Fisher Stevens Simply Asking ‘Should I Care?’ Made ‘Beckham’ a Success, Says Producer John Battsek

On June 6, the 2024 IndieWire Honors ceremony will celebrate thirteen creators and stars responsible for some of the most stellar work of the TVseason. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, this event is a new edition of its IndieWire Honorsevent focused entirely on television. In the days leading up to the event, IndieWire is showcasing their work with new interviews and tributes from their peers.

Ahead, “Beckham” producer and recent Oscar nominee John Battsek tells IndieWire about the unique joy of working with his second time collaborator and longtime friend, Magnify Award winner Fisher Stevens.

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As told to Marcus Jones. The following has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Fisher Stevens has had a pretty profound impact on the documentary business over the course of the past 20 years now. The first doc he ever did, we did together which was “Once in a Lifetime.” Since then, he has produced and directed some of the most important, powerful, entertaining, and impactful documentaries within the space, and as such, I think he absolutely merits the honor that he’s been given.

It’s never easy making docs. Working with talented people can be really challenging sometimes. It’s not that Fisher’s not challenging — he is — but he’s challenging in a really, really positive and enjoyable way. So certainly on “Beckham,” the second project I’ve ever done with him, which was a huge challenge, and a daunting challenge in many respects. He was fabulous, and he was just really great to get into the trenches with him, myself, editor Michael Harte, and producer Nicola Howson, and really eke it out together to try and figure out what was the best way to tell the story.

Truthfully, I was kind of surprised when he told me he was approached about the project, but to be fair to Fish, I took him to his first ever football game. Because I come from a family of mad Chelsea fans, I took him to a Chelsea game, and he immediately became a Chelsea fan. And then he met his amazing wife, who’s an Arsenal fan, and immediately became an Arsenal fan. And then his great friend bought Liverpool, and he immediately became a Liverpool fan, which tells you something about Fish as a football fan. Now he is a proper fan, but in my mind, he wasn’t a proper fan.

And so in many respects, he wasn’t an obvious choice for “Beckham” at all. He didn’t think he was an obvious choice for “Beckham” at all, but actually it was very, very smart of Nicola and David Beckham to have ended up picking him as a director. But my recollection of our first conversation about it was classic Fish, which was him calling me up basically to say, “Look, who the hell is David Beckham? And should I in any way be taking seriously the prospect of maybe directing a documentary about David Beckham?” Classic Fish.

And so really, he didn’t even want to pretend, he wasn’t even trying to be cool to go, “I know exactly David Beckham is.” He’s like, “I actually don’t know. Who the hell is David Beckham? Why do I care about David Beckham? Should I care about David Beckham?” And I was like, “Fish, not only should you care about David Beckham, you should care much more that I bloody produce it for you, because I really care about David Beckham.” I split the conversation into me campaigning to be a producer on the show.

But the reason it was such a smart move by Nicola and David is because he really didn’t know much about David Beckham. And now that they have seen the show, and with just how massive David and Victoria Beckham are, most people that gravitate towards that story would come to it with a tremendous amount of baggage in terms of what they think they already know, and what story they think they want told. And we went with Fisher on this amazing journey of discovery with him as he discovered the world of David and Victoria, and their lives and their extraordinary journeys. His voracious inquisitiveness to find out everything he possibly could about them is what drove the project.

Again, he brings this unbelievable energy, and enthusiasm, and humor, and hunger for it all to the project, and to every day that you’re making it with him. And everyone is impacted by that, and inspired by that, and that became the motor of the whole project. Fish, always wanting more, and wanting more, and asking more, and wanting more, and wanting to meet this person and that person and discover everything and anything he could about David and his life. Any other director — it could have been me directing, I’m not a director of course, but I know David’s story like the back of my hand because I’m a football fanatic, so I would have had all sorts of preconceptions. Fish had none.

And actually it manifested in some fantastic moments when we’d look at some footage with David, and David’s doing something incredible, and Fish would be like, “Wow, David, man, you really knew how to pass the ball, didn’t you? You really knew how to score a goal.” And David would literally look at me like, “Who is this guy? How can the director of this show not know how bloody good I was?” And yet he is literally the most charming human being on the planet, so he does it in a way that just endears him to everyone, not only David. Fish doesn’t pretend to be anything else. It’s not like he goes, “Oh, man, I saw the way that you did that around the wall.” Because he doesn’t have a clue about any of that stuff, and he doesn’t pretend that he does.

And that’s really rare, particularly for someone like Fisher who has such an extraordinary life where he’s been in and amongst so many incredibly talented artists and acted himself, directed scripted movies himself, produced docs himself, directed docs himself, is a close friend of Leonardo DiCaprio and all these other people. And yet his feet are firmly, firmly on the ground about himself. He’s incredibly humble in many respects, and again, having lived the life that he’s lived, that’s pretty remarkable because I know lots of people who’ve lived that sort of life, and they’re a much bigger handful to deal with.

I genuinely believe Fisher’s the secret ingredient to the global success of “Beckham.” He’s the magic that made it have that impact because no one else could have made it the way he made it. No one else could have charmed all those contributors the way he did, no one else could have got them to open up and talk to us in the way they did. No one other than Fisher could have done that.

Read Fisher Stevens’ IndieWire Honors profile.

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