Director Oliver Stone teams with first-time feature cinematographer Salvatore Totino on the in-your-face gridiron drama Any Given Sunday.
“Because I have lived through it, I know that playing in the NFL lives up to the childhood dreams of an eight-year-old boy, secretly clutching the golden figure of a Pop Warner championship trophy under his bedcovers as he drifts off to sleep. I also know that to play in the NFL, one must endure or succumb to pressures bent on compromising the soul in ways that would have made Daniel Webster shudder.”
— Former-NFL player Tim Green, The Dark Side of the Game: My Life in the NFL
Like a rookie quarterback recalling his first snap from center in the pressure-packed atmosphere of an NFL season opener, cinematographer Salvatore Totino can identify the exact moment when the enormity of the challenge in front of him became clear. In the midst of a hectic, disorienting first day of principal photography on Totino’s first feature film, Any Given Sunday, director Oliver Stone sidled up to his 35-year-old collaborator and slyly intoned, “Welcome to Vietnam.”
Many months later, after the arduous shoot had finally wrapped and Stone had barricaded himself in his Venice, California, editing room to ready the film for its Christmas release, Totino could chuckle at the memory. “I didn’t know what Oliver meant by that remark until later in the shoot, when I realized I had lost 18 pounds!”
Any Given Sunday marks the first time since Stone’s 1981 horror film The Hand that the ever-provocative auteur has worked with a cinematographer other than the esteemed Robert Richardson, ASC. Stone’s longtime creative partner had already committed to shooting Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead (AC Nov. 1999), forcing the director to go scouting for new behind-the-camera talent.
While sifting through scores of young cinematographers’ showreels, Stone took notice of Totino’s striking music video and commercial work. Never one to shy away from taking a leap of faith in terms of either casting or crew decisions, Stone hired the Brooklyn native to shoot his $65 million football epic after just one meeting.
Totino entered the New York film world in the 1980s as a production assistant, but quickly became fascinated with the role of the cinematographer. “On one job, I met Paul Gaffney, a New York camera assistant, and I told him that I also wanted to be a camera assistant,” he recalls. “He said to me, ‘Okay, move those cases!’ For two straight days he intentionally made me move cases back and forth, all day long. At the end of the job he said, ‘I see you’re serious!’ On my days off, he started teaching me about cameras, and before long he was taking me on jobs.”
Totino moved up to first camera assistant, and received his first break when he was asked by director Peter Care to shoot second-unit footage on a music video for the British band New Order. He soon became a sought-after director of photography in his own right, shooting a wide array of innovative commercials and music videos. He has shot ad campaigns for Jack Daniels, Nike, Jaguar, The Gap and H.I.S. Jeans, winning a Clio award for the latter. Among his most interesting music videos are U2’s “Staring At The Sun,” R.E.M.’s “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?,” Bruce Springsteen’s “Secret Garden,” Soundgarden’s “Spoonman,” Live’s “Lightning Crashes” and Radiohead’s surreal “Fake Plastic Trees.” (Both of the latter videos are part of the permanent archive collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.)
Set in the near future, Any Given Sunday follows the fictional Miami Sharks franchise through a tension-packed season of intrasquad intrigue. The Sharks’ veteran quarterback, Cap Rooney (Dennis Quaid), has suffered a serious midseason injury, leaving the offense in the hands of cocky third-stringer Willie Beamen (Jamie Foxx). After a shaky start, Beamen shocks both fans and management by rejuvenating the previously moribund team. Before long, however, the me-first style of “Steamin’ Beamen” leads him into clashes with both teammates and the Sharks’ old-school head coach, Tony D’Amato (Al Pacino). To make matters worse, the principled D’Amato is feeling the squeeze from the Sharks’ young, ambitious, take-no-prisoners president and co-owner (Cameron Diaz). In chronicling the chasm between D’Amato’s seemingly archaic ideals of loyalty and teamwork and the modern game’s increasingly cutthroat atmosphere, Stone has fashioned an apt metaphor for the ever-present tension between American individualism and the greater good.
The film’s punishing 65-day production schedule was highlighted by five different staged football games in Miami’s storied Orange Bowl and the newer Pro Player Stadium, as well as Texas Stadium in Dallas. The enormity of the shoots required a sprawling second unit to shoot scenes involving thousands of extras on the sidelines and in the crowd. “It was a very tough, difficult, agonizing process, as well as a logistical nightmare,” Totino admits. “I just saw the trailer last night, which started to make the whole experience a bit more real for me. It was a huge project, and we had great support from Warner Bros. and the film’s producer, Clayton Townsend. I had a full-blown second unit, but Oliver initially kept them with our first unit, because all of the footage has to fit and marry together on a film of this size.”
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