Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
“It was the funniest thing I had ever read”
Director Richie Keen on Fist Fight, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and media ex machina
Fist Fight pits Charlie Day against Ice Cube as two high school teachers up against both the system and the students.
Growing up in Chicago, Richie Keen would ride his bike down to where John Hughes was shooting Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and sneak onto the set. Later, he started as an actor before becoming a writer and then an acting teacher. “I kept getting sent comedians and rappers and wrestlers and pop stars,” he recalls, “and I kept thinking, I’m directing these people. I should direct. I just didn’t know anything about cameras.” So he learned about cameras, and got a job directing his friend Demetri Martin’s show on Comedy Central. That led to a particularly raunchy sketch on Funny or Die starring Topher Grace and Kate Bosworth, which Grace shared with his friend Glenn Howerton, co-creator of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Howerton liked the direction on the sketch, and Keen got his big break. Since then, he’s worked on beloved offbeat ventures like Enlisted, New Girl, and Shameless, as well as more mainstream fare (The Goldbergs). Fist Fight — which pits Sunny star Charlie Day against Ice Cube as two high school teachers up against both the system and the students — is his first feature film. [Slightly spoilerish talk follows.]
Matthew Lickona: Why this for your first feature?
Richie Keen: [The script] was the funniest thing I had ever read, and I felt like I knew exactly what to do with it. Everyone who would meet with me, I just kept emailing them more and more notes. I said things like, “I want to put Charlie in a scene where Hank from Breaking Bad is angry and Ice Cube is angry; that’s a tough spot to be in.” They said, “This is a movie about a fighter, and this guy is a fighter. We don’t care if he hasn’t done a movie.” I have a very strong take on things. I always said this was a prison riot movie, inmates versus prison guards. I said, “This has got to be a boiling pot. We have to find a way for everyone to be losing their minds. Senior pranks right and left, bigger and more violent.” I looked at it as a rated-R Ferris Bueller. It had all the tropes of a good John Hughes movie: it all takes place in a day, it’s a day that changes someone’s life, it’s set in a high school...
ML: To the extent that a film like this has a message, would you say it’s about manhood, or about protest in general, or about both, or neither?
RK: I didn’t want to get to earnest with this, but there were two things that were still important to me. One, I think we can all agree that the education system needs a look. I’m hugely pro-teacher, but it’s not glossy in public school right now. So I picked a rusty school that was falling apart for the setting. And I wanted to make sure that Ice Cube’s character had a point of view, that he was doing what he was doing to draw attention to something. He’s an old-school teacher who loves history. He goes too far [with a fire axe], but he wants his students to learn. The other thing is that both Charlie and his daughter would experience bullying, and they would try to find different ways to deal with that. I was bullied growing up: I was punched in the face, and I was too much of a wimp to show up to the fight. I’m not a violent person, but in some ways, I wish I had stood up for myself. For Charlie, we wanted to say, “That guy is not going to stop, so all right: maybe you’ll get hit, and maybe you’ll go down, but you’ll keep getting back up.”
ML: As I walked out, I couldn’t help thinking that the film would have ended differently in the world of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Both Charlie and his daughter kind of blow up their lives, but then there’s this media ex machina...
RK: We talked about that at length — at length. We asked, “What if it just ended here, where there’s been a fight and who knows what the hell is going to happen to these two guys?”
ML: He tells his daughter that she’s probably going to get expelled for what she’s done.
RK: Right. “You stood up for yourself, don’t even worry about it. Life will be fine. Life will go on. The most important thing is you had confidence and stood up for yourself.” Film is a collaboration. We’re thrilled with how it ends, but we did have a conversation.
Movie
Fist Fight **
Charlie Day is a nice-guy teacher (with a sweet kid and a pregnant wife) in a high school that demands educators who look like Ice Cube and talk with his brand of menace and authority. But even Mr. Cube is not immune to the degradations of Senior Prank Day, and neither is safe from the Administrative axe on this, the last day of school. When Day acts to save his own skin and so gets Cube fired, the fight is, as they say, on — though not for a long while. First, the movie wants you to watch Day sweat, squirm, scheme, and scream as he tries to escape his fate — and fails, and fails, and fails. He succeeds, however, at carrying the film, partly through sympathetic wretchedness and partly through sheer energy. (He also has help from a mostly well-used cast, including Tracy Morgan as a hapless coach, Dean Norris as an exasperated principal, and of course, his co-star, who both mocks and upholds his famed badassery.) The fight, when it arrives, is bonkers, brutal, and almost believable. The film, when it ends, is a little less so. Directed by Richie Keen.
ML: Small surprise, Fist Fight does include a fist fight. Talk about choreographing a fight between regular folks as opposed to superheroes.
RK: Sam Hargrave plays Captain American whenever Chris Evans isn’t playing Captain America. I asked him to choreograph the fight, and he would take a couple of cameras and some stunt guys and film a version of what he thought it should be. Then I would give notes: “No, no, no — there’s no way Charlie can kick like that...” We went through weeks of this — God bless his stunt guys. I kept saying, “It’s got to be longer than the fight in They Live, it’s got to be more brutal than They Live, but not so much that you don’t buy it.” And it had to be surprising, like a horror movie where the final chase goes through all the areas you’ve been before. I wanted to pay off jokes that we had set up earlier, and make it so that you never knew when the fight would be truly over, and you never knew who was going to win.
Here's something you might be interested in.
“It was the funniest thing I had ever read”
Director Richie Keen on Fist Fight, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and media ex machina
“It was the funniest thing I had ever read”
Director Richie Keen on Fist Fight, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and media ex machina
Fist Fight pits Charlie Day against Ice Cube as two high school teachers up against both the system and the students.
Growing up in Chicago, Richie Keen would ride his bike down to where John Hughes was shooting Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and sneak onto the set. Later, he started as an actor before becoming a writer and then an acting teacher. “I kept getting sent comedians and rappers and wrestlers and pop stars,” he recalls, “and I kept thinking, I’m directing these people. I should direct. I just didn’t know anything about cameras.” So he learned about cameras, and got a job directing his friend Demetri Martin’s show on Comedy Central. That led to a particularly raunchy sketch on Funny or Die starring Topher Grace and Kate Bosworth, which Grace shared with his friend Glenn Howerton, co-creator of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Howerton liked the direction on the sketch, and Keen got his big break. Since then, he’s worked on beloved offbeat ventures like Enlisted, New Girl, and Shameless, as well as more mainstream fare (The Goldbergs). Fist Fight — which pits Sunny star Charlie Day against Ice Cube as two high school teachers up against both the system and the students — is his first feature film. [Slightly spoilerish talk follows.]
Matthew Lickona: Why this for your first feature?
Richie Keen: [The script] was the funniest thing I had ever read, and I felt like I knew exactly what to do with it. Everyone who would meet with me, I just kept emailing them more and more notes. I said things like, “I want to put Charlie in a scene where Hank from Breaking Bad is angry and Ice Cube is angry; that’s a tough spot to be in.” They said, “This is a movie about a fighter, and this guy is a fighter. We don’t care if he hasn’t done a movie.” I have a very strong take on things. I always said this was a prison riot movie, inmates versus prison guards. I said, “This has got to be a boiling pot. We have to find a way for everyone to be losing their minds. Senior pranks right and left, bigger and more violent.” I looked at it as a rated-R Ferris Bueller. It had all the tropes of a good John Hughes movie: it all takes place in a day, it’s a day that changes someone’s life, it’s set in a high school...
ML: To the extent that a film like this has a message, would you say it’s about manhood, or about protest in general, or about both, or neither?
RK: I didn’t want to get to earnest with this, but there were two things that were still important to me. One, I think we can all agree that the education system needs a look. I’m hugely pro-teacher, but it’s not glossy in public school right now. So I picked a rusty school that was falling apart for the setting. And I wanted to make sure that Ice Cube’s character had a point of view, that he was doing what he was doing to draw attention to something. He’s an old-school teacher who loves history. He goes too far [with a fire axe], but he wants his students to learn. The other thing is that both Charlie and his daughter would experience bullying, and they would try to find different ways to deal with that. I was bullied growing up: I was punched in the face, and I was too much of a wimp to show up to the fight. I’m not a violent person, but in some ways, I wish I had stood up for myself. For Charlie, we wanted to say, “That guy is not going to stop, so all right: maybe you’ll get hit, and maybe you’ll go down, but you’ll keep getting back up.”
ML: As I walked out, I couldn’t help thinking that the film would have ended differently in the world of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Both Charlie and his daughter kind of blow up their lives, but then there’s this media ex machina...
RK: We talked about that at length — at length. We asked, “What if it just ended here, where there’s been a fight and who knows what the hell is going to happen to these two guys?”
ML: He tells his daughter that she’s probably going to get expelled for what she’s done.
RK: Right. “You stood up for yourself, don’t even worry about it. Life will be fine. Life will go on. The most important thing is you had confidence and stood up for yourself.” Film is a collaboration. We’re thrilled with how it ends, but we did have a conversation.
Movie
Fist Fight **
Charlie Day is a nice-guy teacher (with a sweet kid and a pregnant wife) in a high school that demands educators who look like Ice Cube and talk with his brand of menace and authority. But even Mr. Cube is not immune to the degradations of Senior Prank Day, and neither is safe from the Administrative axe on this, the last day of school. When Day acts to save his own skin and so gets Cube fired, the fight is, as they say, on — though not for a long while. First, the movie wants you to watch Day sweat, squirm, scheme, and scream as he tries to escape his fate — and fails, and fails, and fails. He succeeds, however, at carrying the film, partly through sympathetic wretchedness and partly through sheer energy. (He also has help from a mostly well-used cast, including Tracy Morgan as a hapless coach, Dean Norris as an exasperated principal, and of course, his co-star, who both mocks and upholds his famed badassery.) The fight, when it arrives, is bonkers, brutal, and almost believable. The film, when it ends, is a little less so. Directed by Richie Keen.
ML: Small surprise, Fist Fight does include a fist fight. Talk about choreographing a fight between regular folks as opposed to superheroes.
RK: Sam Hargrave plays Captain American whenever Chris Evans isn’t playing Captain America. I asked him to choreograph the fight, and he would take a couple of cameras and some stunt guys and film a version of what he thought it should be. Then I would give notes: “No, no, no — there’s no way Charlie can kick like that...” We went through weeks of this — God bless his stunt guys. I kept saying, “It’s got to be longer than the fight in They Live, it’s got to be more brutal than They Live, but not so much that you don’t buy it.” And it had to be surprising, like a horror movie where the final chase goes through all the areas you’ve been before. I wanted to pay off jokes that we had set up earlier, and make it so that you never knew when the fight would be truly over, and you never knew who was going to win.
Comments