Spike Lee Talks Diverse Influences Behind World Cup Video ‘The Game’

Lee and what he describes as an “NYU-sized” crew traveled to the favela of Vidigal, near Rio de Janeiro, to make the four-minute clip Pixote’s Game. The short film stars a young boy named Luis Eduardo Matos as a soccer-loving child who gets a soccer ball as a present that takes him all over town. Throughout the clip, the ball takes him from the hands of a favela bully to a beach with samba drummers to the inside of a football stadium.

Lee says he was inspired by two other movies when he came up with the concept: the 1981 Brazilian crime movie Pixote and the 1956 French fantasy short The Red Balloon. He calls the former his favorite film and says he was thrilled to learn recently that “pixote” translates to “peewee” from Portuguese; Lee’s Pixote’s Game is meant as an homage to actor Fernando Ramos da Silva, who played Pixote in the Hector Babenco–directed movie, and was killed by police at age 19. But it’s the latter that has more of an overarching influence on Pixote’s Game, since Albert Lamorisse’s film found a young boy seeing Paris while following around a red balloon. “I remember as a kid watching that movie in school, so instead of a red balloon,” Lee says, “our guy is chasing this soccer ball all throughout the favela of Vidigal and then the rest of Rio.”

Casting Matos was easy for Lee, who spotted the young actor at an open call in Vidigal. “He had a great face,” Lee says. “And he knew how to play soccer and he had done some acting.” After his mother said she would be there for every day of shooting – which jives with Lee’s teachings at NYU, where he tells his students to always cast parents along with young actors – Lee picked him right away. “He was having a great time during the whole shoot, but on the last day he was tired because we were running his little ass to death,” Lee says with a laugh. “The last day he was like, ugh, exhausted. But he gave it his all.”

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