In 1973, a nationally televised tennis match between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King took place in the Houston Astrodome. To this day, it is the largest tennis match ever held in the United States.

In the movie Battle of the Sexes, the directing team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris recount the sports match while delving into the surrounding motivations of the lead players.

In the film, Steve Carell plays Riggs and Emma Stone plays King. What makes this particular version of events different is the concentration on the individual changes the characters were going through. Riggs was on the outs with his independently wealthy wife (played by Elisabeth Shue) due to his gambling addiction, while the married King was heavily involved in a romantic relationship with her hairdresser, Marilyn Barnett (played by Andrea Risenborough).

A previous incarnation of the story, a television movie titled When Billie Beat Bobbie (2001 starring Holly Hunter and Ron Silver), while entertaining, totally ignores the behind the scenes facts.

Free Press Houston spoke to directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris by phone in advance of the film’s Houston release.

On shooting the Astrodome sequences:

Dayton: It took four days to shoot the match, and it was a really important part of this process to try and get that right. Also to get 1973 professional tennis as it existed at the time.

Faris: I was going to say it took four months. Most of the work was in the preparation. We had Emma constantly practicing and Steve did a lot of work on his tennis game with Lornie Kuhle who was Bobby Riggs’ coach at the time. And then we had tennis doubles that not only practiced the style of play, but also specific plays from the actual match.

Dayton: We took the original broadcast and cut it down, added music to it to get a feel for what the film might be like. And then our tennis pros did the plays over and over.

Faris: When we shot it it wasn’t choreographed specifically but everyone knew all the moves.

FPH: How was the process of shooting the doubles?

Dayton: Movie magic. (Both laugh.) We used special effects to make it seem as if it was Emma and Steve.

Faris: The body types were really close.

Dayton: Yes, the funny thing is that Emma as a dancer was quite light. She actually added sixteen pounds of muscle to get to a level where her body was identical to the professional player that we used.

FPH: There’s a shot at the beginning where Carell is in his office and hits a piece of waste paper with a racquet and it sails across the room into a trash basket. Can you talk about that?

Faris: That was in the script.

Dayton: That was planned. What was great was that we were able to work with the cinematographer [Linus Sandgren] whom we’ve known for years. When we do commercials, Linus is one of our favorite go-to shooters. We have a shorthand way of communicating with him. We studied a lot of Altman films and Cassevetes films and wanted Battle of the Sexes to look like it was made in 1973.

Faris: Part of it was Bobby’s character being able to communicate who he was. Where are we finding him in his life when we meet him? He’s kind of a kept man, married to a wealthy woman and with an office job that he’s not very interested in. He feels that his path of a tennis star is passing him by.

FPH: Billie Jean King was a tech advisor on the film, who else?

Dayton: For what it’s worth, all the tennis play was authentic. There were no computer generated shots involved. We made a clear choice to shoot it in the style of the way it was presented on television. We stayed in wide shots.

FPH: There are stock shots of 1970s Astrodome.

Dayton: I know, our special effects team went to Houston and they used a special devise to scan the inside of the existing arena.

Faris: We had never been there but looking at pictures. Some of the suites at the Astrodome were so over the top that if we had duplicated them perfectly no one would believe it.

Dayton: We used footage from the period and of course all of Howard Cosell’s original commentary. There’s footage of Nixon and Howard K. Smith [ABC News correspondent].

Faris: All the shots of Ricardo Montalban, Lloyd Bridges and Roosevelt Grier are from the era.

Dayton: It’s great to go to the source and not try to fabricate it. The whole reason we were inspired to tell this story is that there was a whole story behind the headlines.

Faris: It made the match a lot more interesting if you knew all that was going on in their lives before stepping onto the court.

FPH: In addition to Little Miss Sunshine you’ve directed a lot of videos and commercials. Do you have a favorite?

Dayton: They are a little bit like our children. We love them all. We did a Volkswagen commercial years ago with …

Faris: … Nick Drake’s song “Pink Moon” ….

Dayton: It was an important boost for him, he sold more records after that. People discovered him through our commercial.

[English singer songwriter Drake died in 1974. The VW commercial aired in 2024.]

Faris: We love to work with music and visuals, and we’ve done that both in commercials and videos. The fun part of videos was collaborating with the bands, similar to putting a cast together. We always feel like we’re putting a band together when we cast our movies.

Battle of the Sexes opens at area theaters this weekend.