We only get one run at this life, and Rob Shaver is determined to make the most of his. The 48-year-old is the subject of documentary short “The Life We Have,” which chronicles his commitment to running at least 1 mile per day — years after being diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer.
“Rob is unlike any other human I’ve ever met in my entire life. The fact that he’s so day-to-day in how he approaches life — he told me very clearly so many times it’s the way that he’s managed to keep going so long,” director Sam Price-Waldman told TheWrap. “Because when doctors were telling him, ‘Hey, dude, you’re gonna be dead in two years,’ he kind of had to tune that out and just say, ‘OK, no. What can I do today and today only?’”
“That’s so ingrained in him that it was really interesting for me as a person working in production where we have to plan things, really think ahead. I think every single shoot we only confirmed two days beforehand, because his health was so unpredictable,” he continued. “I was often thinking, you know, ‘What if Rob passes away while we’re filming?’ But just being with Rob, pretty quickly, I learned that’s not the question to ask.”
The 24-minute doc follows Shaver and his family as they navigate his terminal diagnosis, both the good days and the bad days. Plus, there’s even a truly moving moment where Shaver offers his rendition of “Bring Him Home” from “Les Misérables.”
“As a filmmaker, I was like, ‘Hey, Rob, what if we do mostly public domain songs?’ Much easier,” the filmmaker said. “Then, of course, he threw in his own choices, one of them being ‘Les Mis.’ His whole family is huge into musical theater. So when we heard it and played it back, that was the track. And, yes, we had to pay quite a bit of money to get it cleared.”
While Price-Waldman has also been both a musician and a runner at times in his life, that’s not the only personal connection he has to his project’s themes.
“Illness and disease in general, like anyone else on this planet, I’ve had a lot of friends, family members who have been affected,” he shared. “A big thing for me that I felt at the beginning, first meeting Ben, was I don’t really want this to be a cancer movie — I wanted it to be more about just being a human dealing with challenges that are both physical and mental and emotional, and how do you deal with that within yourself and also within your family and your world?”
“This film has been in my consciousness almost every single day now for over two years. It’s been a long time, through that process of both getting to know Rob and also cutting the film, staying with these sound bites, staying with his messages. It’s really started to be a part of my life,” Price-Waldman added. “Before I began this film, I didn’t really think about things on such a day-to-day basis. What I tell myself every day now is be grateful, push myself in whatever way every single day, because that’s all I can do.”
