{"id":11160,"date":"2024-01-26T18:11:09","date_gmt":"2024-01-26T18:11:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=11160"},"modified":"2024-03-21T22:33:52","modified_gmt":"2024-03-21T22:33:52","slug":"how-an-nhl-match-led-norman-jewison-to-make-rollerball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=11160","title":{"rendered":"How an NHL match led Norman Jewison to make \u2018Rollerball\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

By Ray Bennett<\/p>\n

LONDON \u2013 \u2018Rollerball\u2019, Canadian filmmaker Norman Jewison\u2019s only film set in the future, also is his most action-packed and violent and it was inspired by an experience at a National Hockey League (NHL) game.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Released in 1975, it\u2019s set 40 years in the future with James Caan (pictured above) as a star player in a team sport called rollerball that is designed to distract the public from corporate dictators. A race involving skaters, motorcycles and a flying metal ball on a circular indoor track, it degenerates into one filled with aggression, violence and many deaths.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>It was a substantial hit with a domestic North American box office of around $30 million from a budget of less than $6 million. It ranked twelfth in popularity, ahead of movies such as \u2018Barry Lyndon, \u2018The Eiger Sanction\u2019 and \u2018French Connection II\u2019, in a year when only two films made more than $100 million \u2013 \u2018Jaws\u2019 with $260 million and \u2018One Flew Over the Cuckoo\u2019s Nest\u2019 with $109 million.<\/p>\n

Still, Jewison was conflicted over its success, especially in the United States where he felt it was misunderstood. \u2018One of the reasons I made the film was because of my horror of violence in sport, that people were actually being injured permanently,\u2019 he told me when we spoke during the Ghent International Film Festival in 2011.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Solidly Canadian, he blamed that country\u2019s southern neighbour for the way ice hockey had changed noting that the NHL used to be six teams, New York, Montreal, Boston, Toronto, Winnipeg and Detroit. \u2018The moment the Americans moved in on Canadian hockey, they took the rights to the NHL and moved from Toronto down to New York,\u2019 he said. \u2018Well, all of a sudden you\u2019ve got Atlanta and Dallas, all these teams. They don\u2019t even have ice there! It doesn\u2019t even get cold, for chrissake. Then hockey started to change. It started to become more violent. It started to be about hitting. It started to be about punishing people. It started to be about bullying. All of a sudden there were enforcers.\u2019<\/p>\n

He recalled one Saturday night when he went to game in Chicago in a crowd of 16,000 people: \u2018The stadium is so steep. Bam! One guy hits another one and there\u2019s blood on the ice. When that red blood hit the white ice everybody was like they were being fed and they started to scream. It got scary. I saw all the police and all the ushers move to the bottom of the aisles, it all happened magically and I realised that that was what it was all about: they were selling violence. I thought, Jesus, has the player been blinded? He had a stick in his eye, there\u2019s blood all over. They come out with a stretcher and they take the guy off the ice and push the blood to the side. All right, let\u2019s continue the game. Holy shit! I got so upset that it was part of my motivation to make \u201cRollerball\u201d. I wanted people to be frightened by the whole idea of \u201cRollerball\u201d, that it\u2019s like going back to Circus Maximus, it\u2019s inhuman.\u2019<\/p>\n

He also had been inspired by meeting American director Stanley Kubrick after he left the States to spend most of the Seventies in Europe. \u2018He was living in London and making films there when I was there so I got to him. He was totally paranoid about the state of the world and I caught some of that.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>He bought the script for \u2018Rollerball\u2019 from William Harrison who had adapted it from his own short story titled \u2018Roller Ball Murder\u2019 that appeared in Esquire Magazine. He knew there would be logistical difficulties from the outset.<\/p>\n

\u2018We shot the film in Munich as it was the only place that had a circular stadium that could handle motorbikes and skaters because it was a wooden track,\u2019 he said. \u2018It was built for the Olympics and it was perfect. Without it, I couldn\u2019t have made \u201cRollerball\u201d. I took [production designer] John Box to Munich and then back in England we sat down for days trying to work out this game. I mean, how do you invent a game? It\u2019s the hardest thing in the world. It\u2019s got to have rules, it\u2019s got to have penalties \u2026 it\u2019s ridiculous. We\u2019re literally sitting there trying to figure out how do you play rollerball? Nobody knew; it had never been played.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u2018Wasn\u2019t it in the script?\u2019 I asked. \u2018Hadn\u2019t the scriptwriter worked out the game?\u2019<\/p>\n

Jewison shook his head: \u2018No. He didn\u2019t know how to play it. He described it as people on skates and a ball being shot out of a cannon. He took the idea from a board game \u2026 I mean, you can\u2019t do that with people and this ball whizzing around.\u2019<\/p>\n

He and Box built a replica of the Munich stadium about the size of a bar table and tried to figure it out. \u2018We were sitting in Pinewood Studios with this fucking thing,\u2019 he said, \u2018shooting this ball around. I said it was like a roulette wheel so it\u2019s got to start falling the moment it starts to lose speed. Yes. So that\u2019s when we can scoop the ball up. That\u2019s right. And if you had a big glove. Yes, let\u2019s get a fucking glove. We literally \u2013 and the writer was of no help at all, he was, \u201cWell, I don\u2019t know, they\u2019re on motorbikes and you grab the back of the bike\u201d and I\u2019m \u201cAre you kidding? How can we do that, for chrissakes, without killing somebody?\u201d So then we had to get stuntmen to rehearse and train. I had Jimmy Caan, actors, grabbing ahold of the back of bikes and we had to teach them how to skate. God, it was a nightmare, a fucking nightmare.\u2019<\/p>\n

They finished the picture and then came another surprise. \u2018You know something?\u2019 Jewison said, \u2018\u201cRollerball\u201d became a cult film in England. It was the British who embraced it and then the Europeans embraced it. It went to America and the Americans didn\u2019t get it. The Europeans got it. The Americans loved it, loved the violence. I think the film was reviewed by Red Smith, who was the sports writer for the New York Times, instead of the film critic and that appalled me. It opened and everybody wanted to buy the fucking game. They didn\u2019t care. Kill a few people, what does it matter? I mean, the Americans were all for it. That just appalled me. I said, I don\u2019t want to be associated with this. No, you can\u2019t buy the game. I said, this is bizarre; this is Circus Maximus. You just want to sell tickets to see somebody creamed. Oh, God. Only in America.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ray Bennett LONDON \u2013 \u2018Rollerball\u2019, Canadian filmmaker Norman Jewison\u2019s only film set in the future, also is his most action-packed and violent and it was inspired by an experience at a National Hockey League (NHL) game.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6,1263,2257],"tags":[600,1351,5444,5443,5445],"class_list":["post-11160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-interviews","category-memory-lane","category-recalling","tag-gent-film-festival","tag-james-caan","tag-john-box","tag-norman-jwison","tag-rollerball"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11160"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11160\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11197,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11160\/revisions\/11197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}