It was about working through those and then saying to him, ‘We want to do something deeper.’” “So he has maybe created these stock answers to get himself through interviews. “Every time he’s left the house for the last 65 years, has had a microphone pushed in his face,” says Nicholas. It took Tryhorn and Nicholas eight months of negotiation with Pelé’s management to get into the room with the man himself, but once they did, they sat and spoke to him for hours, teasing out memories of his childhood and adolescence. Pelé is now 80 years old – at the beginning of the film, he walks into the frame with a Zimmer frame – but he is the documentary’s most important on-screen storyteller. The difference between Pelé and Elvis, of course, is that Elvis isn’t around to talk to documentarians. “You take that away and suddenly it’s a bit weaker.” “A huge part of the mythology is that yellow shirt under the Mexican sun,” says Nicholas. His peak as a player and a global personality, at the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, was the first to be shown in colour around much of the world. The directors envisioned Pelé as “a 1950s, Old Hollywood studio system star”, a sporting answer to Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe, and his rise perfectly coincided with the early televisation of football, which was previously only broadcast on radio. Nicholas points out that with the advent of widespread air travel in the 1960s, Santos could fly Pelé and the squad around the world to play exhibition matches against AC Milan and Real Madrid, and beat them.
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Using swathes of archive footage of the player grinning for cameras, signing autographs and getting on and off planes, Tryhorn and Nicholas explore how Pelé was the first footballer who had a truly global appeal, because he arrived just as the technology fell into place to be one. “When he’s feeling good, Brazil is feeling good, or vice versa,” says Nicholas, “and somehow, for better or worse, the story we show is the two of them having this relationship between 19.”įirst up for scrutiny is the near-mythological status Pelé enjoys in Brazilian and global culture and the way media and technology combined to make him a star. His two wins perfectly bookend Brazil’s first golden age of football. Meanwhile, his goal in the 1970 final marked his retirement from international football. Pelé was the youngest goalscorer ever in a final, at just 17 (he still is). In 1958, Brazil emerged as a footballing power by winning the World Cup against the home team in Sweden, becoming the first non-European team to win in Europe. And the film sets Pelé up as an avatar for Brazil as a nation, a sort of living foundation myth the country had been waiting for until the 1950s. Gérson, Tostão, Rivellino, Jairzinho and Pelé all played in the final Pelé scored the opening goal. Tryhorn and his codirector Ben Nicholas’ film follows Pelé from his childhood in São Paulo state to the 1970 World Cup final against Italy, which Brazil won, courtesy of four goals from the most iconic international football team ever assembled. Pelé: great at scoring goals less good at humility?
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