goal: on the ball
Football is the sport that unites all Europeans. It seems nearly every major city – from Madrid to Milan and Lisbon to Amsterdam – has at least one club side competing in the Champions League on a regular basis. The World Cup, starting in Germany next June, will grip Europe for an entire month. There’s simply no escaping football– not even in the cinema, says Jason Solomons.
Traditionally a haven of escapism, our movie screens will be bursting with football-related films in the coming year. Some of this has to do with the buzz and commercial openings provided by the World Cup; some of it is because Hollywood and American audiences are finally waking up to “soccer".
By far the biggest undertaking is a trilogy called, rather simply, Goal! This is a three-part fairytale about a Latino boy called Santiago Munez from the Los Angeles ghetto. He’s discovered by an international scout and snapped up by a big club from the north of England (Newcastle, it turns out). In the second film, he’s transferred to glamorous Real Madrid and plays around Europe in the Champions League. In the final film, he leads his country out at the World Cup finals. A likely story? Even in a film it might be far-fetched but football, as they say, is a funny old game and these things do happen.
The biggest stars in Goal! are footballers not actors – David Beckham, Zinedine Zidane, Raul, Roberto Carlos and Alan Shearer. These established stars of the world game all agreed to cameo appearances, which should ensure the millions of fans they already have will turn out to see the films. But, in a case of life imitating art, the film should make a global star of Mexican actor Kuno Becker, the young man picked to play Santiago.
Goal! producer Mike Jeffries says: “We could have cast a well-known star but we thought that audiences should warm to this character over the three films. Kuno is perfect. By the end of the final film, we will be dealing with a huge star, I’m sure of it, so it’s not too risky a strategy. Like Santiago, the character he plays, Kuno will start out as a fish out of water and gradually grow into his role as a star player.
Jeffries, once a Liverpudlian bartender but now a millionaire businessman in Los Angeles, still follows his beloved game from the exile of Santa Monica. “The chance to get involved in a film that takes me so close to football pitches around the world is a dream come true for me. That’s what the trilogy is about – dreams and how they can come true. That goes for fans, players and coaches.”
The first film features a cast including actors Stephen Dillane, Sean Pertwee and Anna Friel. It also stars Alessandro Nivola, a young American actor who will feature in all three films and plays, as he calls it, the “Han Solo of international football”. Nivola comes from a Sardinian family and is that rare thing, a Hollywood actor who has been playing football since childhood. He’s rather good too, and can often be spotted playing on London’s five-a-side courts under the Westway flyover with his friends. Nivola, 33, is married to beautiful English actress Emily Mortimer and the pair are bringing up their two-year-old son Sam between west London and west Hollywood.
Movie screens will be bursting with football-related films this year as Hollywood wakes up to “soccer”
“My character Gavin Harris is glamorous, overpaid, cheeky, decadent – a real playboy,” he says, adding that he in no way modelled the part on David Beckham. “Becks has an incredibly glamorous lifestyle but he’s actually much more humble than Gavin. He does himself down in interviews whereas Gavin is full of himself, confident of his charm and charisma. He’s more like the former Arsenal striker Ian Wright who has become a TV star now. I remember him being an insufferable egomaniac yet totally likeable at the same time. A sort of loveable rogue.”
In fact, Nivola’s character is there to illustrate the flashy side of the game, the bling bling. “My character gets insulted all the time,” he says. “It’s a sort of running joke. There’s one scene where I wake up in a tower block having just slept with twin sisters. Late for training, I run down the corridor, putting my clothes on, and a local woman recognises me and spits at me. Then another shouts: ‘You’re shit’, then I get to my car, the wheels have been stolen and a bunch of kids laugh at me and then I get in a cab and the driver looks in his mirror at me and says there’s no way I’m worth 10 million quid...”
With new computerised technology and the passion of its producers for the game and not just the money, Goal! may be the end of bad football movies. Traditionally, the genre is laughable, with such classics as Escape to Victory, the all-star romp in which a group of Allied prisoners of war take on the Germans during the Second World War. Led by an overweight Michael Caine, the Allied line-up features Pele, Ossie Ardiles and Bobby Moore, as well as several players from the successful but distinctly unglamorous Ipswich side of the early 1980s, such as John Wark and Russell Osman. Immortally, Sylvester Stallone was the goal keeper.
Technology has changed things dramatically. Nivola says: “You used to have to stage the moves and they never looked real because actors are generally not great players and also audiences really know their football – they can spot fakery a mile off. But now it’s amazing. We shot scenes during real games (such as Newcastle v Chelsea in the FA Cup), got permission to mingle on the pitch at the final whistle, and the next day, we’d go back to the stadium and re-stage the action frame by frame, putting actors in the exact spots where the players were just 24 hours before – they digitise the ball in later.”
Producer Jeffries adds that the films are being made with the complete cooperation of FIFA and UEFA, the game’s governing bodies. When Liverpool won the European Cup in Istanbul in May, Jeffries was there, courtesy of a personal invite from UEFA. The production already has permission to film at this season’s Champions League matches and has become the first film crew to be allowed to film at the World Cup finals in Germany next summer.
“We already know we will be filming on the pitch at the final itself,” says Jeffries. “FIFA president Sepp Blatter has personally become involved in the production because he believes the three films will show all the sides of the game but also concentrate on the essential heroism of succeeding in sport. It’s this sort of authenticity that’s always been lacking.
We’ll have real crowds, real players and real action.”
