David Mamet – R. Emmet Sweeney

By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News

April 29th, 2008

Mixed martial arts (MMA) have come a bloody long way since John McCain legendarily dubbed the sport “human cockfighting” in 1996. Its flagship organization, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), aired eight of the top 15 pay-per-view programs in 2007 (boxing had four), while two smaller outfits (Strikeforce and EliteXC) have recently inked deals to air events on NBC and CBS. With major media outlets slowly offering more coverage and the sport’s popularity continuing to crest, it was only a matter of time before Hollywood got its opportunistic hands on those tantalizing cauliflower ears… right?

Uncharacteristic of the movie business, producers are showing restraint in capitalizing on the fad, perhaps still haunted by McCain’s “cock” slam. David Mamet encountered fierce resistance to his new MMA influenced film, “Redbelt,” as he tells Sam Alipour of ESPN.com: “Everybody in Hollywood passed on it. One of the things I talked about (in the pitch) was the demographics of UFC. Look at who goes to these fights. Look at how many follow on TV. It’s huge among young males, exactly the demographic studios are trying to reach. You’re wondering how you can get these people to see a film? Well, this is your answer. The reaction was baffling.”

Much of the reason still lies in the sport’s “barbaric” reputation, a holdover from the early days of the UFC, when they advertised, “There are no rules!” and trumpeted supposed mismatches between heavyweights and lightweights. Editorials are regularly churned out about the “bestial” nature of the sport (shockingly, Don King and Bill O’Reilly have joined the chorus), despite the UFC’s relatively clean bill of health (no life-threatening injuries to date), at least in comparison to pro boxing’s spotty history. After McCain virtually bankrupted the business by encouraging governors to outlaw the fights (which 36 states obliged), the UFC was bought out in 2001 by the marketing-savvy company Zuffa. Although the UFC had already instituted a series of new regulations (no blows to the back of the head, etc.) that cleared them to hold an event in New Jersey in 2000, the new owners claimed to be innovators of the sport, and started to convince regulatory commissions, state by state, that they were safe enough to be allowed into their fair cities. In other words, they were no longer barbarians, but could still get fans to pay at the gate. Now even McCain says that “the sport has grown up,” and most states have legalized it.

Another reason for Hollywood’s reluctant embrace of MMA is the question of whether these fighting styles can even translate effectively to the screen. Mamet brings this up in a 2006 Playboy piece he wrote about the sport — how do you film the jiu-jitsu fights themselves? He claims that the form never broke into national consciousness like kung fu or karate because it is inherently uncinematic: “A fight, to be dramatic, must allow the viewer to see the combatants now coming together, now separating… Jiu-jitsu involves tying up — that is, closing the distance and keeping it closed…It is not dramatic. It is just effective.” Fights that employ this style tend to look like especially sweaty make-out sessions that go on for three rounds. “Never Back Down,” an MMA version of “High School Musical” released earlier this year, dealt with this issue by literally skipping over the foreplay, utilizing MTV-style montage to jump to the submissions, eliding the minutes of groping and intricate body contortions it takes to get there. On “Redbelt,” Mamet and cinematographer Robert Elswit (hot off of “There Will Be Blood”) take a more intimate route, employing very tight handheld framing to capture the technical skill involved in these grappling battles. These fights are not about thrills, but as the main character Mike Terry says, “I train to prevail, not to fight.” They are merely the most efficient means to an end. The main visual interest in the film, as Mamet noted in the New York Times, are the faces, which Elswit tends to shoot in profile on extreme edges of the widescreen frame, their bruised faces as purple as Mamet’s prose is lean.

The film continues Mamet’s obsession with secretive male societies on the edge of the law (gamblers in “House of Games,” security officers in “Spartan,” thieves in “Heist”). “Redbelt” follows the moral path of Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an ascetic jiu-jitsu instructor who intones that “competition weakens the fighter.” Mamet, a jiu-jitsu student for over five years, treats the martial art more as a philosophy than a physical skill, a conduit for self-discipline and moral purity. Terry is like a masterless samurai planted into modern day L.A, his codes of honor ridiculous to the more practical-minded citizens (and viewers) around him. Terry’s refusal to compromise on the ethics of fighting leads him on a collision course with the market economy that’s dying to exploit both his mind and body. Mamet’s Manichean setup can be overwrought at times, but it’s the necessary backdrop for his passionate defense of martial values. It ends in an improbable PPV fantasy, an alternate floodlit universe where the old samurai ways triumph for a night and momentarily silence the bloodthirsty bleatings of the marketplace.

In other words, not good tie-in material for the UFC, which is still too busy trying to land a cable deal with HBO or Showtime to concern themselves with the movie business yet. But at this point it seems inevitable that an MMA movie genre will shortly work itself out, likely plotting a middle road between the populist street fights of “Never Back Down” and the angsty existential battles of “Redbelt.” The visual grammar of MMA is in its infancy, but I hope the Mamet film provides the template: an economic, unobtrusive style seems appropriate for such brutally efficient fighting — a science more salty than sweet.

March 21, 2017

An Audi S8 sluices through the country roads outside of Nice, running down a trio of anonymous sedans. With the aid of pinpoint braking and navigational support, the Audi sideswipes its final target in the center of the city, taking out an outdoor cafe with it. This brutally exciting sequence halfway through Ronin (1998) typifies its fuel-injected virtues, one in which the cars are the stars just as much as Robert De Niro. It’s been years since I’ve seen it, but I could still recall the make and model of that Audi S8 before the wheelman (Skipp Sudduth) requests it from his handlers. But while the cars are the main attraction, the rest of the film is a slyly elliptical bit of post-Cold War spycraft, as a group of out-of-work spooks are hired to steal a MacGuffin that both the IRA and the Russians are after (Ronin is streaming on FilmStruck as part of its nine-film series “A Movie History of the IRA”). The script was heavily re-written by David Mamet (credited as Richard Weisz due to WGA wrangling), and the film is filled with his weighted repetitions, tangy slang and allusive phrasing, the ex-agents communicating in code, trying not to give themselves away. As on his 1966 racing film Grand Prix, director John Frankenheimer required all the stunt driving to be done at full speed with no special effects. The results are pleasurably stressful, as reflected in De Niro’s white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel – he was actually in a car going 100mph, with his stunt driver operating the vehicle in the opposite seat.

Ronin came near the end of Frankenheimer’s long and volatile career in Hollywood. It had been a long journey from the live television experiments of Playhouse 90 and The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to his infamous The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) remake. He had long battled alcoholism, which crippled his career and his health throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. But it was his return to television that revived his fortunes – he won best director Emmys for Against the Wall (1994), The Burning Season (1995), Andersonville (1996) and George Wallace (1998). These prestige, rather stuffy productions made him a viable name again, and producer Frank Mancuso Jr. offered him the gig on Ronin. Frankenheimer had lived in France and could speak the language, so was considered a natural choice for the movie, which would require a lot of location shooting in Nice and Paris.

The script was written by J.D. Zeik and spruced up by David Mamet. There were conflicting claims about the extent of Mamet’s changes. Frankenheimer told the Los Angeles Times that, “The credits should read: ‘Story by J.D. Zeik, screenplay by David Mamet. We didn’t shoot a line of Zeik’s script.” Zeik’s attorney, however, claimed that “Mamet was brought in at the last minute before production to beef up De Niro’s role,” and that the majority of the script was Zeik’s work. Mamet remained silent, and took co-writing credit under the Weisz pseudonym (he only wanted to use his name on scripts he wrote alone). I’m inclined to trust Frankenheimer on this, and the film is filled with scenes that sound like Mamet’s combative slangy dialogue, especially the film’s “getting-the-team-together” first half.

Robert De Niro plays Sam, an ex-CIA operative in need of work. He is recruited by a never-seen “man in a wheelchair” to take part in the heist of a steel case, contents unknown. His fellow heisters include the American wheelman Larry, French materials procurer Vincent (Jean Reno), British weapons trader Spence (Sean Bean) and German computer whiz Gregor (Stellan Skarsgård). Their contact is Deirdre (Natasha McElhone), who doesn’t try to hide her Irish lilt and implied IRA allegiance. Their first attempt to steal the silver case goes haywire, and it leads them to Paris and to the Russian mobster who is also in pursuit. In the grand tradition of Kiss Me Deadly (1955) or Pulp Fiction (1994), the contents of the case are a MacGuffin, an unexplained excuse to keep the story propelling forward.

De Niro is in fine recalcitrant form, his Sam a stubborn bastard who questions the plan at every turn. Like all the other mercenaries, he used to be aligned with a major power and has been cut loose to wander the black spy markets of the world (hence the title, a reference to the story of the 47 Ronin, or masterless samurai). They are all bitter for the loss of direction (and steady paycheck), and so they poke each other for information, responding in riddles. An early exchange between Sam and Gregor goes like:

Gregor: So what brought you here?
Sam: A fellow that doesn’t work so well.
Gregor: The man in the wheelchair? How did he get there?
Sam: Seems to me that was in your neck of the woods back in the late unpleasantness.

None of this is explained or followed up on. The “man in the wheelchair” could be code or a flesh and blood human, and there is no referent for “How did he get there?” Where is there? Is the “late unpleasantness” a reference to the Cold War or a specific mission? Information is restricted from the characters and even more so from the viewers. This allows Ronin to keep its air of mystery, its dialogue obscuring rather than explaining. The most talkative character is a Michael Lonsdale cameo, an eccentric in oversized sweaters and leonine hair, painting mini-samurai in his palatial estate, giving long speeches on the significance of the “ronin,” or masterless samurai. He also is in charge of sopping up Sam’s blood as Vincent removes a bullet from his gut. Like the similar scene in He Walked By Night (1948) I wrote about last week, this sequence is unflinching, focusing on the emergent perspiration on De Niro’s face as Reno digs around in his belly.

While a brutal and memorable entry in the bullet removal scene canon, it’s the car chases that will keep Ronin on clickbait car chase listicles until the end of the internet. Frankenheimer hired French DP Robert Fraisse, who was then best known for his work with Jean-Jacques Annaud (Seven Years in Tibet [1997]), not exactly an action film resume. But Frankenheimer was impressed with his work on the HBO cop thriller Citizen X (1995), and moved ahead. Fraisse spoke to American Cinematographer about the pre-production conversations: “When we started working on the movie, we talked about the style, and John said, ‘I want a lot of setups, I want the shots to be very short, and I want to work with very short focal lengths,’” Fraisse recalls. “John wanted this movie to appear on screen almost like reportage, as if we shot things that were really happening, so we didn’t want to be too sophisticated. Instead, we tried to convey an ambiance, an atmosphere.”

This short lens “reportage” style carried over to the car chase sequences, which Frankenheimer wanted to run at full speed – he hired stunt drivers from Formula One to push the vehicles to their limit. Since they are used to driving at 180 mph, at 100 mph they were able to pull off astonishing hairsbreadth turns and escapes. In one breathtaking shot, a crash ahead has sent a vehicle spinning, and with no room for error the BMW speeds around the car as if going through a revolving door. I don’t know how many times they had to stage it, though it was reported 80 cars were totaled during production.

The most complicated sequence occurs in Paris, where a BMW and Peugeot are chasing each other down the wrong way of a one-way highway. They had multiple cameras covering each shot, with some mounted on the cars themselves. Fraisse again in American Cinematographer: “Most of the time, we used three or four normal cameras, plus one or two remote crash-box cameras, which were cheap cameras with cheap lenses inside very heavy and resistant metal blimp. With that kind of camera, we got very brief but incredible shots. When you shoot car chases with long focal lengths, you can shoot for 20 seconds, because you see the car far into the depth and you can let it come toward camera. But with very short focal lengths, the cars cross the frame very fast, which I think is a very strong effect. We also shot in Nice, which is an old city in the South of France with very narrow streets, so the shots automatically didn’t last a long time. We needed to shoot many setups to have the continuity of the cars going from one street to another.” That continuity achieved through this chaos is a testament to the talents of Frankenheimer, Fraisse and the editor Tony Gibbs, who conducted these brief flashes across the screen to create a thrilling symphony of destruction.

Tag: David Mamet

When Mixed Martial Arts Meet the Movies

Street Grand Prix: Ronin (1998)