Through 17 Super Bowl Halftime Shows, six Emmy Award shows, four Oscar nights, three Grammys, the first-ever FIFA World Cup Halftime Show and an Olympic opening ceremony, Hamish Hamilton has seen it all.
Still, never in his career has the prolific live-event director been more worried about a technical failure than when he helmed the now-Emmy-nominated Bad Bunny Super Bowl Halftime Show in February, when they were shooting on prime cinema camera lenses, not particularly designed for a live show, and they had no backups.
“Even with the World Cup, we always had a backup,” he says. “But with Bad Bunny [aka Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio], my goodness, if we’d lost any of those five cameras, we would not be talking right now, and I would probably have disappeared somewhere and be living on a remote island. There was no room for [backup] cameras. Every shot, we were really on the edge. It was like a white-knuckle ride.”
Fortunately for Hamilton, they stuck the landing, and he lives to tell the tale.
Over the course of nearly two decades, Hamilton has seen the coveted halftime show evolve from an already-popular live music event into a cinematic experience in and of itself, with increasingly grandiose production that extends to the cameras, set pieces, effects and more. Bad Bunny’s show in particular, he says, was “probably, more than any, the most made-for-camera” halftime spectacle he’s directed to this point.
The show was a colorful, vibrant display of Puerto Rican and pan-Latin American culture, featuring a dynamic set showcasing the history of workers in sugarcane fields to the modern joys of everyday life and an actual legal wedding onstage. The show featured cameos from the likes of Cardi B, Pedro Pascal and Karol G, performances from Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin, and hundreds of people disguised as grass.
Hamilton says that Bad Bunny and creative director Harriet Cuddeford came in with a “remarkably focused” vision from day one, adding that they were “very definitive about what they wanted to say.”
“The first time I saw their set proposal, my heart was just full of joy,” Hamilton says. “Right from the get-go, you can tell it was genius. They had the ideas with grass — it wasn’t the grass people yet — but it was green. I knew from second one it would be really challenging, but it would work.”
The typical challenges Hamilton runs into across most of the halftime shows are working with daylight — which can make it difficult to create drama and accents — and using darkness and shadows to help hide things. A more specific challenge this go-round, though, was opening up the show so that those in the stadium seats could see what’s going on. That’s a bit of a change-up from the usual Super Bowl show, where he’s most often the one reminding talent to focus more on the millions more people watching at home.
“That was the only big point of contention, and it was an arm wrestle between myself, Harriet and Benito,” Hamilton says. “I’d be like, ‘This is great, but no one in the stadium audience is going to see this.’ ”
Hamilton is hesitant to take too much of the credit for the show, going as far as to call for creative directors to get considered for nominations at the Emmys, too, adding that “to call me the director of the Super Bowl Halftime Show just doesn’t sit right with me.
“The role of the television director on these kinds of shows has massively changed over the past 10 years. It shouldn’t just be me who’s getting nominated or celebrated here,” Hamilton adds. “It should be myself and the creative directors who are partners in this. Without Harriet, without Benito, what would have gone onscreen would be nothing.”
The show, the first ever to be mainly in Spanish, would end up courting significant conservative backlash, to the point that Kid Rock and Turning Point USA elected to put on their own alternative halftime show. None of that surprises Hamilton, who praises co-producer Jay-Z and Roc Nation as “genius” and “brave” for picking Bad Bunny.
“Sadly, I did expect that reaction, and what I expected came to pass,” he says. “Being part of creating that show was one of the proudest and most joyful experiences of my life because it meant something and means something now — speaking to people afterward who were just so overjoyed about how their culture was portrayed. I don’t think I will do another show that is as important and as joyful in my career.”
This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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