Fisher Stevens Says Making ‘Beckham’ as ‘Succession’ Wrapped Was ‘Creatively, the Greatest Moment of My Life’

On June 6, the 2024 IndieWire Honors ceremony will celebrate 13 creators and stars responsible for some of the most stellar work of the TV season. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, the event is a new edition of previous IndieWire Honors ceremonies, this time focused entirely on television. We’re showcasing their work with new interviews leading up to the Los Angeles celebration.

“What are you doing a fucking series on David Beckham for?”

More from IndieWire

• The 14 Best Thrillers Streaming on Netflix in June, from 'Fair Play' to 'Emily the Criminal'

• Netflix Animation Shares First Looks at 'Wallace & Gromit' and Zack Snyder's 'Twilight of the Gods'

It’s a question director Fisher Stevens said he fielded multiple times as he told friends and colleagues he had been courted to make what has become Netflix’s most-watched documentary of the past year. In discussion with IndieWire over Zoom, the multi-talented filmmaker revealed that he, too, was surprised at first to be approached with the idea for “Beckham,” and even a bit resistant to taking it on.

“I love sports documentaries, but most of them are very much the same in terms of the style, except for the Michael Jordan one, which I thought was incredible, which I thought actually was different and had a real authenticity to it,” said Stevens, referencing 2020 Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series Emmy winner “The Last Dance,” helmed by Jason Hehir. “The way those interviews, those players, he got them to be really real, and that was what I wanted. I wanted reality. I wanted real.”

At first, prior to meeting the soccer icon, that was not something Stevens was sure David Beckham was capable of. “The reason I wasn’t too thrilled, or I didn’t really jump on doing this also was because I watched a lot of his interviews, and he was very curated and very canned,” said the documentarian set to receive the Magnify Award at IndieWire Honors on June 6. “These guys are interviewed so much, and they’re so used to their canned answers that I wanted to try to find a way to make them really authentic. And that’s another reason why you hear me sometimes interject [in the series] so that the audience is reminded that these guys are just talking to us.”

In addition to his other artistic successes, Stevens’ documentary achievements include an Oscar for producing “The Cove” in 2009 and an Emmy nomination for directing the HBO film “Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds” alongside his wife Alexis Bloom.

However, his entry into filmmaking began with another film about soccer titled “Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos,” released in 2006. He recalls being approached by his then-girlfriend’s ex to pitch him and his Greene Street Films business partner John Penotti about Pelé and Franz Beckenbauer joining the titular New York team in the 1970s. After the pitch, Penotti told him, “’If this is bad, you have to fix it.’ And I said, ‘I will.’ And sure enough, [the ex] delivered one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Stevens. “They made a movie about the Cosmos, and they didn’t even interview der Kaiser? That was first of all, like, what the fuck?”

At the time, “I didn’t know anything about documentaries. And John Battsek, who was the producer, had made movies, and he finally admitted that ‘yeah, I delivered a shit film.’ And then me, and him, and a couple other great people put together that film and that was it, I was off to the races,” he said. “I was always juggling between doing plays, acting in movies, and producing movies. And then my theater career kind of ended once I discovered documentary [filmmaking]. I stopped making plays. Also, it helped that my last play that I starred in, I got really bad reviews.”

The process of interviewing subjects and sitting in on editing room sessions got Stevens hooked on documentary filmmaking. Making documentaries has even improved how he approaches his other creative pursuits. “There’s something about the nourishment I get from being on a set as an actor and then coming back into the edit,” said Stevens. “Being an actor on set, and then being an interviewer and interviewing people, and then filming vérité with them and the way I’m shooting, it all felt like it fed into one another.”

“Beckham” came to him right as “Succession,” the Emmy-winning drama in which he played WayStar-RoyCo PR chief Hugo Baker, was ending. “[Writers] Jesse Armstrong and Tony Roche pushed me to really dig deep into Beckham. They just were talking him up, and I didn’t know,” he said. “They were like, ‘You’ve got to watch him play.’ And listening to Tony and Jesse’s passion for David as a player got me excited.” Stevens now looks back on that time when he was simultaneously wrapping “Succession” and getting “Beckham off the ground as “creatively, the greatest moment of my life.”

When it came to working with his primary subject, Stevens found himself doing a lot of begging for access, whether it was sitting in on the Beckham family’s weekly Sunday brunch, or even getting a small peek inside the athlete’s meticulously organized closet. “The one thing he let me film right away were the bees, because he was proud of that,” said the director, referencing Beckham’s beekeeping hobby.

He had an idea going in of the greater story he wanted to tell in profiling someone like Beckham. “You see how big he was, how popular, yet he didn’t become a fatality,” said Stevens. “I wanted the audience to see that, and to feel that time and that place with the music and the pre-internet, but paparazzi at its height, invading privacy at its height. So I wanted to make a cultural statement about that. I wanted people to understand what England was like then. To feel England, and then feel Spain, and then feel L.A., and then even at the end, Miami briefly. To take people through a time warp, but also a travelogue.”

What he did not anticipate was how the soccer star’s wife, former Spice Girl Victoria Beckham, would factor into the narrative. The viral moment where Beckham steps in to fact-check his spouse’s claim that they had equally humble upbringings annoyed Stevens in the moment because he was not supposed to be home for her interview. However, watching that scene play back in the editing room made him say, “Oh, my God, this is a love story.”

He had an idea of how palpable David and Victoria Beckham’s dynamic could be when he had dinner with the couple shortly after he was hired to direct the docuseries, but it was that first three hours sitting down with her, realizing “she is not what you think,” that made Stevens immediately go, “‘Can I interview her again?’ And we did four interviews. And I just started getting deeper into their codependency and their relationship, and it was good. So that was completely unexpected when I took the job,” said the filmmaker.

Even past that moment with Victoria, part of what stands out about “Beckham” is the way the series cross-cuts some of the talking heads’ different takes on moments in the three-time FIFA World Cup player’s professional history, especially scenes with former Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson, which is still a sensitive relationship for Beckham. “Part of the art that we do as documentarians is we’re telling stories. Some of it is completely wrong, but from the perspective of the person you’re interviewing, that’s their memory,” said Stevens.

However, in spite of there being room for the interviewees to rib each other, the documentarian found that “nobody would talk shit about David. I tried to get people to talk shit about him, but people really liked him. And I was like, ‘Who is this guy?’ Because I didn’t know he was so liked either. He’s really liked,” he said.

By the time he wrapped “Beckham,” Stevens was telling those people skeptical of a series on the soccer star, “No, you’ll see. You’ll be surprised how cool this guy is.” Even now, he said, “I miss interviewing David, sitting him on the couch and getting deep with him,” but a “Beckham” Season 2 is not a part of his plans right now.

“You move on,” said Stevens. “We did a second season of ‘Tiger King,’ and I think we rushed it, it could have been better,” he said. ‘The first ‘Tiger King’ was so incredible, maybe could have left it, but you know…”

“Beckham” is now streaming on Netflix.

Best of IndieWire

• The 14 Best Thrillers Streaming on Netflix in June, from 'Fair Play' to 'Emily the Criminal'

• Unsimulated Sex Scenes in Film: 'Nymphomaniac,' 'The Brown Bunny,' 'Little Ashes,' and More

• Every Palme d'Or Winner from the Cannes Film Festival, Ranked

Sign up for Indiewire's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.