David Beckham celebrates at Old Trafford in 2003. Photo / Getty Images
No one has tighter control of their image than the ex-footballer, but the makers of a new show interviewed him for 30 hours.
In a grainy home video from 1999, David Beckham and Gary Neville, both 24, are getting ready for Beckham’s wedding to the woman then known as Posh Spice. Someone asks Beckham if he’s nervous. “No. Only been to the toilet 50 times,” he cackles. It’s not exactly the coiffeured Adonis we normally see. Instead, here’s an anxious young man with a dicky tummy.
This wedding video is featured in Netflix’s four-part documentary about Beckham, which is the big benefit of making a documentary about someone with their co-operation: you get them and their personal archives. Beckham has been right in the centre of the spotlight for 30 years, but no film-maker has ever had as much access to him as the director of Beckham, Fisher Stevens.
“I did 10 interviews with David, each about three hours long, and he wasn’t accustomed to that; most interviews he does are 20 minutes at most. And some he enjoyed and some he wanted to get the hell out of,” Stevens tells me from his office in New York.
The question, though, is what is the point of a Beckham documentary? Rare is the man who has lived more in the public eye than Beckham, and anything he doesn’t want us to know about him is unlikely to be revealed in a documentary co-produced by his production company, Studio 99.
After all, as exposed as Beckham has been for the past three decades, few celebrities have wielded more control over their public image than him. I spent time with the Beckhams in 2006 when I was ghostwriting Victoria’s book and, while both were unfailingly kind to me, I know how efficient and protective the machine around them is. So how could the documentary be anything other than hagiography? Does Stevens, who was recommended to Beckham by Leonardo DiCaprio (of course), ask Beckham about the rumoured infidelity scandals?
“It wasn’t pleasant, but we got into it. For me, I approached it as ‘How did your marriage stay together?’ and you’ll see how he responds. I talked with both of them about the difficulties they went through,” Stevens says.
The producer John Battsek (Searching for Sugar Man, One Day in September) adds: “They were both signed up to telling us whatever we wanted to know. I’m sure you’ll say, ‘Of course you would say that.’ But they were. There was no ‘You will not ask that or do that’. Fisher and I thought that might be the case, but we were clear from the start that we would only do this if we could go in any direction we wanted. And we did.”
It’s clear that Stevens is very good at getting both the Beckhams to talk candidly. That’s apparent just from the first two episodes that I was allowed to see, which chart the footballer’s childhood, his rise as Manchester United’s star player, his relationship with Victoria and the fallout from the 1998 World Cup match against Argentina when he was given a red card for kicking Diego Simeone. Victoria repeating some of the sexist football chants against her (“Posh Spice takes it up the arse!”) is a TV moment few of us ever expected to see.
And Stevens definitely gets some revelations, such as that just before the infamous 1998 England v Argentina game Victoria told David she was pregnant — which might explain his uncharacteristic kick at Simeone. On top of that, Simeone tells Stevens that he didn’t think Beckham deserved the red card. It is extremely enjoyable to watch the Beckhams make fun of their wedding in retrospect (no, David didn’t like his purple suit; no, Victoria doesn’t know why they were sitting on thrones). However, all of the revelations in the first two episodes serve only to burnish the Beckham brand. Battsek and Stevens both promise me there are stories in the next two episodes that are less positive. But why would Beckham authorise a documentary that shows his warts?
As well as the Beckhams, Stevens interviews David’s parents, Alex Ferguson, Roy Keane, Paul Scholes, the Spice Girl Mel C … pretty much everyone involved in Beckham’s life is in it. Particularly enjoyable are the interviews with his best mate, Neville, who memorably describes himself as Beckham’s “side dish. Not the beef — the mustard.”
When I quote that to him, Neville says: “I want to rephrase that — I’m the bass player and he’s the main singer.” How did Neville feel when he heard Beckham refer to him as “Mr Sensible” in the film?
“That’s because I was always trying to temper his … what we’ll call his spiritual side. I used to dread what haircut, what outfit, what tattoo he’d come in with next. But that creativity and fearlessness is why he’s one of the most successful footballers of all time,” he says.
As an illustration of just how jaw-droppingly, demographic-spanningly famous Beckham is these days, at a recent game with Inter Miami — the team Beckham co-owns — the guests included Prince Harry, Will Ferrell, DiCaprio, Selena Gomez and Owen Wilson. By contrast, Neville is talking to me on his phone in the car while he’s stuck in rainy traffic in Manchester. But is there really more to know about Beckham?
“I come from many generations of mad Chelsea fans,” says Battsek, who is English. “So I thought I knew a lot about Beckham. But one thing that really surprised me while making this film is how he never recovered from leaving Manchester United. His father was so tough on him as a kid, Glenn Hoddle threw him under the bus [when Beckham played for England] and then Ferguson threw him out of Manchester United: to have these father figures rejecting him is a recurring theme in his life and David is profoundly shaped by that. It’s part of why he needs things to be perfect.”
Neville adds: “David is a perfectionist on and off the pitch. We roomed [at Manchester United] and all the transporting of the picture frames, the pillows, so the room looked just right … To be honest, I’m not that way inclined. No crumbs or empty water bottles in his car, which is very much not like my car. So it was a very brief rooming relationship … On the pitch, the perfectionism is a positive. Off the pitch, when the remote has to be perfectly in line with the TV, less positive.”
Did he know that Victoria had told David she was pregnant before the 1998 Argentina match?
“I didn’t know about that until after the match. In an ideal world that news wouldn’t have been passed on that day. But David and Victoria were completely obsessed with each other and were on the phone with each other for hours and hours,” he says.
I tell him my favourite part of the documentary are the home videos from the Beckhams’ wedding, where Neville was best man, which include this snippet from his speech: “The Spice Girls requested that the Bayern Munich team be here. They explained they’d love to meet any men who can stay on top for 90 minutes and still come second.” Only at a Beckham wedding could such a joke be made.
“It was the first time I’d spoken in front of such an audience and I wouldn’t call myself Ricky Gervais in terms of stand-up, and it was such huge pressure,” Neville says. “So I didn’t drink before. Then, after, I tried to get as drunk as possible, but David and Victoria cut the music at 1am because they didn’t want their wedding to end all messy with everyone brawling at 3am. I said, ‘David! You can’t do that!’”
So who won that argument? Like I need to ask. Who always wins? The Beckhams.
Beckham is available to stream on Netflix.
Written by: Hadley Freeman
© The Times of London
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