Gresh & Fauria welcomed ‘The Dynasty’ director Matthew Hamachek to the show this morning on WEEI in Boston. The first two episodes of The Dynasty: New England Patriots will drop Friday, Feb. 16 on Apple TV+. In total, it will be a 10-episode series with two episodes dropping each Friday for five weeks.
Hamachek is a documentary filmmaker whose films have been nominated for two Academy Awards and won three Emmy Awards. Most notably to sports fans, he directed Tiger, the two-part documentary on the rise, fall, and epic comeback of Tiger Woods.
The hosts welcomed Hamachek and talked about how much they have enjoyed the series and mentioned how good some reviews have been. They asked him what he has thought about the initial response to early screenings.
“I think the thing that matters to me most is that people feel like we got the story right,” he said. “What I mean by that is not necessarily the fan base, although I am very interestd in that, it’s the people who were in the room and that’s the thing that I’m most interested to hear as this thing starts to come out.”
Hamachek said he was not a Patriots fan and really didn’t know much about the team when he started the project based off the New York Times bestselling book by the same name, written by Jeff Benedict. He thought not being a fan of the team was helpful and allowed him to sit back and “listen to what the people who were in the room…when they were making the decisions that led to the great successes, and also the people that were there in the rooms when this thing started to fall apart towards the end.”
As he familiarized himself with the characters of the story, Hamachek learned what a lot of football media and fans already knew in that the Patriots were not a very open group when it came to talking. He learned about some of the legendary Bill Belichick press conferences where answers beyond the mundane were tough to get. “Part of me wonders if one of the reasons we succeeeded here is that these guys never were able to get a lot of this stuff off their chest and here was an opportunity to finally do so,” Hamachek said.
He went on to talk about the difficulties of getting certain players to talk, including former Patriots kicker Adam Vinatieri. “It’s not that Adam didn’t want to go on,” he said. “I think [he] wanted to make sure that peple like Tom [Brady] and Bill [Belichick] and Robert [Kraft] were going to participate, but also that we were actually going to do this in an unvarnished way.”
Hamachek added, “I don’t think what the Patriots accomplished, to have two separate dynasties over 20 years, will ever be accomplished again…it was an honor for me to get to talk to these people who were there who made it happen. I think for everybody, whether you are a Patriots fan, whether you hate the Patriots or you couldn’t care less about football, it’s a fun thing to sit back and watch. You’ll learn a lot about people and how you create something, how you sustain it and then sometimes the messiness of being a human being with ego…that comes in and how that stuff can sometimes tear it all apart.”
