Exclusive: Director David Michôd Discusses The Importance of Bringing ‘Christy’ To Audiences
Director, David Michôd is posed to release his latest sport’s memoir, Christy this coming Friday, November 7.. Before it’s release, BeautifulBallad had the amazing chance to sit down with him to chat about bringing the life of boxer, Christy Martin, to the big screen.
On whether he was a fan of boxing prior to the film: “No. I’d always been fascinated by it. I wasn’t an enthusiast, but what I did know was that a lot of really talented artists have been drawn to it. So I mean, there’s a number of great boxing films that have been made, but even just a lot of the… I was drawn weirdly to the writing about boxing some… Joyce Carol Oates’s book is so good, and there’s AJ Liebling’s, the Sweet Science and Norman Mailer and George Plimpton. All these people have written about boxing and written about it so poetically. So I was really fascinated. I was actually quite excited to just dive into the world of it. So yeah, I am now.”
On moments during filming that terrified him: “It was really challenging for us and scary knowing that there was an actual Christy who was, at some point going to read a script that we’d written, at some point see a cut of the movie that we’d made, who was going to be on set. Even before we’d started shooting, Christy came to the location that we found to be the Apopka house, and I was terrified that she was going to walk in there and go, ‘What’s this shit?'”
On watching Christy trust the filming process daily on set: “Every now and then I sit down, and I try and imagine what it would be like to have someone playing me in something. Why they would, I don’t know. And I just can’t do it. I can’t imagine surrendering to it, which Christy had to do. What we were asking Christy to do was to surrender to us because there’s no other way to do it. We’ve just got to run with that, just run with it and run the risk that it might turn into something else all together. I think it became apparent really quick that everyone so believed in this project. It was a really difficult movie to make, but it never felt friction between its participants.”
On realizing they were making something beautiful: “It’s a tough movie about a kind of pugnacious trash-talking kind of person who led a wild, colorful, but also quite harrowing life. It did regularly feel to us like we were making something quite beautiful as well. The movie makes me cry every time I watch it and I’ve seen it a lot. And there’d be all sorts of people on the crew who would regular, I’d regularly catch them with tears in their eyes and I don’t know. That is so rewarding. And there were moments on set and any number of scenes where when we were shooting them, I would be crying behind the monitor or it’s such a, I mean, that’s why you do it. It’s why you make stuff to feel something.”
On finding the lighter moments during filming: “This is going to sound crazy, but it’s always been true for me and I’ve made some dark movies that no matter how dark the work is, it has to feel like a kind of play. You need to feel loose and playful, and when the camera’s rolling, it’s super intense and then when you call cut, you need to keep it light. You need to keep the set light. So I didn’t, even though we were shooting some, possibly some of the most harrowing stuff I’ve ever shot, I wasn’t going home at the end of the day carrying all that baggage with me because I like the set to stay friendly. I like the set to have a lot of love.”
On filming the boxing scenes: “We had really beautiful people around Sydney [Sweeney] for the boxing stuff. Matt Baiamonti was training her and Wally Garcia who was choreographing the fights. Everything was, it wasn’t just about teaching, it was showing. Sydney had a fight background already, but it wasn’t just about training her in boxing, it was about training her to fight like Christy did. So a lot of that stuff was already baked in and it was all done with a great reverence for authenticity. It was wanting, and Sydney really wanted this too. The fights in the movie are all, to whatever extent you can, it turns into chaos pretty quick, like modeled on actual fights that Christy fought, combinations and the way they unfolded. Yeah. But I don’t know, I then, every now and then, would still go and open up YouTube and watch all the Christy fights and go, ‘Oh, my God. It’s another level.'”
On the one thing he wants audiences to know about the film: “For me, I have been able to talk about it, but I won’t shut up about it. It’s just, I think Mirrah [Foulkes] and I really felt like we were making a movie that felt urgent. We felt like we’re able to Trojan horse into the world a movie that feels very important. Christy’s life was so wild and colorful and fun, and that is the movie. But inside it is something, is a world of really dangerous stuff in terms of coercive control, intimate partner violence and the ways in which it functions. There are so many red flags for these kinds of relationships that plan to write throughout the movie, and there will be people out there who recognize those red flags. These relationships can be so insidious in the way they function.
Women can find themselves trapped in them. Even very powerful women can find themselves trapped in them. I think the more you shine a light on those things, the more the exit doors present themselves. Because the statistics on this stuff are horrifying. I mean, Christy, you were saying before, every minute there’s 17 women in America being assaulted by a partner. In Australia, more than one woman a week in a country of 30 million people, more than one woman a week is murdered by an intimate partner. In the UK, twice Australia’s population, it’s two to three women a week are murdered by an intimate partner. In America, it’s more than 20 women a week are murdered by an intimate partner. That is an emergency.”
Christy opens in theaters on November 7.
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.