Awesome Exclusive Interview: BIG FAN director Robert Siegel

Writer of last year's smash THE WRESTLER makes his directing debut with one of the year's best films

Every few months a little movie comes along that I try to get all my film buff friends to see. This week it’s Big Fan, a fascinating character drama about Paul Aufiero, an obsessive New York Giants football fan whose life is turned upside down by a chance encounter with his favorite player. Writer Robert Siegel, who scored big last year with his screenplay for The Wrestler, directs for the first time here—and I’m certain Big Fan is destined to be a classic in the sports film genre. The film is extremely effective in its examination of a subculture of pro sports by avoiding cliché last minute touchdowns or sentimental life lessons.

Comedian Patton Oswalt plays Aufiero in a tour de force lead performance. You’ve seen Oswalt on the CBS sitcom King of Queens and heard him as the voice of Remy in Pixar’s Oscar-winning Ratatouille—but you’ve never seen him like this. It’s a powerful character study, certainly worthy of an Oscar nomination if enough voters get a chance to see it.
Aufiero fills his days as a parking garage attendant writing scripts for the calls he’ll make that night to a sports talk radio show, singing praises of his beloved Giants and heckling the rival Philadelphia Eagles. The film deftly balances urban drama and dark comedy, and builds to a potboiler climax—it’s a small, subtle gem that’s certain to make my top 10 list at year’s end.

Big Fan opens October 23 at the Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley and Lumiere  in San Francisco. I had a chance to chat with writer-director Robert Siegel about his film. Check it out:

Hey Robert, a friend of mine told me he heard you yesterday on the Razor and Mr. T Show here in the Bay Area, which sounds like it could be the show that Paul calls into every night.

Yes, promoting this movie has meant a lot of sports talk interviews. Everyday I have a conversation with Tic Tac and Sherm or the Beezer and Frank in Tucson.

The Staten Island locations and details created such a sense authenticity in this world of sports fantatics. Was this filmed near where you grew up? And were you a huge football fan growing up?

I grew up in Long Island and I grew up listening to sports radio in WFAN, the first sports radio station ever launched in 1987. I was a super hard core sports geek when I was a kid.  All my friends these days are recovering comic book geeks, but I was a baseball card geek. And I listened to a lot of sports radio.

But you must have separated from that kind of fandom at some point, to make the kind of observations you make in Big Fan.

Well, you have to have one foot in that world, and then you have to take one step back and observe those fans from a sociological perspective.

Even as I was younger, I was fascinated by the personalities the people. They were calling from parts of the New York area that I had never been to. They were Vinnie from Flushing and Joe from Regents Park. They had different sounding accents from mine. There was something exotic about that whole sports talk world.

Why did you pick the Giants as the team Paul loves?
I wanted there to be a juxtaposition between his small life and the world that he’s in and the team he loves. The Giants is that they are the marquee, upper class team in New York, like the Yankees, they are the Manhattan glamour teams, whereas the Jets and the Mets are more blue collar. I’m speaking in very broad terms here, oviously, there’s tons of blue collar Giants fans, but even within this world, Paul is kind of an outsider socio-economically. He just won’t be in the luxury skybox ever. He can’t even afford tickets into the stadium, he watches on TV in the parking lot.

I interviewed John Madden in front of an audience at a film festival a couple of years ago. We were supposed to talk about sports movies. But Madden told me not to ask him any questions about sports movies—he hates them. He said he’d been around athletes so much that it drove him crazy watching actors trying to look like pitchers or wide receivers. The beauty of your movie is that it captures this very important part of sports culture without requiring any kind on on-field heroics.

I agree with Madden. I hate how in football movies are filmed like car crashes…a two second play takes twenty seconds, they use all these ridiculous slow motion shots of the guy spinning through the air.

The Natural was my favorite movie growing up, but that’s the kind of movie the feel good thing that I hate now. Remember the Titans and Invincible and that shit.

In addition to Patton’s performance, the film is packed with terrific character players, such as Kevin Corrigan as Paul’s not-so-bright best friend. And Michael Rappaport is pretty amazing as Paul’s nemesis Philadelphia Phil.
Michael Rappaport is very good at playing assholes. I saw that character as the Colonel Kurtz to Paul’s Martin Sheen—there’s this destiny, this quest for the two characters to meet. That's kind of my homage to Apocalypse Now.

You obviously did not have a big budget, but you got so many details just right. Like when Paul watches a game on TV in the Giants Stadium parking lot, he wears the blue home jersey and when he watches a road game on TV at Sal’s apartment, he wears the white away jersey.
(Laughs) I’m glad you noticed that. Of course, if the Giants are on the road, he’s going to wear they away jersey.

There’s a climactic scene that takes place in a sports bar in Philadelphia. Did you find the most hardcore Philly sports bar to film in?
Actually the interiors are a bar in Staten Island. We shot the exterior at the real place, Sharky’s in Philadelphia, but for the inside we went to this old Staten Island place. We covered all the Giants and Yankees posters with as much Eagles stuff as I could find.
I spent probably $300 bucks on eBay buying all that stuff in the bar.

The owner of the Staten Island bar had no idea what the movie was about and he was just sitting there all day watching us cover up Don Mattingly posters with Mike Schmidt posters, looking angrier and angrier.

As small as Paul’s life seems, and as extreme as his obsessive fascination with the Giants might be, I didn’t feel as sorry for him as I thought I would by the end of the movie. He kind of has a reason for living, and its to root for the Giants, and who the hell am I to say that’s not enough?

Exactly. If you’re happy does it really matter? As long as you’re not getting your happiness making coats out of human skin, and getting your happiness from something that hurts people, what’s the problem.

He’s got a reason to get up in the morning—if you ask a psychologist what people need for happiness: a sense of purpose, a sense of community…he’s got them all. My twist on this is that he’s not a loser, he’s not sad.

There aren’t many lead performances I’ve seen this year that scream Oscar nomination as loudly as Patton Oswalt’s Paul Aufiero. Are you going to campaign for one?

I would love to invest in an awards campaign, We’re looking into the research into what it cost, and its simply not affordable.

The movie had a total budget of $250,000—and that’s about that it what cost to get started to campaign for an Oscar. It costs about $5 a screener to mail out to each Oscar voter, and there’s 20,000 voters. Then you have to spend millions of millions on tv and advertising. You’re basically throwing money down the drain and we can’t afford to do that.

There’s this great little independent theater in Los Angeles called the New Beverly, that shows double features that are often based on themes or genres. Sometimes they’ll just do a Scorsese double or two 40s noirs, but sometimes the pairings are much more thoughtful. If you could show Big Fan as a double feature with any other movie what would you pick?

Its always compared to King of Comedy and Taxi Driver and Marty, and Billy Wilder’s The Fortune Cookie, and those make sense. But I would pair it with Saturday Night Fever. I see it being the most similar to Big Fan, and its one of my favorite movies.
 
In Saturday Night Fever, Tony Manero is not glamorous, he works in a paint store. But when he’s on the dance floor, that’s where he’s a star.

The thing that makes Paul a star in Big Fan is this irrelevant thing, calling into a sports talk radio show. Similarly, Tony Manero isn’t the  king of Studio 54, he’s the king of the Odyssey 2000. He goes to this little shitty disco in his neighborhood. It’s a movie about a little guy who has this one thing that makes him feel special.