Director Thomas Carter breaks down 'Game'

• Carter worried that he had too much story for one film.
• The film is about a high-school football team that had a 151-game winning streak.
• In addition to films%2C Carter has directed such TV shows as %22Hill Street Blues.%22

Thomas Carter had a problem.

How do you tell the story of perfection? The director's latest film, "When the Game Stands Tall," involves the real-life De La Salle High School football team that won 151 consecutive games from 1992 through 2004. Perfection can become monotonous.

But Carter, whose credits include "Coach Carter" and "Save the Last Dance" as well as such television shows as "The White Shadow" and "Hill Street Blues," found a way. Every streak ends, after all, so his film — which opens Friday, Aug. 22 — looks at that end, and at starting over with a new class of kids at the Concord, Calif., Catholic school.

Carter talked about that recently, as well as how to shoot realistic football. And he answers a vexing question.

Question:Were you worried about avoiding making the story seem overdone?

Answer: I didn't have that particular worry, just because I knew the truth of the story, and I knew what they did and I thought it was amazing. It's hard to even fathom winning 151 games straight. You can't even wrap your head around it. Even when you watch the best teams, and they're playing games, something always goes wrong. You're at the end of the game and somebody misses a field goal, or someone got sick that day. Something happens. You get a bad call. How could something not go wrong in one of those 151 games, where they would not lose the game? I mean, just from a pure chance standpoint it's hard to imagine.

Q: What did worry you?

A: My biggest concern was we had so much story to tell and I wouldn't be able to do it well. I felt like we had great structural challenges. The movie was very ambitious with the kind of stories it wants to tell. You start with a strong focus on a couple of characters in the first act of the movie. Then the movie has to make this shift and sort of turn its focus to this other high-school class of characters. I knew that was going to be tough to manage, because the movie wasn't operating with the clear narrative drive from the beginning that most movies want to do. Yeah, I felt challenged by those kinds of things that we struggled with. I don't know if we ever solved them, but yeah.

Q: You seemed to figure it out.

A: For me it was ... finally getting to something very simple, which was that the class of 2004 was a class they knew hadn't fully bought into the program, felt a little bit entitled, didn't have strong leaders, wasn't quite as committed. They knew they were coming off this great team of guys who had won that last championship, and now they were faced with a team and a class that was very different. How were they going to get those guys to be a true De La Salle Spartan player and young man?

Q: There were other dramas, too.

A: I knew I was eventually going to be going to that, so everything else was in some way preparation to have the challenge of that class be something the coaches were striving for, and I as a filmmaker was trying to show the audience. It was aided and abetted in the story by the fact that it was a tremendously adverse year, in fact, in history. There had been a tragedy that befell one of the team members. There was a health-care scare for the coach piled on top of that. So there were those things combined. I knew what I was in for.

Q: How did you make the game footage realistic?

A: You have to do a number of things. We had a team of 47 guys who were all auditioned and handpicked to be on our squad of players that we used for the games. They were all very talented players, some of whom had played in college and couldn't go on, or were playing in leagues at a very high level. So they were all talented guys. We trained the actors, physically and football training, to be very good. They're not incredible football players, but they were playing at a physical level by the time the training was over that they could be inserted into the games and look real and feel physically true to the job they were asked to do.

Q: So you have to account for the camera in the middle of plays.

A: The camera's always involved in the choreography; whether you're shooting a dance movie or a sports film, the camera has to become a partner to the actor.

Q: You directed some of the best shows on television. Do you have a dog in the fight as to which is better, TV or film?

A: I don't really have a dog in the fight, but I am a big TV watcher. I watch less broadcast TV than I do cable TV, although I do watch some broadcast. I'm a big TV fan. I think TV is doing extraordinary work. If you look at a show like "Boardwalk Empire," just on a production value and directing point of view, it's phenomenal. I watch that show and go, "My God, this show looks better than 90 percent of the movies, and it's done on a level of quality better than so much stuff."

Q: So which is better?

A: I think television, on its highest level, with those number of shows we all respect, has outdistanced films in general. Certainly there are those films that come out and are extraordinary, but yes, I think in general it's outdistanced the quality of filmmaking right now.

Reach Goodykoontz at bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. Twitter: twitter.com/goodyk.