Netflix
Jake Rogal: I work at a company called Words and Pictures, and Connor Schell is the CEO of the company. So this thing had already been in the process when I joined the company. And I met with Connor pretty early on, and he said, “Hey there’s this doc potentially behind the scenes at the Olympics with some basketball teams. We don’t quite know who it is yet, but are you interested?” I said of course, sounds awesome.
So then it was so what teams, the USA, no brainer, because they’re the team everyone’s trying to beat, all the superstars. France lost to the U.S. in the gold medal game in Tokyo; they’re the home country. They have Wemby; that’s pretty much a no-brainer. Canada has pretty much the most NBA players besides the U.S. on the team. They have Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, one of the best players in the NBA. They can be compelling. They also don’t have a lot of Olympic experience so that was a decision in their favor.
And then, the last team we waited a while because we weren’t sure who we wanted to go with. Greece was floated out there because of Giannis [Antetokounmpo]. But we really wanted to think of who could really go far in the tournament, and Serbia had finished second at the World Cup. They have [Nikola] Jokic, obviously, a global superstar, and they have an amazing country history. Germany was floated out there because they won the World Cup, but ultimately, the history of Serbia basketball put them over the top. So, they were the fourth team.
Then it was a matter of getting all the parties involved, which was FIBA, and the Olympics, USA Basketball. Make sure everyone’s on the same page. So that actually went up all the way to right before we shot, which was the spring of 2024. We started shooting in June, so it was really last minute, but a lot of the legwork and getting the product off the ground was done before I entered the picture, but I watched all the hard work that went into it and saw all the parties come together, which was definitely challenging.
