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"Black Cat, White Cat"
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There are lessons to be learned from Foreman, Ali, Frazier, Julio [Cesar] Chavez and Pernell Whitaker, so good at their job, and so relentless. The metaphors are so grotesquely clichéd: How can you take a hit and adjust? How do you respond when you're bleeding? But in boxing, these aren't metaphors: They are the truth. There's real blood. And trying to be an artist in movies and being an athlete are very similar, because you have to stay focused at all times on the work, and the moment that the studio's on the phone or the agent's on the phone -- or the corporate sponsor -- focus starts to drain.

Lolita is a huge boxing fan. When we were starting out together, in the volatile and tentative early days, I said to her, "Look, I am a boxing fan. I subscribe to two boxing monthlies and read them cover to cover. And I go to the fights and I'd like to take you to fights. If you don't like fights, fine; many women don't, many men don't. But this is who I am and I always go to these things. If you like it, great, but there's no expectation. Just give me one weekend, give me one fight and read this book." And I gave her Joyce Carol Oates' book "On Boxing,'' a book by a woman whose father took her to fights as a little girl.

We went to a fight in Vegas and I can remember the whole card, starting with Tyson and Razor Ruddock. The sixth fight on the undercard was the great fighter Roberto Duran, out of shape and fat, getting beat by "Irish" Pat Lawlor, a journeyman fighter. I remember telling Lolita, "See that guy, who's on at 4:30: That's the guy who some say was the greatest fighter of all time, and he's about to get his brains beat out by this hack." That's the kind of drama you find on the undercard! Anyway, she was taken completely with the sport and became a knowledgeable fight fan. On "Play It to the Bone," we took many of the women on the crew who had never been to a fight and had the usual stereotypical notion, "Oh, it's just a bunch of guys hitting each other" [and we brought them to see some local fights and an Oscar De La Hoya match]. And to a woman they were turned around.

I think the sport is so different in person than on television. On television you cannot appreciate how hard they hit, the punishment they take. Any one of their punches would break one of our ribs; and the response they have is to hit back! The concentration of these guys, who are almost without question uneducated (high school education is first-class for a fighter), is something we can all aspire to. And the conditioning. The Tour de France is one thing -- boxers have that and get hit and know they're risking brain damage.

At the end of my movie, Woody asked to fight with a professional double we were using, and I agreed. The last boxing thing I shot was Woody sparring with a pro named Cleveland Corder, a welterweight, the only white man I know named Cleveland.

He was actually Antonio Banderas' double, he had Antonio's outfit on, so I thought we could film Woody letting go on some blows. And Woody was in as good a shape as any actor could have been. But Cleveland could take Woody's best shots and just flick them away. Woody could fight Cleveland Corder for 10 years and never land a punch. So we ran two cameras on this, framing out Cleveland's head, and Woody is running out of gas, running out of gas, running out of gas. And finally, I said, "Cut." And I jumped in the ring and embraced Woody because it was the last boxing shot of the film. And he said, "God, why did you let it go so long? What was it, five minutes, six minutes?" I looked down and it was a minute and a half. It was half of one round. Woody, who'd been conditioning for 12 weeks, couldn't get through it. And both my actors were in extraordinary shape.

Your movies tend to open up relatively private sports worlds -- the minor leagues of "Bull Durham," the basketball playgrounds of "White Men Can't Jump," and now the undercard fighters in "Play It To the Bone." How did you get the idea for this one?

The idea came from sitting around with Bill Caplan, who's been George Foreman's publicist since Foreman was 18, and my late, dear friend, the sportswriter Allan Malamud. We were talking about the fact that I love the undercard. If the main fight starts at 8 p.m., I'll go at 5 p.m. Nobody will be there. That's where there's great drama, and nobody knows. You read a "bout sheet" with eight or 10 bouts; it's like reading hieroglyphics, but you get where the fighters are from, and their records. So you see a guy is 16-0 and he's from Philadelphia, with 14 knockouts. This is a fighter to watch out for, and he'll be fighting a guy he's supposed to beat; you start to imagine what the promoters are thinking.

Out of the eight or 10 bouts there a couple that could go either way. And these fighters have got to win to continue their careers, even if they are 16-0; if you can't win the 6 o'clock bout in Vegas, even though the TV coverage doesn't go on till 7, you're never going to go back to Vegas. And there will be guys who come up with no handlers, like my guys in the movie, and knock the shit out of some stud from Philadelphia, and take a bus back to Mexicali.

So "Mud" and Bill and I were sitting around, talking about undercards, and I said, "What is the greatest undercard fight you ever saw?" And Bill and Mud said, "July 12, 1965, an undercard fight to Sugar Ray Robinson and Ferd Hernandez." Now this was way past when Sugar Ray should have been fighting. But he was the greatest fighter of all time -- or, as Dizzy Dean said when he was asked if he was the greatest pitcher of all time, "I don't know, but I'm among 'em." Robinson was beloved in Vegas by Sinatra and all those guys; he'd be out of money and he'd go to Vegas and they'd find a fight for him, stage it and give him all the money for it. He had this fight set for the Hacienda, and it was a big deal.

Well, the semi-main event fell apart, because both fighters were not able to fight that morning. So the promoters called the Main Street Gym in L.A., which no longer exists -- there weren't many fighters based in Vegas then, unlike now. They got hold of these two club fighters, guys who'd had their shot, and said, "You have to be here by 6 o'clock." They were Mexican-American fighters, best friends who'd never fought each other and were working out at the gym; they drove over, beat each other's brains out in what everybody described as the most unbelievable war they'd ever seen, got in the car and drove home. That was the anecdote out of which this movie grew. They were friends: That's why they didn't think anything of driving over to Vegas together, to save gas money.

Do fighters often advance beyond these undercard matches?

Some advance, some don't. There are guys called opponents; an opponent is a guy you have to beat. There are about three heavyweight opponents. If you're a rising heavyweight, you'll fight a bunch of opponents -- guys who are sanctioned, guys who have decent records. If you can't beat them, you'll never get anywhere. Then you'll get to a couple of guys you'll have to get past, stepping-stone guys, two or three in every division. And if you can't get by them, again, you're done. Bert Cooper is one; there are only about four. These guys are not in the top 10, but they're in the top 25, and they're a real test -- like, "Here's a feature film, you're not making student movies anymore."

Bert Cooper is an African-American heavyweight who had Evander Holyfield out on his feet about six years ago, but Holyfield recovered to beat him, and then beat Mike Tyson, so Cooper was that far away from the top. He hits like a mule. He's not the greatest defensive fighter; if you really are patient you can wear him down. But if you get into a slugging match with him, Bert Cooper will knock you out. I was at a fight once in Vegas and way down on the undercard I saw that the first televised bout was Bert Cooper against a guy named Chuck "Instant" Coffee from Kentucky. I couldn't wait to see what Chuck "Instant" Coffee was like. He was from Kentucky, 26-0 with 26 knockouts, and he had his shot at an undercard fight in Vegas; I figured everyone in Kentucky had to be watching this. He had beaten a bunch of opponents to get to one of these fighters you had to get by -- but he couldn't get by Bert Cooper.

I had this in mind for a long time. And after "Marley" fell through, I thought, it's time to make it. I told Lolita, "I'll write this boxing movie, and I'll write a part for you" -- that's how it started, truthfully. The whole script I wrote in a week and a half, but I had 10 years of things in my head. I wrote 10 pages with a black guy and white guy as the leads. Then I changed course; I felt people would think of it as "White Men Can't Jump II" -- that somehow I'd just taken my two guys and put them in another sport, which is not at all what I was doing. Anyway, I like not to know everything when I start writing, because I think you can kill a story by having it overly organized. There should be a sense of discovery along the way; obviously you should have a sense that you're heading north instead of south, but how you get there is part of the job.

One of my favorite fights in the last five years was Arturo Gatti and the European lightweight champion from Spain, Wilson Rodriguez. So I started to think, "What if I made one of these guys a European who comes over here?" And I pictured Antonio Banderas as I was writing it. After seeing him in Pedro Almódovar movies, and watching "Evita" and thinking, "All he's doing there is standing there and all I want to do is watch him and not everything going on around him," I thought Antonio wasn't getting his due in America. I saw Sean Penn for the other part as I wrote it. Then I went to see "The Hi-Lo Country." I like the director, Stephen Frears; I don't think he got that right. But I was enamored of the way Woody Harrelson inhabited that mess. And I thought, "Woody! He's getting better and better, his heart is everywhere, I know how to work with him; I think we can do some classic Woody things and do some new things." We gave it to Woody and Antonio and they both said, "Yes," like that, without big offers.

Next page | The bad boxing in "Raging Bull"