Director Taika Waititi wants soccer comedy Next Goal Wins to pass hope and happiness on

LOS ANGELES – The national football team of American Samoa, a tiny South Pacific island, were once thrashed 31-0 in a match – the worst defeat in international football history.

But the true story of that humiliating 2001 loss to Australia has inspired the underdog comedy Next Goal Wins, directed by Oscar winner Taika Waititi and starring Michael Fassbender as the coach hired to turn the team around.

In the movie, which opens in Singapore cinemas on Dec 7, the team recruit Thomas Rongen (Fassbender), a Dutch-American coach down on his luck, to help them redeem themselves in the 2014 World Cup qualifiers.

Speaking at the film’s recent Los Angeles premiere, Fassbender, 46, says he came to the project because of Waititi, the New Zealander film-maker who directed the superhero blockbuster Thor: Ragnarok (2017) and won a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for the war comedy Jojo Rabbit (2019).

“He introduced me to the story, and I checked out the documentary,” says the Irish actor, referring to the acclaimed 2014 documentary on which the movie is based.

“And it’s such a heart-warming story – a real story of human positivity,” adds the Oscar nominee for dramas 12 Years A Slave (2013) and Steve Jobs (2015).

But, although based on a real person, the character he plays is not meant to be a faithful biographical representation.

“He does exist in real life, but once we started developing the character on set, it started to take legs and go further away from the real Thomas Rongen to serve the story that we were telling.”

But making a comedy was a bit of a departure for Fassbender, who played Magneto in the X-Men superhero films from 2011 to 2016 and won praise for his dark turns in serious dramas such as Hunger (2008) and Shame (2011).

“I thought it would be a challenge because we were improvising and trying to be funny, but it was a lot of fun,” says the actor, who is married to 35-year-old Swedish actress Alicia Vikander and has a two-year-old son with her.

Waititi, 48, fell in love with the story after watching the documentary.

“I was so taken by it and impressed, and I ended up getting in touch with the directors and said I’d love to turn this into a film,” says the acclaimed writer-director-producer, whose breakout movie was the vampire comedy What We Do In The Shadows (2014), which he co-directed, co-wrote and starred in.

He admits, however, that none of the cast knew their way around a soccer pitch – but that worked out well.

“None of them are good. Because we come from New Zealand and we come from the islands and most people play rugby,” he says matter-of-factly.

“They were like, ‘Ooh, we should learn how to play soccer?’, and I said, ‘Don’t do that. The film is about the worst soccer team, so don’t learn.’”

And Waititi is no expert when it comes to the game himself.

“I played soccer when I was quite young and I don’t think I really understood the rules,” he says.

“But it wasn’t really about the sport or understanding the sport that was the reason I did the film.

“It was about the people and the relationships. And also wanting to show the world the Pacific Islands and our culture,” says Waititi, whose father is Maori and therefore has the same Polynesian heritage as American Samoans.

The message of Next Goal Wins, he says, is ultimately “about hope and not giving up”.

“In the last few years, we’ve been reminded a lot, especially in cinema, about how terrible the world is, and made to believe that humans are inherently bad,” says the Waititi, who is married to British pop singer Rita Ora, 33, and has two daughters aged 11 and seven from a previous marriage.

“But we’re not. Humans are a fantastic species, and this is about telling a story where nothing really bad happens and you can go out with some hope and feeling happy.”

Next Goal Wins opens in cinemas on Dec 7.