Months before he became the star of the World Cup for the second time in a remarkable career, Zidane was hailed as the unlikely hero of this year’s Cannes film festival. The footballer had just joined Les Bleus in their training camp when Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait premiered, a unique, 90-minute study of the beautiful game in full flow, wowing critics and audiences alike.
The project, created by two artists, Frenchman Philippe Parreno and Turner Prize winning Scot Douglas Gordon, follows Zidane for 90 minutes on April 23 2005 when Real Madrid played in the Santiago Bernabeu stadium before 80,000 fans against an unyielding Villareal side. It was a perfectly ordinary match in Spain’s Primera Liga but for the presence of 17 film cameras there to capture Zidane’s every move and mutter. Like Hellmuth Costard’s Football As Never Before, an earlier curio featuring George Best, the cameras, supervised by Se7en cinematographer by Darius Khondji, were trained on Zidane for the entire match.
Over the course of the film, there are moments of scintillating biomechanical beauty. There can be few sights to match Zidane suddenly accelerating to beat two defenders or the impeccable left foot cross that levels the score for an eventual 2-1 victory. Mostly though, he’s off the ball, still dictating the pace, a study in concentration.
“The concentration was fascinating," director Philippe Parreno tells me. “He’s a smart guy. He did not get a long education, but when you are the best player in the last 10 years you have to be clever. He’s always thinking. When we talked to him afterwards he had forgotten the cameras were there. If he’s playing football, he is completely absorbed moment by moment. When he was 12, Manchester United came to watch him and he got a bit freaked out. But I don’t think it has happened since.”
Zizou, the talisman of French football, famously guards his privacy fiercely. The idea of a film that would allow the football to do the talking was therefore immediately appealing. You can see why. Barring a softly crashing score from Mogwai and occasional quotes on screen, Gordon and Parreno’s film focuses only on its subject. But was it difficult, I wonder, for the filmmakers to gain the trust of one so reticent?
“He was engaged with a lot of the ideas,” says Philippe. “It was a way for him to talk about his life and work without talking. He hates answering questions. He is extremely true to himself. If something is crap then it is crap. He gives you trust but don’t play with it or he will take it back. And he has never wanted to be representative of anything but football. That is why is so enigmatic. He does not exist anywhere else but the pitch. He did not want to be narrated. He doesn’t want to give opinions. He says he does not want to be used for anything except football. We had hour-long discussions about being kids going up really close to the television to see football close up. Those are the moments that stay, the things you’ve pressed yourself against the television to see.”
After receiving the thumbs-up from Zidane, there were still several logistical mountains to climb, some of them mighty costly.
“Real Madrid were fine with anything Zidane had approved but we had to buy the rights of the game and the images”, explains Philippe. “Then, on the day, some of the Villareal players said they would do whatever it took to get Zidane sent off.”
Sure enough, Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait ends when the footballer loses control and charges into what becomes a mass brawl (the provocation for which remains out of shot). In what now seems like a dress rehearsal for the World Cup, Zidane is shown the red card by a referee in the final minutes of the match. The film ends as he disappears down the tunnel.
“Watching the World Cup final, I knew it was coming,” says Philippe. “The thing is, I don’t know the guy, I never saw his family. We talked about the film and the pitch and the game and nothing else. Of course you can see how he behaves on the pitch and each time it’s different. He says, 'People tell me I am good but I have no idea, I have to prove it to myself.' So he’s always intense on the pitch. But when you spend months in an editing suite watching someone’s every move and occasionally worrying that you may be making the most boring film in the world, you get to spot little things. So I saw his eyes just before he was sent off and they looked exactly like they did in our film. I knew something was about to happen.”