Hamish Hamilton has directed over a dozen Super Bowls, the opening ceremony to the 2012 Summer Olympics, six Emmy Awards ceremonies, four Oscars and three Grammy nights, among many more marquee events. None of those, he says, were quite as challenging as the first-ever FIFA World Cup Finals Halftime Show he directed on Sunday.
“A lot of that is because it was the first,” Hamilton, co-founder of the production company Done + Dusted, tells The Hollywood Reporter over Zoom from his New Jersey hotel room the morning after the World Cup, calling the show “challenging beyond challenging.”
“Along with the Olympics, this was right up there,” he says. “I’m sure the first Super Bowl Halftime show was incredibly difficult, but when I came in they’d already done over 40 of them. By the time you get to Super Bowl 47, the NFL’s got everything super well drilled. But in this kind of scenario, there are so many unanswered questions. There’s all the people who haven’t done it before, a huge amount of nervousness, we’re doing this in daylight, you’ve got the grass, you’ve got a huge collection of superstars. It’s absolutely terrifying because there are so many things can go wrong.”
Luckily for Hamilton and FIFA, they didn’t have any technical snags Sunday, and months of prep came and went in a quick-fleeting moment as Madonna, BTS, Justin Bieber, a Gustavo Dudamel-led orchestra, Shakira, Burna Boy, the PS22 Choir and the Muppets all hit the stage in an 11-minute time span. “It’s a mixture of exhaustion, relief and happiness,” Hamilton says of the show’s conclusion. “I’m very proud of what we did to help bring Chris [Martin, of Coldplay, who served as curator] and Global Citizens’ vision to life. They had this dream four years ago. It’s an enormous undertaking and they should be applauded for what they did.”
