Billy Crystal looks back on the making of '61*'

Billy Crystal, the director of 61*, looks back at the making of the film twenty years later.

Video Transcript

- Holy cow.

ETHAN ALTER: 61 was released, 20 years ago, this April, and that's, I'm sure, a very personal movie for you as a baseball fan being able to tell that story.

BILLY CRYSTAL: Yes, and to recreate one of the great summers of my life. I was 13, a huge Mickey Mantle fan, and Roger, and the Yankees, and that ballpark. That ballpark to me was just this-- the original Yankee Stadium, 72,000 seats, the history of it. And I got to know Mickey very well, and we became very good friends.

So he told me all of these stories over the years about he and Roger living together, and so on, and so forth. So when HBO came to me with the script, they just wanted me to produce it. I said, well, let me work on a script a little bit, because this isn't right. We could make this better, and they brought in their young writer who became a television giant named Hank Steinberg.

And it was his first script, and we worked on it. And I put in all of these things that Mickey had told me. So it became not just a baseball movie, but it became a story of these two men, who were teammates, who became rivals, who became friends.

So I just I loved directing that movie, and we were able to take abandoned, old Tiger Stadium in Detroit and turn it into the Yankee Stadium that I loved going to as a kid. And Tom Jane and Barry Pepper were just extraordinary, recreating those two icons. It really was a special time.

ETHAN ALTER: Well, one of the things I like so much about is I feel like, as much as it draws on your own memories, I'm sure you also dig beneath the hero [? worship, ?] and you really get into who these guys were. And some of their system their aspects weren't maybe as savory to the public.

BILLY CRYSTAL: Yeah, well, that was the important part of it, because it was not-- as I said, it was not just a baseball movie. It's a character study of these two guys. I mean, Roger Maris was, like, 24 years old at the time, 25 years old, you know? And Mickey was a little bit older, and it was really this-- it was the summer that they, finally, fell in love with Mantle, you know?

They had mixed feelings about about Mickey, because he wasn't DiMaggio. You know, he inherited Joe DiMaggio as center field when he was just a kid and not ready for the intensity. With all of this super talent that he had, there was a lot of injuries, you know, things like that.

So that was the summer that they totally fell in love with this guy. A lot of it, because they didn't want it to be Roger. It was it should have been Mantle to a lot of these people, and they, finally, recognized-- I think he was 30. --how great and awesome a player Mickey was. So there was a lot of things to mix into the script, and it says something about America. You know, we said on the poster, why did America only have room in his heart for one hero? You know, I think with what's going on politically today, it's really interesting to see about even division on sports heroes.

ETHAN ALTER: As a baseball fan, we often hear directing baseball movies can get boring, because directing that action over and over, again, can be frustrating. Did you have that experience?

BILLY CRYSTAL: I loved every second of it, you know, being a pretty good baseball player myself at the time, and I loved getting it right. Again, this beautiful stadium, which was, at the time, along with Fenway and Wrigley, the oldest stadiums in baseball. Getting these guys out there in these vintage uniforms, and we cast it really well. So everybody really looked like who they were playing. And when I would see the numbers of the players that I idolized as a kid, 32, Elston Howard, and Anthony Michael Hall as Whitey Ford was 16, and Yogi, number eight, and seven, and nine, and on, and on, and on.

Every day was a gift to me, and I worked with one of the greatest directors of photography in the history of movies, Haskell Wexler, who was in his late 70s then. A two time Oscar winner who just wanted to do the movie, because he loved the story. He said, use what you're going to pay me to make the movie. He was just a genius to work with. God, I miss being able to go to a game.