Tyson is acclaimed indie director James Toback’s stylistically inventive portrait of a mesmerizing Mike Tyson. The film is a first-person account by Tyson, and the end result is a riveting and brutally honest portrait of a man we thought we all knew, but never really knew at all.
Everhip’s Kimberly Austin recently sat down with Toback to discuss his friendship with Tyson and to get his thoughts on the film. Toback is fascinating to speak with; the kind of guy you wish would corner you at a cocktail party and entertain you with his stories all-night long.
Q-Don’t you think people will say, “it would have been nice to get the other side of the story?”
Well, I don’t think so. I think it would have been boring, because what are you going to hear? I took a psychoanalytical approach. I’m the psychoanalyst and Mike’s the analysis. Mike is lying downstream of consciousness, and you have a movie in which you’re back to where you started which is, “Whom do I believe?”. I heard six accounts of this event, or three of this or that, and you’re left with nothing. Whereas, what I wanted to do was not say this was true and everything else you’ve heard is false, but rather, this is what Mike Tyson’s version of his life is. To me there was no choice, the alternative would have been a hodgepodge that got us nowhere…to say nothing of the fact that no one is going to be as interesting as Mike anyway.
Q-Tyson is such a polarizing figure. Do you think the film will have any impact on his legacy?
I do. Even people who have been admirers of his have been astonished in a very positive way. For example, Sugar Ray Leonard, Michael Strahan, Warren Beatty, Annette Bening…all these who basically had a good view of him anyway, were kind of overwhelmed, and a lot of people who despised him or just had no interest in him or in boxing have been captivated. I told the story Actually, it was not my intention to convert people but around halfway through editing I started to feel that this might actually be a movie that might appeal to people who didn’t like him, and I was just curious, so I recruited 35 women over a period of 3 weeks by offering them 100 dollars,,,,first I would say “Do you like Mike Tyson, do you like boxing, do you want to see a movie called ‘Tyson’?”, and if the answer was no on all 3 counts, then I would say “Well here’s the proposal. I’ll give you a hundred dollars if you leave in 5 minutes, but if you stay you don’t get any money, but I want to hear what you think”. So 35 out of 35 passed up the 100 dollars, and in most cases they were either in tears or really moved. Nobody had anything but a positive view of the movie, and most people were shocked that they now had, if not this affection for him, at least this understanding of him that totally reconstructed their original view…I liked the idea that I was getting people to re-think something that they thought they knew, because anytime you can get people off a conventional automatic, manipulative vision of something to me is a triumph. It’s like OJ Simpson. Everyone thought he was nice because he smiled and did Hertz commercials, but anyone who knew OJ knew he wasn’t anything like that. Jim Brown was the only one who said it, because everyone was saying “Can you believe OJ Simpson did that?’ And Jim Brown said, “Not only can I believe it, it was, like, overdue.”
Q-What is Tyson’s opinion of the film?
I think he’s kind of stunned by it. It’s a very weird thing for him to be presented with this sort of raw, unprotected version of himself, which he did not come up with intentionally. I didn’t trick him into it, but I used a device that I feel is the only way this stuff would have come out. Instead of just asking him questions and getting answers, and asking another question and another question, I stood behind him and threw out a general idea and then let him go for twenty minutes, thirty minutes, forty minutes with the camera going uninterrupted, and as a result, you get a kind of psychoanalytic effect. There are things you’re not thinking rationally or consciously that come out in spite of yourself, and that struck me as a more ambitious way of getting to the core of who he was, and I think confronted with that, it’s a bit disconcerting and daunting. And given that he’s got multiple personalities and voices anyway, to be confronted with so many of them in a movie, and you’re seeing yourself there in a way that you normally don’t have that ability to see yourself.
I think that he was shocked to see how well it was received. “What are these people giving an ovation to? I’m just myself. They’re applauding me for being myself. What’s the big deal? That‘s who I am, that’s what I am”. There’s a kind of modesty and embarrassment, like taking 17 shots of him naked and he knows he’s being photographed, but he doesn’t know that 14 of the 17 angles are going to be shown. So now all of a sudden he’s got all 17 photographs to look up at. And people are clapping and he’s saying, “What are they doing, why are they clapping?” I think he was nervous that they wouldn’t clap, and that they would be saying “So?”
Q- What’s Mike doing now? What do you think he could do in the future?
He’s spending a lot of time with his kids, with his girlfriend, and he has a new daughter. I think what he says at the end is the real answer to that question, which is the “Past is history, the future’s a mystery,” and I think that my notion of what he should be doing eventually is, at least as of now, he doesn’t yet get…and it is working with kids as a kind of teacher or mentor because he’s very good at that, and these kids look up to him. And, I think that he’d be terrific at it. I don’t think it’s something he’d do right now. I think he’d like to get some money, that used to be there in unimaginable plentiful supply, and now is not.
Q- Can he make a living never making a public appearance?
He’s got this virtual game coming out, where he and Muhammad Ali are boxing each other, and he’s got an autobiography coming out that he’s writing or writing with someone, and Jamie Foxx wants to play him in a fictionalized version of his life…so I think that those three things alone will probably bring him enough money to live fairly well for a pretty decent amount of time.
Q- Was there anything that was off limits when you set up the ground rules to shoot the movie?
There were two things that were very clear; nothing was off-limits, and he would have no control over what was put in the movie…none. In fact, he didn’t see it until it was done, and the first thing he said was “It’s like a Greek tragedy, the only problem is that I’m the subject.” But then he also said, “Do we have to see me beaten up so many times at the end of the movie?” And I said “yeah. We see you triumphant in the beginning, and we have to really register the humiliation you went through at the end, and it has to be humiliation that’s felt, not just observed or mentioned, but one that we see you going through.” And by the way, I did cut out the Danny Williams fight (which is one of the times he got knocked out) and he said “Gee, thanks!”
Q-What was the turning point in Tyson’s life?
Definitely prison. First of all, I don’t think there’s ever been a movie, or a television show, or documentary that gives you the sense of horror of being incarcerated that he does, just by talking about it. I mean I know, and not just because he’s Mike Tyson, but you say to yourself, “If Mike Tyson had this reaction, imagine how I would feel?” Yet just the actual depiction of prison life and solitary confinement and what goes on, to me, I would rather be hiding in the Siberian tundra then spend one night in that place. And he says he was never the same after that. His friends have said over the years, “You gotta let go, you gotta accept it.” He thinks it’s easy for them to say. He says, “I can’t. It changed me. I was never that same after that.”
Q-Do you think because you are friends, that you brought a truly unbiased eye to the film or are you maybe, just a little bit protective of him?
No, not protective, but I definitely like him. If I didn’t like him I wouldn’t have wanted to make the film. I wouldn’t be interested in making a film about someone I didn’t like. It was obvious that’s going to come through if you’re inviting someone to get to know somebody, and listen to them for an hour and a half, unless you’re the sort of person who sort of says, “look at this piece of shit”. Well, I might say that about someone whom I’m inviting people to look at for 30 seconds or a minute…“Look at this asshole”…but I’m sure as hell not going to spend a year and a half of my life making an hour and a half movie to say that. So there has to be some strong degree of empathy and connection, which there was no question about it.
Q-Where did the idea for the movie come from?
I brought it up. But it basically came from the scene in Black and White where he’s alone in the gym and he goes into this whole thing about his own humiliation about his time in prison, and I thought this meditative contradictory Mike Tyson would be a great subject for a kind of cinematic portrait. And he said I’m ready to do it whenever you’re ready to do it, and then of course it’s a question of the right circumstances, and it didn’t happen for six or seven years, but we both knew we would do it at that point.
Q-How long was the shoot?
It was a week of shooting five days, ten hours a day. And then maybe an hour lunch break, and eleven and a half months editing.
Q-What was the thought behind the fractured, overlapping, shots in the movie?
Fractured personality needing a fractured visual style with overlapping voices. I wanted to give a sense of what he refers to early in the movie, “chaos of the brain”, visually and orally.
Q- Was there any time in the making of the film that you had a particular recollection about something and you thought “Oh maybe he’s right. Maybe I should have seen it that way?”
No, because basically I didn’t care if he was contradicting himself, or it was different from a previous version. The idea was “What is he going to say now that is going to be of interest?” and including him contradicting himself like he did in Black and White. Anytime I’m getting him to say anything, I’m adding it to the pool, and then I’ll worry in the editing room what has to go. Basically the editing room decisions were made primarily on what was working rhythmically and structurally.
Q-What do you think is going to be the most shocking revelation about Mike’s human side?
I think the most shocking thing is how consumed by fear he is all the time. How fear was a debilitating and ongoing reality, and everything successful in his life was in response to that. He never got over being bullied and pushed around as a kid and everything grew from that.
Q-How do you think the success of the movie will change him?
I don’t think it has changed him yet. I think it will change him in the sense that it’s going to have an impact, that is. Well, I hate to be cocky about it, I think it’s impossible that it won’t have an impact given the impact that it’s going to have culturally. I think he’s aware he’s been ostracized and down and out and humiliated, and now all of a sudden he’s doing something or been seen as doing something that’s resurrecting him in a way. And portraying him as someone who also had triumphs, and who was also a fundamentally decent and smart and articulate person. So I can’t imagine he’s going to say “Well, that’s nice, what do I do with it?”, as opposed to feeling that it is enhancing him in some way and making life easier in some way. I know he’ll say, “I don’t care what people think about me,” but you know, that’s a defense more than anything else.
Q- Did prison bring out another side to him?
He became an omnivorous reader. Actually Cus (D’Amato, his longtime trainer and guardian/mentor) had him read, but he became a serious reader in prison. I sent him books, Pete Hamill visited him and gave him books, John Kennedy Jr. gave him books when he visited him, Maya Angelou gave him books, so he was ready. Nietzsche, Machiavelli, he did a lot of reading.
Q-Did Tyson think he could have been anything else?
Not successfully, not the way he is here. He could have had some success in other areas, but not even sports. He didn’t play any other sports. Boxing was his only sport. It’s like a prodigy with a musical instrument.
Q-Does he still train?
No and he doesn’t want to, he doesn’t want to get his head into it.
Q-What do you think he would have done if he didn’t box?
He’d probably be dead or in jail.
Q- Who do you think is going to see this movie?
My guess is that word of mouth will bring in all sorts of people that wouldn’t normally come, but you know who knows? Look at the movie that everyone went to see—It was 17 Again. So who knows? It would be silly for me to say well everybody loves the movie, so everyone is going to go. The point is that movie-going now is all over the place and the real audience for movies and the big audience says, “Oh my God, I’m going to see Zac Efron! If you ask my nine-year-old son, would he like to see Stepbrothers or any of my movies. he’s going to pick Stepbrothers.
Tyson opens nationwide in theaters today.
