Stars bring love of American football for sports movie

Chic in a fitted beige dress and ultra-high heels, and with her hair freshly coiffed, Jennifer Garner looks every inch the A-list movie star when we meet to discuss her latest film. But get her talking about American football and her face relaxes into a wide smile.

"I grew up around all that," the 42-year-old actress says. "Sundays, family, football, the Super Bowl - we were all about that." A New England Patriots fan despite having been born in Houston, Texas, she says: "My son [two-year-old Samuel, one of three children Garner has with husband Ben Affleck] is already built like a footballer."

So when the script for Ivan Reitman's Draft Day fell into Garner's lap, she felt an immediate connection to the gripping sports drama whose story unfolds over the course of a single day - the biggest day, to boot, in American football, apart from Super Bowl Sunday.

Every year, the National Football League (NFL) holds its annual draft, where teams from around America exercise their right to pick from a slew of talented newcomers in a process that is as complex as it is enthralling. The Czechoslovakian-born Canadian filmmaker took the crux of that day - the frenetic backroom negotiations, the teams bitterly competing for the best picks of the new crop - and turned it into a story about one man and how his life spins and pivots on a single day.

Portrayed by Kevin Costner (who's graced his share of hit sports movies over the years), Sonny Weaver Jnr is general manager of the Cleveland Browns - a real NFL team whose insignia, colours and stadium feature in the film - and has to figure out how to land his top pick while navigating some thorny personal issues. (Among other things, he's still getting over the death of his football legend father, Sonny Weaver Snr, as well as trying to step out of his considerable shadow.)

Garner portrays Ali Parker, Weaver's recently pregnant love interest and the team's salary cap manager - basically the person who makes sure the bloated salaries offered to in-demand footballers don't destroy the team. The actress shadowed a real-life salary cap manager to get a handle on how the complicated process worked. "I'm familiar with a lot of the terminology around football, but there was still so much I had to learn," she says.

The film is a boon for die-hard sports buffs - given its authentic portrayals of how teams come into being, the plethora of cameos by sports personalities (including Cleveland Browns legend Jim Brown, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and Hall of Famer Deion Sanders), and the real-world setting. Principal photography began at the actual draft day in New York last year, and many other scenes were shot at the official facilities of the Cleveland Browns.

But Costner is realistic about what makes a really good sports movie. (He's certainly trafficked in enough of them, including the baseball-themed Bull Durham, Field of Dreams and For Love of the Game, golf film Tin Cup and cycling movie American Flyers). His contention is that while sports can be a great subject for a movie, it doesn't necessarily guarantee that the film will be good.