Behind the Camera: Part 1
(This is the first of a series of posts about boxing and filming it and everything in between.)
A question that I get asked more than any other question is how I ended up spending three years working on a documentary on amateur boxing. The answer is easy.
There are only two things in a documentary film. What you are filming and how you film it. I was literally walking down the street one afternoon looking, whether I knew it or not, for a particular kind of inspiration…a subject matter or a story or a person that had never really been shown on film…someone or something that was not so much larger than life as much as a gateway into the deeper, complex, messy humanness of being human where I could have free reign to do my thing. It didn’t happen when I walked by a random boxing gym and spoke to a trainer outside sweeping the sidewalk. And it didn’t happen when he invited me to see a local boxing match. It happened the first time I saw children fighting in a ring and the madness of the crowd and a mother in tears embracing her kid for beating the other boy.
In the sport of boxing, I was not interested in making a film about Mike Tyson or Muhammad Ali or Oscar De La Hoya. If someone offered me cold hard cash to make my name on a film about one of them I would have turned them down and shrugged my shoulders to anyone who asked if I was insane. Any film takes an incredible amount of time and energy to complete and rarely will any future film projects get off the ground without a similar project from the past on your record. It makes little sense to do anything but grind out the kind of thing you want to do as, like everything, you become what you do.
