RED ARMY is an exceptional documentary about the Soviet Union and the most successful dynasty in sports history: the Red Army hockey team. Told from the perspective of team captain (and current Russian Minister of Sport under Putin) Slava Fetisov, the story portrays his transformation from national hero to political enemy and back again. The film also examines how the sport mirrored social and cultural movements in the Soviet Union, as well as the painful adjustments many of the team’s key player had playing when they came to the United States to play for NHL teams after the collapse of communism.
RED ARMY was directed by Chicago-native Gabe Polsky (co-director with brother Alan Polsky of THE MOTEL LIFE and co-producer of of Werner Herzog’s THE BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL–NEW ORLEANS). I had a chance to sit down with him a couple months ago during the Chicago International Film Festival, and it was great to see absolute passion and enthusiasm for this material, as both a hockey fanatic himself and an admirer of the Red Army’s style of playing. Please enjoy my talk with Gabe Polsky…
Capone: I love the way that you open the film with your primary subject just outright insulting you and being rude. Why did you opt to do that?
Gabe Polsky: Well, first of all, I wanted to introduce the audience to Slava Fetisov. And in a nutshell, without having to say very much, you’re able to get who this guy is, and it also sets up the arc that we see at the end. He starts off hard—the typical Russian. But then you start to learn why that guy is the way he is and the story behind that guy. Plus, it engages the audience right off the bat. It’s like, who is this guy? And I represent the audience in a way. I’m trying to understand what life was like there. You get a sense about what you’re about to learn in the film, and then you see his credits scroll, so you learn he's a very successful guy today.
Capone: The immediate thought as an audience member is “I hope it gets better than this for you, the interviewer,” which it clearly does. In fact, you bookend the film with him insulting you, and then you reclaim your Chicago-ness at the end, which is the best. The room of critics that I watched this movie with went crazy with your last statement to him.
GP: They did? That’s funny. I would have loved to be there for that. And it’s also a little bit of a play on the idea of what is Home—your identity, your nationalism, what you’re proud of—because in the movie that’s a major theme, the nature of patriotism. We all identify with something, with home. At the end, he comes back to Russia, and people wonder how he lived through all that and then went back there. Because that’s his home. He lived under a system, and those are his people. He felt a duty to go back and try to help the situation no matter who’s in power. You still have to deal with the powers that be in order to make change.
Capone: That might have been one of the most shocking things in the whole movie is he went back. Did I see that he was at the New York Film Festival with you?
GP: Yeah, he went to New York to support the film. He was at Cannes too, which was pretty crazy for him. Even for me, that was my first movie in Cannes, and to have a guy so good at hockey in Cannes was very unusual. First of all, they don’t care about sports that much. Secondly, a guy from the Soviet Union, it’s just very unusual. But the director at Cannes was telling me, “Gabe, this is your movie star,” because he’s like a character.
Capone: You could not cast him any better.
GP: No. He’s like someone from a Tarantino film.
Capone: The other thing you understand from the start the film is that this is not going to be your standard-issue ESPN or HBO sports documentary. It’s going to be a little rougher than that, a little darker. It changes the way we looked at the Russian team during the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid—they were the enemy. And with this film, we understand how the enemy was looking at us? And we realize that that win was a fluke. You could play that game 10 times, and the Russian would have won nine out of 10 times.
GP: And that happens. You can’t have a perfect record. But the “Miracle on Ice” is a very small part of a much larger story, and also the movie tells us what you think you know, but you really don’t know about this team. When I tell people I made a movie, I have to say it’s about Soviet Hockey and this great dynasty, they say, “Oh, yeah. The Miracle.” aThat’s the legacy of this team and this spor. So I found that slightly sad and misrepresentative of what this team really meant for sport and culture. They really elevated sport to an art form, to a masterful, creative expression on the ice. It was beyond sport; what they did on ice was almost a cultural thing.
Capone: You look at all the elements that went into their practice routine that had nothing to do with hockey. The ballet, the chess lessons, all of the psychological preparation that made them of a single mind, which I guess is the Soviet way in all things, that group think. I know a little bit about hockey, but it took me about 30 seconds to realize I’ve never seen anybody play like that. And even people that don’t watch sports movies and know nothing about hockey are going to see the differences pretty quickly.
GP: That’s the common response I get from people after seeing it, and that’s why I made the movie. Anyone can recognize beauty when it’s done at the highest level. You don’t have to be a sports fan. You see it, and you’ve got it. You don’t have to say anything. People that come up to me after screenings are people that don't care about sports or hockey or are surprised because they’re expecting a hockey type of film, and it’s not that. They didn’t expect hockey to be like that, and it’s still not.
Capone: Not even in Russia, from what I understand. Hw long ago was it that you first saw footage of the Red Army team play? And what was your response to that?
GP: I think I was 13 years old, and I had a VHS tape of this 1987 Canada Cup, which is now like the bible of hockey. It has never gotten better than that. I watched it over and over, because it was like a religious experience when I first saw it. I had ambitions to play professional hockey and was good at it, but I couldn’t believe it. It was a profound creative expression on the ice, and I was wondering why they weren’t teaching hockey like this to us. I wanted to do that. Why was our hockey so limiting, confining, and almost primitive and aggressive in a certain way? How come, also, in a society that was considered so brutally oppressive was the hockey so free and open? It was a paradox, and it got me really curious about the story and what was behind it. What was the story of this team?
When I did more research later on and became a filmmaker, I realized the story of the team is really the story of this country. It paralleled pretty closely the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, and it made it into a much bigger story. I knew from the get-go that if I told a story about hockey or hockey history, it wouldn’t be a successful movie. I wasn’t interested in that. I wanted to reach people on a visceral level, on a human level, and get into some of these really juicy geopolitical issues. The idea that hockey was an agenda of the Soviet government and was created for specific reasons to deliver messages all over the world. And this system was created from scratch, and within 10 years, they were the best team in the world. The whole system of developing these young athletes.
Capone: They essentially kidnap them at a young age.
GP: More or less. They were taught to serve their country. That was their duty. Everybody was there to serve. That was the whole point of that society. You have to understand, it was the highest honor for them to be on that team. They didn’t look at it like, “I’m in prison.” But later they started to realize, “Oh god, this doesn’t happen everywhere.”
Capone: The Canada Cup tape that you saw, was that an official release or was that one of those bootlegs that was passed around?
GP: Somehow I got a hold of it. It wasn’t a bootleg, but for some reason back then, you couldn’t just go to a store and find this thing. You had to look through newspapers and find it somewhere in Canada and have it sent. Nowadays you can find anything pretty quickly. But I got a hold of it and just couldn't believe it. In North America, creativity like this in sport is not encouraged. In fact, most of the time it’s discouraged. You do something creative, and they say, “Why are you doing that? Go in the corner and beat the hell out of the guy.” The coaches in the system aren’t necessarily philosophers. In the Soviet Union, you had to go through a whole education and learn about anatomy—it was a whole school of hockey. Here, anyone can be a coach. It was frustrating, having to play for coaches that weren’t necessarily into that.
Capone: I think the biggest farce in this country is the idea of getting into sports is supposed to encourage teamwork, but it’s not really. It really is about trying to shine to get noticed.
GP: See, you get it. You totally get it.
Capone: But when you watch this, you see “That’s what a team does.” They’re passing behind their back because they know their guy is there, and if they don’t see a scoring opportunity, they’ll regroup and try again together. It’s amazing to watch.
GP: That’s paradox of our system, exactly what you’re saying. They didn’t make more money if one guy was the best. In fact, they were discouraged to show too much individuality. The unit was the star. We’re incentivized here to think whoever scores the most goals gets the biggest contract, gets to go play on the national team or whatever it is. At the same time, you know that you can’t win without being a part of a team, so there are conflicting instincts. It’s similar in the film industry too; everyone tries to take the credit.
Capone: It’s unbelievable how much archival footage you had. Where did that come from, and how hard was it to find?
GP: Part of making a unique documentary, if you do have archival footage, is finding footage that people haven’t seen before that really gives you a flavor, that feels new and interesting. So I had a researcher here in the U.S. and one in Russia, but the Russian wasn’t sending me anything interesting. So I decided to go out there myself, and I went to these two different archival houses. Houses, they’re called; they’re really dilapidated warehouse buildings. They’re all organized manually with written cards. So I told them what I needed. They said, “Why are you here?” I said, “I’m making a hockey film,” because I didn't want them to think I was making anything political. So they said okay and took me to the area where they thought what I needed was, and there were all kinds of thing—some stuff related, some unrelated, but they had stacks of film canisters, 35mm.
Capone: I’m sure it’s been well preserved.
GP: [laughs] Yeah, exactly. Literally, these are like original films. They would put me on a machine, and I looked to see what was there, and ultimately it became insanely overwhelming, because I had hundreds of these canisters. Ultimately, I found little bits here, little bits there, and got a lot of footage that way. And then in the U.S., I had a great archivist who helped me, but most of the stuff people haven’t seen before, especially here.
Capone: The training footage in particular is unbelievable. I was thinking about Slava Fetisov: he’s probably talked about this for Russian films hundreds of times over the years. And he’s probably tired of re-living it. At the same time, you’re coming at him with some very specific questions that he probably hasn’t been asked before.
GP: Yeah, that’s exactly right. From the get-go, he was a bit defensive, like he was on the ice, because he felt, “What does this guy really know about Soviet Union and Russia?” I think that he saw that first of all I was prepared, that I was asking questions that he wasn’t used to being asked. I was a young guy, not that that matters. But maybe he felt like maybe he could push me around. Maybe I gave him a vibe or something. But he got comfortable and realized that I was trying to go much deeper and tell a more layered story and ask questions he wasn’t used to, and ultimately opened up more than he said he had ever really opened up to anybody about this story. I think he’s skeptical; he’s so used to talking about the Miracle, and he’s tired of it. And that’s really anyone really wanted to know before. If you look at films from the last 20 years, I don’t think you could find one film where the Russian is the good guy. Maybe STAR TREK.
Capone: It’s almost inconceivable that when the Iron Curtain fell that one of the first groups that benefited from that were Soviet hockey players.
GP: Because the Russians wanted to sell them like slaves. Those were assets. I’m sure they could have sold their military secrets, but that wouldn’t be too good. With these guys at least, they could profit, because at the time there was economic instability. But they also sold the older guys, not the younger guys right away. Some of them wanted to get the hell out of there. But Fetisov was a little different, where he just didn’t want to be sold like that. “Fuck that, I’m not going to be sold like a slave.” He just said, “I won’t go.”
Capone: It’s almost hard to believe that no one predicted that their style of play was going to clash with the American style completely.
GP: But for me, it was so predictable. Were they crazy? You take one guy, they play a completely different system, and they try and plug him in. What is he going to do? You can’t play this style of hockey with them. Everyone needs to be on the same page.
Capone: You have a little bit of it in the film, but it must have looked ridiculous when the game was actually being played.
GP: Or just sad. It’s like being forced. How do I describe it? If you know calculus, and you’re forced to do basic arithmetic, you’re just sitting there. You hear about these people who were doctors in the Soviet Union, and they come over and are taxi drivers in New York City. You’re forced to do something that is so beneath you.
Capone: Which makes that whole Detroit situation [in which the coaches pulled together some of the original Red Army players to play together and ended up winning two Stanley Cup championships] seem almost like a fantasy come true.
GP: I’m surprised it took so long for somebody to realize that the only way for it to work is for everybody to be together.
Capone: You have both Werner Herzog and Jerry Weintraub as executive producers on this, both people you have worked with or made films about [the Polsky brothers produced HIS WAY, an HBO documentary about legendary movie producer Weintraub]. Were they a part of the film from the beginning, or did they come in later?
GP: They were both later, and it’s not something that I planned from the beginning, but I did show them both the film, and they both really liked the film, both of them.These two guys were big sources of inspiration to me, because I had spent a lot of time with them and a lot of it rubbed off. Whether it was good, bad, or whatever, I learned a lot from them and respected them and felt that they provided me with advice when I needed it. They felt this film was an important film.
Werner, for instance, when he saw the film, his eyes lit up and was really excited and felt that there was something deep in this film, with the players and what they weren’t saying. And the hockey for him, even though he’s not a fan, was, as an artist inspiring to him, and there’s a weirdness to it. Jerry, he loves history, and I think he lived some of this Cold War stuff, too. He went over there a bunch of times for the Goodwill Games. He’s got his own stories about Soviet Russia. So he got really excited. It wasn’t always fun and games after I made the film. There was a lot of disappointment and a little bit of rejection, and they helped guide me a little bit and steered me right.
Capone: Rejection in terms of getting it distributed?
GP: Yeah, getting people behind it, into the right festivals. They gave me some good advice. What’s so interesting is, they’re two guys that are very similar, but yet completely different. One guy is the Hollywood guy, the other is the anti-Hollywood. But they both approach filmmaking as renegades, in a way. Jerry is in his own world, but he does things his own way, and doesn’t let anyone fuck with him, and Werner does things his own way. They’re totally opposite, but they’re also very singular minded and very driven and self sufficient and don’t rely on anybody.
Capone: And they also recognize and appreciate a great story.
GP: Yeah. It reflects what I’m trying to do, and my storytelling is trying to hit these different levels, trying to get at the mystery and the weirdness and the bizarre things, but also hit the universal too and entertain people. That’s what I want to do.
