The Dynasty Director Discusses the New England Patriots’ Controversies and Drama

Summary

• Hamachek and team expertly combine interviews and archival footage to create a compelling sports docuseries on the New England Patriots dynasty.
• The series sheds light on the human drama behind the iconic NFL team, presenting a complex and contextually rich portrait of their rise as an ‘evil empire.’
• From incredible footage to surprising revelations about the Patriots’ controversies,
  The Dynasty
  offers a fascinating look at the team’s journey from underdogs to perceived villains.

Author Jeff Benedict and filmmaker Matt Hamachek have a special artistic relationship. Benedict co-authored (with Armen Keteyian) the premiere biography of Tiger Woods, and Hamachek (with Matthew Heineman) brought it to vivid life in the two-part documentaryTiger. In 2020, Benedict released arguably the most well-researched and authoritative account of the New England Patriots dynasty which spanned the first two decades of our young century, The Dynasty. It was a time when quarterback Tom Brady, coach Bill Belichik, and owner Robert Kraft dominated the NFL and sports media.

Again, Hamachek has delivered a visual counterpart to Benedict’s work, combining its narratives, access, and research with treasure troves of archival footage and a bevy of confessional interviews to create a masterful sports docuseries. The Dynasty: New England Patriots is the kind of sports documentary that fans (of football, of sport, of human drama itself) clamor for but rarely get to see. In a word, it’s authoritative, presenting a complicated and contextually rich portrait of selfless underdogs who became an ‘evil empire’ in the sport. It’s as knowledgeable as it is suspenseful, and transcends the confines of sports to become an operatic epic of human competition.

Hamachek spoke with MovieWeb about making the 10-part Apple TV+ docuseries.

A Patriots Documentary from an Outside Perspective

“I was working on a two-part series about the golfer Tiger Woods,” explained Hamachek, “and that was taking place in 2019, 2020, and a little bit in ’21. Towards the end of that, Jeff Benedict, who wrote the book that inspired the Tiger documentary, reached out and said, ‘Hey, I’m about to finish this thing about the New England Patriots. So would you be interested in coming in and turning that into a series as well?'”

It’s interesting. I wasn’t a Patriots fan growing up, I had my own team. And in some ways, maybe people would say that that gave me a disadvantage, but I think it’s the opposite, because I didn’t come in with a preconceived notion at all about what the story was supposed to be or how it’s supposed to be told.

“With Tiger, we didn’t have a lot of the people that were there. In this one, we’re gonna be able to sort of have Tom Brady and Bill Belichick and Robert Kraft, if we were lucky enough. The process is the same, though,” continued Hamachek. “What I mean by that is you have to build up trust with people, and you have to go to them and say, ‘This is the kind of story that I want to tell. And this is how people will be portrayed.’ And some of them said yes immediately, and some of them, you know, it took them time to really talk to me and feel like they could trust me to tell the story the right way.” He went on:

“And that happened over a two-plus year journey of just building up trust and eventually getting everybody in the chair and asking them all sorts of questions, the good, the bad, the in between. And also going through 35 thousand hours of archival footage, a lot of which had never been seen before. So that was an incredible experience, to really listen to them and go through that stuff and pair those two things together, and tell a story that, yes, is about football, but is really about the humans that are part of this story and how they bounce off each other.”

The aforementioned 35 thousand hours of archival footage is masterfully edited together with the interviews to create dramatic stories about the players, big games, major injuries, internal dramas, and everything else. Some of that footage is incredibly candid (inside the locker room during intense moments, for instance), and a lot of it captures some of the greatest games in NFL history (such as the infamous Tuck Rule game in the snow). Much of it looks remarkably crisp considering it’s from decades ago. How did they get and navigate all that footage for The Dynasty?

“It was a combination of both working with NFL Films, who has an incredible archive on their own, some of which, up until like 2013 or 2014, was shot on 16mm and obviously looks beautiful. But then also,” said Hamachek, “the Patriots have a huge archive of tens of thousands of hours in there as well, and a lot of it had been digitized, but they were also going through the process of getting things digitized right as we were making this. We would start to get like batches of things, and people start combing through it, and we’d find just these incredible gems.”

Basically, that would allow us to be in the locker room right after Tom Brady was injured and was going to be out for the season. And we get to look at Matt Cassel’s eyes as he realizes that this team and the hopes of everybody in New England and fans across the world are now on his shoulders to try to get them back in the Super Bowl.

“We had an incredible archival producer, Matt Fisher, who managed all of that,” added Hamachek, “and that paired with all these great interviews really made for some compelling storytelling.”

Spygate: When a Secretive Team Opens Up, Everything Is a Surprise

There are myriad presuppositions that come with investigating the New England Patriots, but as football researcher Ernie Adams says in The Dynasty, “If you’re not in the building, you don’t really know.”

“I told you I was not really a fan of the Patriots growing up, so I really didn’t know that much,” explained Hamachek. “But the little that I did know was that this is a team that always kept people at arm’s length. The thing that you normally saw from the Patriots was Bill Belichick at the lectern saying, ‘We’re on to Cincinnati’ whenever he was asked any kind of a question, something like that, right? And so they never really felt like they were letting you in.”

“And so the combination of not being a fan and the way that I had sort of seen them meant that even something like Spygate — which was a story that non-Patriot fans obviously paid attention to — was a surprise. When you get in there, and you start to ask the people who were actually there how it was, everything is a surprise. Because we’d asked one question to one person, and then you realize that the headline was just the tip of the iceberg.”

“And then you get in there, and you find the archival footage of Bill talking to the team right after the thing had broken,” continued Hamachek. “And it was really interesting to actually just watch the expression on the face of these people while they’re going through this.” He added:

And even more fun and interesting to me and a lot of the people on this, was that they go from being in the depths of those scandals to going on this incredible undefeated season. We had an editor on the project describe it as if you got to be on the Death Star with the evil empire as they go from sort of planet to planet destroying everybody in their path, but instead of the sort of
solemn Darth Vader-like energy
, they’re having this incredible party while they’re doing it.

Related: 10 Sports Movies That Were About More Than the Game

“And just when you think they’re going to accomplish the most incredible sort of sports feat in history of going undefeated and winning the Super Bowl, they face this incredibly humbling moment, and you get to listen to the people talk about it. Somebody says you can hear the sounds of people sobbing and throwing up in the locker room afterward,” said Hamachek. “And so there’s all these details in that one little story of Spygate, which I think everybody thinks they know so well, but to be able to see it unfold and to hear it from the people that were actually there — there’s so many new details and ways of telling that story that were different, and that’s just one of the 10 episodes.”

From Underdogs in New England to Villains Everywhere

“I think we were able to really talk to the people that were there, not only within the organization, but also to the rivals who they played against,” explained Hamachek. “Michael Strahan said to me — we interviewed him about the Super Bowl in 2007 against the Giants — and he started to reference a line from one of the Nolan Batman movies, ‘you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.’ And he talks about that in the context of that’s how the country saw them. And so, I don’t think that impedes you from telling the story. I think that’s part of it.”

“Then bouncing that off of the fact that you’re actually getting to be with those people that have this perception thrown on them and that juxtaposition of those two things is endlessly fascinating,” added Hamachek. “Because for that entire episode, you’re with them on that ride, and probably at moments, if you’re a non-Patriot fan, thinking, ‘Why am I having so much fun with these guys that I thought I didn’t like so much?'”

And then all of a sudden, you get to sort of reverse and go on to the side of the Giants and see it from their perspective and realize that they’re the ones that are actually the underdogs in this story, and the roles have completely reversed. The people that you started off watching as David, those guys become Goliath, and now they’re going up against the next David.

“In that episode in particular, there’s all these incredible [references] to God and the devil and all these bigger conversations. That’s why I wanted to use a Verdi opera piece that is actually about judgment day and the end of the world, and I felt like having listened to all of these stories, that was the perfect sort of ending song for this entire story of Spygate and that season, because it felt like these grand forces were at play.”

The End of a Dynasty: How the Machine Unravels

People have been rooting for the Patriots’ downfall for 20 years, from Spygate to time clock trickery, alleged headset tampering, and, of course, Deflategate. Each controversy was, in retrospect, relatively petty and minor, and yet there was so much vitriolic contempt towards the often unbeatable Patriots that people would latch onto even the smallest of scandals and turn them into massive media campaigns.

“I’ll never forget watching a morning show, some archival footage we had found,” began Hamachek, “and the morning show led with a clip about Deflategate that was the first story and then a few stories later, the broadcaster said something like, ‘And now on to the story of ISIS and what’s unfolding in the Middle East.’ And when I saw that, I thought, well, this is exactly the thing we need to show the audience when we present this story, because it felt like this thing had consumed the country.”

The lead story is whether somebody took a little air out of a football. Whether they did it or not, almost, it’s totally irrelevant. And then the third or fourth story is something like ISIS, which is vastly more important. So I think we have an interesting relationship with winning in this country, and that’s one of the things that we wanted to talk about in the Deflategate episode.

Related: The Dynasty: New England Patriots Review | A Masterpiece of Sport Documentaries

And yet, the New England dynasty ended not with a bang, but with a whimper. First, Tom Brady left (later winning yet another Super Bowl, this time for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, before retiring). The team was gutted over the years, with most of the great Patriots during the dynasty years (Gronkowski, Edelman, Wilford, Gastkowski, etc.) having gone elsewhere. On January 11th, coach Belichik left the Patriots as well. We wondered if that announcement surprised Hamachek, or if there is anything he’d like to ask coach Belichik now

“Definitely no questions that I want to ask now that I wasn’t able to. I feel like we got everything in with pretty much everybody we interviewed honestly,” began Hamachek. “I was certainly surprised by the news. But I also think that when people watch this, they will see the breadcrumbs of why everybody left, from Tom and Bill, and they will understand sort of why this thing unraveled in the end, despite them sustaining that thing that started this whole story, which was a group of people coming together and being incredibly selfless and focusing on team first and winning.

And I think that whether or not you’re a Patriots fan who knows everything about the team and has watched all of
Three Games to Glory
and other things that have come out over the years, or even if you’re a person who couldn’t care less about football, I think it’ll be fascinating to watch this story and watch how this machine unraveled in the end.

The Dynasty: New England Patriots​ premiered on Apple TV+ with two episodes on Feb. 16, 2024, followed by two more episodes on Feb. 23 and each week after. You can watch it through the link below:

Watch on Apple TV