FOOTBALL CRAZY
THE KEEPER I Manchester City’s 1950s German shot-stopper gets a ball-busting bio…
If you know anything about Bert Trautmann, it’s this: the German-born goalkeeper for Manchester City broke his neck in the 1956 FA Cup final and carried on playing. Colliding with Birmingham City’s Peter Murphy, Trautmann dislocated five vertebrae, but heroically continued the match, which City won 3-1. Naturally, it’s a key element to new Trautmann film The Keeper, but his extraordinary life keeps this detail for the second half.
“I met him in 2009 for the first time and the reason he allowed us to make the film was that we did not only focus on his injury,” says the film’s director Marcus H. Rosenmüller. “He wanted to be a symbol for this reconciliation.” Indeed, Trautmann’s story goes far beyond one momentous match. A prisoner-of-war after he was captured by the British during WW2, he was ultimately awarded an OBE for promoting Anglo-German relations.
To play Trautmann, Rosenmüller cast German actor David Kross. They first met during a dinner in Munich, close to where the director grew up. “In my opinion, Trautmann was two things: a gentleman, but also a football comrade. And I thought David Kross,
when I met him, was so polite, genteel and gentleman-like. I gave him the first draft and he said, ‘Yes, I want to make this – I want to be Trautmann.’”
That was just the beginning of an arduous process. Kross spent four months intensely training with a goalkeeper from Bundesliga side Union Berlin, while Rosenmüller had to figure out how to vividly recreate several key matches
– not least the ’56 final at Wembley. A “head-scratching” puzzle, says the director, it was ultimately managed with a smart mix of CGI, art direction and set design plus use of the Rosenaustadion in Augsburg. Even then Rosenmüller spent hours with his DoP, Daniel Gottschalk, planning how to shoot the beautiful game – something many football movies get wrong. “For me this was the most difficult thing, technically
– how to make them exciting,” he says. Fortunately, he’d already made 2006’s Heavyweights, about the 1952 Winter Olympics in Oslo. “There I learnt that it’s always good to add the emotions of the spectators and to make it fastpaced, so that it’s not boring!”
As the film shows, Trautmann’s journey from POW to celebrated goalkeeper is anything but easy, as he faced prejudice from fans still traumatised by the war. With Britain currently facing political turmoil as it prepares to leave the European Union, Rosenmüller believes a film about integration – and not isolation – is very timely. “Certainly we never thought 10 years ago there would come a Brexit,” he says. “As bad as it is, this film maybe shows the other way might be best.”
ETA | 5 APRIL / THE KEEPER OPENS NEXT MONTH.