CHRISTY: The Making of a Boxing Legend – and Movie

Who better to tell the true story of the rise and fall of boxer Christy Martin, than screenwriter Mirrah Foulkes and her director husband David Michôd – right after making their movie, Christy about the fighter’s compelling and volatile life.

So Helen M Jerome sat down with the filmmaking couple at the London Film Festival, straight after watching Christy, starring a pugnacious Sydney Sweeney in the title role.

It’s perhaps telling that although Christy Martin was the most famous female boxer to emerge in the late 20^th Century – the Katie Taylor of her day – you’d be hard pressed to find many who know her real story.

That Don King (depicted above, right) added her to his roster of boxers. That her stellar appearance on the undercard before the famous Mike Tyson-Frank Bruno pay-per-view fight lifted her into the stratosphere. That she married her hugely controlling manager. That she pushed fellow female fighters away with words and deeds.

But now, in the brand new biopic, Christy, we see beneath her tough exterior to reveal a tough interior, furiously denying her feelings and desires as she spirals out of control and bounces into the ring. Are viewers about to journey on a doom loop or is there a redemptive arc for the boxer known as ‘The Coalminer’s Daughter’?

As couples often do, especially those who work together, Aussie filmmakers Mirrah Foulkes and David Michôd (below, left; and Michôd with Christy star Sydney Sweeney, below, right) tend to finish each other’s thoughts and sentences. So you can see how they collaborate even as you read their interview.

The other realisation during our conversation was how many amazing sportswomen’s stories have been neglected, forgotten, and even erased. Maybe Christy can kickstart some more of these tales being told…

For starters, which women’s sports do you enjoy watching?

Mirrah Foulkes: Well, I think the whole of Australia got gripped with women’s football around the World Cup, and the Matildas suddenly became these superstars.

It was so nice. I’d never been interested in football in my life – I know that’s probably blasphemy in this country, but people were running home from events to watch the game, and it felt like the whole country got behind them. So I’m now a big Matildas fan.

David Michôd: They were breaking stadium records, and not just for women’s sport, but records for those stadiums in general. It was pretty extraordinary.

I mean, I really enjoy watching women’s tennis.

I have grown strangely to love boxing, because I wasn’t an enthusiast before making this film. I schooled myself up and have actually strangely found that I like watching women’s boxing more than I like watching men’s boxing.

Oh yes, I feel the same about women’s rugby over men’s.

I don’t know why it is, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the fight that put Christy Martin on the map, against Deirdre Gogarty in ‘95, was the fight of the night, even though it was on a Mike Tyson Frank Bruno undercard.

Then cut to 30 years later and we’re shooting our film.

The second last night of the shoot was the Mike Tyson Jake Paul fight.

MF: Which was a fizzer.

DM: But fight of the night was Katie Taylor Amanda Serrano. Those two are amazing – and that was a great fight.

MF: I’ve also got to give a quick shout out to women’s surfing, particularly in Australia.

We have been punching above our weight in women’s surfing for a very long time.

We have some great surfers.

That would be a really good film – women’s surfing.

DM: Yeah. Molly Picklum is the women’s number world champ at the moment.

MF: I wish I knew the stats off the top of my head, but I’d say Australia has the most women’s surfing champions, but I’m not sure of it.

You should do a women’s Point Break.

MF: Oh, well, Point Break is my favourite all-time surfing movie.

DM: Yeah, never remake a masterpiece!

MF: Actually, I think they already did.

DM: And it was a mistake.

There’s one quote when I saw the film Christy that jumped out. She says: I don’t see myself as a champion of women’s sport.

Obviously in the magazine, we do champion women’s sport and I wonder a) does she still stick by that because you know her well? And b) this film seems like it is championing women’s sport.

MF: Yeah, this is one of the really interesting things about Christy. She would say she has very few regrets. There’s one that’s pointed at towards the end of the film, which is a very important moment.

But her other regret – I would say I can’t speak for her, but in our conversations – is that there was a period in her career when she was guided by really the wrong people in many different ways.

Her own self-loathing, self-hatred caused her to speak out against other women in sport.

And Christy really regrets that. She certainly would not say that now.

DM: But she understands where it came from.

She was actively encouraged to cultivate a trash-talking – if not homophobic – showbusiness personality that I think she looks back on now with some regret.

MF: She was very much being schooled to adapt.  

How much did Christy Martin get involved in the film? I presume you had her onside early on?

MF: She was involved from the very beginning of the writing. Before we even started writing we talked with her a lot. And she remains she remains very involved to this day, so probably more than we would have even expected.

Because you go into it with certain degree of trepidation, not sure how the relationship’s going to go. And we’ve become very close to her and love her. We realised early on in the writing that she was a huge asset to us.

Then also while we were shooting she was really important to have around for lots of different reasons, both the detail of the minutiae and everyday stuff, but also in terms of reminding the crew and cast of what we were doing.

She was a big inspiration when she was there on set (above, alongside Sydney Sweeney, playing her).

You could feel energy lift, and it was pretty special having her there.

David, two of the most famous bouts are those with Deirdre Gogarty and Laila Ali (daughter of Muhammad Ali). How did you choreograph these fights? Both were filmed, so did you base it on what actually happened?

DM: Yeah, we had a wonderful stunt coordinator/fight choreographer named Wally Garcia who fully embraced my desire to keep the fights in the film as authentic as possible. That meant embracing the ugly mess of fighting.

So much of it is just exhausted clinches and swings and misses and just dancing around each other. It isn’t just wall-to-wall knockouts, even though Christy knocked out a lot of women.

Those two in particular are the set piece fights of the film. So we tried our best to keep them chronologically accurate – and keep as much as we could in the choreography as well.

Having said that, it feels in training like you’re choreographing and rehearsing a dance, but once you get into it for real – when the cameras are rolling and you’re repeating it – it gets dangerous really quick.

It starts to develop its own kind of mess, which you have to embrace, even if that means you start drifting away a little bit from what actually happened.

People around me were wincing at the movie screening, which I’m sure makes you happy!

DM: Yeah, I mean, it’s a very difficult thing to do, to shoot boxing that is safely achievable. When you’re in a real fight, these fighters wouldn’t fight again for however many weeks, if not months, because it’s unbelievably taxing.

When you’re shooting fighting day after day after day, you need to be able to protect your performers. But you want it to look real.

We had an amazing team of stunt performers playing Christy’s opponents, who Sydney loved. And they came to an arrangement pretty early on that they were going to trust each other.

They were going to… hit each other. They were going to let each other know when a line had been overstepped, but very rarely did that call get made.

They wanted it to look good. Everyone wanted it to look good.

What first attracted you to the idea of Christy and drew you to the story? I didn’t know the story and feel I should.

MF: We didn’t either. And when we did, we felt we should – and felt like others should as well.

So, first and foremost, Christy.

But then also I think there’s a bunch of really interesting themes laid into her story.

And it’s a great opportunity to make a film that on the surface feels like one thing, but is actually about many other, very important things.

Did it drop in your lap or did somebody bring it to you as an idea?

DM: It was just a particular moment. I’ve never actually asked Christy why it was at that moment…

I had a meeting with her because her life rights were available, and I too hadn’t heard of her.

But as soon as I became familiar with her story I was like: this is amazing.

Just as her fight against Deirdre Gogarty in ‘95 was buried down on a card despite it being the fight of the night. Just as Taylor and Serrano’s was buried down on a card underneath a fizzer of a main event.

I came to realise that there are these unbelievable stories about women just there to be told. And so many people don’t know them because they’ve been buried under the hubris of the towering male ego. Some of these stories – Christy’s in particular – are just amazing.

How quickly did you get Sydney attached to it?

DM: Happened pretty quick once we had a script we were showing people.

What was her level of commitment?

MF: 120%, and it needed to be. She wanted it so badly and she wanted to work hard.

DM: We knew that we wanted to find the right person, a gifted actor.

With Sydney we had someone who had already had some fight training, competitive fight training.

But more than anything we needed someone who wanted to do the work, who was really hungry for this role. And because it was gonna require a lot of her and I knew within a few minutes of talking to her that she was gonna do the work.

Was she eating steak and burgers, as in the film, all the way through?

DM: Yeah, she was eating a lot, working out a lot. It was unbelievably demanding.

She’s in almost every scene of the movie and during the shoot, when the rest of us were wrapping for the day and going to bed, exhausted, she would have to go and train or rehearse or learn lines for the next day.

When you were writing this, Mirrah, getting the authenticity of the West Virginia accent, how did you develop the script? Was there much already written down?

MF: Again, it came out of deep research, mainly using Christy as a wealth of knowledge.

And obviously a lot of boxing research, because I didn’t know anything about boxing.

A lot of stuff shot off from that, but always at the very centre of it was Christy as a resource.

She was amazing, we got to do a little trip around Florida and see some fights together, and go to boxing gyms. We visited a bunch of houses she lived in, including the house she and Jim lived in.

So we spent some time there, but it’s always a challenge when you’re not from a place. But also there can be something really interesting about it, being an outside eye coming in.

How important is the gay part of her story, which is there from almost the first scene?

MF: I mean, I think it’s intrinsic to Christy’s story.

It’s what set her off on this path of hiding in plain sight, of building up a persona that was so removed from her true self.

It informs everything in the movie and – again not wanting to give any spoilers – it certainly informs how her life is now.

DM: And how constrained her life was. You know her sexuality is important – also the location is West Virginia in the late eighties, for a gay woman it meant she was wanting to live an impossible life.

So that was incredibly contributive to her throwing herself into boxing and into a marriage, as a kind of denial.

MF: If Christy had felt she was able to live openly gay, her life would have been completely different – and we probably wouldn’t have been making a film about her…

The other thing it reminded me of is Ike and Tina Turner, where the person you’re working with becomes the husband (depicted below, left), the controller. I don’t know if that’s something you’re alluding to?

MF: I think there’s a lot of examples of those kinds of relationships. Unfortunately, way too many. And they’re just the ones in the public eye.

Yeah, there’s lots of them we thought about and drew on in various ways.

So why should our readers – who are addicts of women’s sport – go and see this movie?

MF: Well, as I mentioned earlier, this movie’s about a lot of things.

It’s first and foremost a boxing movie, but it’s a boxing movie about really important thematics.

And it seems like such a trope to say it, but Christy is a true inspiration.

I think the way she lives her life now is exceptional, and she’s a great person.

The fact that she is alive and doing what she’s doing now is a testament to that strength.

You can’t find anyone much stronger than Christy.

DM: And she was a phenomenal athlete.

I would encourage everyone first to go and see our movie.

Second, then watch Laura Brownson’s documentary, Untold: Deal With The Devil, on Netflix.

Then third, go on YouTube and watch all of her fights because they’re phenomenal.

She had a similar fighting style to Tyson. Low centre of gravity and power. And her fights are brutal.

So, if for no other reason, it’s a portrait of a phenomenal athlete everyone should know about.

Finally, what are your favourite women’s sport movies? Mine is I Tonya.

MF: Well… [very long pause] I just want to say something on that… I think the fact that we’re reaching and trying… is testament to the fact that there are all these amazing sporting women whose stories haven’t been told. And Christy’s just one of them.

We should be able to reel off 10 female sports movies that we love.

It’s harder to do because there just aren’t as many.

I love I Tonya, and so I’m going to steal it back off you.

SM: Made by a fellow countryman…

And having said that, the second you leave the room, I’m gonna think of another one!

Christy is out on general release from November 28th.