How much of what happens in the film is based on your actual experiences.
Yeah. I mean, nothing really. Honestly, I’m really an extrovert. In terms of my experience, I think, if anything, I’ve been fighting for a long, long time, and I knew that was something that I wanted to get on screen because I felt like as an independent film, I knew that was like what we’d call add value, right? I was like, “Okay, well it may be a small movie, but I know that my fight friends, who are legit fighters, and I were like, “Yeah, well, this will be a cool aspect of this small little under a million-dollar movie. We’ll have dope fighting in it.” And then I was like, “Yeah, but I don’t want to do a fight movie. I want there to be a heart to this movie.” Because I love drama, you know?
So I was hoping that maybe the fighting aspect could be a gateway to some of the other sort of tender moments. Sort of like a Silver Linings Playbook kind of a thing or something like that. Sort of like a warm blanket kind of a movie was my hope.
That totally was pulled off because I was like… Because for some reason, I don’t know why, but I ended up covering a lot of boxing and like fighting movies. They give them to me. I’m not an expert on any of this stuff at all. So I was like, “Okay, well, here we go.” And I didn’t know what was going to happen. And I was like, “Oh my God, this is not what I thought it was going to be.” I liked the fact that it also has a heart to it, as you said.
Sure. Yeah. I think when we first started making it, I love the Safdie brothers, and I love… I don’t know if you’ve seen their movie Heaven Knows What that they did. It was a micro-budget movie that they did before Good Time about. I believe it was heroin addicts, and I just was so inspired because it’s like a very docu-narrative. Nomi and our plan were we were originally going to do a docu-narrative type thing because I have the fight experience, and she has the performance experience. So we were like, “That’s what we’ll do. We’ll kind of workshop it that way.” And as we were rehearsing, we were using our names because we were like, “Okay, if I’m fighting at the end, people are going to be calling me Nick, so we don’t have to say Chris or Joe, and it’s not my name.”
“I don’t want to do a fight movie. I want there to be a heart to this movie.”
So then the producer came to see. We were bringing producers in to watch us rehearse to get them attached. And when we attached Andrew, our producer, he’s like, “Let’s really shoot this thing.” But at that point, we’d gotten so into our names. We just felt like it had such a ring. It was really hard to think of rebranding the character. So we’re just like, “F**k it. Let’s just leave it. Nick and Nomi.” It has a nice ring to it. And so there is that weird kind of thing. We did set out to kind of do it like a docu- narrative, but it ended up being what it is, which is… I think what I’ve heard people say, like the Coen brothers, they say that sort of happens a bunch.
I wanted to talk about Thailand specifically and the Muay Thai scenes. Were you connected with those people, or how did you get in there, and how was that experience?
Oh, the crew over there, like the greatest—the greatest country, the greatest people. It’s the birthplace of this sport, and I don’t know if you know there’s a great story about one of their national treasures with a fighter that went by the name of Nong Toom—Beautiful Boxer. There was a movie named about her, and she was a fighter who, after winning enough money, and in Muay Thai, she transitioned. She became a post-operative trans female. And there’s a movie about her called Beautiful Boxer, and she was nationally revered. Her nickname was LadyBoy. This is a derogatory term by today’s standards, but the nation loved her at the time. At the time, she was a male boxer but grew out her hair and was wearing a sports bra, I think, but she wasn’t on hormones, I think. But we’re talking like a champion, like a stadium champion. And when she won, she retired and was like, that’s it. Nong Toom. That was the story.
In terms of the fighters in the movie, Brett Hlavacek, who I fight in the end, he’s a world-class fighter. He’s an actual WBC belt holder. He’s a world and national champion. I mean, the guy’s incredible. He has huge connections out there, and so through him, he’s an associate producer on the movie, I connected to all sorts of folks in Thailand, and we went over there together.
We all just stayed together at this one gym. We trained, we filmed. We went out, we filmed. We did all that stuff, just sort of naturally, which is the same way we did it in Greece through Nomi’s connections over there. So yeah. That’s one of the ways of maximizing our budget. It was like, “All right, I know that these people that I’m working with that I’m friends with,” it’s just scrappiness. We’re just doing what we can to tell a story that hopefully cracks zeitgeist, so to speak, if that makes any sense.
