Rudy (33 page)

The fact that all of these players had jobs meant they couldn't hang around for five or six weeks to film on a Hollywood schedule. So Paul arranged for them to come in for a series of four-day weekends. David rearranged the whole shooting schedule around that, so all of the football scenes could be shot on the weekends. Weekdays were dedicated to other scenes. It worked out perfectly for everyone; the guys loved it. This was a union film, with full catering and craft services. At dinner, they'd serve a choice of steak, prime rib, or shrimp, and the guys would order all three! A few of them gained twenty pounds or so over the course of the shoot.

Paul was right in there on the sidelines, doing the real coaching for all the football scenes—and there were a lot. The script only called for about five minutes of football, but we got this team looking so good, we shot something like sixteen hours of football; we wound up filling almost seventeen minutes' worth of screen time in the final edit, which is huge in the course of a less-than-two-hour film. The fact that Paul was called upon so often led David Anspaugh to finally just ask him to play an “assistant coach” in the film, so we wouldn't have to waste time clearing him from the sidelines when the cameras rolled. Poor Paul had to shave off his beard and moustache. The crew insisted there were no coaches at Notre Dame in the 1970s with facial hair, and they were constantly looking for period accuracy in the piece. He went home that night and his wife barely recognized him.

Paul's family got into the filming too. His wife played a nun on screen; two of his sons, Shawn and Nick, showed up as an assistant coach and a defensive back, respectively; and his other son Bill helped pull the team together, was the one-on-one coach for Sean Astin, and played quarterback in the football sequences.

There was so much good energy on this film that I was constantly taken aback when we hit obstacles. Notre Dame had opened up the campus to us, which was remarkably generous; but there were so many departments involved, and various factors made it difficult to get answers and clearances at times. Mid-shoot, they would tell us we couldn't use certain fields or couldn't set up our cameras in certain areas. Since I was the local consultant on the film, I'd always be the one left to fix things. I'd scramble and call old buddies around town to get us a space to shoot elsewhere, including a field off campus that wasn't even a football field. We just mowed the grass ourselves—I was good at that!—and made it look like a football field. In fact, there's a memorable scene in the film where the guys are playing in the rain and mud, and that whole thing was filmed on that random field, just off the side of the main road into South Bend. They were forced to use a rain machine to pull that off, since we were blessed with so much good weather for the whole shoot.

Of course, the big shoot, the penultimate scene, the moment when I dressed for a game and finally stepped foot inside that stadium to get my twenty-seven seconds of glory on the field—that could only be shot in one place: Notre Dame Stadium. That was one of the greatest challenges of the entire shoot. If we didn't get that scene right, the whole movie would have failed. That's a lot of pressure under normal circumstances. Seeing me run out of that tunnel to a stadium full of people, seeing me head into the game for the final kickoff, seeing and hearing that crowd chanting my name, watching me sack that quarterback and get carried off the field was the equivalent of Rocky winning the fight in
Rocky II
. I can guarantee you they spent days and days filming those fight scenes, getting everything right. Just the final knockdown alone, I bet they shot it from lots of different angles over the course of a series of hours, if not days. You don't mess around with the climactic scene of a movie.

Well, Notre Dame couldn't give us days on end with a stadium full of people, and we couldn't afford to pay sixty thousand extras to fill the stands anyway. So we shot a lot of close-ups on other fields, shots that would be combined in the editing room to make the whole thing come together. We shot a few scenes with approximately four hundred people in the crowd on weekdays, when the stadium wasn't in use. And then finally we got the Notre Dame marching band to agree to give up part of their halftime show at a couple of games, to allow us to film at the stadium during real Notre Dame home games.

Halftime is only seventeen minutes long to begin with. Do you know how long we had to get the shots we needed? Six minutes. No joke. Six minutes, to film all of it.

Talk about pressure!

Notre Dame was up against Boston College that Saturday. When halftime came around that day, we were just killing the gang from Beantown. It was something like 28–6. So the crowd was all pumped up when the real team hit the locker room and our movie team huddled in that famous tunnel, raring to go.

It's hard to even imagine the logistics that went into shooting this thing. We had to clear everyone off of the sidelines. Had to hand out 1970s-era Notre Dame banners to people in the front rows, as well as some Georgia Tech banners and shirts, since we had played against Georgia Tech in that final home game back in 1975. NFL Films set up something like nine cameras in the stadium to capture the action from every angle possible. Paul had worked the movie team forever, knowing they'd have to basically nail the plays the first time out—Sean Astin included. Everyone knew there were four things that absolutely needed to be accomplished: capturing the team running out of that tunnel with Sean at the front, basking in the magnificence of that sixty thousand–strong crowd; the kickoff; the two plays I was involved in, including my sacking the quarterback; and the moment when I got carried off the field on the shoulders of my teammates. David Anspaugh made sure it was rehearsed meticulously, so it would all go off like a dance. Like a ballet.

I was up in the press booth looking down at this whole thing. Everyone was wired up with headset radios so we could coordinate everything perfectly.

Paul Bergan was down in the tunnel with the whole gang of players, and he gave them a pep talk to keep everyone focused: “When you go into that stadium, remember who you are. You're not the schoolteacher or accountant anymore. You're a Notre Dame football player. It's the only chance you'll ever have to be one, so don't embarrass yourself. Stay in character. Stay in the game. You're only gonna get one chance to come through this tunnel. So make it great!”

He told me all of this afterward. I was so psyched that he did that. He drove it home for those guys. After all, if just one of them had stopped or gotten off track, or waved to someone in the stands, it could have messed up the whole shoot.

Little did he know there was a whole other reason that they would need to stay focused: at the last minute, our whole communication system went dead. All of a sudden we couldn't talk to anyone. David Anspaugh was silenced. I couldn't hear anyone in the booth. No one could give the signal to Paul to let him know when cameras were rolling so he could send the guys from the tunnel out onto that field. It was awful! To this day we don't know exactly what happened.

Paul stood down there just waiting and waiting for someone to give him the signal. The Notre Dame band kept playing, waiting for us to get started. The scoreboard had been reset. The sidelines were cleared of real coaches and players and filled up with our movie guys. But then no one knew what to do.

It's kind of hilarious if you stop to think about it: if you were in those stands and went to the bathroom at the start of halftime, when you returned to your seat, you would have seen the scoreboard reset (to 24–3) and a different opposing team on the field. I'm sure there was more than one person in the crowd who felt like they'd entered the Twilight Zone!

Finally, some Notre Dame official said to Paul, “Forget it. You've missed your window. Shoot's over.”

But then something magical happened. Someone else—to this day, no one recalls who it was—said, “Go, go, go!” and Sean Astin led that whole 1975 Notre Dame team out of the tunnel and onto the field. Everyone did just what Paul told them to do, stayed focused, and pretended they were really in the game. The guys from NFL Films were in tune to the whole thing, so used to capturing the action without a script (because, after all, there is nothing predictable about a real-life NFL football game), that they all just rolled cameras as soon as they saw there was some action, and they kept shooting to the best of their own abilities despite the lack of coordination between them.

Nobody—absolutely nobody—would know whether we got the shots we needed until they developed the film and took a look in the editing room.

We had auditioned eight or ten different guys to do the kickoff. The ball was supposed to be kicked all the way to the Georgia Tech end zone, and that's not an easy thing to do. Luckily, we found a guy, and he had nailed it in every single practice. He was one heck of a long-range kicker. There was just one problem: he wore glasses. As he ran out to do the kickoff on this one-and-only shot we had, one of the production assistants on the movie grabbed the glasses right off of his face. “Those aren't period!” that PA told him. His glasses were simply too modern for 1975.

This poor guy didn't know what to do, so he just ran out there and tried to kick the ball—a ball that was nothing but a blur to him! Well, he totally miffed it. The ball only flew about twenty feet. Luckily, it didn't matter. With all of those NFL Films cameras going, they followed the rest of the team, and those guys ran the play as if the ball flew all the way to the end zone. So despite not seeing the ball fly through the air, the whole thing would look fine on film.
Phew!

Next thing we knew, our fake Notre Dame and Georgia Tech teams were lined up and running the two plays they had practiced. The guys running the clock nailed it. The crowd nailed it. And with seconds to go, Sean Astin nailed it—soaring through the air and sacking that Georgia Tech quarterback with all the gusto I did back in 1975. It was awesome! It was like leaving my own body and watching myself through the lens of history. It's hard to even describe that feeling.

That's when his teammates gathered around him and hoisted him right up onto their shoulders. Sean raised his hands with all the glory of a real winner, basking in the roar of that massive crowd, in that magical stadium, as he gazed over the North Wall to the magnificence of Touchdown Jesus—and the cameras captured it all.

The dance was complete.

Six minutes. Six minutes to capture the entire climax of this movie.

And we did it. First time out.

Good thing too: the following weekend, when Notre Dame played Penn State, South Bend got hit with a blizzard. There was a foot of snow on the ground. If we had waited to shoot, or if we had flubbed it up the first time, none of the shots would have matched the snow-free close-ups and plays we had shot in different locations around town in the weeks prior. In other words: the film never could have come together. The whole thing might have died right there, or at best been cobbled together in a way that would have sent it straight to video instead of straight into the multiplexes.

I could hardly believe our good fortune. It was hard to count the number of little miracles that happened in order for that film, even that one final scene, to come together.

The whole thing felt blessed.

Before the shoot was over, Jon Favreau made a big point of coming over and thanking me. “Thank you, Rudy,” he said, shaking my hand, serious and sincere. I thought that was very cool of him. I thanked him too. I was glad he could be a part of the movie. Both he and Vince Vaughn were great to work with and great on screen. Perfect, actually. I couldn't imagine anyone else in those parts.

Saying good-bye to everyone at the end of that shoot was tough. We all bonded so much that it felt like we were roommates, classmates, and teammates in every way. It was emotional, especially with David and Angelo. I couldn't thank those guys enough for what they had done. And they thanked me too. Just like Jon. I gave major props to producer Cary Woods, a USC guy who fought the good fight for us, and of course, Rob Fried as well. The movie never would have been made if it wasn't for Fried's perseverance. He is a great businessman, a Cornell graduate, and I knew exactly where I stood with Rob, always. He is very sincere with a great big heart, and he knew there were big lessons that could be learned from sports, big messages that could be delivered through a film like
Rudy
. I truly would never be able to thank him enough for getting my movie off the ground and seeing it through.

Once everyone left town, the emotional release of sleeping in, of not making those 4:00 a.m. set calls, of not worrying about what obstacle we'd have to overcome in any given hour, was a lot for me to take. Plus, I had spent the last decade talking to people about this dream of making a movie, and that dream came true! Like anyone, you find yourself riding on adrenaline through intense high points in life. When they're done, it takes a while to settle down.

The thing is, I didn't want to settle down. I wanted to hold on to that feeling. I wanted to hold on to that inspiration and passion for the rest of my life.