By 
Jack Huston knew if he ever directed a movie, it would not simply be something he wanted to make. It would be something he needed to pursue. An idea which loomed so large and for so long in his mind’s eye that only he could bring it to life. And, perhaps fittingly, it might have begun with an image that never left him in all the years and days which passed since he played the soulful hitman Richard Harrow on Boardwalk Empire.
It began on a New Jersey set and with a co-star pounding away on a sack filled with dirt.
“I used to watch him punch sandbags in between takes and always going off to the boxing gym,” Huston muses when thinking back on his earliest days working opposite Michael Pitt on the HBO period drama executive produced by Martin Scorsese. At the time, Pitt and Huston had a lot of scenes together with the pair playing WWI veterans who for better or worse (usually worse) get caught up in the bootleg racket. But during this same era in their careers, Huston was also making note of his colleague’s baleful expressions, and the fact he was increasingly taking up boxing as a hobby.
“Michael carries himself like a boxer,” Huston says. “He always has… It’s there, it’s in his face. But he also has this sort of amazing vulnerability and sensitivity in his eyes.” That look stayed with Huston, perhaps not least of all because alongside moviemaking, boxing is in the Huston family’s blood. Before becoming one of the great writer-directors of the Hollywood Golden Age, Jack’s grandfather John Huston (The Maltese Falcon, Key Largo) saw success as a pugilist, winning the Amateur Lightweight Boxing Championship of California while only a teenager—and all before a broken nose changed John’s long-term career interests.
Something about the solitary figure, of a man in a ring battling his opponent but also himself, has obvious cinematic appeal. So when Huston sat down to write a screenplay about such a classic silver screen silhouette, the words came pouring out; as did memories and that sandbag.
“I wrote every word for [Michael],” Huston admits. “I couldn’t imagine it being anybody else. I heard his voice in my head as I was writing.” He even named his fictional boxer after him, turning Michael Pitt the actor into “Irish Mike” Flannigan the boxer—a professional bruiser who is in desperate need of grace.
When Day of the Fight begins, viewers are keyed into the grim reality of Mike Flannigan being down on his luck. He apparently just got out of a very long stint in prison for a crime that is not immediately apparent, and in the ruins of his life, he has been informed by a doctor that he absolutely should not box again ahead of the film’s titular prize fight. But that bout, like absolution, only comes at night. So the rest of the film is about Mike preparing for the big event, not so much like a fighter but as a condemned man putting his affairs in order. He is even able to find something as elusive and sparkling as redemption in a handful of dwindling hours.
When he steps into the Den of Geek studio, Huston describes the movie as ultimately being about “a life in a day,” as well as a narrative about more than who wins or loses during a ringside donnybrook.
“I always think the best boxing films aren’t really boxing films; they’re films about the boxer,” the writer-director explains. “It’s one of the most fascinating professions. We always talk about how you could walk into any boxing gym and there might be 30, 50 other stories just like Irish Mike’s. Their profession itself sort of takes them on these very interesting paths.” For Mike, that path is perhaps less about his solitary nature as the man in the ring, and more the people along the way who are there to prop the fallen challenger back up.
“If you’re on a good path, the people closest to you, the people that really matter in our life are far more willing to forgive than we might expect,” Huston suggests.
A sense of community has also come through like vivid technicolor to Huston, even as he toiled over ensuring his first directorial feature would be black and white (never an easy fight to pick in the 21st century). It indeed took a village of old friends and colleagues sticking their necks out to get Day of the Fight made, including again that Boardwalk Empire connection via the HBO series’ Emmy-nominated star, Steve Buscemi.
“It was an uphill battle,” Huston says of the process of getting the movie made. “So it was incredibly important for us, in order to get the film financed, that certain people showed up.” In the case of Buscemi that meant combining two minor tertiary characters from Huston’s earlier drafts into a larger role that would allow Buscemi to reunite with his former onscreen protege, Michael Pitt.
Huston recalls, “We got a hold of Steve’s manager, and they were like ‘absolutely not.’ Like it has to be [a much bigger part]. So I was like, ‘I’m just gonna call Steve.’ I made a phone call and I think I sent him the script the day before Thanksgiving, and the day after Thanksgiving, I got a message saying, ‘Yeah, I’ll be there first day.’”
Buscemi showed up on set for a day and took the bare minimum SAG pay for his work. But it helped get Day of the Fight made. “That’s the stuff where you get emotional, because… this film is impossible without these guys who actually showed up when it mattered. And there’s a lot of people in my life who showed up when it mattered, and there’s some people who don’t.”
Huston’s experience on the project is filled with dozens of similar stories, including convincing Joe Pesci to come out of retirement again after The Irishman for a small but pivotal part. It took those contributions plus a million others to get the film as Huston imagined on the screen, complete with haunting black and white interspersed with flints of color.
“Black and white is almost like a magnifying glass into the soul,” Huston says. “There’s something about when you put a camera on somebody and you see in black and white, it’s almost like I’m looking inside them. And I found that very early on with Michael that I could put the camera on him and it harkens back to the old [Marlon] Brando, [Paul] Newman, [James] Dean.”
Of course cinema history runs through Huston’s veins. As the grandson of the aforementioned John Huston, and the great-grandson of actor Walter Huston, and several more generations of filmmakers and actors, Jack was raised to love the magic of the moving image.
“I sit here as an incredibly proud grandson and great-grandson, and nephew,” Huston says. “I was so lucky that I grew up watching those movies and that they were played for me. Our entire family are lovers of film. That’s the best part about it. We can’t think of anything we’d like to do more than sit around watching movies.”
Still, while making Day of the Fight, Jack can hear old John Huston’s famous gregarious drawl in his head, familiar to viewers of anything from Chinatown to the Rankin/Bass Hobbit movie.
“I do feel him sort of chuckling to himself, just because of how difficult it’s been,” Huston laughs. “It’s like, ‘Well, you wanted to make a movie and you wanted [to make it black and white].’ You can imagine this being a really sort of ‘earn the stripes’ because of how unbelievably hard it was.”
But like Irish Mike, Jack learned a sense of community can get you to the final bell.
Day of the Fight is in limited release in theaters now in the U.S.
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