It is a truth universally acknowledged that soccer and movies just don't mix. After all, the list of films on the subject is short and far from distinguished. "But what about Escape to Victory?" John Lynch jokingly protests when I bring up this unfortunate but undeniable fact. Well, exactly - if John Huston's hilariously silly second World War prison escape drama is the pick of the crop, then the case is surely proved, and that's without even mentioning such grim recent fare as Fever Pitch or When Saturday Comes.
Unlike, say, boxing, the rhythms and highlights of soccer seem to elude most filmmakers. All the braver, then, of Lynch, together with his wife, director, to set out to redress the balance with an ambitious biopic of George Best, which the couple co-wrote and co-produced. The Belfast-born Lynch, best known for his performances in such films as Cal and In the Name of the Father, bears more than a passing resemblance to the footballer he idolised from an early age. "I certainly adored George when I was a kid," he says. "But at times I did find myself wondering what we were doing, scrutinising someone's life like that."
The sad story of George Best has been well-charted over the years - from teenage footballing genius, to twentysomething washed-up has-been, to joke drunk, playing his alcoholism for laughs for the benefit of tabloids and TV.
"He has been spread so thin for so long - everyone wants a part of him," says Lynch. "The film is about all that, how there was no protection around him, and how he went from the innocence of the 1960s into the madness and self-destruction of the 1970s."
The couple first met Best five years ago, after seeing Genius, a documentary profile of the footballer. "We wrote a grovelling letter, explaining that we wanted to tell a very personal story of his life," says Lynch. "We made a list of why we shouldn't do it," says McGuckian, who already has two films under her belt. "There was the whole football thing, the fact that he's still alive, the sexism, the alcohol abuse . . . but for some reason we still decided to go ahead."
They switched production to the Isle of Man when it became clear that raising finance in Ireland would not be possible. One of the main investors was Sky TV, which has been moving into film financing in the last couple of years. It must have seemed like a perfect fit - a film about the most famous star of Britain's most famous club, backed by the television channel whose fortunes are inextricably linked with modern British football. But the relationship with Sky has turned very sour indeed, ending up in court earlier this year. Sky lost that case, and was prevented from broadcasting the film in March, but continues to insist on its contractual entitlement to broadcast Best on its opening weekend in cinemas.
"Sky . . . has not as yet confirmed whether they're screening the film that weekend," says McGuckian. As a consequence, most British cinema chains are highly reluctant to take the film on, wary of setting a precedent which would break the traditional pattern of movie releases, with its well-defined gaps between cinema, video and TV premiere dates (the dispute has less effect in Ireland, where Best is receiving a fairly wide release).
The issue is being followed with great interest in the UK, where Sky's aggressive stance is being noted with some trepidation by other film-makers. In the course of their case, McGuckian and Lynch accused Sky of "mis-selling" the original finance agreement to them, of not meeting their contractual obligations to support the cinema release. ere at The Dome in London.
"We brought the case against Sky to ensure a theatrical release for the film in both Ireland and the UK and to encourage sales of the film to other distributors around the world," says McGuckian. "Best is a `made for cinema' film and was shot on film stock to be projected in cinemas, not on tape for exclusive TV broadcast."
Several of the film's cast have signed an open letter to Sky, protesting that: "It was never our understanding that we were collaborating on a television film solely for Sky Premier. . . As practitioners in the film industry, we do not condone the Sky Pictures policy of frustrating the traditional theatrical release pattern that supports our industry."
According to McGuckian, the decision to take Sky to court was taken after the death of Ian Bannen, who plays Sir Matt Busby. "That was the point when we decided to fight it. All of our cast lobbied hugely for us. As far as they were concerned, they had made a cinema film, and they wanted to see it in the cinema."
That cast includes a host of familiar names, including Ian Hart as Nobby Stiles, Linus Roache as Dennis Law and Jerome Flynn (of Robson and Jerome fame) as Bobby Charlton. Not to mention Roger Daltrey as Best's old drinking buddy, Rodney Marsh, and cameo appearances from the likes of Patsy Kensit, Stephen Fry and Clive Anderson. But what footie fans will really want to know is how well the match footage works. Rather than recreating matches from scratch, McGuckian blends archive television and newsreel footage of classic matches with close-ups of Lynch, as Best, in action.
"There was some suggestion that we should go another way with it. John felt that it should be more diaphanous, more ethereal," she says. "But we set out to give some sense of the way George played. We recreated the archive as precisely as we could. It has to feel as if it's of that period. It was all about time and effort and research - treating the footage to match the original material."
The main mistake other directors have made in attempting to bring a football match to a film audience, she believes, has been bringing the camera onto the pitch. "If we break the very established convention of how football is shot, we are asking too much of our audience. Everyone knows you can't put the camera on the pitch during a game."
In Best, the technique works rather well, but, having talked just a couple of weeks before to Oliver Stone about his American football movie, Any Given Sunday, I can't help pointing out that Stone took the completely opposite approach, believing that there was no point in simply reproducing material viewers can see on TV every weekend. "I'd love to talk to him about that," laughs McGuckian. "Because he pulled it off, but he's probably the only director around who could have done that."
In fact, it's the tradition of American sporting movies which hangs over Best from its opening scene. It self-consciously evokes the greatest sport film of them all, Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull. While Best's story is a sad one, I suggest, it lacks the tragic grandeur (or, indeed, the cinema-friendly brutality) of Scorsese's film. George Best is essentially a passive figure, his destructiveness turned in on himself. "Yes, but that self-annihilation is seen to affect all those people around him, and in turn it can't but have damaged him," argues Lynch, who accepts, though, that the film centres on the same sad theme as all sporting films. "We were starting from this notion of time, and what it does to a sportsman. There's no greater loss for George than the passage of time."
Best is on general release from May 12th