Air isn’t directly about Michael Jordan – but Ben Affleck knew he couldn’t direct it without his blessing.
He said: “Out of respect for his family and him, and a pure selfish determination to get this movie made, I knew it would be the stupidest thing in the world to make a movie that invokes his name and tells a part of his story that he was opposed to.
“If he said no, that would be it and I was very prepared for that, even though it wasn’t the Michael Jordan story. What I found was that he was very gracious, and when I said it wasn’t historically accurate, but that I wouldn’t violate anything important to the truth, I asked for what he wanted us to include.
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“I found that he only ever wanted to talk about other people’s contributions, to make sure they were included in this story. That’s how the characters of George Rayling (Marlon Wayans) and Howard White (Chris Tucker) became so integral.”
Air keeps the basketball legend firmly in the background as it recounts the story of how Nike, then a distant third in basketball shoe sales behind Converse and Adidas, landed the world’s most famous player – and created the original Air Jordan shoe.
Instead, the focus of Affleck’s film is entirely on those who helped make the deal happen; a corporate underdog story which invokes many of the tropes of the sports genre. Finding the heart in a business-oriented story is always a challenge, but it was one that became immediately apparent when Affleck went to meet the Chicago Bulls legend.
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He continued: “I was initially going to make a story about Michael himself, and his parents weren’t so much a part of it. But it was through trying to flesh that out and asking about them that I saw how he thought of them; here was this intimidating, powerful man, as close to a deity as you’re going to find, and I just saw this reverence, respect and love as he talked about his mother.
“It was a shame on me that I never assumed it would be the case, but suddenly that was the story, and it’s a beautiful story about what she means to Michael, and on a larger scale, what these mothers mean to athletes and other people who were thrust into the spotlight when they were very young, giving them the enormous amount of guidance they needed.
“I asked him who should play his mother, and he said Viola Davis – which is like saying you need Michael Jordan if you’re putting a basketball team together, she’s literally the very best! It was a lifelong ambition of mine to work with her, and I’d only ever know that I’d made it as a director if I got a chance to put her in one of my movies.”
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Davis may have not been a part of that conversation, but she was daunted to hear that the entire movie rested on whether she would accept this part or not.
She said: “I didn’t get the call from Michael Jordan, but it trickled down to me that I was the only actress he wanted. It’s very flattering, as I always go in with imposter syndrome, wondering if I am actually wanted – but that just makes it even more of a challenge to step into the role.
“If you watch videos of Deloris Jordan, she’s a study in Zen neutrality, she’s very steady and quiet, I imagine she stays the same when she’s mad! So to envelop that spirit was a challenge for me, because I’m usually the woman with a chip on her shoulder, I go in bombastic.
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“So it was both flattering, challenging, and then just a joy to be able to work with Matt and Ben, me and Julius still talk about this as one of our greatest experiences to this day.”
Yes, Davis’ husband Julius Tennon stars alongside the actress as Jordan’s father James. A devoted blue-collar family man, Davis is quick to highlight that: “the dynamic you see between us onscreen is our dynamic in real life.”
Whilst Affleck’s career-long dream was to work with Davis, he didn’t have similar aspirations to direct another star who hasn’t previously appeared in one of his directorial efforts: Matt Damon.
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That’s right, Air marks the first time the boys from Boston have starred alongside each other in one of Affleck’s behind-the-camera vehicles despite regularly co-starring in several other projects and nearly 40 years of close friendship.
Damon was involved with the project from its earliest inception, when Affleck first read the screenplay by Alex Convery, which made the Black List of best unproduced screenplays in Hollywood.
He remembered: “It all started with the script, I didn’t know the story beforehand. The first step was getting the blessing of Michael Jordan, we needed that before we got too excited – I was going to go meet him with Ben, but my kids were up to something in New York.
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“He called me afterwards and said he was an intimidating guy, but he had this look on his face when he spoke about his mum that he’d never seen before, so we knew then what this movie had to be. The bad news is that we weren’t allowed to make the movie unless we could get Viola Davis!”
Despite being faithful to the true story, and to put onscreen many of the insiders general audiences wouldn’t know about, the creative team were quick to stress that they didn’t want to make a beat-for-beat account of events as they happened.
Damon continued: “We were trying to capture the spirit of this time, not be an account of who said what. All the people on the Nike side talked about this time with such nostalgia, and that’s what we wanted to depict – a weird time where they were underdogs, these renegade outsiders, and the characters had this infectious energy that just jumped off the page when I read it.”
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One of these “renegade outsiders” was Peter Moore, the designer of the Air Jordan shoe, here played by Our Flag Means Death star Matthew Maher.
He’s a creative genius who created the most iconic shoe of all time, but what struck the actor was just how humble he was.
He said: “Peter Moore passed away a week before I joined the movie. What struck me was looking at his designs, which were so ahead of their time, and then you see him talking and he’s just a regular guy who speaks about his work in such a direct, down-to-earth way – a genius can’t always express themselves very well when they talk about their work, which has this parallel with pro-athletes.
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“I knew I couldn’t get into the genius mindset like that and decided to play the character as written in the script; a man at the crossroads in his life, going through a midlife crisis and waiting for the place to apply himself. What shone through from documentaries I watched was that he was a great collaborator and seeing him portrayed like that in the script was something I really appreciated.
“And there was a meta-aspect of working on this movie, where everybody worked together to solve problems in the same way.”
Speak to any member of the Air cast, and all you’ll hear is effusive praise for their collaborators, which speaks to the high calibre of talent involved with the movie. Damon and Affleck are open about their ambitions here being creating a “feel-good movie” that appeals to everybody – and with a cast like this, a story about a deal to make a pair of trainers might just succeed at that aim.
