I have loved football as an almost mythic game since I was in the fourth grade. To me, the game wasn’t even grounded in reality. The uniform turned you into a warrior. Being on a team, the mythology of physical combat, the struggle against the elements, the narrative of the game. Steve Sabol Read Quote
If you can show something as complicated as two people falling in love with just music and camera angles, well, just think about what you can do with football. Steve Sabol Read Quote
When we started in the early ’60s, football had a little bit of a tradition. But, they didn’t have a mythology. And NFL Films, through our music and our scripts and our photography, created a mythology for the sport. Steve Sabol Read Quote
My Dad hated his job. He sold overcoats, but he wanted to make movies. He had a failed career working with the Ritz Brothers – they were like the Marx Brothers, only a tier below. I always had a picture in my mind of him in a straw hat. Steve Sabol Read Quote
I’ve been very lucky in the freedom that I’ve been given. Every artist needs two types of freedom: You need the freedom to – the freedom to come up with an idea or treatment – and then you need the other half of the freedom, and that’s freedom from – somebody saying, ‘This is great. This is how I want you to do it.’ Steve Sabol Read Quote
The only other human endeavor on which there’s more 16-millimeter film than pro football is World War II, and we’re going to pass that in 2013. Steve Sabol Read Quote
I’ve always been fascinated by Picasso and how he would look at a single image through multiple perspectives and from separate moments in time. He would look at a woman’s face and he would see almost a three-dimensional look even though it was a flat canvas. I thought, well why couldn’t we do the same thing with a football play? Steve Sabol Read Quote
We would get 20 different angles and then cut them all together. That’s what I called it at the time – the ‘cubistic’ treatment of shooting football. It was the same thing Picasso did except we did it with a football play. It’s taking a single image and looking at it from multiple perspectives. Steve Sabol Read Quote
