Hamish Hamilton has directed over a dozen Super Bowls, the opening ceremony to the 2012 Summer Olympics, six Emmy Awards ceremonies, four Oscars and three Grammy nights, among many more marquee events. None of those, he says, were quite as challenging as the first-ever FIFA World Cup Finals Halftime Show he directed on Sunday.
“A lot of that is because it was the first,” Hamilton, co-founder of the production company Done + Dusted, tells The Hollywood Reporter over Zoom from his New Jersey hotel room the morning after the World Cup, calling the show “challenging beyond challenging.”
“Along with the Olympics, this was right up there,” he says. “I’m sure the first Super Bowl Halftime show was incredibly difficult, but when I came in they’d already done over 40 of them. By the time you get to Super Bowl 47, the NFL’s got everything super well drilled. But in this kind of scenario, there are so many unanswered questions. There’s all the people who haven’t done it before, a huge amount of nervousness, we’re doing this in daylight, you’ve got the grass, you’ve got a huge collection of superstars. It’s absolutely terrifying because there are so many things can go wrong.”
Luckily for Hamilton and FIFA, they didn’t have any technical snags Sunday, and months of prep came and went in a quick-fleeting moment as Madonna, BTS, Justin Bieber, a Gustavo Dudamel-led orchestra, Shakira, Burna Boy, the PS22 Choir and the Muppets all hit the stage in an 11-minute time span.
“It’s a mixture of exhaustion, relief and happiness,” Hamilton says of the show’s conclusion. “I’m very proud of what we did to help bring Chris [Martin, of Coldplay, who served as curator] and Global Citizens’ vision to life. They had this dream four years ago. It’s an enormous undertaking and they should be applauded for what they did.”
Figuring out how to format the show to fit so many acts in such a short time frame was its own challenge, but as Hamilton says, the bigger question was the “gargantuan kind of logistical undertaking” involved with the broader production. There was the “very strong daylight that just kept coming,” which influenced how they shot the whole show. And whereas the NFL games MetLife Stadium usually hosts are played on artificial turf, the FIFA final was played on grass. The more delicate surface impacts everything for halftime, from what stage sets are possible to what sorts of cameras they could use.
Plenty of the pressure was coming from outside as well. The halftime show was the subject of skepticism from soccer fans around the globe, who questioned the need for the show and worried about how adding a concert to a game where halftime is normally just 15 minutes would impact the competition itself. The Cure’s Robert Smith made headlines last week ahead of the finals in his critique of the show, writing “pleasejustfuckoff.” The Guardian, meanwhile, referred to the concert as “the half-time show nobody asked for.”
Hamilton, himself British and a lifelong fan of the Premier League’s Arsenal F.C., acknowledged those sentiments and noted they’re more prevalent in markets outside of the U.S., which is historically much more acclimated to melding music and sport thanks to events like the Super Bowl.
“I’m a football fan, and have been my entire life,” he says. “Around the world, certainly around Europe and in the U.K., I saw some people who were like, ‘We don’t want your halftime show. We don’t want the Americanization of the beautiful game.’ I was, of course, very aware of that resistance. It’s not so much in America, because sports, entertainment and music sit a lot closer together here than they do probably anywhere else in the world. But I was very aware of that, and also about disrupting the second half if there were any issues with the grass. It’s hard, it’s pressure.”
Will any skeptics be converted now that the first show has come and gone with the rest of the tournament?
“It’s a very good question, I was so absorbed and immersed in creating the show within the game,” Hamilton says. “If someone else was directing and I was just watching from London [as a fan], maybe I could comment. But listen, it’s the World Cup Final, it’s the greatest, most-watched sporting event in the world. Having been part of it as a live director, I would say on balance definitely, and I hope that they do another one.”
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