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James Toback vs. Mike Tyson
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The Big Bang—a nonfiction film in which 20 people with radically diverse backgrounds, personalities and looks give their takes on life and beyond—followed and registered with haunting clarity, yielding a lingering sense of transparent accessibility. Without this transitional “documentary,” it is unlikely that the notion of fusing role-player and role in fictional films would have evolved in my head as it did.
Two Girls and a Guy stands both on its own as a portrait of a classically split dissembler—melding Blake Allen (role) and Robert Downey Jr. (role-player) into one multiple-personality—and as a bridge to Black and White, in which half of the movie is delivered as written (Ben Stiller, Joe Pantoliano and Robert Downey Jr. playing their scripted parts) and the other half (Mike Tyson, members of Wu-Tang Clan and Downey—again) clearly embodying themselves.
It was while watching Tyson “perform” in a scene with Oli “Power” Grant and Raekwon in a downtown gym—a scene in which Tyson speaks with a refined degree of complex and meditative self-awareness about prison, humiliation and murder—that the idea of making a film about Tyson (and Tyson alone) was generated.
I proposed it to him at the end of the day and we agreed to go ahead, but apparently both of us needed to take an oblique path to its fruition. Tyson needed to descend into a series of painful losses and retirement from the ring and I needed to make two more movies (including When Will I Be Loved, in which Tyson appears—as himself—in a scene in which he insists he is not Mike Tyson at all but rather “Buck, the pimp from Minnesota”) before we were actually close to ready. And it was not until the death of my mother (to whom the film is dedicated—and my consequent awareness that any ability to function at all would be possible only by immersing myself in the making of a movie) and the crash of Tyson (literal and figurative—his arrest on drug possession after a car accident) that we finally leapt forward into a one-week, quasi-psychoanalytic journey, photographed with two cameras (the Panavision Genesis and the Panasonic VariCam) by the great Steadicam operator and cameraman, Larry McConkey.
Using every imaginable interior and exterior of a rented house in the Hollywood Hills and an ocean/beach location near Malibu, the intention was to allow a kind of surrender; to let the cameras roll without pressure or interruption from an array of angles, to create conditions in which Tyson (or the Tysons), being shot, could emerge in the full breadth of his mesmerizing complications. Nothing anticipated, nothing ordained—just a moveable field on which to play out the faces, voices, emotions and linguistic flourishes through which we can connect, admire, resist, withdraw or simply witness this bold iconographic figure acting the role of himself.
In carrying to its logical conclusion the impulse to treat film—and “acting”—as a portrait of the person, the style will necessarily reflect the subject and, in seeking to do justice to the Whitmanesque multitudes contained in Mike Tyson, the display of multiple moving images—shifting shapes and sizes—and dialogue overlapping, densely laid over itself, felt organic and even inevitable.
What is especially satisfying for me about Tyson is that it ends by leading to questions about the future. What format and subject are next? Where does this Tyson exploration lead? Fiction? Nonfiction? A mix of both? The great joy is that the answer to each of these questions (and all others) is, at least possibly, yes.
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by injury in denver on 5/31/09 at 8:26 pm
An element of uncertainty in the roles a movie actor plays ensures that his audience interest always remains alive.
- Comment by Discount Pharmacy on 9/11/09 at 11:40 pm
directors are everything to a film, they make all the decisions and have the vision for the film, they are the voice and eyes of the film before its made, they shape every lighting idea, wardrobe choice, casting decisions, every shot filmed and then finally edited together, they head the music in a specific direction...they do everything to make the film what it is. not a great description but its a start..
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This story was published in the Spring 2009 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Toback vs. Tyson / Legendary indie director challenges Mike Tyson to show his true self in Tyson
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