Interview: Director James Toback Talks Tyson

I finally saw the film 'Tyson' over the weekend - a new video release. Amazing honesty and repoir with Mike Tyson, very moving.

http://www.movieretriever.com/blog/318/interview-director-james-toback-talks-tyson

April 28, 2009

James Toback has been a controversial figure in Hollywood for years, dividing audiences and critics over films like Fingers, Exposed, Two Girls and a Guy, and Black and White. There's no divisiveness in opinion over the quality of his latest film, a riveting self-portrait of a fascinating man called Tyson. In no one's words but Mike Tyson’s own, Toback allows one of the greatest boxers who ever lived an amazing self-examination captured on celluloid. The response has been nearly universal in its acclaim. Mixing archival footage and a few days spent with the champ, Toback has made one of his best films. Near the end of a press tour that clearly exhausted him – he even shared a story about falling asleep during a French TV interview as we were getting started and nearly appeared like he may do so during this one (although never lost an amazingly intellectual and well-spoken beat) – Toback was insightful, fascinating, and riveting.

--Brian Tallerico


MOVIE RETRIEVER: You've known Mike for years, so you must have had a reasonable idea of what he would say and how the movie would turn out. What surprised you the most about him?

JAMES TOBACK


JAMES TOBACK: Two things really surprised me. One was his ENDLESS use of the word "fear" to describe his condition in and out of the ring. The number of times that he describes situations in which he was fearful shocked me because you don't... I don't think of him that way. I had no idea that lurking just below his level of consciousness was this constant sense of uneasiness and fear and insecurity. Nothing like that. And the other thing, which was probably connected to that, was his respiratory difficulties. He mentions that, although he wasn't diagnosed, it's clear he was a childhood asthmatic. When he says he had trouble breathing... I had asthma when I was a kid. When you say you had trouble breathing, what you're really saying is you were forced to deal with death or the fear of the death without having any preparation for it. When you're lying there and you're four years old or five years old and you're gasping for breath, you don't understand what's going on. You just feel something very bad is about to happen. To overcome that... I don't care whether the movie does phenomenally well or not well... when you have to overcome THAT, your whole life is going to be different. You can't ignore that as the operating reality. It's like having your head held under the water constantly. The panic that is clearly under the surface in Mike is the direct result of that sense of helplessness, his permanent danger to the integrity of the psyche.

MOVIE RETRIEVER: I feel like he makes clear that he's always had that. How does prison amplify and change that?

TOBACK: He says he lost all faith in humanity. I think he's haunted by it - the humiliation, the degradation, the feeling he'd been reduced to nothing, the certainty that he would never get it back. I think that's it, primarily. I think what happened is that it lasted... I think that the prison experience combined with the looming sense of panic based on his respiratory incapacity is the key to his whole personality. How do you overcome that? By becoming powerful, by intimidating people, and by saying, as he does, "I'll never let anyone bully me 'cause I would f***in kill 'em." By letting the homicidal monster in, you expand so you never again feel like the impotent, short, fat kid.

MOVIE RETRIEVER: The person with the least fear is the one who strikes the most in others. So, what are the next 30, 40 years of Mike's life like?

TOBACK: Well, who knows if he has 30 or 40 years? He says he can't believe he's 40 - now he's 42. I think he's living on a day-to-day basis, not just because he goes to a 12-step program but because I think his mentality is fundamentally that. And he doesn't let it go too far beyond that. I think he'd be upset to think that he was being "pressured" to live longer. (Laughs.) He likes the idea that life could end at any moment.


MOVIE RETRIEVER: There's a line in the film - "No one that isn't an extremist can understand the mind of an extremist." So what makes you an extremist?

TOBACK: My inability to maintain any kind of temperate sense of what I'm doing. I can't do something halfway. I can't get into something and feel like I'm doing it in a sort of functional way. When I go into a hotel room, I have to reconfigure it. I need to always feel that things are the best they can be or at the most extreme. If I hear a song, I hear it 30 times if I like it. Over and over and over again. If I see a movie that I really like, I'd rather see that movie four or five times than go to three or four other movies. There's always been this sort of addictive part of my being. I've had to stay away from addicts. I can't think that it's not biochemically-based. The people who are that way ARE that way. You sense it physically. I used to drink non-stop. I quit alcohol. I used to smoke. I quit. Both in one day. Gambling. You felt all of them as physically existing inside.

MOVIE RETRIEVER: It's interesting that you present extremes of doing AND quitting. You either do it or you don't. There's no middle ground.

TOBACK: Yeah. Yeah.

MOVIE RETRIEVER: Were there any questions that Mike wouldn't answer?

TOBACK: No. And I didn't really ask questions. I would raise subjects. For instance, the first morning of the first day - "Earliest childhood memories." An hour later - "What do you think about sex?" An hour later I could feel his curiosity over what is Toback leading me into. I would just play it straight, which I think is the best way to do it period, but certainly with someone who is fundamentally honest.

MOVIE RETRIEVER: Was there anything that he was TOO honest about that you said to yourself that for his sake or for someone else, you wouldn't want to include it?

TOBACK: (Thinks.) No. The idea was that it was going to be completely open and that I would decide what was in and what was not.

MOVIE RETRIEVER: Okay. So, what did Mike think when he first saw it?

TOBACK: He said, "It's like a Greek tragedy and the only problem is that I'm the subject." After the Sundance Film Festival screening, he said, "People always used to say they were afraid of me and I wondered, 'Why? What are you afraid of? Why would people be scared of me?' Watching the film tonight I realized that I'm scared of that guy."

MOVIE RETRIEVER: How much time did you spend with him?

TOBACK: Three days in the rented house in the Hollywood Hills and two days walking on the beach north of Malibu. Shot about 30 hours.

MOVIE RETRIEVER: A lot of extra footage? Maybe on the DVD?

TOBACK: I think so. Yeah. I haven't looked at in a year-and-a-half, but I know there's a lot of good stuff I didn't use. The first thing was to get a structure and a style down and then what did I fit into that structure and that style.

MOVIE RETRIEVER: Did you always know that you'd use the one-interview structure for the film?

TOBACK: Yes. I didn't know that I would do it psycho-analytically until I got there, which turned out to be the key. Instead of face-to-face. I was a voice behind him, coming in at an angle, almost like a therapist and just triggering memories, which is what I was trying to do.

MOVIE RETRIEVER: Jim Brown, Bugsy Siegel, Mike Tyson - one could say that you're obsessed with larger-than-life personalities. Why do you think that is?

TOBACK: I guess because I like to think that I'm sort of one myself. I feel that by getting interested in other and writing about others, it's sort of a convenient way of doing an autobiography. I'm so absorbed with myself that I don't want to give in to that impulse - "Part Five of the James Toback Story as Told by James Toback". So I think I find these surrogates and sort of deal with the same subjects through them. I can feel that it's my world although I'm using them as a way to approach it.

MOVIE RETRIEVER: People are talking about the movie a lot and how it's changed their opinion of Mike, which leads to the natural question of - was that something you intended to do? Is this a case of showing people the Mike you knew? The real Mike?

TOBACK: No. I was aware of it. I was certainly aware that it would be highly surprising and disappointing if the movie had so little impact that people would think the same way. But I didn't set out to make it SO that would happen. I set out to make it because I was fascinated by him and I thought stylistically that I could come up with an interesting framework to show it.


MOVIE RETRIEVER: When you got the 30 hours in the editing room, did you think of anything you wish you had asked or addressed but didn't?

TOBACK: No. My only fear was that there was so much that I would never get it down to an hour-and-a-half. It was so overwhelming. And I had all the archival footage and all the fight stuff and I thought "this is a f***in nightmare."

MOVIE RETRIEVER: Has the overwhelmingly positive response to the film surprised you?

TOBACK: It has surprised me the degree to which the near-unanimity. I've always had mixed response. I've always had people who really got them and were excited. And I've always had some vicious detractors. And then there's been an in-between middle group. I assumed the same would be true here, particularly given Mike's incendiary nature. I was shocked that there wasn't more negative feeling and that he just overcame it and the movie got all the good stuff I was sure we'd get without any of the other.

MOVIE RETRIEVER: Although there has been a little bit of a discussion and argument that maybe the other side of a few issues, particularly the rape charge, should have been addressed by the film. How do you answer that?

TOBACK: It's a self-portrait. It's not an investigation. It's not a documentary which tries to figure out. First of all, you're never gonna know anyway. About that or anything else. What happened to me this morning at breakfast? I tell you that I did this and I did that. Maybe I'm telling the truth. Maybe I'm not. Eventually, you either trust people or you don't. Mike Tyson - the movie isn't insisting that he be taken at face value. I don't have the right to. I'm not saying, "Here's the truth." I'm saying, "Here's Mike Tyson's vision of himself presented through my stylistic vision of him." Richard Schickel wrote a great biography of Kazan. It was very well-researched. He talked to all sorts of people. Kazan wrote an autobiography. They're different. There are some similarities but they're two different books. The question is "Whose version of a life is going to be more interested? Kazan's or Schickel's?" Schickel's will have more points of view. There is a virtue in that alone, but I would rather read, if I had a choice of two, Kazan's version of his own life. No matter what digging Schickel did and no matter what insights he came up with that contradicted or supplemented Kazan's, I would still rather have Kazan commenting on Kazan's life. I would say that would be true of any figure in history.

MOVIE RETRIEVER: I was struck by how self-examining and introspective Mike is in the film. You've known him so long. Has that come with age or did he have that awareness all along?

TOBACK: I think he's always had his own voice. He always had an almost physical sense of language. He says nothing in jargon. Everything is his flavored language. A lot of people only speak in jargon. They get phrases. They apply him here and apply them there. Athletes especially. Mike doesn't have any of that. It's all his fresh take on everything.

MOVIE RETRIEVER: You said in Interview that boxing is dead. Why is that?

TOBACK: I think the era of the great champ can't flourish in today's climates. There are too many divisions. The talent has been too diluted. There are too many other things like Ultimate Fighting. There isn't the iconography of the champion that there used to be. There's not going to be another Mike Tyson.

- Tyson is currently playing in New York and Los Angeles and opens in other cities, including Chicago, this Friday, May 1st, 2009.