Don Handfield, director of the inspirational movie ‘Touchback’, about a man who looks back at his life and to the injury that ended his dreams of becoming a promising high-school football player, talks about the movie in the production notes.

“As a director, I find three feeling words to describe the world of the film, words that then serve as a clear way for me to communicate my vision to the people around me. For ‘Touchback’ the words were authentic, beautiful and worn. These words guide the choices made on the film from the very first day of pre-production.

“I saw twenty or thirty choices for Murphy’s truck, none of which were all of these words. The hero truck for old Murphy was finally found on a location scout, when I saw it as we drove by. The truck was rusted to beauty with red tape over one of the tail pipes. I first used it as an example, and when a similar truck couldn’t be found, sent the production knocking on the door to ask about it. When the family that owned it refused to sell it because they loved it so much, I knew we had the right vehicle.

“Because of the level of authenticity we wanted to achieve it was important to shoot this film on location in the Midwest. We also never shot on a stage.

“Some of our key locations – like the factory – were shot as is, right down to the grease on the keyboards of the 1980s computers inside it.

“A majority of the locations weren’t ready to go, or needed to be adapted for the period aspect of 1991, and my Production Designer, Roshelle Berliner, and her team did an incredible job making the many locations we did have to dress seem as authentic as the ones we didn’t.

“Morgan Gillio came on and did a masterful job with props, and I can’t say enough about our makeup artist, Barney Burman. He won an Academy Award for ‘Star Trek’ just after our first fall splinter shoot, and thankfully stayed with us for principal photography in the spring. His work on the age makeup of the character helped create the reality of the time travel aspect of the film.

“As far as the style of cinematography, I am not a big fan of hand held. It has a time and place, but I think it’s overused. I wanted the frames and the style of the film to evoke some of the classic films of t the last few decades. ‘Deer Hunter’ and ‘Days of Heaven’ were visual inspirations for the look and feel of the film.

“Football action was always a big part of Touchback, and it was something that was always foremost in my mind to try and capture in the best way possible. A lot of sports scenes captured for film come off feeling flat, forced. I spent years trying to figure out how to address this, so when the opportunity came, ‘Touchback’ wouldn’t have those shortcomings if possible.

“The first thing we did was a splinter shoot of a real high school football game in the fall of 2009, before we had cast, prepped, or done anything. It was an opportunity to capture real Midwest football action at relatively little cost. We found two real high school football teams in rural Ohio, and I had several DPs come out to shoot the game, including a crew from NFL films.

This allowed us to get many pieces of the game – real action pieces – and some set piece shots (like the Pinto on the bluff) – that would have been impossible on our budget and inordinately expensive for any production – but were inexpensive because we were just, for the most part, capturing reality. These uniforms the real high school teams played in then became the battle uniforms (and numbers!) for our fictional David vs. Goliath.

“The second thing that helped our football sequences was getting lucky. When this project was set up at a studio several years ago (with a different director and a much larger budget) – it landed in the hands of Mark Ellis, one of the best sports coordinators in the business. He did the football for ‘Varsity Blues’, ‘Invincible’, ‘We Are Marshall’ and many other blockbuster sports films.

When the film was greenlit again, years later, with an indie budget, he actually reached out to us because he had fallen in love with the script and wanted to be a part of the movie. I can’t speak highly enough about Mark and what he brought to the table as part of the filmmaking team. He made the football scenes we recreated better than reality.

“The third thing we did was cast lead actors who could really play football. Brian Presley was actually a state championship quarterback in high school and even played the position for a spell in college at Arkansas. Chris Hall, the star receiver, was played by Mark Blucas, a former Division I basketball player for Wake Forest and a high school football star in his own right.

Now we had a team of actors who could pitch and catch like the real thing. In fact, Mark Ellis talked about having to do something he called a “Texas Switch” which is so common in sports movies – actor drops back, camera pans away as stuntman throws ball to another stuntman who catches ball and dives to the ground out of frame as actor stands up like he just caught the ball. We didn’t have to do that on ‘Touchback’. Because Brian could really throw bombs and Mark Blucas could really catch them. Most of the time.

“I wanted ‘Touchback’ to feel and sound like a timeless love story. For that, I knew most of the movie should be classical score, orchestrated and played by live musicians. I went through many possible composers and ultimately settled on William Ross. His music was always so emotional, and he was one of the few composers that had the breadth of range needed to be able to cover the wide range of musical styles needed for ‘Touchback’. The action pieces for the football game, the love themes, the darker moments, Bill can do it all and has been a joy to work with.”

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Former high school football star turned farmer and family man, Scott Murphy (Brian Presley) finds himself with a unique opportunity to revisit his glory days during the state championship game where he permanently injured his knee in a game-winning play. Given a second shot at his destiny, Scott seeks counsel from Coach Hand (Kurt Russell), Scott’s longtime mentor on and off the field, to help him decide whether to let his fate unfold, or follow a path that will change his future.

Written and Directed by Don Handfield, ‘Touchback’ also stars Melanie Lynskey (‘Win Win’, CBS’ “Two and a Half Men”), Mark Blucas (‘Knight and Day’) and Christine Lahti (‘Obsessed’, NBC’s “Law and Order: SVU”). Handfield gives his statement about the inspirational movie, released in April of this year.

“‘Touchback’ is a film about what it takes to choose your life exactly how it is, instead of regretting it because it’s not what you’d hoped it would be. The first draft of this script was written over a decade ago. It went through many revisions, but the spirit and themes and characters have, for the most part, remained intact.

“‘Touchback’ had many false starts and almost got made many times over the years, with several different studios with different directors at the helm, but for whatever reason it just kept coming back to me. It was always my dream to direct it, so I think a part of me was always a little relieved every time it fell apart and came back to me. Ultimately, it paid off when the current incarnation of ‘Touchback’ came together.”

“I was always moved by Capra’s classic film ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’. But while that film served as a broad source of cinematic inspiration, most of the emotional themes and events more specific to Touchback were influenced by personal events.

“The initial spark for the setting and events of behind Touchback came from several real life experiences that mirrored the experience of Scott Murphy in some ways – except the time travel. These include blowing out my knee as a high school wrestler, working on my Uncle’s dairy farm, and the collapse of my first marriage in my early twenties.

“In high school I was captain of my wrestling team, but during my senior year, my undefeated season came to an early end when I blew out my knee in practice. From the sidelines, I watched a wrestler from another school I had beaten during the season go on to win the district, the region and place 2nd in the state tournament. I always wondered ‘what if’ I hadn’t been hurt, and having another player’s success as an odd benchmark certainly made the feeling of regret and wonder more poignant. This served as the kernel of inspiration for the character of Murphy, and Hall as the benchmark of his ‘what could have been’ success.

“Another big factor in the development of this story was the summers I spent working on my Uncle’s dairy farm in a very small community in Connecticut as a boy. I experienced the world of ‘Touchback’ firsthand – the hard-working farm life, the tight-knit communities where everybody knows everybody (and their business) and the all-volunteer fire departments. The pace, the sense of community, the self-sufficiency, and underneath it all the nobility of the people who lived there spoke to me and it was my hope to both pay homage to the people and places like it.

“When I wrote the first draft of ‘Touchback’ many years ago, I was going through a divorce. My parents were divorced when I was small so I saw this as a colossal failure on my part and it made me question what it took to make it work despite the slings and arrows life threw your way. I believe we write about what we don’t fully understand – or the things we don’t have and we long for in our life. For me it was both a solid relationship and marriage, and a sense of family and community support from those around me.

“‘Touchback’ is a film about what it takes to choose your life exactly how it is, instead of regretting it for how you’d hoped it would be.

“In short, it’s about choice. The choice we make every day on how we view our life. Change your view – or your attitude – and you quite literally change your life.

“Modern films are often structured using Kubler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grieving – Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and finally, Acceptance – with the latter being the final emotion of the film – embodied by the main character’s acceptance of whatever he was in denial of in the first act.

“The problem with this emotional structure is that it was created as a model for dying, not for living. Acceptance has a bit of ‘settling’ or resignation to it, which is very different from choosing something, exactly how it is, warts and all; in other words, not choosing a situation despite its flaws, but because of them. That’s transformational. That’s magical. That’s the “Philosopher’s Stone” and that’s the power I believe we all have inside us as human beings.

“I always use the pound puppy analogy to try to explain choice versus acceptance. If you were picking a dog and went to the pound, you don’t accept the dog with half an ear and a stubby tail, you choose him because you like him the best. Because those flaws gave him the heart and soul and character that make him who he is.

“In a way, we need to choose our partners because of their flaws, not in spite of them. The flaws, the little imperfections, are what make people special. The same goes with relationships. And people. And towns. And our own pasts.

“I’ve often found in my own life that something I thought was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me often turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me because of the transformation it caused in my heart. That is certainly the case with Scott Murphy, and something I hope people take out of the theater on the way home.”

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