Action Packed Flashback – Fighting

If the streets are good for anything, it’s stories. Everyone likes an up-and-comer and the streets of New York City are full of them. In New York City, a young counterfeiter is introduced to the world of underground street fighting by a seasoned scam artist, who becomes his manager on the bare-knuckling brawling circuit, so says IMDb about Fighting, the second feature film from A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints writer/director Dito Montiel.

While it was just released in 2009 to little success (a little over $30 million), the film is a gritty modern take on such movies as Lionheart, so read on as we take a look back at Fighting in Action Packed Flashback with writer/director Dito Montiel on Killer Film.

“Movies are crazy man. [Fighting] was actually a basketball movie over at Paramount,” Dito recalls. “They’ve been trying to make this for like 10 years. A producer called me up and asked me to look at it. Then Channing Tatum called me up and said ‘I don’t want to do a basketball movie, but I’m big of fighting.’ So I told the producer about that and they liked it.” The film follows Shawn MacArthur, a promising young man, who seems to be running away from something. Shaun is played by Channing Tatum, who was just starting his rise as a headlining star. “It sounds crazy, but I just had fun writing it, drawing from the movies I grew up on.” Once Shawn meets Harvey, played by Terrance Howard who was coming off of Iron Man, he gets introduced to the underground circuit of fighting for cash. “Terrance Howard said he wanted to do it, making the character of Harvey something special now.”

Once Dito Montiel, who just came off his personal and autobiographical feature film debut, got the script, major rewrites were in order. “When I read the script, I wasn’t interested in a basketball movie or sports movies too much. I like Rocky, of course, and Lionheart, but to me what was interesting was Harvey and Shawn, who were lucky to find each other, since they were both lonely people, you know?” We learn that Harvey is from Chicago, who moved to New York to make something of himself, although that didn’t quite go the way he thought. Shawn is from Alabama. The characters are real with depth, something that aids the brutal, quick street fights seen in the film. At the core of the movie, the characters are archetypes of Middle Class values. It’s a notion that has allowed the 1970s to be such an iconic time period for movies. There’s no class like the Middle Class, and their stories are as universal as they come. It’s a key reason to why Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Lionheart is one of his better films, something that wasn’t lost on Dito Montiel. “Studios tell me everyone wants to escape, times are tough. I get that. Let’s have a good time. But did do they need a Hummer too?” recalls Dito on how Hollywood focuses too much on rich people. “What I really liked about it was the characters were honest. I talked to my wife the other day, and she said it used to be cool to be poor, now it’s cool to be rich. That’s the truth. When you make a movie about down-and-out characters now days, you automatically associate them as bad people. Everyone who’s broke doesn’t sit around and cuss or shoot up, there’s a lot of good people stuck in a rut. Harvey and Shawn aren’t doing so great, but they’re so real.”

Despite the title having a double meaning to what the film and the characters are about, you cannot overlook  the fighting in the film.

“Channing went full-on,” proclaims Dito Montiel. “On a few occasions, when he fought the first guy, he got jabbed hard in the nose, breaking it. Here Cung Le (‘The Human Highlight Reel’ and Strikeforce Champion) chokes him out and a little jab knocks him down? There was defiantly real fighting, especially with Brian White, as him and Channing went at it. I could barely watch it. It was really fun.” The film only features a couple of fights, most notably the finale in which Shaun goes up against Evan Hailey (Brian White), a professional fighter who used to be on the same college team as Shawn, and was coached by Shawn’s father. “I’m not a big fight fan, even though my father was a boxer, but when I see movies it’s all fancy footwork. I just wanted to see street fights.” While Montiel wanted the actors to just go at it without the stylized help of a fight coordinator, Relativity Media/Rogue Pictures wouldn’t allow it. “The studio didn’t want me to put Channing in a room with someone and fight for real,” he laughs. “The fight coordinator told me real fighting wouldn’t look good on camera. Some of their thoughts were it wouldn’t look like movie fighting. I just wanted to see street fights. We were doing the fights on every level: we weren’t making a movie where Channing was the greatest fighter ever where Mr. Miyagi teaches him a move nobody’s seen. It’s MMA, everyone now days knows a few moves at least, so there’s no real surprise. We tried to make the fights as dirty as possible. Elbows, rolling around, grabbing eyes, doing whatever you can, like if you’re at a bar or something and this happens.”

“The rules of PG-13 are so crazy,” he explains as the studio wanted a PG-13 movie, yet fans can see an Unrated Cut on Blu-ray/DVD. “You can do just about anything, except showing squirting blood that’s red. You make it green and that’s okay. Then you can only say ‘f*ck’ once. It’s so funny, the Unrated Cut is the same movie. It’s like a few extra hits. The weird thing is it sounded crazy to make Fighting PG-13, as people think I want to make the X-rated version of something. I wanted to keep it real, so it was a blessing in disguise. It turns out to feature no cussing and four added kicks. For some reason, the MPAA had issues and were obsessed with these kicks. If you can spot the difference you’re a genius. I don’t even know the difference.”

Shawn inquires before his first fight: “So… What they got rules, or...? Harvey looks at him and quickly adds, “Yeah! You lose, you get nothing.” That right there perfectly sums up the film, the characters and their values. I think it’s time that you re-watch Fighting.

Until the next flashback…