you think that eSports is big enough that a number of documentaries could cover it? Like films based on certain events, or perhaps even certain teams?

As I mentioned before, eSports is really a whole galaxy of games and personalities and tournaments and sponsors and fans. In a way, eSports is very much like traditional sports. It’s just that the games that these people play are on computers. And I think we’re going to start to see a lot more storytelling about this community and about the people who live in it. In fact, it’s interesting to note that while we were making the film, eSports appeared on the cover of the Sunday New York Times on three different occasions. That’s a lot of mainstream press coverage for something that most people in our country had never heard of before this year.

How great was it working alongside Michal Blicharz and a number of eSports talents?

Following Michal Blicharz for a year was really a blast. He’s a very funny, very passionate guy from Poland who loves to prank people. He pushes his team very hard, striving for excellence, and he cries all the time when he gets tired or emotionally drained. He’s a big pussycat wrapped in the shell of a lion. And he was a wonderful character to provide the backbone to our story.

Finally, now that All Work All Play is headed to theaters, do you have another project lined up? Would you like to make another eSports-related movie as a follow-up?

There are several projects that we’re looking at right now — nothing that we’re quite ready to announce at the moment, but I would love to tell another story about this group of people. I grew up in a family that loved games. My father especially was a big fan of games and friendly competitions. In fact, the first movie that we made, a movie called Wordplay, which is about the New York Times crossword puzzle and people who are really good at solving it, was largely inspired by my father and my family.

All Work All Play is absolutely cut from the same cloth. It’s a story, at its core, about a group of people who have a passion for something — in this case video games. They took their passion and they created a community around it by hosting tournaments, giving away prizes, and attracting more and more people to this love of theirs. This whole idea of eSports has only been around for 15 years now. A lot of the people in our film were there at the beginning when eSports started. I’m fascinated to see where this is going to go down the road, and I’m quite certain that I’ll be spending time with this group of people in the future.

Tickets for the event can be found here. The trailer is below.