in a way, it’s lance’s psychopathic behaviour that’s somehow worse than the cheating” ben foster
Shooting in the French Alps, in the autumn of 2014, Frears and his production team gathered together a scaled-down group of amateur and pro-cyclists, including number one British rider Yanto Barker, to ride alongside the actors. It was frequently hairy; Foster remembers one day when he just missed colliding with a truck, went off into a field but managed to pull back onto the road without crashing. “I think that was the one day when I actually got the peloton [ the pack of riders] on my side as Ben the Actor because Lance would’ve done that; after that they were very supportive.”
Unlike the sport itself, with static cameras usually mounted on the back of vehicles ahead or above the riders, Frears and his cinematographer Danny Cohen set out to put viewers in the middle of the peloton, with small cameras fixed to bikes and cranes used on the back of tracking vehicles. “I think we were paying tribute to many of the races,” says Foster, who admits the riders frequently remarked at how similar these recreations were. Alongside this, Frears and his editor Valerio Bonelli seamlessly blended in archive footage to complete the illusion.
Still, Foster points out that The Program is first and foremost a drama. “It is not a documentary,” he says. “It is a story about a rider whose character name is Lance Armstrong.” It’s arguably why Frears only “watched half” of Alex Gibney’s fascinating 2013 account The Armstrong Lie or why he didn’t get inside the tactics of pro-cycling. “The psychology is what’s really interesting,” he says, noting how “shocked” he was by the way Armstrong can write two autobiographies and lie in both of them. “You forget we’ve lived through Tony Blair – so we have experience of this kind of person.”
How does a man become embroiled in such a mammoth lie? How does he maintain it? And how does it bring him down? As any follower will know, Armstrong retired in 2005, only to make a dramatic comeback four years later, when he finished third in the 2009 Tour de France. It was only then that former teammates began to talk. “He was such a fool to come back,” says Frears. “I guess if he hadn’t come back, he’d have got away with it. But then I guess that’s what Greek tragedy is based on, isn’t it? The stupidity of intelligent people.”
Waylaid by hubris, Armstrong tried to quell the rising storm by appearing on Oprah. Frears calls the interview “guarded”, certainly compared to the more frank one-to-one he gave to a BBC journalist this year. “He thought the whole thing would blow over, and he thought that [ going on Oprah] was all he had to do. But, of course, it didn’t. It opened all the doors, and people started asking for their money back.” Lucrative sponsorship deals were retracted (he’s said to have lost $75 million in one day); legal battles with the Sunday Times and SCA Promotions cost him millions.
With a potential $100 million lawsuit still hanging over him, brought by former teammate Floyd Landis on behalf of the US government, Armstrong’s fall from grace has been sharp, painful and emotionally devastating. Even now, his position is that he won the Tour de France races. “What you’re curious about is how much self-knowledge is there?” notes Frears. “Have you worked out what you actually did? Have you been in analysis long enough to understand your behaviour?” He stops for a second. “I hope the film is a fair account.”
The Program opens on 16 October.