Inspiring Hollywood boxing movies like Rocky and Cinderella Man where underdogs struggle to the top in the ring have long given movie audiences triumphant heroes to root for.
And Rachel Morrison’s The Fire Inside, about boxer Claressa Shields’ true-life ascent to women’s boxing gold at the Olympics and set for a world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, follows in that tradition. But that’s before Morrison’s feature directorial debut twists and breaks sports movie conventions that demand a dramatic bid by a long-shot contender to produce athletic greatness and a star forever.
Morrison, a veteran cinematographer best known for titles like Mudbound and Black Panther, does show Shields struggling to go the distance. “But the heart of the movie for me is what happens after she gets gold,” Morrison says about the American boxer, whose celebrated career includes two Olympic gold medals before going professional.
As a female pugilist in a male-dominated sport, Shields had to fight her way out of Flint, Michigan, a town made famous by the Michael Moore documentary Roger & Me and a contaminated drinking water crisis in 2014. That’s two years after Shields won the first-ever women’s boxing gold medal in 2012 at the London Summer Games at age 17. But Morrison insists the women’s boxing great loved her hometown and her family in Flint.
The training, the fighting in the ring, to win Olympic gold, Shields loved that part of the boxing game too. It was the struggle to get ahead and prevail against adversity outside the boxing ring that becomes a key focus of The Fire Inside.
“What’s really interesting about this film is it’s really the story of when winning isn’t enough,” Morrison says as the film explores the aftermath of Shields fulfilling her Olympic dream. The Fire Inside director argues even the toughest of people find staying at the top is harder than getting there.
“Whether it’s winning a gold medal or getting nominated for an Oscar, or winning a spelling bee in fourth grade, you still have to get up the next day and have breakfast,” Morrison, who became the first woman nominated for a cinematography Oscar for her work on Mudbound, adds.
Then there’s those who show early brilliance in their careers, only to peak too early, because as the night sky illustrates, stars eventually burn out. “Whether it’s child actors or musicians who have an amazing first album and there’s a question over their sophomore effort. Some of that is nobody can stay at the top forever. So then it’s what does it take to get back up and find the purpose to keep going,” Morrison insists.
The job of making a biopic that’s more about the journey than the destination started with Oscar-winning Moonlight director Barry Jenkins. He adapted the 2015 documentary about Shields, T-Rex, into a female version of Rocky.
Jenkins eventually handed the project over to Morrison to direct the then-titled Flint Strong movie, later renamed The Fire Inside. Ryan Destiny plays a young Claressa Shields, and Brian Tyree Henry is her local volunteer coach taking a young woman under his wing in his Flint, Michigan gym.
“This is really a two-hander. Ryan is an absolute revelation. She hasn’t filmed a film like this before. And there was obviously some question about whether she could carry it and she absolutely does,” Morrison says. That includes six months of training to learn the boxing game top to bottom and to bulk up physically for boxing ring clashes.
“I actually trained too, because I felt it was so important to understand the mind of the game, to understand what it feels like to be hit or be hit,” Morrison recalls. And the intimate space of the boxing ring allowed no use of body doubles or stand-ins as the cameras rolled.
“Boxing is so experiential. The camera has to be in the ring with the boxer. Any of the scenes we shot, the way we shot them, wouldn’t have worked with a stunt double,” Morrison says of her shot construction.
As Destiny playing Shields moved in the ring, so too did Morrison’s camera, to capture rights and lefts and rights, each designed visually to show solid weight behind each punch, and cumulatively to get the audience into the fighter’s mind.
The director and Destiny in studying Shields’ boxing style used archival footage, but did far more than decide how to follow a right hand with a hook. Besides being incredibly fast with her fists and showing extraordinary strength as her blows fell on opponents, Morrison insists every new match and challenger called for a different game plan in the ring and a new shooting style on The Fire Inside set.
“It’s not that we were trying to match punch for punch, but the style, or what we’re trying to say with a fight, was really specific,” Morrison adds. The director recalls the use of a “oner” in her film, or a long take uninterrupted by physical cuts, to reintroduce a teenage version of Shields as a boxing badass.
Morrison recounts Destiny, with no place to hide from the camera, nailing the character of Shields and her boxing prowess on screen. “It’s probably a minute straight of a coordinated fight and it was probably that moment where I was, if she (Destiny) was any less of a boxer, the shot wouldn’t work, the concept wouldn’t work. But she held her own, and then some,” she remembers.
The exteriors for The First Inside were shot in Flint, Michigan for authenticity. But much of the rest of the movie was shot in Toronto, where as it happens Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man, a classic boxing movie that starred Russel Crowe, was also shot as the Canadian city stood in for New York City and New Jersey.
Morrison will return to Toronto to bring her first feature as a director to TIFF for a red carpet bow at the Royal Alexandra Theatre on Sept. 7. “It’s the right festival for the film. This is such a crowd pleaser and (Toronto) is an audience-driven festival,” she argues.
And being surrounded by her local cast and crew in Toronto will be the icing on the cake. “They all worked so hard and their work is so beautiful and I can’t think of a better way to celebrate the film than to celebrate with them,” Morrison says.
