January 20 1999

 

Volume 23 Issue 14

Young Texans & their footballs

Peter T. Chattaway

 

It’s a bright and early Saturday
morning and I’m spending two hours
on the phone to some hotel room in

- New York City. So are a dozen other

reporters from student papers around
the continent. We're here to inter-
view the cast and director of Varsity
Blues, the new high school football
drama

starring Oscar-winner Jon Voight and
teen-heartthrob-of-the-moment
James Van Der Beek.

But before we can get to the
big names, we're introduced to a long
list of supporting cast members, who
by-and-large seem more interested in
talking about their career ambitions
than in, say, the meaning of the
film. But they all agree on one thing:
everybody got along with each other
on the set. As Ron Lester, who plays
the bigger-than-Texas lineman Billy
Bob, puts it, “There's no attitude
involved in this cast. Everybody
became, like, instant friends. We all
just became this big-ass family.”

That doesn't exactly make for
sensationalistic copy, so Paul Walker,
who plays star quarterback Lance
Harbor, tries to liven things up. “The
vibe of the movie,” he deadpans,
referring to the constant partying,
strip-club-visiting, and police-car-
stealing that takes place in the film,
“was kind of what was going on,
yknow, it felt like high school. There
was a lot of cheerleaders sleeping
with a lot of football players, getting
drunk and hanging out, that kind of
thing was going on a lot. Scott [Caan,
who plays party animal Tweeder] and
me were appalled, of course.”

Then Walker lets out an embar-
rassed please-don't-put-that-in-print
laugh.

“Oh my God! No, uh, what was
the question again?”

The fans who swoon over Van
Der Beek’s title character on Dawson's
Creek may be surprised to find that
Varsity Blues is pretty much a hor-
mones-to-the-hilt guys’ movie, right
down to the frisky sex-ed teacher.

It's up to former models Amy
Smart and Ali Larter to play the
obligatory girlfriends, but Smart says
being surrounded by so much testo-
sterone was not a problem. “We're
pretty much tomboys at heart,” she
says, “so we get along better with
boys than girls. But they treated us
really, really well.”

Lucky thing, too. Larter had to
play one scene wearing nothing but

 

whipped cream and two well-placed
cherries. (Don't ask.) “It was actually
my first night of working,” she says
of that scene, “and this was pretty
much my first movie, so you can
imagine how nervous I was. And it
took up seven hours to do that scene.
Luckily I had a great director and a
wonderful crew with me; they made
me feel safe and comfortable, so I was
able to go into those emotional
places.”

Uh, okay. Speaking of directors,
Brian Robbins pays us a visit, too.

Robbins is no stranger to stories
about high school students with
attitude problems; he’s best known
for his role on the TV series Head of
the Class. “I was the rebellious guy in
the leather jacket,” he confesses.

Varsity Blues, too, is about
rebellion, of a sort: it tells the story
of high school jocks in small-town
Texas who need to learn how to stand
up to their coach, Bud Kilmer (played
with an unnerving intensity by
Voight), whose obsession with victory
borders on the criminal. The film,
says Robbins, is about “standing up
to authority when authority is wrong
not—living by the rules just because
they're the rules. The rules need to be
correct and they need to be morally
right.”

Robbins is justly proud of the
film's sports footage, which puts the
actors and the camera right into the
thick of things. Before the shoot, the
actors, mingling with about forty
genuine Texan high school football
players, went to football practice
after their rehearsals and lifted
weights after dinner. “It was like
being in boot camp for them,” says

Robbins, who directed the scenes out
on the playing field from a playbook
which told players and camera crew
alike where to hit their marks.
“Usually when you do an action
movie like this, the first unit shoots
the real actors and the second unit
goes off and shoots all the stunts and
everything. I didn’t want that to
happen,” says Robbins. “I wanted to
shoot all the action myself because I
wanted it to look real. We spent half
of our 43 days shooting football.”

At least one co-star knew what
he was doing: Eliel Swinton, a lowly
production assistant until Robbins
tapped him for the part of Wendell, is
the only bona fide varsity football
player in the main cast. Now, he says,
he wants to be an actor; he is espe-
cially effusive about working with
Voight, whose generosity, he says,
knew no bounds.

Swinton describes approaching
Voight for advice during a lunch
break: “I asked him, ‘What do you
think of before you do a scene? What
goes through your head?’ And he
started talking to us—for half an
hour! He took his whole lunch!”

Indeed, Voight does give long
answers to short questions, and it’s
murder on a conference-call inter-
view. When Voight shows up, his
pensive, articulate answers to each
question are so long that only a few
queries ever make it past the gate. To
wit, when he is asked if he based his
character on anyone in particular, he
replies: “This guy that I play is a
pretty dark fella. He’s an abusive kind
of character, and I must say I hada
few role models in my life of people
who have been abusive in certain

ways, and so I can pick up from
them. But he isn’t based on one
person, no. I did an awful lot of
research, into my own life as well
and my life experiences, and I came
up with this character.

“I hope that this pure guy
doesn’t exist anywhere, but certain
aspects of his are very much in
existence, this need to win beyond
any cost and the abuse that can
happen when people are given the
power over other people. And
coaches have that kind of power.
Young people look up to them, and
they're going to be molded by them,
and they're going to give their all to
them, and great coaches are really
aware of that responsibility and
really try to deal with each child
individually and try to set a standard
of good behaviour, morally, too, for

the people that they're coaching.

“And especially in high
school—because not everybody's
going to be a professional athlete,

either—there’s got to be an awful lot
of character building. Even in the
pros, when people aren't encouraged
to be good human beings off the
field, that’s a disaster. These guys
who are playing pro football are in
their 20s. They're young people, and
they can be encouraged to [indulge
in] very bad behaviour with all the
success they have, so good role
models [and] good coaches are very
important to our society, as are all
good teachers. There’s nothing more
important than good teachers, except
maybe good parents.”

Whew. Then Voight passes us on
to Van Der Beek, but not before
singing his praises first. Van Der Beek
plays Jonathan Moxon, a second-
string quarterback who doesn’t care
for football but plays along because
it’s what everybody in town does.
When Lance suffers a crippling knee
injury, Jonathan takes his place and
finds himself thrown into the centre
of attention.

Van Der Beek himself played
some football as a kid, but a mild
concussion forced him to drop out
and take up theatre instead at the
age of 13. Now, of course, the 21-
year-old actor is best known as the
title character on Dawson's Creek, the
hit high school series created just last
year by Scream scribe Kevin
Williamson.

The other actors on that show
have all been doing the horror-movie
thing lately— Katie Holmes in

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