(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.
This is footage from an interview I did with Mike Tyson. It is mostly raw footage with only simple edits so it has both its slow moments and dramatic spots. The interview didn’t really work for the focus of the film so I cut it out and am posting it here as a piece of journalism….
In making a documentary, there are some interviews you seek out and it takes months and months of phone calls and painstaking navigation through all the layers of people that anyone famous has built up around them. This is not one of them. I was shooting one day at an amateur gym and one of the boxers there, Patricia Manual, casually said, “Oh yeah, Tyson is working out at the gym I work at…”
The gym of all places was Crunch in West Hollywood where Tyson was slumming it while in rehab after getting arrested for snorting coke off his car dashboard. Patricia set up the meet, Mike agreed to do it and then we sat down to talk. About 30 seconds into the interview, Tyson started shaking his finger at me and telling me he wanted to talk about amateur boxing and not about his life in amateur boxing. I realized at that instant that while I was prepared for his personality, I was completely unprepared for how thoroughly damaged he was by the media, both through their normal insatiable appetite for a person’s self-destruction and Tyson’s own love for self-destruction in front of the world’s cameras. He had learned to be completely guarded in most everything he said and was making an uneasy attempt at moving on past the Tyson of old that everyone loved to watch but made him feel like a monster even to talk about.
While I was ready to dive straight into the thick of Tyson as the conflicted and confused genius that he was, he was ready to put in a few words for the kids and jump back on the path of normalcy. So rather than ramble on endlessly about the old baddest man on the planet, I’ll leave the demons in the closet, post the short interview here and leave it at that.
