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Very few actors are able to turn their delicately powdered noses up at an easy payday, a movie they can just phone a performance in for that will buy them a nice little luxury.
Michael Caine famously called Jaws 4: The Revenge the film that built him a new house, and Tim Roth made something similar back in 2014, only it was about sharks of a different kind.
Quite what Roth thought would happen when he signed on to make a movie about the International Federation of Association Football, or FIFA for short, is anyone’s guess, after all we are talking about an organisation that has been absolutely mired in allegations of corruption for more than 20 years now – and this was a film that was 90 per cent funded by FIFA itself.
Not only that, but the part that Roth thought ‘yep this is fine’ to play was none other than Sepp Blatter, the Swiss former President of the association who, just a year after the film was released, would be banned from all activities relating to football due to an investigation into corruption that forced his resignation amidst reports of illegal payments.
Tarantino-favourite Roth at least had the decency to decry the film a couple of years later, although his reasons for getting involved in the project in the first place still don’t really stack up. He admitted to Yahoo: “United Passions was a crap movie that I did for money… But, it got my kids through college and it kept the roof over my head. It’s the right reasons, but the wrong movie.”
Quite aside from being derided by critics on release as being nothing more than propaganda, United Passions was also a huge box office bomb, losing almost $30m worldwide and making a pitiful $165k in ticket sales, which ironically is about what it costs to buy a ticket to a game at this summer’s World Cup. It actually did so badly that across ten major cities in the US over a three-day period, it brought in $918, making it the worst opening in cinema history.
Roth was far from alone in his culpability; however, the film also starred French legend Gerard Depardieu and Jurassic Park’s Sam Neill, who really should have known better, to say the least. The production of the film is genuinely a bizarre one, with a storyline that basically tracks the history of FIFA, including the beginnings of the corruption scandal, but with millions in funding that partially came, inexplicably, from the government of Azerbaijan in return for having some scenes filmed in the country.
Roth added: “Most actors, truly, never get to make a movie they’re proud of at all. We get to make a lot of movies we’re NOT proud of, but that would come pretty much top of my list.”
Perhaps Roth tried to make up for it by making Selma the same year, the film about Martin Luther King that was Academy nominated for ‘Best Picture’, although even then he played Alabama Governor George Wallace who famously worked against the integration of black students into US colleges, even standing on steps to block their way. Not a great year for Tim then all told.
