“You gotta give massive credit to Fisher,” Harte told IndieWire. “That scene is, if anything, a representation of how good he was at getting people to relax in front of the camera. And also Tim Cragg, our cinematographer, who had the wisdom to keep the camera going back and forth. The person that deserves the least amount of credit is me, because it’s probably the least amount of editing in the whole series!”
Harte, who scored an Emmy nomination for his work on the four-part Netflix docuseries, still deserves plenty of credit. In addition to scaling the sheer amount of archival footage of football legend Beckham and his wife, former Spice Girl Victoria — not to mention the tabloid frenzy that accompanied their relationship — he had to find a way to create a cohesive, compulsively watchable narrative out of a life and career lived largely in the public eye. Or, as Harte wryly put it, “We had this little tiny bit of archive, which was only 40 years of his life when he was the most photographed person in the world. Who ends up marrying the most photographed person in the world. And all the football matches that he ever played.”
The result is a meaty documentary that earned five Emmy nominations, including one for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series. “Beckham” moves effortlessly from past to present and back, with both Beckham and Victoria (as well as a coterie of admirers, colleagues, and former friends) commenting on the past even as we watch it unfold. Ultimately, the docuseries fulfills its purpose as an examination of Beckham’s life and career while also offering commentary on the state of celebrity during the late ’90s and early 2000s (not a great time to be a public figure).
That throughline came about late, though. Harte started the editing process after Stevens had shot 70 percent of the interviews, and soon the two were discussing what was popping and what was not. “Fisher’s great,” Harte said. “He’s very open to other people’s ideas. What was great is the edit started talking to the shoot and back and forth and he’d send me new things.”
And the biggest surprise? How the former Posh Spice came across in her interviews.
[The interview has been edited for clarity and length.]
IndieWire: What were some of those conversations where you were calling Fisher and saying, “I’m seeing this in the edit”? What were some of the things that resulted from that?
Michael Harte: The main one was, “What is this about? What is the core theme of the series?” And initially, the first assembly was all about football. I remember, as a massive football fan, I was like, “This is great, I’d watch this forever.” And then I showed my partner the cut and there’s no more honest feedback than when somebody gets out their phone and starts looking at it. [Laughs] So I’m like, we’re missing a huge part of his story here. So I went back to the rushes and watched everything again. And we realized this is a film about family and relationships. What initially was a film about football, and we were using David as a way into football, we needed to flip it around. I used football as a way into David and his life. It was a small change. And when I talked to Fisher, I was like, “We’ve got to lean into his family and his relationship with his family as much as possible.” But also the other conversation with him was, “Get as much of Victoria as you can. She’s so good.”
One of the most striking moments in “Beckham” is seeing the effect the negative attention had on Victoria. Watching her remembering sitting in the stadium while the crowd screamed that chant about her. .. she became collateral damage.
It’s funny you said that because that was the moment when I watched her interview, and I thought, “We need as much of this as we can get because it’s so insightful and so honest and so surprising.” The thing with a lot of documentaries like this is, because they’re famous and their story is so well publicized, the audience has an expectation of what it’s gonna be. But your secret weapon is you can use the audience’s expectation and flip it on its head. And I think the biggest surprise in all of this was Victoria and the way she told her stories.
Seeing both of them talking about getting massacred in the press is tough to watch at times. And we’ve forgotten just how vicious people were to them back then. How did you land on not making it seem gratuitous, reliving that bad press?
Yeah, there was a bit of a line. The first episode is full of energy and joy. And it rides a wave all the way right up to, literally, the last moment of the first episode. And then the series takes a huge turn into a pretty dark place, definitely the lowest point in his career. Also, he’d never spoken about it before in that detail. And again, credit to Fisher because he created such a relaxed atmosphere and David really gave him a lot of things he’d never given anybody before on camera. And there is a danger that we go all in, and it does become, like you said, almost gratuitous. But Victoria starts to weigh in at one point about the chants that are being sung while David’s on the pitch. And she tells the story in a funny way, and she gets to the heart of it. She does it with such energy. The tone of the way she told it gave us license. There was a tone that I started to find, and they basically gave it to us in their interview.
‘Beckham’ Courtesy of Netflix
You said the first pass was much more focused on football. Was the second pass closer to what we saw on Netflix?
Yeah, it was. It goes a long way when something isn’t necessarily working, [and] you just stop editing for a bit and you talk. I remember Mark Lewis used to say it when I worked on “Don’t Fuck With Cats”: “We’re all adults here. Let’s just talk about this.” A day talking can sometimes save you five, six weeks in the edit. The big thing was we realized that in Episode 1, he had two people in his life who really stood out: [former Manchester United manager] Sir Alex Ferguson and Victoria.
Sir Alex Ferguson is very much from Manchester United, a very successful period in his life. And one of the philosophies is, “There’s no I in team. We’re all together, we all wear the same colored boots, we’re all wearing the same jersey.” Then you meet Victoria and the Spice Girls, and the Spice Girls were very much about individuality, and David then is in the middle of that. There’s two different philosophies at play in his life. Once we had that theme in our head the film became very easy to cut, weirdly. Everything started to work.
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