Girlfight: A Conversation With Karyn Kusama
by Loren King
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From Body and Soul to Raging Bull, the boxing film is such
a cinematic staple that it has become a hallowed genre of its own. With
their primal clash of warriors, smoke-filled rooms, musty gyms, and crusty
coaches, boxing movies have for decades been the arena of men, with women -- the
boxer's mother, wife, girlfriend, or mistress -- safely protected outside the
ring.
Girlfight is a
boxing movie for the new millennium. The film
follows the genre's tradition of boxing as personal catharsis, of a
nobody-who-becomes-a-somebody with all the attendant romantic
complications. But this time there's a major twist: It's a scrappy,
intense young woman -- Diana Guzman (Michelle Rodriguez) -- inside the
ring of fire.
Girlfight is also
grittier than most Hollywood boxing movies because it is a story about
amateur boxers, not the prizefighters audiences have been accustomed to
seeing from Gentleman Jim to Rocky. In Girlfight,
the young men
and women are beginners, both physically and metaphorically. They clumsily
do battle on the ropes of passion and maturity as they navigate their way
into adulthood.
Writer/director Karyn Kusama's first feature shared the Grand Jury Prize
at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival. Kusama drew on her own experiences in
the early '90s, when she boxed at Gleason's Gym in Brooklyn, NY, for her
script about a female boxer's personal and professional journey.
"If I was going to tell a boxing story, I knew it had to be about a young
woman," says Kusama, a St. Louis native who graduated from the film program
at New York University and worked as an assistant to filmmaker John Sayles,
who eventually helped produce Girlfight.
"There's such a tradition of boxing films, so if I was going to do anything
interesting with that tradition, I was going to have to subvert
it a little bit. Boxing, in general, is sort of the last of the great contact
sports -- a true, dramatic face-off between two people. And you see that
war so clearly that it becomes cinematically interesting," she says. "I felt
I was telling a classical narrative with a trajectory that was linear ... the
problem with storytelling, at this point, is we are just used to seeing men
occupy that role, that hero's journey. It was important to me to see a young
woman go through that. Not even in a political way -- I'm just bored by the
lack of questions that I feel from a lot of those other stories."
In Girlfight, troubled high school student Diana Guzman lives in a
housing project in Brooklyn with her dismissive father and her younger brother.
Her discovery of boxing at the local gym, under the tutelage of
tough but compassionate trainer Hector (Jaime Tirelli), opens a new world of
self-discipline and a way to channel her anger. When she finally competes
against another featherweight, Adrian (Santiago Douglas), simply because there
are no other women to fight, sexual and romantic complications ensue. It's the
battle of the sexes in microcosm. Kusama says she was intrigued by the emotional
possibilities for her characters that grew out of seeing men and women spar with
each other in the gym.
"When I started boxing in 1993, there were not a lot of women, and there was no
institutional competition. That came later, in '95 or '96, with the Golden
Gloves," she notes. "I think more and more women from the same backgrounds and
neighborhoods as men are attracted to boxing. But change
will be slow. Boxing is not a sport for everyone; it should not be a national
pastime. But it is something more girls are going to be finding."
One of the most intriguing aspects of Girlfight is its redefinition of
femininity. Diana, who dresses in the defiant style of most urban teens,
becomes more comfortable with her body and her sensuality when she is at
her most powerful and self-assured -- working a punching bag, or sparring in
the ring. The message of the film is that boxing makes her more, not less, sexy
and appealing. "I wanted to see the character soften up as she became more
entrenched in the sport," Kusama says. "That idea grew from Michelle's
performance, because she brought so many human qualities that I don't think I
could have anticipated."
Actress Michelle Rodriguez, who won the role of Diana at an open casting call in
New York City, had never boxed or acted before Girlfight. She trained for
four-and-a-half months before the cameras started rolling for the grueling,
24-day shooting schedule. Her freshness and natural athleticism made Rodriguez
a natural in the role. "She has an athletic grace. She's very gifted; if there's
any quality in Michelle that mirrors the character, it is that she's full of
potential and raw talent," observes Kusama. "I was lucky to have that to work with
because it is a lot easier to work with raw talent than to work with polished
no-talent. For me, anyway."
Diana was written as a Latina in Kusama's script because, says Kusama, "being a
Latina was authentic to boxing in New York and New York City life, and I wanted
to pay homage to some of my favorite fighters. In the lower
weight divisions, Latinos dominate the sport, so I felt it was honest." Kusama
says her influences for Girlfight came from Hollywood melodrama, and from
the naturalistic style found in Elia Kazan's classic On the Waterfront
and John Huston's boxing film Fat City.
Since the world she was depicting was that of novice boxers training in decrepit
gyms, Kusama and director of photography Patrick Cady created a
style far removed from, say, the balletic violence of Raging Bull, Martin
Scorsese's masterpiece that redefined the boxing film. In Girlfight, the
boxing sequences, though carefully choreographed, are deliberately clumsy,
hard-nosed, and scrappy.
"My hope -- and I can't say I completely succeeded -- was to create a more
naturalistic experience of the activity in the ring, with less overt choreography,
less theatrics," says Kusama. "It was interesting to me to
think these characters are eventually going to become more emotionally open and
vulnerable and maybe even a little theatrical with their feelings outside the
ring, but we could keep what was going on inside the ring quite honest and plain.
It has to be choreographed, for safety; we don't want black eyes for next day's
shooting. But I think a lot of boxing movies miss the sport itself: they miss the
fear and the emotional giving that goes on between
two opponents. And at the amateur level, I knew I had a different mission because
of working with characters whose experience level wasn't so high. So I wanted to
do something about the struggle to find form, as opposed to being these perfectly
formed fighters."
Kusama, now working on her next script, which she calls a sci-fi/horror film that
she hopes to shoot next year, says Girlfight doesn't glamorize violence,
but acknowledges that boxing is a natural and viable outlet for disadvantaged urban
youths, both male and female.
"The film promotes the concept of sport, and I think boxing is the answer for a lot
of young people. It's hard to accept, but I think, better boxing than a host of
other after school activities. ... We forget how hard this world really is, how
difficult it is to navigate through it when you are
young and haven't been given the tools or resources you should have gotten," she
says. "In a culture as violent as ours, we have to accept that people integrate
violence into their life, and for this character [Diana], violence is a primary
energy for her. Her anger and rage is definitely a creative
energy, if it could be controlled and focused into something, directed into
something. I liked the concept that the character needed to box not because she
needed to get out of her neighborhood or win a lot of money but because she just
needed to box, she needed to move, she needed to express herself in this visceral,
sensory way to feel alive. On the simplest terms, that's what makes boxing so
compelling.
"I wanted to glamorize the concept of regimen, routine, and discipline because I
think there is something compelling about working through things and committing
to things," Kusama continues. "It's really important to find what it is in your
life that you love to do, and then do it. That's the inspirational part of Diana's
journey. She finds what she's good at."
* Read the PopcornQ review of Girlfight
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