— Tony D’Amato

* * *

  No matter who you are, no matter what you do for a living, there’s always somebody younger, faster and stronger coming right up behind you. At the crossroads of his life, Tony D’Amato (Al Pacino) has finally come to that realization.

Four years ago, D’Amato’s Miami Sharks had nailed two AFFA (Associated Football Franchises of America) championships in a row, but in pro years, that’s a lifetime. Now, his team is struggling with three consecutive losses, sliding attendance, and aging heroes, particularly 39-year-old quarterback Jack "Cap" Rooney (Dennis Quaid), who’s desperately clinging to what’s left for him as a player.

Off the field, D’Amato is struggling with a failed marriage and estranged children, and is on a collision course with Christina Pagniacci (Cameron Diaz), the young president/co-owner of the Sharks organization.

Unlike her late father, an old school protector of the sport’s sanctity, Christina maintains a take-no-prisoners style of management. She knows that the harsh realities of the modern game means that profitable portions must be parceled out to the highest bidders from the world of media, marketing and merchandising...and a losing team means a losing investment. Although she may start off as a novice, she evolves more and more as the crisis escalates, and eventually becomes a force of nature of the modern world of professional sports.

Cap Rooney is a quarterback who symbolizes the great recent past of the Sharks; he's football royalty. But he's getting older and fighting to hold onto his own legend. When a devastating hit knocks Rooney and the second-string quarterback out of the game, the Sharks’ third-string, seventh-round draft pick, Willie Beamen (Jamie Foxx), is called onto the field. After a shaky start, and against all expectations, Beamen begins to stun both fans and management with his spectacular gridiron performance, throwing the great Cap Rooney’s future into doubt and forcing D’Amato to grapple with his long-cherished ideals of personal and professional loyalty.

Whereas D’Amato firmly believes that the game "has got to be about something more than winning," the only goal that the pragmatic "Steamin’ Beamen" has is winning— with all of the material perks that he can acquire during the short life span of a pro football player.

With Beamen pushing from one side, Christina Pagniacci pressuring from the other, and his old quarterback Cap trying hard to get back onto the field, Tony D’Amato sees the Sharks coming apart at the seams. Pressured and disillusioned, he wonders if he’s losing his edge, his team and his very reason to wake up in the morning.

"Any Given Sunday" is produced by LAUREN SHULER DONNER, CLAYTON TOWNSEND and DAN HALSTED. The story is by Daniel Pyne and John Logan and the screenplay is by John Logan and Oliver Stone. Stone’s behind-the-camera team includes Clio Award-winning director of photography SALVATORE TOTINO in his first feature assignment; production designer VICTOR KEMPSTER, who previously collaborated with Stone on "Heaven and Earth," "Natural Born Killers," "Nixon" and "U-Turn"; costume designer MARY ZOPHRES ("There’s Something About Mary," "Fargo"); and film editors THOMAS J. NORDBERG, STUART WAKS, STUART LEVY and KEITH SALMON. The casting directors were BILLY HOPKINS and MARY VERNIEU. Warner Bros. will distribute "Any Given Sunday" worldwide.
 
About The Production...
Oliver Stone. Football. Not necessarily the first combination that comes to mind in a movie word-association game. But in his work, Stone has always followed his passions, and football is one of them. "Oliver truly loves football, and also loves athletes," says legendary Hall of Famer Y.A. Tittle, a friend of the filmmaker and one of the legends who volunteered to be a part of Stone’s film. Joining in for the ride would be such greats as Jim Brown, Johnny Unitas, Dick Butkus, Bob St. Clair, Warren Moon, Terrell Owens, Ricky Watters, and Lawrence Taylor.

Stone recalls, "I’ve had a history of jumping around to different subject matters: war in ‘Salvador’ and ‘Platoon,’ economics in ‘Wall Street,’ music in ‘The Doors,’ history and politics in ‘JFK’ and ‘Nixon,’ Buddhism in ‘Heaven and Earth.’ It’s a paid education; I never come out where I came in."

The origins of Stone’s fascination with the world of football can be traced back to when the filmmaker was growing up as an only child in New York City. "From about 9 on I collected football cards and ran my own football league in private," recalls the director. "I had stacks of notebooks with statistics on the runners, yards, passes, everything. Playing with these great old football cards and dice and a sort of invented ESP, this game would seduce me for hours at a time."

It took four decades for Stone to finally convert his boyhood passion into what he once referred to as "an homage to Robert Aldrich," referring to the late director of such two-fisted classics as "The Dirty Dozen" and "The Longest Yard," the latter a highly enjoyable action-cum-football movie of the early 1970s.

Stone’s and producer Dan Halsted’s intentions to make a movie about pro football began to take shape at Turner Pictures four years ago, when Stone developed a script called "Monday Night" written by Jamie Williams, a former tight end for the San Francisco 49ers, and Richard Weiner, a sports journalist and co-writer (with Joe Montana) of Joe Montana’s Art and Magic of Quarterbacking.

Stone separately acquired the spec script "On Any Given Sunday," by Chicago playwright John Logan. The two stories had remarkable similarities and, when Turner Pictures folded into Warner Bros. in 1996, Stone amalgamated another, third, series of scripts developed by Richard Donner and Lauren Shuler Donner at Warner’s over several years, under the tile "Playing Hurt," which had also been in development for some time. From all these scripts, Stone merged what he felt were the most interesting components of all three stories into a final shooting script that reflected his socio-political perspective.

Jamie Williams, a former pro player with the San Francisco 49ers, who portrays a tight end in the film, notes that "Baseball is what America aspires to be. You know, mom, apple pie, hot dogs, Sundays with the kids. Football is what this country is. We are a warring nation. We define ourselves through our strategy in violence. We have tactically and strategically put ourselves in the a power position, which is what football is all about."

Several of the film’s other participants had their own interpretations of what the film touches on in its sweeping story. "It’s about life, basically," notes Jamie Foxx, whom Stone cast in the central role of Willie Beamen. "Football just happens to be where we’re playing it. Within life everybody has to struggle. Everybody is on top sometimes and then, the next thing you know, they’re on the bottom."

Says James Woods, whose history with Oliver Stone ranges over five movies, "I think that football is not as big a part of it as you’d expect. I think it’s really more about honor and certain moral issues involving the right thing to do for people who have a strong capacity for life."

Adds Cameron Diaz, "Everyone in the film is engaged in a struggle, and has to make decisions which will affect the rest of their lives. Oliver has chosen to tell the stories of contemporary people from different strata of society. They just happen to take place in a football backdrop."

Stone adds, "Football is conflict in a thoroughly ritualized form; it’s both religion practiced on a Sunday, and at the same time our violent American version of the gladiator games of the Roman Empire. It’s not for nothing we called the championship trophy in the film the ‘Pantheon Cup,’ and there are references in the movie to Native American tribal rituals that echo those same deeply traditional themes. Football is still a pagan rite in which men — and women — are able to exorcise their demons in ritual play.

"You can be a savage out there on the field," Stone continues, "and I think that’s part of its allure. Football players are heroes in the sense that they make it through this ritual of savagery at great damage to themselves, both physically and psychically. Some of them have played years of football without recognition. True, some of them are highly overworshipped and overpaid, but nobody ever honors the underpaid for what they do, and there are far more of them than there are the stars.

"The spotlight only goes to the stars, but people forget the concept of a team. There is only one winner at the end of the day. The individuals come and go, but a great team is like a great movie — the whole is greater than any part."

Stone feels, "The film’s inner meanings address themes of tradition, change, and the conflict between the individual and the team ego. The private and the corporate are merging themes in 21^st Century American life. Every major character in the film undergoes some form of change, something we’re all fearful of in our lives."
 
Discoveries

Despite the fact that he wrote one of Al Pacino’s hallmark roles in 1983’s "Scarface" (Tony Montana, the brutally ambitious Cuban immigrant), Oliver Stone had never before directed the actor on screen. "I’ve worked on and off with Al for years," notes the filmmaker, "initially as a writer with our first attempt to mount ‘Born on the Fourth of July’ in the late 1970s (the rehearsals gave me much insight that was helpful ten years later when we actually got to do it with Tom Cruise), then as the writer of ‘Scarface’ and the unrealized ‘Noriega’ project. To paraphrase Nietzsche, Mr. Pacino is ‘a monster of energy.’ His sweetness as a person, and the great pain which he’s able to turn on and off on screen -- a refined intense instrument of acting if ever there was one."

Just as Stone was ahead of the curve when he cast Tom Cruise ("Born on the Fourth of July"), Michael Douglas ("Wall St."), Kevin Costner ("JFK"), Val Kilmer ("The Doors"), Charlie Sheen, Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe ("Platoon"), and Woody Harrelson ("Natural Born Killers’), so might perceptions of Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx alter when audiences see their performances in "Any Given Sunday." To date, Diaz has been praised for her delightful charm in such films as "My Best Friend’s Wedding" and "There’s Something About Mary," and Foxx has been praised for his comedic skills on television’s "In Living Color" and his own series, "The Jamie Foxx Show."

Stone sought to explore the edges of Diaz’s and Foxx’s skills in their respective roles as Christina Pagniacci and Willie Beamen, and was rewarded with the actors’ enthusiasm for the project. "What I loved about the script and Oliver’s approach to the film," Diaz says, "is that at some point you see every character’s side. You may not agree, but in the end you’re going to have to choose the person you want to take sides with. At some point you have to understand that Christina is representing the future. She knows the way the sport has been played over the past 30 years, as a team sport, achieving a goal together. But at this point in professional football, she knows that those days are over.

"Christina knows that it’s a big money-making business with advertisements, networks, endorsements...an entertainment industry," continues Diaz. "She’s trying to take advantage of that for her team so that it can keep going and start winning again."

As for Jamie Foxx, the role of Willie Beamen was a natural for him, as a die-hard Dallas Cowboys fan who played the game in high school. In fact, after an initial meeting with Stone, Foxx set out to campaign for the part of Beamen. "Oliver said that he wanted to see me throw the football, so I went out and got my Cowboys jersey--Deion Sanders’ number 21, one of my favorites--and my Cowboys helmet. Then I made a videotape of me throwing the ball, but like I was in a mini-training camp with my homies. We’re throwing the ball on tape, and I’m talkin’ trash to the camera, and on the spot I came up with a little rap for Willie...which maybe is what pushed it over for Oliver." (In fact, Foxx’s "Willie Beamen Rap" would ultimately be included in one of the movie’s montage sequences.)

The range of actual players who responded to the calls on "Any Given Sunday" was remarkable under any circumstances. Seven football Hall of Famers participated in the film: Jim Brown and Lawrence Taylor respectively cast in the major roles of Sharks defensive coordinator Montezuma Monroe and linebacker Luther "Shark" Lavay; and, in cameo appearances as the head coaches of each team that the Sharks oppose, Y.A. Tittle, Dick Butkus, Bob Sinclair, Warren Moon and Johnny Unitas. Added to the mix were such current or recent pro players as Irving Fryar, Terrell Owens, Ricky Watters, Jamie Williams and others. All told, there would be 100 speaking roles, dozens of bit parts, thousands of extras and two large filmmaking units under Stone’s command.
 
A League Is Born
It was clear from the beginning of the project that Stone’s determination to paint an unyielding, honest, and free depiction of professional football would necessitate an element of fiction in its physical backdrops. Ultimately, the filmmakers and the National Football League agreed to disagree, without rancor or interference from one party to the other, and thus, the AFFA (Association of Football Franchises of America) was born, the professional football league to which the Miami Sharks and all other teams depicted in "Any Given Sunday" belong. In the end, dozens of people associated with the NFL, both past and current, making their own personal decisions, participated in the film, playing everything from players and coaches to trainers and equipment managers.

As it turned out, the creation of the AFFA allowed Stone and his creative team unprecedented opportunities. "We were freed up to create our own "look"— concepts of team names, logos, uniforms, trophies, rules, etc." says producer Clayton Townsend, just like in Stone’s childhood card-and-dice game. "Oliver wanted to de-sanitize the game, take it down from the impersonal TV angles we’ve grown accustomed to, getting right in the face of these guys, both dramatically and physically."

Stone’s choice of location for nearly the entire shoot of "Any Given Sunday" was Miami. It was predicated on several circumstances, including the company’s ability to rent out three major sports facilities for the filming of games and training. One was the Orange Bowl, which has seen more than half a century of great football action; it was selected for the Sharks’ home stadium, with three games filmed there: the Miami Sharks versus the Minnesota Americans, Chicago Rhinos and New York Emperors. The Homestead Sports Complex, its flamingo-pink exterior perfectly capturing the South Florida atmosphere, would be converted into the Sharks’ training facility.

Miami’s myriad mansions, restaurants, country clubs and the razzle and flash of Miami’s legendary South Beach nightlife would also figure prominently in the film’s story.

Following the completion of Miami shooting, the "Any Given Sunday" company then headed to Dallas to film the final game at another stadium with an extraordinary light and look, home to the fictional Dallas Knights. It also would be Stone’s fourth visit to Dallas ("Born on the Fourth of July," "Talk Radio," "JFK"). BARRY SWITZER, coach of Cowboys, plays a sportscaster with Oliver.
 
Football Boot Camp
However, before production started and the teams took the field, real football players had to be recruited and the actors cast by Stone had to look like real football players. The director charged football coordinator/second unit director Allan Graf and his associate Mark Ellis with the task of creating the brunt of the teams. Both are veterans of professional football who worked previously on such films as "The Program," "Jerry Maguire" and "The Waterboy," and currently are working on "The Replacements."

Recalls Graf, "We started recruiting football players in September, 1998 with a national manhunt and invited the best of them down to Miami. We held a week-long combine where we chose and cut them down to about 50, almost every one of whom had played either in the NFL, Canadian, or Arena Football League. These are the real-deal guys."

Adds Mark Ellis, "Then we had to incorporate the actors, cast as Sharks, and these guys jumped right in. They dressed with the players. They had their own lockers. They were part of the team. Luckily, Oliver chose really good athletes who were also really good actors, so we got the best of both worlds. We put the actors and the players through a regular eight-week-long football camp at the Homestead Sports Complex in Florida, and it was pretty tough. They would lift, run, and hit-- everything expected of a professional athlete."

"I started with a lot of work in the gym just to get my stamina and muscle endurance up," comments LL Cool J, cast as Julian Washington. "Being in football shape is a totally different thing from what you’re used to. Your body has to be ready not only to move explosively, but also to be able to withstand impact."

Recalls Bill Bellamy, who portrays Jimmy Sanderson in the film, "We learned something like 52 plays. I learned how to be a wide receiver. I had to learn to catch a ball properly. I had to learn how to break my speed down, how to drop my hips so I could explode out of the break, stuff that you just don’t know when you play street football. It was just weeks and weeks of soreness."
 
Brave New World
Two elements of "Any Given Sunday"--the AFFA backdrop, and Stone’s desire to place the film a couple of years into the new century--allowed the film’s visual artists a degree of creativity absent from any previous movies with a pro football backdrop. Production designer Victor Kempster, art director Stella Vaccaro, and their department set about to redefine the sport’s setting.

"In the end, not being affiliated with the NFL gave us the creative freedom we needed to give Oliver the near-future look he was after," says Vaccaro. "Not being hindered by real-world field graphic regulations allowed us to paint outside the lines, so to speak. Our field design for the California Crusaders game, for example, was bigger and bolder than anything the NFL had ever done, even in the Super Bowl. And our field design for the Dallas Knights included a bold supergraphic in the center of the field that actually ran sideline to sideline.

"Working with the film’s costume designer, Mary Zophres, our goal was to provide the film’s teams with a fresh look without alienating loyal football fans or ignoring recognized iconography such as field numbers, yard lines and hash marks.

"Making ‘Any Given Sunday’ was a much bigger task than any of us had anticipated," admits Vaccaro. "Who knew that it would take 800 gallons of paint to paint a football field?" Larger than any Hollywood soundstage, the football stadiums and their designs were bigger than anything the art department had encountered before. Shooting in actual stadiums, they had to contend with things that aren’t encountered when designing sets for the stage.

For example, they learned that pro football stadiums will cut their grass up to three times a week to keep it in top condition. For the art department, that meant constantly painting and repainting the teams’ graphics on both real grass and artificial turf to maintain continuity in the script through turf growth, mowing and being played on for upwards of 14 hours a day.

Since the Orange Bowl, as the Sharks’ home stadium, would figure so prominently in the story, Kempster, Vaccaro and their crews wanted to make the location as interesting as possible. They prepared an 1100-foot-long graphic wall, which was erected against the perimeter walls of the stands. On it they layered vintage and custom shots of football players, Sharks team graphics and, of course, advertising logos. More than being a springboard for product placement and promotional deals, the creative incorporation of advertising in the design was an important part of recognizing the world of professional sports as it is today.

Other Miami locations off the field provided their own challenges. Although, for historic-preservation purposes, the crew was respectful of the physical environment of the Vizcaya Museum, an extraordinary mansion built by tractor magnate James Deering in 1916 on Biscayne Bay, which serves as the setting for a black-tie benefit party in the film, they were able to alter other environments for their purposes.

For a wild party at Luther "Shark" Lavay’s house, Kempster and company found a house designed by the well known Miami-based firm Architectonica. On the first scout to this location, Kempster had the idea of filling the house with lit globes hanging off the ceiling. With the help of the rigging electric crew, the art department was able to wire 200 globes into the existing electrical plan without damaging the interior, and Kempster’s vision was achieved.

Other remarkable houses were discovered on Star Island (Christina Pagniacci’s elegant, austere home), North Miami Beach (Margaret Pagniacci’s fin-de-siecle mansion) and Ft. Lauderdale (Tony D’Amato’s wooded retreat on the water). The Dolphins’ own Dan Marino allowed the production to utilize his beautiful house near Ft. Lauderdale as the backdrop for scenes depicting quarterback Cap Rooney’s (Dennis Quaid) family life.
 
Suiting Up
Also pushing the envelope was costume designer Mary Zophres who, with Stone’s encouragement, guided the AFFA players’ uniforms into the next century.