This Was the XFL Director Talks Relationship With Vince McMahon

– Charlie Ebersol spoke with the Two Man Power Trip of Wrestling podcast about his ESPN 30 For 30 documentary This Was The XFL. The audio and highlights are below:

On Vince McMahon: “I’ve known Vince since I was four years old and we go years without seeing each other and I’ll figure out a way to get over to Stamford or get to a RAW so I can hang out with him a little bit but it is a very different experience interviewing him. The challenge with an interview is that you have to press him so he’ll go to the places you want him to go and I’ve never been in a position where I’ve been pressing my father or Vince McMahon very much at all. It was a very nerve-wracking day. I interviewed my father and the very next day did Vince and that night we did the dinner, so in 48 hours I did both of them and the dinner and it was an extraordinarily anxiety filled day but here is the thing about Vince. He is brutally honest and he’s not really afraid to talk about anything. On some level I felt a certain degree of responsibility to maintain a level of decorum in asking the questions and not going off on tangents because God knows there was about 800,000 things I wanted to ask him about. But I wanted to make a film about a specific thing, so I got through my questions I was asking him and had an additional fifth-teen others since we had a little bit more time.”

On why he made a documentary about the XFL: “ESPN and I had been talking for years about how to do a documentary about my Dad or something around sports given what I had grown up around with my father running NBC Sports and when they came to me and said what about the XFL? I jumped at it for two reasons. One, I desperately wanted to make a film about my father and Vince McMahon’s relationship because I knew no one else could or would and two is the XFL is the only time I really saw my Dad and Vince for that matter really fail. I thought that they were so incredible in the face of sort of all the adversity around the XFL and also how their relationship survived what was a very public failure. It was great fodder for a film and I really, really wanted to show a different side of Vince. I am exhausted fighting people who have sort of the wrong impression about him and I thought a film would be a great opportunity to bring it to life.”