Zitat des Tages von Steve Sabol:
The only other human endeavor on which there's more 16-millimeter film than pro football is World War II, and we're going to pass that in 2013.
Look at a football field. It looks like a big movie screen. This is theatre. Football combines the strategy of chess. It's part ballet. It's part battleground, part playground. We clarify, amplify and glorify the game with our footage, the narration and that music, and in the end create an inspirational piece of footage.
I don't go to games as much as I used to because of the NFL's Sunday Ticket. So I'll watch the games, take notes.
Covering a Super Bowl is actually one of the easiest things we do because our most experienced people are there. We'll have 25,000 feet of film and there's no way you're going to miss anything.
There have been nine Super Bowls in New Orleans, and not all of them have brought the best of luck to NFL Films. We got robbed twice there, got food poisoning, and my hotel room was broken into on the day the Bears played the Patriots in January 1986.
How about that? You can hear NFL Films music on everything from 'SpongeBob SquarePants' to 'Deep Throat.'
I was kicked out of school one year for streaking.
I never thought of what I was doing as a way to sell the NFL. I was making movies about a sport that I loved, about players and coaches that I respected. I wanted to convey my love of the game through film. And most artists convey their love through art. And my art and my love was expressed through film.
Football is a sport of emotions, and we have to capture that in our films.
The autumn wind is a pirate. Blustering in from sea with a rollicking song he sweeps along swaggering boisterously. His face is weather beaten, he wears a hooded sash with a silver hat about his head... The autumn wind is a Raider, pillaging just for fun.
To me, football is very personal. Even as a kid, I looked at football in dramaturgical terms. It wasn't the score that interested me, it was the struggle.
We see the game as art as much as sport. That helped us nurture not only the game's traditions but to develop its mythology: America's Team, The Catch, The Frozen Tundra.
I have loved football as an almost mythic game since I was in the fourth grade. To me, the game wasn't even grounded in reality. The uniform turned you into a warrior. Being on a team, the mythology of physical combat, the struggle against the elements, the narrative of the game.
When my father bid $5,000 for the 1962 Championship Game, that was a huge amount. It was double the bid the year before. Pete Rozelle was flabbergasted. Who was this guy who was willing to spend so much money on what seemed like relatively worthless rights to the NFL Championship Game?
We would get 20 different angles and then cut them all together. That's what I called it at the time - the 'cubistic' treatment of shooting football. It was the same thing Picasso did except we did it with a football play. It's taking a single image and looking at it from multiple perspectives.
You know how I came up with the name 'Road to the Super Bowl?' It's an homage to the old Bob Hope - Bing Crosby buddy movies - you know, like 'Road to Zanzibar' or 'Road to Morocco.' Can you tell? All I've done my whole life is go to movies.
If you can show something as complicated as two people falling in love with just music and camera angles, well, just think about what you can do with football.
