Sam Blair

0:00 Thank you yeah.

0:47 So I'm a documentary filmmaker and I always get asked what I make films about and always find it really difficult to answer that question and partly that's because I have made quite a few films about Sport and I feel quite self-conscious about this.

1:04 And I think that's because I feel that in film. And in the Arts generally maybe that Sport and maybe particularly football is perceived to be quite low brow and I'm an uptight documentary filmmaker who wants to make films that are taken seriously so I'm going to talk a bit about why I make football films and hopefully make myself feel a bit better about that.

1:34 So I arrived at sport as a subject when I made a film about athletes as my graduation film from the national Film School. And this wasn't out of a particular interest in athletics I wasn't a big fan of it.

1:50 But I came to because I wanted to make a film about people overcoming limits and confronting something in themselves and to do that you need a subject where that inner struggle is visible and in sport the psychological and the physical are sort of perfectly entwined and I found that filming Athletes Training and competing was an amazing way to explore these themes that interested me then the first film I made about football was a short called Manchester United the religion which was about obsessive football fans and where sprinters was a visual study of athletes in this film I interviewed the subjects and it sort of became a therapy session where I tried to understand what drives their behavior and I'm going to play a clip from that I've not missed a helmet since at Old Trafford since 1974 which is now approximately 1100 consecutive home matches over me period of time I've missed games Here There and Everywhere.

3:04 So it's I've got a perfect record of go inputs you know 40 Years of not missing a home games it's quite good oh but countless numbers of jobs because it's really hard to get a job working all the time off I mean there's not many bosses I need I can I can have Wednesday or Saturday off Sunday off Monday off Tuesday off is there so my obsession by religion is is Manchester United and that's where I get my Thrills from I'd say it's a religion I mean I've never been one for going to church or anything like that.

3:29 But I think as the flag says there is a banner Old Trafford that says Manchester United the religion. And it is actually a religion I think there's Judaism islamism christianism and Manchester United ism yeah.

3:48 So so I think Maradona 86 which was the most recent film I made lies somewhere between these two films because it focuses on the central character with a sort of similar level of visual scrutiny like I applied to the athletes but it's definitely also about this sort of obsessive passionate and religious nature of football making a film about Maradona wasn't actually my idea I was asked if I wanted to do it by a producer called John batsec who's a huge Maradona sort of obsessive and I really wanted to work with John and sort of then realized that I actually didn't really like Maradona very much when I looked reminded myself and that's obviously presented a bit of a problem and when I started looking at the footage of Maradona I got quite worried because I was struggling to see what I could bring to it it's the first time I've made a film using archive which on one hand is nice because you make the film without having to leave the house but it brings lots of limitations and you have to make this footage yours somehow the fact that the footage is so iconic only added to my feeling of concern and sort of working with something that carries a huge amount of weight with it. And I was aware of not wanting to just re-edit it and stick my name at the end but a couple of things helped me find my way into it and the more I looked at Maradona the more I sort of was aware of him as a performer as much as a footballer and everything seemed operatically charged and emotional and I sort of saw that this could be a film about the theater of football and maradona's role within that which I found really interesting so another important aspect of discovering the writing of Eduardo Galliano who's this guy who's a Uruguayan writer and you know I didn't have any interest in getting down the usual Road of interviewing Peter shield and or Terry butcher about how they feel about Maradona we kind of wanted the film to try and get to the essence of him and felt that a literary voice would be able to deliver some insight and give the film gravitas and galliano's written a lot about Latin American history and has a sort of beautiful poetic approach to non-fiction and he's written a lot about football and for example is a quote here that sort of is the kind of thing that makes me feel better about making football films so I found it really interesting working his ideas into the film combining his words with the archive from 86 and I've got a clip from early in the film which shows how they they work together the pleasure of demolishing Idols is directly proportional to the need to erect them all over the world plenty of people were ready to celebrate the fall of that arrogant interloper but part of a new fugitive from Hunger that Greaser who had the incident audacity to Swagger and boss foreign but in The Frigid circle of today's world which detests defeated forbids all fun that man was one of the few who proved that fantasy 2 can be effective so narration and documentary is quite often used to explain things or to help with the exposition.

8:08 But I wanted to use it to present ideas galliano's ideas with the archive telling the story and using news reports and the match commentary to take us back into the moment and I really wanted to get the Argentinian perspective on Maradona but it was almost impossible to access anything from their video archives and we ended up having to track people down off YouTube who had recorded stuff onto VHS tapes back in 1986 and get get them to send us stuff and we got Clips like like this John geologists the search for archives then becomes really obsessive when you end up digging up all this amazing stuff and I really wanted to surprise me in some way.

9:07 And I hadn't seen before and at one point one of the researchers found this camera angle of maradona's second call against England which was sitting unnoticed on YouTube and we sent it around news agencies trying to find where it come from and then the discovery of this new angle became this international news story. And we didn't even end up using the clip but you know we found this clip of Maradona doing doing keep your peas with this giant inflatable Globe which I thought would be a great image to win the film on sort of perfect and it's a direct echo of this scene from Charlie Chaplin film.

10:12 So I ended up using the same music in my film which gave the film my film this sort of operatic feeling which I really wanted because you know.

10:22 I think maradona's story has this emotional and Mythic quality and I think he personified the idea that anything is possible in football and he played and behaved as if there was no limits which amaze people and piss people off in equal measure I think despite the money that controls football and the predictability over who'll win it retains a capacity for surprise because it's an outlet for unrestrained and the rational emotions and in football you're never quite sure when someone will do something outrageous and maybe that's what it's all about.

11:02 So I'm going to end with this moment from the film which probably sums up football's ability to make people lose their minds and maybe the question is in what other aspect of life could this explosion of Joy take place thanks a lot