Roger Federer Radiates Glory in Prime Video Doc 'Twelve Final Days'

In men's tennis, like other sports, there is constant debate over which player qualifies as the greatest of all time. Djokovic with his unprecedented 24 Grand Slam victories? Nadal with his astonishing 14 French Open wins? Federer, the first man to win twenty Grand Slams? Or perhaps a player from an earlier era – Rod Laver – who won all four Grand Slam titles in a calendar year, not once but twice?

The GOAT debate in tennis will never be resolved. But there is broad consensus on one thing: no one has ever played the game with so much grace, so much beauty, with such an effortless shot and so economy of form as the man from Basel, Switzerland – Roger Federer. So it was with immense sadness but sincere appreciation that tennis fans greeted the news in 2022 that Federer, bowing to the times, would retire from the sport he had defined for more than two decades.

Federer: Twelve Final Days, documents the master's departure from the professional arena, a departure executed as elegantly as a Federer backhand. The film, directed by Oscar winner Asif Kapadia and Joe Sabia, premiered at Tribeca Festival on Monday evening. The film debuts next Thursday, June 20 on Prime Video.

“I had interviewed Roger for the series I work for Fashion called 73 questions. He's not blowing smoke – he was probably one of the best interviews I've had out of 90 interviews. It was on the Wimbledon court and it was really special,” Sabia explained in an interview with Deadline. “I think he thought it was such a special experience that he would be willing to let me go to Switzerland to film him – three years later – for his retirement.”

Sabia documented behind the scenes as Federer recorded a video sharing the news of his decision. The message went out via Instagram on September 15, 2022.

“As many of you know, the past three years have presented me with challenges in the form of injuries and surgeries,” Federer said in the video. “I have worked hard to get back to full competitive form. But I also know my body's capabilities and limits, and its message to me has been clear lately.”

The original idea was for Sabia to turn his material into a short documentary – one set long, so to speak (to use a tennis analogy). But if you're going to play one set, wouldn't three be even more exciting? That's where Kapadia came in.

“Joe shot it. Joe had cut something together. Then I got a message saying, 'Look, would you be interested in making a movie about Roger Federer? There's this edit.' So I came in much later,” says Kapadia. “The truth is, I'm at home doing laundry and looking at this [edit] and I say, 'I'm not sure this will be for me,' right? But… I'm really working on it, and I'm really moved by it. And I think that's what made me think, 'Okay, this really affected me in a way that I didn't expect.'

Kapadia says he probably realized in retrospect that the Federer project fit neatly into a kind of timeline of films he has made – about singer Amy Winehouse, racing driver Ayrton Senna and football great Diego Maradona.

“Amy was about a girl in her teens and twenties. Senna was a racer in his 20s and 30s, and he died in his 30s,” he notes. 'Roger's story was about someone who retired at the age of forty. And when I met Maradona, he was in his fifties. So somewhere there is this 'age of man', 'age of people' [theme].”

Stylistically, it is a departure from Kapadia's previous documentaries, which pioneered a new way of creating non-fiction stories: no on-camera interviews; every second covered by archive video. That approach has influenced many other documentary makers. But Federer: Twelve Final Days is shot much closer to the vérité style and features on-camera interviews with Federer, his family members, his contemporaries on the court and fellow legends of the game including John McEnroe and Björn Borg.

“Sometimes it's good to do something completely different,” Kapadia notes, acknowledging that there have been imitators of his style in the films Winehouse, Senna and Maradona. “[If] everyone does it, then you always have to switch and say, 'Well, I'm going to do something else.' And I thought that was interesting, the fact that it was very different from the previous work, but it's still about character. And most importantly, the film must be truthful to the character. And I think this is fair to Roger. This is really what he is like. He's a really good guy and he comes across that way. He is very giving, sharing and emotional.”

The “Twelve Final Days” of the title refers to the period between Federer's announcement that he would retire and the event that would mark his final competitive tournament, the Laver Cup in London. He chose to play doubles with his rival Rafael Nadal. It says something profound about Federer that when Nadal, who is four years his junior, entered the professional scene and began winning titles that Federer might otherwise have claimed, he did not reject or loathe the upstart. They became good friends. There are many tears shed in the film as Federer says goodbye, many of them by Nadal.

Now Nadal is nearing the end of his career, just like Andy Murray, the great Scottish professional and multiple Grand Slam winner. Time waits for no one, which is what makes the documentary so moving. Kapadia mentions a line spoken by another player in the film: “Athletes die twice,” that is, once when they retire, and once at the end of their lives. “It's a very powerful line, Joe, that you just caught in the hallway, but in a way probably my favorite line, when you realize, yeah, no one has really said it so succinctly. It really feels like death. You see that in the eyes of all the other rivals.”

“They ultimately see their deaths,” Sabia adds. “Roger even says this: Every time there's a screening, he says, 'It's like watching my funeral over and over again.' He strongly endorses this [idea] we speak of. But I think what's really compelling is that the audience gets the chance to imagine themselves in the shoes – not necessarily the idea of ​​being a top tennis player and losing that – but what identity do we all have so close to ourselves that if we were to imagine that disappearing tomorrow, what would we think about that?”

The most anyone could hope for is a legacy like Roger Federer's to look back on.