The title of Jennifer Lopez’s halftime documentary, now streaming on Netflix, not only refers to how the film explores her preparations for her 2020 Super Bowl appearance with Shakira, but also how Lopez looks at the second half of her life, when she turns 50.
“I feel like I’m just getting started,” Lopez says in the film as she celebrates her 50th birthday. And later she ponders other things she hopes to achieve in life.
When producer Dave Broome was first introduced to the film that would become Halftime, many of the most important moments of Lopez’s professional life over the last few years, which feature prominently in the film, hadn’t even happened.
Speaking to ahead of Halftime’s Tribeca Festival 2022 premiere last week, Broome explained how filming began when Lopez “was nearing the end of her stay in Las Vegas and was wondering what was next in her life.” Life was coming and we had no idea. ”
“Hustlers isn’t on the table,” Broome added. “And nothing that happened in her life that we’ve seen in the last four years is something that we thought we were going to film.”
When Lopez did Hustlers and launched an awards campaign for her role, which sadly ended in her not receiving the Oscar nomination many had predicted, and when she was chosen to officiate Super Bowl 2020 with Shakira, “the whole movie changed.” said Broome.
“It was a constant fluid [for four years]. They start with an outline and say, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do.’ And then all of a sudden, ‘What do you mean, now she’s in this movie where she’s playing a stripper? What do you mean by a possible Oscar nomination? The great thing about the documentary is that none of it is scripted, it’s real life. So if you’re tracking it, you’re hunting it and you’re finding and building the story as you go,” Broome said. “I can’t tell you how many edits we’ve had. It’s like, ‘OK, here’s the movie.’ ‘Oh wait, that’s not the movie because that just happened.’ “Now here’s the movie.” ‘Oh wait, that’s not it.’”
Lopez’s producing partner Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas shared from the Tribeca stage how the project grew into something bigger.
“What started out as a run and gun trying to capture Jennifer, who is celebrating her 50th birthday on the It’s My Party tour, began to morph into something else when my partner, Benny Medina, saw that there was a bigger one story to tell,” she said as she introduced the film.
Oscar-nominated director Amanda Micheli was hired in late 2019 to craft “hundreds and hundreds of hours of archival and personal footage” and “find the story that hadn’t been told.”
That process spanned roughly two years of edits amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with Micheli preparing for interviews when the world shut down in March 2020. As COVID restrictions eased, interviews with Lopez and those close to her began, and Micheli says she was able to “find the story in the cutting room.”
“It was truly an epic endeavor and for me it was a labor of love,” she said.
The resulting film shows Lopez reflecting on her life in honest, vulnerable ways, sometimes explaining how low self-esteem she felt when she was criticized.
“When you’re making a documentary and you start looking back at your life differently, it’s an emotional process. Honestly, it was like therapy,” Micheli said of her interviews with Lopez. “I think she really did admit, looking back, at times when her self-esteem wasn’t bulletproof, and that came as a surprise to me because I’ve always seen her as so successful.”
[The following paragraphs contain spoilers from Halftime.]
While the film shows her crying in bed and having moments of frustration, Lopez is shown grappling with the Oscar amid what appear to be Super Bowl rehearsals while telling her co-workers how she had a dream she was chasing was nominated and she woke up to check and find that it’s not true.
“The truth is, I really started to think I’d be nominated,” she says in the film. “I got my hopes up because so many people told me it would be me. And then it didn’t happen.”
Halftime also borrows from the political inspiration behind Lopez’s halftime performance.
At the beginning of the documentary, Lopez explains that while she’s not “active in politics,” she lived in the United States, which she “didn’t recognize.” She seems particularly upset at the migrant families who have been separated at the Mexico border as part of the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy, adding that the widely publicized images of children in cages really struck her.
“These motherfuckers act like everybody’s an immigrant trying to sneak into the country and they’re criminals because that’s the narrative that Trump created that’s bullshit,” Lopez is shown. “Some of us have been here for years, and a lot of these people are just good people who believe in the American dream — that’s all they want.”
The film also shows Lopez’s team resenting some of the NFL’s decision-making, including “higher-ups” in the league wanting the cages removed the night before the Super Bowl, and Lopez and Medina wanting the expressing frustration that the league picked two Latina women to headline the halftime show instead of just one cast member. Lopez, in particular, is frustrated as she grapples with the logistics of trying to cut her show down to six minutes for a 14-minute double headlining show. In this discussion with her music director, she says that having two Super Bowl performers was “the worst idea in the world”. She previously told Shakira that if the NFL wanted two headliners, they should have given them 20 minutes.
[Spoilers end]
Broome, who has done several projects for Netflix, thought the streamer made sense for the project as “a global platform for… a global superstar.”
Still, he was impressed that Netflix didn’t immediately agree to the prospect of a documentary about Jennifer Lopez.
He said: “When I entered the project [to Netflix] and I said, ‘I have a documentary on Jennifer Lopez, what do you think?’ To their credit, they don’t say, ‘Oh yeah, we’re in Dave, let’s go.’ The question was, “Great, what is that? What is the story you will tell? How do you want to put it together? Who is the director?’ What do we say and what do we think we want to do.”