< Home / Interview / Critic / Bio / My articles in Japanese >

The Fighter

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story : The Fighter, is a drama about boxer "Irish" Micky Ward's unlikely road to the world light welterweight title. His Rocky-like rise was shepherded by half-brother Dicky, a boxer-turned-trainer who rebounded in life after nearly being KO'd by drugs and crime.

Opens December 17, 2010 (Limited - 12/10)

Runtime:1 hr. 54 min.

Q&A with Director David O. Russell

(Q): Tell us about what drew you to this. This is a film that seemed to really inspire you as a filmmaker. Such dynamic cinematography and editing and music and at the heart these four amazing performances.

(David O. Russell): It was the characters. It’s a gift when you get characters that are real that are that amazing. It was a bleach blond mother with seven bleach blond daughters, all true. They’re like a gang, and they manage these two sons who are fighters. And the redheaded bartender that Amy Adams plays; tough woman. Very strong women in the movie. So it was the women characters and how the men characters kind of interacted with them.

And they’re just also really raw people. They have big hearts and their roofers and road pavers, and they’re really funny. They’re as funny as they are tragic. They know how to live; they’re very much alive. So it was all that stuff that I felt I had not seen before because there have been amazing boxing movies, so that was really the secondary part to me after the amazing characters.
 
(Q): The characters you just mentioned are all the women in the film; we don’t usually think of women when we think of a boxing movie.

(David O. Russell) : But I think the women make the men what they are in this picture. Mark Wahlberg carried the picture on his back for many years. This was a dream project for him. He’s from this part of the world, he’s from nine kids, this is a story about a real family with nine kids, he had an older brother, Donnie, who was his mother’s favorite. So it’s very close to him and that gave us an entrée into that world that is very real.

And he saw Christian Bale at his daughter’s preschool and realized he thought Christian was the best person to play it. But there were earlier versions, Darren Aronofsky was going to do it before he did “The Wrestler,” and that would have been a very different film, and also a really good film but a different film.
 
(Q): So tell us about these two central characters, Micky Ward, who Mark Wahlberg plays, and Dicky Eklund. The movie’s called “The Fighter”; in a way that title could apply to both of them or either of them.
 
(David O. Russell): Well Dicky is a very charismatic guy. He’s like the mayor of Lowell; he talks to everybody, he never stops moving, he’s a very gifted fighter, he was born with talent. And like a lot of people who were born with talent, sometimes they don’t respect it, so he didn’t have the heart or discipline that his younger brother did. So he was the hero of that town and then he became notorious. He was the hero for fighting Sugar Ray Leonard and they were making a documentary about him, HBO was. Lowell is famous because Betty Davis is from there, Jack Kerouac is from there, and these guys are the next famous thing from there.

The HBO documentary went from being a very heroic thing to becoming the first documentary made about crack in America because that’s what was happening with his life. So it became the disgrace of the town, and we used that device of a movie within the movie because it’s kind of tragic to see how he thinks it’s this amazing thing that then becomes this disgraceful thing. He’s a very charming guy for a crackhead. He’s an amazingly charismatic person with a huge heart. And he could smoke crack and train for 10 hours. He’ll go right from the gym, he’ll run five miles across town, which he does in the movie, he was supposed to be training his brother, and then he’s running across town in work boots, not even in sneakers, in like road paving boots.

(Q): There are so many interesting dynamics going on in this movie. The relationship between Alice, the mom, and Dicky. Mark Wahlberg’s character is the one that’s going off to fight, but there’s this real interesting connection between Melissa Leo’s character and Christian Bale.

(David O. Russell): Melissa Leo’s a great actress. She was in “Frozen River,” and she’s unrecognizable here. She’s got her hair up and it’s all bleached; she’s a great actress. She looks exactly like the real mother. Everybody in town thought she was the real mother. The funny thing is that’s what the dynamic of the movie is. Christian, even though he was a crackhead, was still the star of the family and the star of the community; he was not going to give it up to his brother.

And the subtext to all of his shenanigans, I think, if there’s a subtitle, it says you can’t have it. It’s still mine, and if I just keep stirring drama up I don’t care if you can’t have it. You always want it the most I think from the people who won’t give it to you, so that’s why it motivated his younger brother so much.

(Q): Was this a hard film to get made? Apparently it was years in the making and then when the shooting actually happened it happened in a very intense way.

(David O. Russell): Well like I said, there were many incarnations of the film. There was one version where Brad Pitt was going to play the Dicky part and they were going to make this film for like more than $60 million, which seems kind of wild to me because we made it for 20 and we only had 33 days to shoot it, so it was fast. We shot the fight scenes only in three days. I liked it being fast though; it made us be very focused.
 
(Q): How did you draw on the fact that you were working in Lowell? You actually used some of the people in the town. Micky O’Keefe, who plays the police chief is a real guy right?
 
(David O. Russell): The guy who was playing the trainer who was on the car, he’s the real cop from Lowell who lived through all this. Because it’s a story of a guy who has a cop and a criminal in his corner and they hated each other. Dicky and Micky O’Keefe still do not like each other to this day. But Micky got different things from both of them so he wanted them both in his corner.
 
(Q): Tell us about your work with the actors. What was that like? They’re four amazing performances and different styles of acting. Mark Wahlberg is somebody who is very internal, soft spoken, you can’t quite read him. Christian Bale you can definitely read him; you definitely know what’s going on. So what was it like working with these different actors?
 
(David O. Russell): Mark I always kind of compare him to Spencer Tracy or John Garfield or James Cagney. You probably have no idea who these people are, but they’re good people to look up. They’re guys who are just kind of real and they bring that realness to most of what they do. So Mark kind of fit himself into Micky Ward because it’s very close to his heart. Christian completely transformed himself into this guy with the bald spot and the skinniness.

He’s a very private person, Christian is, he’s very quiet, and Dicky is never quiet, so it changed him. He had different teeth he put in. Dicky had terrible teeth because he would pull some of his teeth out to get drugs. You get a tooth pulled you get some drugs.
 
(Q): Could you talk about Amy Adams? This is also a wonderful performance. She plays Charlene, who’s Mark Wahlberg’s girlfriend, and she’s sort of up against the family. It’s like her pitted against these eight women.
 
(David O. Russell): She was what helped Micky, who’s such a quiet person by nature. Micky will never say anything negative about anybody. And it takes this really sexy, bitchy, bartender, played by Amy, who played completely against type. She was eager to shatter the “Enchanted” type casting that she had been put into from those movies. She’s very strong and she helps him stand up to his family.
 

(Q): There have been a bunch of movies set near Boston or in Boston; this seems to really be the real deal in terms of the accents and the attitudes and has such an authenticity, especially Amy Adams. Is she from that area or she is just a great actress?
 
(David O. Russell): She’s just a great actress. We all followed Mark’s accent because when he did “The Departed” he didn’t like that there were like 10 different Boston accents in the movie. So I just said everybody should just follow Mark’s lead.
 
(Q): The boxing scenes in the film, they’re also the real deal. These are not sort of the type of elaborately, artfully choreographed fight scenes we’ve seen in some movies. You really feel like you’re watching some painful boxing going on.
 
(David O. Russell): We only had three days to do it so we hired an HBO crew to do the fights, which means we had six cameras. We had them use the very cameras they had in 1990 because it’s a period movie, which is kind of a weird beta and it makes it look a little bit rougher and different. We couldn’t do it shot for shot so I was choreographing eight cameras actually on monitors to make sure I got the shots that I needed. Mark wanted to choreograph whole sections of Micky’s fights, and then we took the actual commentary from those fights, because some of those fights are startling. They’re cinematic if you just watch them on YouTube. Like the Sanchez fight, because for six rounds he losing – he’s a very slow starter, he’s just like his personality.

He’s very quiet, he’s a slow starter. And so the first six rounds Larry Merchant and the announcers are just saying what a bum he is and that he should quit and that it’s just so sad people should get their money back. For six rounds they’re doing that. His patented punch is a body shot, which is very hard to land; it’s very hard to knock somebody out with a body shot and it’s not that common in movies, and that was his punch. And he knocks this guy out; it was like the next Oscar De La Hoya, with one body shot. And the guy doesn’t get up for 10 minutes and the announcers have to eat their words like in two seconds. And we couldn’t get actors to reproduce that so we just cut and pasted, we just used their actual commentary and put it right on the fight.
 
(Q): Did you get a sense for why Micky fought like that? I mean you watch it and he just takes punch after punch. Where did he get this style from?
 
(David O. Russell): His brother moves a lot and is like Mohammad Ali but Micky takes five punches to give one punch. I do not know why he fights like that; that’s just his personality.
 
(Q): I was just wondering how did the project come to you? How did you receive the project?
 
(David O. Russell): There had been several scripts that Mark Wahlberg had been helping to develop over the years with the producers David Hoberman and Todd Lieberman, and with Ryan Kavanaugh, another producer, they came to me after Darren went off to do “The Wrestler” and they said “How would you do this?” And Mark would call me every night from his bathroom where he would watch ESPN classics – that’s where he would get away from his family or something – and he would call me and I told him that I thought the women should be more prominent, that I thought the drug story was a little bit went a long way because we’ve seen those. So I told him how I would change it and he said “Well why don’t you do it?” And so we started talking about it and went from there.
 
(Q): Christian Bale lost a lot of weight on this and he actually lost hair as well. Can you talk about his preparation process?
 
(David O. Russell): Christian and I spoke about Dicky and we knew that we both loved Dicky, that he’s the heavy, with Alice, in the movie, but he’s also a very lovable person. So we agreed about how lovable he is and funny, he’s charming. But then he just went off and did his thing. I love the bald spot, I love the receding hairline. He lost the weight however he does that, and we talked a long time about the teeth because Dicky had two sets of bad teeth; one was the pre-prison set of bad teeth and one was the post-prison, because in prison they gave him new teeth.

That’s the first thing his brother said when he came out and saw him for the first time, he said “Oh they gave you new teeth.” And he spent a lot of time with Dicky. Dicky and Micky lived at Mark’s house in Beverley Hills for three weeks and were training Mark and Christian, and Mark and Christian both got to observe their personalities, and that’s a great thing for any actor to have.
 
(Q): You left of the Arturo Gatti fights. Could you just speak to that a little bit?
 
(David O. Russell): For those of you who don’t know, Arturo Gatti was murdered a year ago. He was a great fighter from Canada and this movie ends, the championship that Micky ends at the end of this movie is what gave him the gateway to earn fighting Arturo Gatti, which gave him the only real money he ever made. He still works as a Teamster, Micky Ward, but it gave him his house and it put some money in the bank. And they had three epic fights which, they’re real brawlers.

They smash it out, they’re insane epic fights. They had three of them where they’re so bloody and they keep going. So the reason we didn’t do that is that we had to collapse a lot of time as it was. We had to very economically establish that Dicky was a hero in the first five minutes, who he was, by not going back in time, but just kind of economically showing you who he was in the town and using an HBO interview from the past to show you who he was with his mother.

So to go into the future of Arturo Gatti, I guess it makes it much more of a sports movie, and also the real journey of climbing the mountain for me was for him to get that fight. Because if he lost the championship fight in England as the last fight in the movie, then he never would have fought Gatti. And that guy was really dissing him, that British fighter who had never been defeated, Shane Neary. He was always saying “I look forward to fighting Arturo Gatti. I think Micky Ward is beneath me.” Anytime you do that you’re in trouble. So he said that and then he never got to fight Gatti; Mickey inherited Gatti.
 
(Q): You mentioned that the move was made in 33 days. The one scene I saw was after the fight he was in the mirror and you showed his body, how much weight he gained, and then you saw him making the comeback and now he’s shredded. How was he able to go from overweight to six pack for the comeback?
 
(David O. Russell): We finished shooting in 33 days and Mark was very happy to start eating pizza and drink wine again. They wanted to do some additional shots of the fights to get some single close ups because I hadn’t done any of those. So before they did that he said “Before I lose my weight again, why don’t you shoot me now while I’m fat?” And I said “I don’t believe you’re ever fat.” He was an underwear model.

And his trainer said “Oh he’s fat,” and when his trainer said that I was like “Oh really?” He was kind of chubby down there. And so we shot him being fat for a couple of scenes and then he had to lose the weight again for those close ups of the fights at the end. That’s how we did it.
 
(Q): You’re the first to be involved with the Ghetto Film School. How did you come across the Ghetto Film School and what motivated you to participate?
 
(David O. Russell): For those of you who don’t know, the Ghetto Film School is the first public high school for cinema, like the High School for the Performing Arts, but this is for cinema. It’s in the Bronx and it is the brainchild of Joe Hall and he created this school. I just came from the Bloomberg Building doing Charlie Rose; that is like the Willy Wonka Factory over there. They trace you through the building. Just like a LoJack; they can follow you everywhere. But that building is so much fun it makes you want to go to work.

They have like a food court. Anyway, the reason I mention Bloomberg is because he’s a big supporter of the school. As the mayor, he loves the school. So it’s a high school for cinema. It’s fantastic, it’s in a new building, you should go visit it. And they have a curriculum based on narrative filmmaking and kids have to be really good students to get in there. They have to want it, like any of the other magnet schools. And we’re having our tomorrow night premiere here in New York is to benefit the Ghetto Film School, and that will be on 23rd Street at the School of Visual Arts Theatre.
 
(Q): I see that Darren Aronofsky is credited as executive producer..

(David O. Russell): You see that Darren Aronofsky’s executive producer; what happened? Darren was going to make this movie. He developed the screenplay with writer Scott Silver and then he couldn’t get it financed. It just kept banging around. Brad Pitt was going to do it, he wasn’t going to do it. I heard one story that Brad Pitt said “Let me have three months and I’ll tell you if I’ll do this movie.” That’s how the big stars do it. He was going to do it for $20 million, which turned out to be our entire budget.

So to the day, three months to the day, he called Paramount and said…oh jeez, maybe I shouldn’t be talking about this. This is going on the internet. Alright so, Brad Pitt’s an awesome guy and too bad we didn’t get to work with him, and Darren would have made a great picture. So he went off to do “The Wrestler,” and then that was my good fortune because I ended up making another project at that time. I was making a movie that didn’t get finished during my rocky years so this came back to me. Darren saw the movie and really loved it, and he had a contractual right to claim executive credit and he said he wanted his name on it, so that made me feel proud that he wanted his name on it. So thank you guys for coming out.

Oh wait is this that second piece? Oh let me tell you guys something. So that first trailer was like the real straight ahead trailer that they did, which was good, that’s like more for the red states. My friend Spike Jonze saw the movie and he helped them design, this is a more character driven trailer that reflects more colors of the movie.

End.