The Pugilist

Director James Toback talks battling his inner demons and his kindred spirit: Mike Tyson.

by Sam Adams

[ fight night ]

Taking things easy does not come naturally to James Toback. As he sits down for an interview midway through the CineFest/Philadelphia Film Festival, he rummages through a plastic drugstore bag and pulls out a bottle of aspirin, softening the sting of a knee injury he aggravated the night before.

By his own admission, which at this point has taken on the quality of a self-propagated legend, Toback would have been hitting something considerably harder at this time of the morning a couple of decades ago. "I haven't had a drink in 20 years," he says. "But if I had one glass of champagne now, I would be drinking the rest of the day and tonight and it would be the first thing I do tomorrow morning."

The subject of compulsion comes naturally when talking to Toback, whose films include Fingers and Black and White, especially when talking about Tyson, his portrait of the former heavyweight champ and, as it turns out, a longtime friend. The two men, a portly Jew with a degree from Harvard and an asthmatic kid from Brooklyn who became the world's greatest boxer, could hardly be more oddly matched, but Toback says they instantly recognized each other as kindred spirits when they first met, more than 20 years ago on the set of The Pick-Up Artist.

"One of the things that made Tyson and me so clear about each other was that as we walked through Central Park at 5 a.m., there was a sense of, despite our completely different backgrounds, a complete understanding of the psychological dynamic of the other," Toback says. "Tyson is a Dionysean personality, and it's my own nature, as well."

In characteristically immoderate fashion, Tyson is composed solely of stock footage and talking-head interviews with his subject, culled from 50 hours shot during a single week. Despite the fact that Toback takes the director's credit, he still considers the film a "self-portrait," although exactly whose self is being captured is open to debate.

Toback's strategy results in troubling moments, particularly on the subject of Tyson's ex-wife, Robin Givens, and of Desiree Washington, the former beauty queen he was convicted of sexually assaulting. Tyson's vicious characterization of Washington cries out for a rebuttal, but the film provides none, except perhaps for Tyson's later admission that his pattern in relationships is to seek out a powerful, dominant woman and "dominate her sexually."

Given that Toback considers himself Tyson's friend, one has to wonder if he was tempted to excise the latter admission from the movie. But Toback says he was no more inclined to limit Tyson's observations than to supplement them. "My goal was not to present him in a certain way," he says. "It was to present him as he presents himself. My whole notion of the film would have been called into question if I left something like that out. I would have looked at the movie as dishonest."