STACK #137 Mar 2016

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Why was it so important to you that he was happy with the film? It’s a film about integrity and it would have been embarrassing if we didn’t use some ourselves. David has done so much research for us that it only made sense. For me it was very important. Also, it’s based on his source material, so it would have been crazy not to involve him in the whole process. Can you talk about working with Ben Foster? He clearly immersed himself in the role – he was talking about how he took some performance enhancing drugs as part of his research. I didn’t know that he had done that until a journalist mentioned it to me. But I think that makes complete sense, he has to spend so much of the movie on them; it doesn’t surprise me at all. He is a very immersive actor and very focused. If I’m perfectly honest, we kind of collectively decided that there was no point in us hanging out very much because it wasn’t going to help. David and Lance didn’t get on so we didn’t really hang out at all until the film was nearly over. But I love what he was doing and I thought he did a great job, particularly what he did physically. There

is a scene where he has to show off his muscular physique so that Ferrari [Guillaume Canet] can say it’s not right – the amount of work that must have gone into that, and then he just has to lose that physique and change it again. He’s very focused. Has working on The Program changed your opinion of sport at the highest level? Are you more cynical now? I am a big sports fan and I don’t know if it has changed my opinion

of sport. I think of top-level sport like this as entertainment. I come from a country where our biggest sport is Gaelic football and hurling, which are both amateur sports, and it’s almost like the truest form of sport – like people from one village competing against people from another village. The fact that Lance took drugs has never been something that annoyed me. That’s not my problem, personally, with it, but I’m sure that’s the way it is for some other people. The fact that he didn’t let people [on his team] not take drugs and he ruined people’s reputations and careers deliberately to hide his cheating is what makes me not like him. So I think there is part of me that doesn’t trust any endurance sport. I don’t know if it necessarily ruins them as a spectacle, but it definitely makes them less engaging. Like David says, I’ve no interest in watching chemists compete. It’s like watching Formula One – you can be into Formula One and I get it, but it just doesn’t do anything for me, it’s just engineering. So what is your sport? I love soccer. I’m a Liverpool fan. I’ve been checking scores today [laughs]. I also love a bit of rugby and tennis.

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