The program
Teaming up for the story of disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong, Stephen Frears and star Ben Foster get with The Program. Total Film joins the pursuit.
Pursuing Lance Armstrong.
It’s been called the lie that shocked the world. Professional cyclist, cancer survivor, an inspiration to millions – Lance Armstrong’s bubble finally burst in October 2012. After years of accusations and investigations, the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) published a 1000-page report accusing Armstrong of taking performance-enhancing drugs – doping, as it’s commonly known. The seven-time winner of the Tour de France, cycling’s most gruelling competition, was a cheat.
You don’t have to be an Oscar-winning screenwriter to see the dramatic potential: cycling’s golden boy, who raised millions of dollars for cancer research through his Livestrong foundation, unveiled as the ringleader of what USADA dubbed “the most sophisticated, professionalised and successful doping programme that sport has ever seen”. The drug was erythropoietin, or EPO, a hormone known to stimulate red blood cell production, crucial for any athlete wishing to boost their performance artificially.
Never tested positive for EPO, Armstrong’s cunning is what caught the attention of veteran British director Stephen Frears. “Lance did it better than anyone else,” he says matter-of-factly, explaining he was turned on to the subject after he read a review of the book The Secret Race by Daniel Coyle and Tyler Hamilton, the latter being one of 11 former Armstrong teammates who ultimately testified in the USADA report. “It just sounded riveting,” he says. Power, money, celebrity, shame – the Lance Armstrong story had it all.
Immediately, Frears sent the review to Working Title’s Tim Bevan, who had produced Frears’ 1987 breakthrough film, My Beautiful Launderette. “We tried to buy [ the rights] and Tyler Hamilton was too busy shafting his co-writer!” laughs the director. After recruiting the services of Scottish pro-cyclist David Millar, who had been banned for two years for
taking EPO, Frears and Bevan turned to Sunday
Times chief sportswriter David Walsh’s account, Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit Of Lance Armstrong.
So began the first stage of The Program, Frears’ frank and unswerving dramatisation of events, spanning 20 years until Armstrong was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles, given a lifetime sporting ban and went on Oprah to confess. At the film’s core is the culture of “thuggery and bullying” that surrounded Armstrong’s U.S. Postal Service-sponsored team as fellow riders were intimidated into keeping silent. “They got away with it for a long time, by terrorising people,” adds Frears. “In a way, it’s Lance’s psychopathic behaviour that is somehow worse than the cheating.”
With Bevan bringing screenwriter John Hodge ( Trainspotting, The Beach) on board, Walsh’s book gave a backbone to the story – as the writer becomes the crusading journalist who begins investigating Armstrong after he wins his first Tour in 1999, following his remarkable recovery from testicular cancer. “I was rather reluctant to make films where journalists are heroes,” says Frears, who wound up casting Irish actor Chris O’Dowd as Walsh, “but that’s just a prejudice of mine!”
To play Armstrong, Frears approached Ben Foster, the Boston-born actor who has an uncanny ability to disappear into characters (as his recent turn as author William Burroughs in 2013’s Kill Your Darlings showed). Like Frears, who only knew about Armstrong from the back pages, Foster was a casual observer before he started The Program. “What I knew was that he’s an incredible athlete and he did what no-one else had ever done. But I didn’t know a whole lot about his back story.”
When Frears met Foster in New York to entice him on to the project, he’d kept the actor in the dark. “He didn’t know why he was seeing me. I said, ‘I’m thinking of making a film about Lance Armstrong.’ And he jumped onto the sofa and went into a Lance Armstrong pose! The one with the seven yellow jerseys behind him.” He’s referring, of course, to a controversial photo Armstrong posted on his Twitter account in November 2012, alongside the provocative tweet “Back in Austin and just layin’ around”, as he kicked back next to his seven framed winner’s jerseys from the Tour de France.
Foster’s first task was to learn how to ride like a professional cyclist. It meant switching to clipless pedals – which hold the cyclist’s shoes in place by a sprung mechanism akin to a ski binding. “It is claustrophobic being trapped into these pedals – it is not a natural device; you want to get out of it,” says Foster. It meant falling over, a lot. Foster calls it daunting, “particularly when you have the opportunity to spend time with a culture that demands such physical mastery over a tool, an instrument.”
Spending about six weeks on a bike, Foster joined his co-star Jesse Plemons – cast as Armstrong’ teammate Floyd Landis – at a training camp in Boulder, Colorado, where the Garmin-Sharp cycle team were participating in the Cross Colorado Tour. Given one-to-one tuition by Allen Lim, then Garmin-Sharp’s director of sport science, Foster also had to go through a severe programme of weight and body change to adjust his shape (echoing Armstrong’s own physical transition before and after his battle with cancer).
Consuming an 800-calorie-a-day diet, Foster gradually began to take on Armstrong’s shape. “What he did to his body was very surprising,” says Guillaume Canet, the French actor-director cast as Dr. Michele Ferrari, the controversial Italian medic, and EPO advocate, in league with Armstrong. Every day, under the guidance of pro-cyclist Andrea Klier, Foster would get up at 4.30am. “He would cycle every morning for two hours, arriving on the set, not eating anything, and you could see his body changing,” adds Canet. “That was very, very impressive.”
Impressive doesn’t even begin to cover Foster’s morphing into the character. He began to echo the rider’s signature stance on the bike – his pedal strokes, the way his heels stick out slightly, the arch in his back and how he shifts his hips. “He is almost birdlike,” grins Foster. “He’s like a vulture or a hawk or a coiled cobra.” It paid off. “There was a heady moment when there was a picture of Ben in some paper and underneath, it said, ‘Lance Armstrong’!” exclaims Frears. “That was extremely satisfying.”
Canet also spent hours in make-up every day to transform into Ferrari. When he first met Frears, for lunch in Bordeaux, he was convinced the director wanted him to play the Belgium-born Johan Bruyneel, Armstrong’s team manager (a role that ultimately went to
Inglourious Basterds’ Denis Ménochet). When Frears told him it was to play Ferrari, reports Canet: “He said, ‘I want you to change your face, your voice, everything.’ Unable to meet with Ferrari, it meant hours in make-up and work with a voice coach. “That’s how I started to [ dropping into a pitch-perfect Ferrari voice] speak with an Italian accent!”
If getting the actors to change their appearance was part of the verisimilitude Frears was seeking, he also needed to recreate sequences set at the Tour de France. Back in 2013, he’d spent a day being driven in an official car around the Tour, at the awe-inspiring Mont Ventoux stage. It was, of course, impossible to film at the real event, the road being occupied by dozens of cyclists; nor was it really viable to fake the enormous scale of the event. “The resources don’t exist for you to be able to stage it properly,” he nods.