THE CHAT

Director Michael Hoffman ("One Fine Day," "Soapdish") first saw the Don DeLillo-written screenplay for "Game 6" in 1997. The movie, starring Michael Keaton as a failure-obsessed playwright and Red Sox fan who suffers through Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, was finally filmed last summer and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Saturday.

Kind of a tough year to make a movie about the Red Sox and failure.

Well, I don't know. I think Red Sox fans are probably very nostalgic about that, about losing. It may be an easier year in some ways. I sort of side with the people who say that Red Sox fans are going to go through a bit of an identity crisis. Once they're not losers any more, what are they? Are they just another middle-of-the-pack team? There was a romance to all that, quite obviously, and now they have to redefine themselves. . . . Baseball was religion when I was little, St. Louis Cardinals baseball. In a way it forms your life as a storyteller, as a filmmaker. There's all sorts of fundamental, basic, metaphorical things in sports that are the same things you use in drama. . . . [Game 6 of the 1986 series] is truly Shakespearean. There's a remarkable sense of fate and tragedy. It's like watching Birnam Wood approach Macbeth castle.

When you were filming, did you think about what would happen if the Sox won the Series?

Well we did, and we actually went down to a big Red Sox bar in the Village for two nights and interviewed people and talked about their experiences and sat and watched the games with them. We were really right at the end of the post-production process during the Series. The truth is, the biggest worry for me had to do with the fact that it was the Cardinals. It had been a bit of a drought for me as well. I just couldn't believe the Cardinals didn't show up. All those big bats. But yeah, there was a lot of talk, do we need to be covered in case they win, do we need to be covered in case they lose? For DeLillo, he would have been happier if they lost in 1986, and they lost again in 2004. But I don't know how much of a difference it makes; their identity is what their identity is, and I'd be surprised if this one event completely changes that.

So you weren't rooting for the Sox to make some sort of spectacular World Series collapse?

I was, but I don't know if I can divorce that from being a Cardinals fan. I just wanted the Cardinals to do something.

DeLillo was more on the side of. . . .

DeLillo has a kind of tragic view of the world on some level, a very ironic view. If you read any of his novels, I don't think you'd be struck by the happy endings. That's not the way he sees things.

Did you have to change things around at all after they won?

I didn't change one thing. This movie is kind of a parable about dealing with failure; it isn't really about the game. . . . I suppose the most interesting thing to deal with is the fact that in '97, '98 I was back in Boise working on this movie, and we were also building a house. And I went to this masonry center, and we were picking up tile, and when we left I got my house plans and walked out of the store and went back to my car and realized they weren't my plans, they were Bill Buckner's plans. And I went into the store and met Bill and his wife and we wound up being friends.

What's his perspective about everything?

I think his perspective is, more than anything else, that it's all kind of overblown. It's one play and one game, and somehow it's taken on a significance that it really shouldn't have. He's a wonderful guy, and he was an incredible baseball player. Almost 3,000 hits, he should be in the Hall of Fame. He's an amazingly gifted man and an incredible man. I'm a huge fan of his.

What does he think about the movie?