Jeff Hathorne

So we document everything from Friday night lights to Saturday morning Pop Warner football through a Pitt game culminating with a Steelers game on Sunday.

And we try and have everyone that views this film experience what a weekend, a fall weekend in Pittsburgh is like.

So it's as much about the little kids playing Pop Warner who are struggling to put their helmets on as it is about, you know, TJ Watt trying to sack a quarterback.

So it really covers the entire story.

nature of football and the ages and spectrums and different ways that we consume it here in Pittsburgh.

We didn't try and pair it or parallel it or compare it with any other regions or city's

we simply tried to tell the story of Pittsburgh and what it means to people here.

And the high school section is one of my favorite sections in the film because it really covers every gamut, every emotion that you have, you know, the exhilaration of running out under those lights on Friday night to, you know, losing what potentially might be the last football game you ever play and being consoled by your parents after the game and the coaches giving speeches before and after the game.

And it's,

we were lucky enough to be given the access to cover that in a way that we wanted to cover it so that we could properly tell that story.

And to me, what you kind of, I said it before, but what you feel in that part of the film, it just is so nostalgic for everybody, whether you played football or not.

Everyone went to high school.

Most people went to a high school football game at some point.

And whether you were a fan of that, a part of that or not,

This helps you understand why it's so important to so many people.

So one of the challenges that we had because of the nature of the screen is that it's not produced in the way that a traditional documentary is produced.

When you think of a documentary, you think of plenty of sit down interviews, plenty of talking heads helping to tell that story.

Well, we decided early on that because this screen is so big, that won't really work in this film.

You know, seeing a gigantic head on that screen talking to you for 30 seconds doesn't play as well as it does in a traditional format.

What we tried to do was create situations where folks would be having conversations and we could capture that sound and those stories and those moments and still have them in a film, but in a different way than you would traditionally see.