Sundance Film Festival

from Darroch Greer

Lest we forget, some of the best drama occurs in sports. But who has the time to watch movies and follow baseball? How many devoted film fans watch NFL Films? How about this: What‘s the last film you saw where the lead character never leaves the screen? Never.

Visual media artists Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, a Scotsman and French Algerian, had some time to kill in Jerusalem while installing an exhibit back in 1996. They got a football - that‘s soccer ball to us stateside - and kicked it around for three days, while also kicking around ideas. What if they could make a documentary about their favorite footballer (soccer player), and how might it be different than just a fawning documentary portrait?

“What if we were to make a film where the central character was, literally, always central,” Gordon asks, rhetorically. “If action was happening off that character, then that action would be missed. Originally, we thought of Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait as a more traditional narrative film. And then we thought, why not take it out of the traditional narrative and put it into something that is the same time structure as a feature film - and that would be a football match.” [Soccer games last 90 minutes.] “So, that was how we thrashed out an early strategy….We really wanted him to be the central character in a film that would construct its own narrative.”

It took Gordon and Parreno two years to contact Zin�dine Zidane. Americans might know him as Zidane of the head-butt. Within those two years, Zidane won the World Cup for France and moved from Juventus, his team based in Torino, Italy, to Real Madrid - at which point Gordon and Parreno lost touch with him and had to start over. It took four more years to get to him. Time was running out. At 32, Zidane was getting ready to retire.

“Philippe and I are older,” Gordon says, “which is kind of strange to meet someone who obviously has this profile in the world. I have to be quite honest: I was completely kind of shell-shocked when I met him. I couldn‘t really even speak, which was kind of strange. As my father said to me, ‘Well, you‘re older than he is. Get down to work.‘”

The scheme of Gordon (pictured right) and Parreno (pictured below) was to film Zidane playing a game of football with 17 cameras trained on him; to capture him - and only him - throughout the entire course of one game, no matter where the action. “I think we had a crew of about a 150 people,” Gordon recalls. “Considering that Philippe and I had made tiny films before, this was a pretty daunting prospect to try to control all these people. In a stadium with 80,000 people, another 150 doesn‘t seem to make that much difference. But then we realized that every second another hundred dollars was being spent.”

Thirteen of the 17 cameras were 35mm, two were Super 16, and two were video to accommodate what were probably the longest lenses in the world. Yes, that‘s right, soccer and film fans.

“Along with the camera assistants and focus pullers and loaders, etc., there was a lot of activity,” Gordon says wondrously. “Actually, the way that it worked, we had an outside broadcast unit, which was sitting outside the stadium and having a live feed from all of the cameras. Philippe and I and Darius Khondji [the DP] sat and sweated it out nervously in a truck outside the stadium while the action was all happening inside. It was pretty nerve-wracking.”

“The day of the shooting, some interviews with the players of the opposing team were published,” Parreno is quoted as saying. “They said they would do everything they could to keep Zidane from playing a good game so that we wouldn‘t have much of a film. So, in a way, the fact that we were shooting influenced the event - and that was slightly traumatizing.”

The cameras were staggered, with cameras one through four starting at the same time, followed by cameras five through seven three minutes later, and so on. There was one camera with a wide lens high up in a special gantry to “punctuate the action”. But other than that, every other camera was at eye-level. “That was another thing,” Gordon says - “to try to move the look of the film away from the tele-visual, which tends to be above head-height, and take it down to get face to face with our subject.”

The Super 16 cameras were hand-held behind the goals. One of the camera men with the Super 16 was Michael McDonough. “In total there were 17 cameras, 14 35mil bodies, almost all 435s, high-speed 35 cameras,” McDonough recalls. “It‘s a type of Arriflex 35 camera. It‘s an MOS camera so it can shoot high-speed. Those were all rented out to us with a selection of very long zoom lenses - some Hawk 150 to 450s, along with the Ingenue Optimal, which is 24 to - I need to look that up. It‘s known as the Optimal - Ingenue, the French company, makes it. Then there was one unit, which was Super 16 with a zoom lens, and I had that hand-held, right behind both goals. And then there were two of these Panavision 7 mil to 2100 mil, which is a 300-times zoom. Actually, we had to have special permission to take those out of the country because - they get used for other purposes, shall we say. I‘m not quite sure how to put that.”

Gordon elaborates: “Michael McDonough had heard that Panavision had been pioneering some lenses with the military, and that had only been used by the U.S. Army. I mean these were absolutely enormous - but they would only work with video. Actually, two of the operators that we used, Jimmy Dosantos and, I think, Donald Marx quite frequently work for the NFL, and they were the only two that could handle lenses like that. The body of the lens was something like four-and-a-half feet long, maybe five feet long. They‘re the Panavision….They were from 700 to 2,100 millimeter lenses. They‘re called Panavision 300x Zoom. I think Panavision hasn‘t released them. The Panavision guy flew over from LA, set it all up for us, then took the lenses back.”

“It‘s probably satellite technology,” McDonough speculates. “Panavision probably developed them for the government, or something, but they‘re using them for this other purpose, so there had to be special permission to ship those to Madrid. Maybe it‘s not worth saying that. But it‘s a beautiful lens. They weighed 85 pounds each. At that point, the camera - it was a Sony 900 HD camera, and it‘s mounted on the back, and at that point it almost becomes like a still sports photographer, where they put these huge lenses with this little 35 mil body on the back. It was mostly all lens. But they were able to get closer than anything.”

Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait is actually 92 minutes long. The game went into overtime so there are two extra minutes before Zidane was taken off the field. That means there was 92 minutes x 17 worth of footage for Herv� Schneid to edit. You do the math. (OK: 26 hours.) Twenty-six hours is not a huge amount of footage for a documentary by any means - but when you have 17 takes of everything… “We kind of hoped we might be able to get this edited in three months,” Gordon recalls, “then six months, then eight months, nine months; then it took a year.”

Unfortunately, neither Gordon nor Parreno are going to be present at Sundance this year. “Were incredibly excited [about Sundance],” muses Gordon, “but not having been there, and still not going….Obviously, it‘s the industry cherry on the cake, as it were. It‘s going to be seen by our peers, hopefully under optimum conditions.

“I‘m actually heading off to the Caribbean tomorrow. I‘m actually working on a drawing project. One of the nice things about working in the film world is it‘s pushed Philippe and me to kind of reassess what we do when we‘re in the art world again. It‘s kind of a back-to-basics approach, so I‘m headed down to the Caribbean to make some drawings for a few weeks….We both have a pretty broad practice. A lot of the ideas are a little more oblique than the simple notion of a portrait of a football player. This is probably the most ‘pop‘ thing we‘ve ever done.”

The film has been released on DVD in France. Gordon is proud that the Z-Man has out-sold the X-Men.