Catching Up With... Tyson's James Toback

James Toback is celebrated for his narrative films such as The Pick-Up Artist, Two Girls and a Guy, and Black & White, each of which star Robert Downey, the DeNiro to Toback’s Scorsese. His new film, though, is a documentary on the epic life of his friend Mike Tyson. Notably, not a single other person besides Tyson himself is interviewed, which makes for an intriguing—and intense—hour and a half. Paste caught up with Toback about the film, improvisation, and whether Tyson would have beaten Muhammed Ali.

Paste: You’ve got a lot of experience building narrative films from extensive improvisation. Was that experience an especially good preparation for shooting a documentary?

James Toback: Absolutely. It’s a very good point you raise. In fact, in my six weeks of doing interviews about this movie, that’s the first question that really fascinates me. I would even go so far as to say that improvisational filmmaking in a fictional film is much closer to documentary filmmaking, the way I do it, than improvisational film is to a film done with strict adherence to a script. If you have a script that you absolutely stick to, which is overwhelmingly how fictional movies are made, that doesn’t even resemble saying, “I have a script, but in most cases we’re going to forget it and start with the premise, the intentions, what’s going on in the scene, and come up with our own stuff.” That kind of free-wheeling, inventive work is much, much closer to the kind of documentary filmmaking that Tyson is, than it is to the sort of conventional, that-what’s-on-the-page, that’s-what-you-do kind of approach. And much more fun. And it’s ultimately capable of reaching heights that you can never reach when you’re just sticking to the page because that sense of life, the spontaneity and suddenness, you can’t get that when you do it as written. You can get a great scene that way, but there’s another dimension that’s just not there when you don’t have the sense of discovery and surprise that comes from literally finding the moment as it’s occurring.

Paste: It’s such a more collaborative process. I love the idea of what you do. Two Girls and a Guy is probably my favorite film you’ve ever done, and it’s obviously such a close collaboration between you and those three actors. What a great process to be able to be in the middle of.

Toback: And I have to tell you that after being off the shelf for awhile, not even being in print, it’s actually coming out on Blu-ray in a few months. The newfound fame of Robert Downey has finally found a way of having some applicability to my life. [laughs] Fox just sent me today a 20-minute DVD of what they recently shot of me talking about the whole history of the movie, the story behind the scenes, and they’re going to package it with the original commentary Robert and I did with Natasha and a Blu-ray copy of the movie. So it will be there in all its glory in a few months.

Paste: It was such an audacious choice—unsurprising that you would make an audacious choice—to pretty much exclusively use the footage of the Tyson interviews in this film. A few clips, a few photos, but it’s pretty much an hour and a half of the man talking about himself. And the energy never flags. That’s what you’d worry about, but it doesn’t in this film. How early in the process did you make that decision, and how much of a challenge was that in the editing room?

Toback: The boxing footage comes in a bit, and there’s some dazzling stuff from early in his life. But yes, it’s mostly him. I mean, he’s such a mesmerizing talker. It’s shot in different rooms in that mansion, different angles, some on the beach north of Malibu. But mostly it’s because he’s such a riveting talker, and I just felt from the start that he could hold the screen as long as I needed him to. The idea of bringing anyone else in just struck me as a mood-breaker. People have gossiped about him endlessly, and I just thought, "What’s the point of adding more to that?" Instead of just rehashing the same second- and third-hand clichés, why not allow this fresh and original perspective from him, on him, to be the only voice? And once I decided to do that, I couldn’t really break it. I had originally thought that I would make myself and our friendship part of the movie, but ended up deciding to cut myself out completely. I didn’t want to make a movie about me. So this is sort of a self-portrait of Tyson presented through my own perspective.

Paste: I walked in expecting it to be a movie about Tyson, and ended up walking out thinking it was more a movie about what Tyson thought about Tyson. And that was more interesting to me. The whole unreliable narrator thing can be an interesting thing to play with.

Toback: Yes. And think about his state and position in the world, probably one of the five or 10 most-famous people in the world. And that he’s had this incredibly fascinating life, and he’s so interested in talking about it. And he has a perspective that’s really fresh and unadulterated where what he says is exactly what he thinks, no attempt to color or change it. It’s almost as if there’s no concern about what anybody is thinking, just straight out what’s on his mind. That’s kind of a terrific prospect. Then it was just a question of really sculpting it. Getting it wasn’t that difficult; it was just five days of really intense shooting. Then it was just a question of how to shape it so that there’s no dead spots, and so that there’s a feeling of sequential inevitability.

Paste: I love the line where Tyson says, “It’s like a Greek tragedy; the only problem is that I’m the subject.” Can you unpack what you think he meant by that?

Toback: Well, he’s had this divided sense about the film since he saw it. It’s partly as if he’s looking at some monster from the past who he doesn’t feel any real connection with anymore. But at the same time, that figure had unimagineable achievement given where he started, and an unimagineable crash. And then a resurrection, and then another crash. It’s almost as if he’s the survivor of an earthquake and he’s standing amidst all the rubble, wondering, “How did this happen, and what am I still doing here?”

Paste: I’m sure you’ve been asked this question at least eight dozen times, but Tyson at his peak versus Ali at his peak? Could Tyson have taken him?

Toback: I think he could have taken anybody at his peak. The way I always answer that is imagine the 10 greatest heavyweights of all time in a room. And they’re watching each others’ greatest highlights. Then the lights come up and you ask each of them, “If you can eliminate one guy, ensure you’d never have to have fought him in the ring, who would it be?” I think everyone in the room would pick Tyson.

Paste: The ferocity was so potent; he was like a force of nature there for a couple of years.

Toback: Yes. He’s the only one who would have induced real fear in that room. You can never know what’s going to happen in the ring. Ali and Tyson both had incredible speed, the two fastest heavyweights who ever lived, by far. So then you say, okay, what about power? Well, there’s no question Tyson had 10 times the power Ali had. So, what would have given Ali a chance? And the only thing I can say to that is that Ali was Ali. You could never underestimate him against anybody. And there’s that whole psychological battle that Ali brought to every fight. So I would never put anything past Ali, but just on the face of it, I think Tyson was unbeatable at his peak.

Paste: He just seemed like there was nothing in the world that had ever been more important to anybody than winning that fight was to him.

Toback: He talks early on in the film about the happy warrior. People think of boxing as brutality, but for a boxer at his peak there’s a joy in it. And he had that, for those couple of years. Now, he ended up just fighting for money, in a very depressing, cynical way, those last four or five fights. But in the peak years, it was almost an art for him. A very destructive art, but an art nonetheless.

Paste: That’s true, and I find a theological significance in that too. There are things we were made to do, and Tyson was obviously made to be a boxer. And there’s a joy to fulfilling that feeling of being a hammer and driving a nail. For you too: You were obviously made to be a filmmaker, and I’m sure you’ve felt that in-the-zone feeling of doing exactly what you were made to do.

Toback: Absolutely. And it took awhile. I was 26 or 27 before I figured it out. But once I did, it was just a question of how old I was going to live to, because I was just going to keep doing it until then.

Paste: Next project on the plate?

Toback: There’s a movie called The Director that I’ve been trying to finish for quite a while, and as soon as I finish it, I’ll cast it, set it up and shoot it. I wish that were right away, but I think it’s going to take awhile.