A little over two years ago Armando Bo (age 43) was encouraged to venture out into the world stream Already get into the mud to expose the shady football dealings that led to the FIFA Gateone of the biggest corruption cases in history.
said with a certain humor and from the absurdthe Series President has trampled in a context of pandemic and confinement. That’s why we decided to make a second season, in a prequel keyalso conceived and directed by the Argentine director Academy Award -for the screenplay of Birdman- and recently released in Amazon Prime videos.
The new one The President has eight episodes and dwells on the figure of João Havelange, the Brazilian who transformed football into a business, politicizing – and rotting – the central body that administers it.
Though It is set in the 70s and early 80s.the series is very good and It arrived, fittingly, just days before the World Cup kicked off in Qatara seat whose election is being investigated on suspicion of vote buying and money laundering.
“The world of corruption, the world of football and these characters, taken from a cynical and bizarre point of view, I also find them funny. At one point, that cocktail where politics, corruption and football mix It’s sad and, at the same time, it’s the truth. This is kind of the story we tell”, sums up the director of the last elvis Y Animal.
“The first season was more about corruption and the football business. And I think this season is about what the world was like when football was still a sportand how it starts to become something very political,” he explains.
The series shows Havelange -played by the Brazilian Albano Geronimo– like the political animal he was, an unscrupulous guy who made alliances with Latin American dictatorships and negotiated with arms usurp power from the Europeans and maintain control of the organization for nearly three decades.
“He didn’t care about anything and came to shake and break everything. He mixed football with marketing, which was starting to appear. And, at some point, he bypassed the Europeans. Because he invented the system or the idea of ‘boys team’ Y ‘great team’. He got together with all the African teams and got them to vote,” he says.
-How did he do?
-FIFA had that rule that all federations could vote, but they didn’t even know what they had to vote for. You campaigned, I think 70 trips to Africa with Pele. And, well, at some point it took over from the colonial Europeans. It wasn’t all bad. What happens is that later he negotiated with who he had to negotiate to continue to scale and transcend that belief that football had to be big business.
“I had no ideals but ambition. This is why it is a series that even those who don’t like football can enjoy,” imagines the director, a member of a family of artists.
The Cro-Magnon series and the Robert Cox story
Son of actor and producer Vittorio Bo -the dolphin The super agents– and Armando’s nephew, Pioneer director of erotic cinema in Latin AmericaTogether with his star and muse Isabel “Coca” Sarli, Armando Jr. made his debut in advertising and directed four acclaimed films before the first in the world series with President.
He now has several projects underway with his new production company, Of: a series about the Cro-Magnon tragedy, already resumed; a movie about Robert Cox and the history of the Buenos Aires Herald; and another film based on the screenplay by The badsthe famous novel by Camila Sosa Villada, among others.
“They are the fourth generation of directors. So I know how complex the world of cinema is. And we’re figuring out how we can make it work on an industrial level as well. Not just on the artistic side,” he says about his new production house.
And he adds: “I am very proud to have so many projects. To some I’m trying to direct them. But the intention is to film and produce other stories, with other directors; continue to advance the storytelling by being a director, writer or producer or showrunner. I think part of that interests me too: not always seeing everything from the same point of view.
-And what do you base yourself on to choose each role?
I can’t do everything. The first thing is that you like a project. With About’s partners we choose very well where to get involved. Obviously I prioritize the projects that I like the most, as an artist. Because It is where more blood is shed, where one gets more involved and remains more destroyed, more beaten by trials.
“Producer is a role that I really like, I saw it in my father and grandfather, because they both produced. It’s a role that I enjoy and that allows me to tell stories from another side without just being in there,” she admits.
The return of Andrés Parra and the Havelange gold bars
In the debut season of President -premiered June 2020- Bo tells how the network of corruption, fraud and money laundering is being formed came to light in 2015, with Giulio Grondona -owner and lord of the AFA and vice president of the international federation- as the narrator and the central character of the plot.
But the main protagonist is Sergio Jadueplayed by the Colombian Andrés Parra, the Chilean Grondona who, when the FIFA Gate exploded, he agreed with the FBI to cooperate with the investigation in exchange for a reduced sentence.
In the new episode, written and spoken in Spanish, Portuguese and English, Jadue/Parra returns as a kind of all-knowing plot guest. “I think it’s the opposite of Grondona, right?” Bo says.
“In the first season, the narrator was the God of Argentine football, this godfather who tells the story of this little Chilean man who did everything wrong and did everything right. And now, It is this little corrupt who tells the story of the king of the beginning of corruption”, argues Armando.
“Even these extremes work. I believe that the series grows a lot from the first to the second season in terms of story level, in terms of casting. And he takes a lot of risks.”
-One of those risks must have been to tell with humor a dark period in Latin America, with the worst dictatorships in its history. How did you manage to keep that comedic tone?
-Was part of the seduction. On the one hand this guy (Havelange) grappling with the dictatorships of the moment, Using football to cover up the atrocities of the ’78 World Cup. On the other hand, to tell the story of the journey to bring something amateurish into a free capitalism, where the series ends, in the 1982 World Cup.
“So we’re not just telling what he wanted, but the change in the world, how it went to the side that everything was for sale; how marketing might affect people,” she explains.
-And how Havelange could affect everyone.
What he did was very impressive. He was an Olympian, a marathon swimmer, and he had a very clear idea of what he wanted and where he wanted to go. The guy was a son of a bitch from hell and he wasn’t even the nicestnot the most cancerous, nor the funniest.
-And he got where he got without charisma.
He wasn’t charismatic at all. One of the big challenges of the series was how to make achieve humor or possible cynicism with this character who is almost a robot, right? I read that he hired a biographer and that when he included FIFA Gate in his bio, he was kicked out. So I found it very funny if this story were told by someone it would upset Havelange.
Jadue, that’s right a loser and a tragicomedy characterIt seemed super absurd to me. I think the series gets into some pretty dark and difficult places. So, finding a balance with this character and having this storyline with a little bit of humor helps a lot to keep the point of view of the series, which is to play with the theme, laugh a little about the world of football and what it generates. But without going over the line.
-Not long ago you said that football itself is a parody. What did you mean?
-Myself I am a soccer fan. I really like being around people, with your father or your kids, and watching a game and hearing things: partying, getting nervous. It’s something spectacular. And, in parallel, the world of football is very funny and very cynicalif you break down the characters, how you manage and how you do business.
And he shares that “at one point, the series is about how this guy He’s finding his way back to turning FIFA into an invoicing machine. The crazy thing about all of this is that I couldn’t figure out that I was doing it.”
-Because?
-Because FIFA has always remained a non-profit entity, which is very funny. FIFA is like an embassy. There are anecdotes that say Havelange returned to Brazil, because he never stopped living in Brazil, always with two or three gold bars in the bag. And since he had a diplomatic passport, no one checked it.
Source: Clarin
