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.
Steve Sabol
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.
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.
Lombardi, a certain magic still lingers in the very name. It speaks of duels in the snow and November mud... He remains for many the heart of pro football, pumping hard right now.
Football is a sport of emotions, and we have to capture that in our films.
NFL Films has had one continuous, creative vision for 47 years. These are timeless things; timeless stories that we capture just like people go back and read Greek mythology.
How about that? You can hear NFL Films music on everything from 'SpongeBob SquarePants' to 'Deep Throat.'
I think in the NFL knowledge is power, and you try to get the knowledge by whatever means.
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.
Football is such a great game, but football players are so dull.
My Dad hated his job. He sold overcoats, but he wanted to make movies. He had a failed career working with the Ritz Brothers - they were like the Marx Brothers, only a tier below. I always had a picture in my mind of him in a straw hat.
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.
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.
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.
The importance of an artist is bringing new signs into a language.
When we started NFL Films, there were no focus groups, there were no demographic studies, there were no surveys. Every decision that we made, we made with our hearts, not with our heads. And, in the very beginning, we really didn't even have a business plan.
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.
So they talk about heaven, and I don't know what is waiting for me up there. But I can tell you this: Nothing will happen up there that can duplicate my life down here. Nothing. That life cannot be better than the one I've lived down here, the football life. It's been perfect.
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.
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.
When we started in the early '60s, football had a little bit of a tradition. But, they didn't have a mythology. And NFL Films, through our music and our scripts and our photography, created a mythology for the sport.
I've been very lucky in the freedom that I've been given. Every artist needs two types of freedom: You need the freedom to - the freedom to come up with an idea or treatment - and then you need the other half of the freedom, and that's freedom from - somebody saying, 'This is great. This is how I want you to do it.'
I blew the college boards, and to ease the snub from Harvard made a tour of Europe.
If there's one thing I can't stand, it's not being noticed.
A perfect record does not mean that someone is the greatest. Rocky Marciano never lost a fight, but I never hear anyone say he's the greatest heavyweight champion of all time.
I've always been fascinated by Picasso and how he would look at a single image through multiple perspectives and from separate moments in time. He would look at a woman's face and he would see almost a three-dimensional look even though it was a flat canvas. I thought, well why couldn't we do the same thing with a football play?
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.
I remember when we were making 'They Call It Pro Football,' which was our 'Citizen Kane.' The first line is 'It starts with a whistle and ends with a gun.'
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?
I was kicked out of school one year for streaking.
I always was fascinated by neat nicknames.
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.
All this technology has not changed the way NFL Films does business and our process. Yes, with one touch of a button now you reach millions of people but it is still the same approach that my father and I started out with.
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.
