Toback on “Tyson”

The director on why he doesn't care if his portrait of the (in)famous boxer is one-sided.

Were you ever concerned, considering how many controversial aspects of his life have been publicly aired, that the film could be dismissed as one-sided?

Well, it’s not supposed to be a he-said, she-said investigation. It’s a self-portrait filtered through my aesthetic. It’s meant to be a self-revelation, a kind of psychoanalytical portrait of one fascinating figure, illustrated by fight footage and stylistically presented by me. That was the idea all along. I would’ve been much less interested in making a documentary in which all the audience was asked to do was [determine] whom to believe, with varying versions of the same story. To take a vote on who believes what about which didn’t seem even a mildly interesting prospect.

Tyson’s former assistant manager Steve Lott has been very vocal about what he sees as discrepancies in the film. Why isn’t he represented in the film?

It’s a question of selection. I didn’t want to make a two-and-a-half-hour movie. I thought the interesting stuff in [Tyson's] formative years was Cus D’Amato. Steve Lott is one of a group of people who were around Cus D’Amato’s place, felt they would be swept away on Mike’s coattails, and felt left out — and in Lott’s case, 25 years later, is still bitter about not having been included. I think he felt, “Well, I was there at the beginning. I deserve something in it and I haven’t got it.”

The 2005 documentary made about your work as a filmmaker was called “The Outsider.” Is that a hyperbolic word, or do you actually feel like an outsider?

I do, because the studio system — which is what you would define as the “inside world” — is one to which I exist in a kind of parallel relationship. The guys running studios now are not, for the most part, interested in financing serious dramas with humor in them. They’re interested in tentpole movies, effects movies, gimmick movies. The idea of straight, dramatic films is, let’s say, a sidebar of what they’re up to. The financial performance of those movies has been insufficiently encouraging for them to change their minds. What pays off for them is kids movies and funny, goofy teenage comedies.

If it weren’t just studio greed, but economic woes, what kinds of compromises would you be willing to make to get your films made?

None. There’s no point in making a movie if I’m not going to make the movie I want to make. I don’t feel compelled to make any movie, per se. If it’s a movie that I want to do, I’ll find a way of doing it, one way or another. But the idea that I’m just going to make a movie so that I could make a movie and do something I don’t believe in, or I’m not excited by in some way, would seem pointless. Life is too short.

Absolutely, that’s understood. I was speaking more of fiscal compromises than the creative kind.

I’m very shrewd about that. I write movies with an awareness of how much they’re going to cost, so I intentionally keep myself away from movies that I know can’t possibly get made the way I want to make them. There would be no point in my writing a movie that I know is going to cost $150 million, even though I know it’s the kind of movie I want to make at that moment — although I can’t imagine even needing a quarter of that. One of the reasons I did ["Tyson" is that] I knew I could finance it myself and start shooting immediately, which is what I did. If it’d been more expensive, I wouldn’t have been able to.

Besides meaty conversations with boxers, what stimulates you these days?

What excites me is whatever my next movie is going to be. Then I get excited and into it, and watching my nine-year-old son develop on an almost daily basis is endlessly fascinating to me. I intend to use him as an actor in my next couple of films because he’s a phenomenally interesting kid and very beautiful to look at. There’s a movie called “The Director,” which I’m going to finish in the not-too-distant future, which I’ll hope to get set up quickly.

And just so nobody can accuse me of being one-sided, what pisses you off these days?

I have to say, I just stay away from anything that doesn’t interest me. The older I get, the less patience I have with anything that bores me, hinders me, upsets me, so I just avoid it. If someone tries to impose it on me, which is rarely the case, and I can’t avoid the person, I’m happy to just run them over.

“Tyson” opens in New York and Los Angeles on April 24th.

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