The Bizarre Reason Why Michael Jordan Hardly Appears In Air Finally Revealed
Ben Affleck's movie Air has just been released and it already generates Oscars buzz, being a whole year away from the awards season.
While the critics and audiences share their love for the movie, it offers at least one peculiar detail that only now has been properly explained.
Why does Michael Jordan barely appear in the movie?
Despite the fact that his essence is definitely present throughout the entire movie, the man himself is basically hardly ever seen physically.
The film, directed by Ben Affleck, has made quite a risky decision. The movie follows the story of the Nike executives who were behind the creation of the Air Jordan snickers line.
In Jordan's brief appearances, we see the body double's back at almost all times, or just his profile, but we never see his face.
The director of Air reflected on this controversial decision talking with The Hollywood Reporter recently, where he explained why viewers would not really get to see Michael Jordan in his movie.
"Jordan is too big," simply says Affleck on the issue. The whole idea was to have Jordan "above and around the story."
According to him, the decision was made just to give the movie the essence of what huge personality Jordan is, without having his actual visual embodiment.
The vibe and the feeling the audiences had of Jordan while watching the movie made the difference, and if the viewers "projected it onto the movie, it worked better," explains Affleck his decision in more detail.
This way, the story could explore other secondary, but nevertheless fundamental, characters in the athlete's life.
For instance, his mother, Deloris Jordan, played by the one and only Viola Davis (who was invited to the movie after Jordan has explicitly asked for her to portray his mother), or Howard White, who also appeared at a late stage of writing, after Jordan talked about the relevance of this Nike executive in his story.
Having the movie revolve around basically its staple character without ever showing him, is not something that is done frequently.
This kind of a very risqué creative decision is really one that can either sink, or elevate the movie at large. As the audiences and critics have seen, it definitely did the latter.