‘Tiger’ Directors on Doc’s Opening Scene That Almost Didn’t

Hollywood loves character-driven tales with a meteoric rise, a dramatic fall and the final word redemption. Tinsel Town goes to like HBO’s Tiger Woods documentary, and so will viewers — and it’s solely going to take two minutes to hook you.

“Tiger,” from administrators Matthew Heineman and Matt Hamachek, has a superb opening scene, which viewers will see Sunday from 9 p.m. ET to about 9:02 p.m. ET. The chilly open combines never-before-seen footage from Eldrick “Tiger” Woods’ dad, Earl, talking glowingly about his boy on the Haskins Collegiate Awards Banquet with a childhood Tiger ensuring “daddy” simply noticed his sensible iron shot from the green. Earl’s audio continues over a signature Woods win at The Masters, after which finally, laid on high of police-station footage from Tiger’s 2017 DUI arrest.

Yeah, it’s been a wild 45 years.

Heineman and Hamachek informed TheWrap they first examine Earl Woods’ proud-papa Haskins speech in Gary Smith’s 1996 Sports Illustrated article, “The Chosen One.”

“Both of us had read that and sort of thought that, well this would be a fascinating way to start the film because I think introducing our film through Earl’s words was always going to be fascinating,” Hamachek mentioned. “The problem was that, while Gary had written about it and several people had sort of taken what Gary said and wrote it and used it and regurgitated it, nobody had ever seen the actual footage or heard Earl’s words before. This was really just sort of cocktail napkin scribblings of a journalist who was there.”

A month into making their film, the Matts reached out to the Haskins group.

“One of the things that is so fascinating about Tiger and these people in his life and the people that have access to his footage, they’re all very, very protective of him. And I think that one of the things we had to do with Haskins, in terms of getting access to their archive, was to convince them that we were making a very complex sort of nuanced portrait of him, that it wasn’t going to be salacious and it wasn’t going to be a puff piece on Tiger,” Hamachek continued. “And once they understood that we were doing that, probably after eight, nine months of talking to them back and forth, they finally agreed very close to the end of our filmmaking process to let us have the footage. And once we did, it was clear that this was going to be the beginning of the film.”

If you’re questioning, Heineman says they reached out to Woods to request his participation in “Tiger” even sooner than that — on “almost on Day 1” — after which once more later within the course of. Both instances they had been informed by Woods’ camp that “due to a preexisting relationship” he was not in a position to participate of their undertaking, Heineman mentioned.

Woods has a TV cope with The Golf Channel. That is both a legit or handy (well mannered) excuse.

Woods’ ex-wife, Elin Nordegren, additionally declined to be interviewed for the documentary. Knowing the subject material, Heineman and Hamachek had been by no means going to get both of them.

Instead, HBO’s two-part “Tiger” doc is pushed (that’s a golf pun, get it?) by never-before-seen footage and revealing interviews with those that had been as soon as shut with Woods, together with his former caddy and shut pal Steve Williams; Earl Woods’ pal and biographer, Pete McDaniel; Tiger’s old flame, Dina Parr; and Rachel Uchitel, the girl on the heart of the intercourse scandal that without end altered Woods’ world.

“Tiger,” which hails from HBO Sports and Jigsaw Productions in affiliation with Our Time Projects, boasts Uchitel’s first-ever sit-down interview about her relationship with Woods. Alex Gibney govt produced “Tiger” alongside Sam Pollard, Stacey Offman, Richard Perello, Armen Keteyian and Jeff Benedict.

“Tiger” premieres Jan. 10 on HBO and concludes with Part II on Jan. 17. Both…