‘Christy’ Director David Michôd On Why Great Boxing Movies Aren’t About Boxing

Great boxing movies are always in demand and, as evidence, three are hitting cinemas this fall. 

Audiences love a story about an underdog who, against all odds, smashes their opponent in the ring and achieves a hard-earned moment of victory. The training sequences are always intense (who can forget the scenes where Rocky trains in the Siberian wilderness?) and the fight scenes bloody and brutal. But for Christy director and co-writer David Michôd (Animal Kingdom, The King), the appeal of a boxing story has always been when emotional blows land outside the ropes.

“No boxing film works without what's happening outside the ring,” Michôd says. “Christy’s fights reflect where she is in her life, full of spirit, rage, then finally something bleaker.”

Based on the real-life rise of Christy Martin, the scrappy, trash-talking West Virginia fighter who smashed through the male-dominated world of ‘90s boxing, Christy follows a woman who conquers the ring only to battle for survival in her personal life when her husband attempts to brutally murder her. 

Michôd wrote the script with Mirrah Foulkes, and while he admits he never really thought he had a boxing movie in him, he says Christy’s story was so exceptional, he had to make this movie. 

To tell Christy’s story, Michôd made sure that the fight scenes weren’t just athletic spectacle, they’re storytelling engines. “You could see how each fight would have its own personality that would in some way reflect where [Christy] was at, both in her career and her life,” he says.

The film’s story arc begins with Christy’s youthful discovery, physically, emotionally and even sexually. Early fights are bright and breathless, almost giddy. “She was discovering that she was uncannily good at this thing,” Michôd says. “Surprised to be winning, excited to be winning, she’s full of life.”

Because young Christy had so much exuberance and forward momentum, Michôd says they were careful not to overwrite the following training montages and winning streaks. “We kept them short and punchy. Just enough to show momentum and joy.”

For turning-point battles, like Christy’s famous Deirdre Gogarty fight, the script went deeper.

“We would write in quite a lot of detail, even if only to give the fight choreographer a clear sense of, okay, this is one that we’re going to need a lot of choreography. Left hook, uppercut. Even if it all changes later. A script is a guiding document, actors need subtext, choreographers need a roadmap, producers need to prep.”

But rising success comes with mounting control from her trainer-turned-husband, Jim Martin (Ben Foster). “He was slowly squeezing that life out of her, so the fights start to become more furious and angry. Eventually, the fight, in a way, seems to then slip out of the ring and into the living room,” he says. 

If you were to watch only the boxing scenes in this movie, you would see Christy’s clear character arc, demonstrating the notion that character is primarily revealed through action, not dialogue. 

And he also watched a lot of the classic boxing films to see what worked and what didn’t. 

“I looked at a lot, and then I kind of stopped. I mean, I do that often. I'll look at some things early on, and then stop looking at those things, because the aspiration is always to make a movie that doesn't feel like other movies. But there were a lot of things that I learned from watching those films that were what not-to-dos.”

His favorite boxing film? “Michael Mann's Ali. That's just master craftsman stuff,” he says. 

For many, casting Sydney Sweeney as Christy was a surprising choice. She’s a good actress, for sure, but for such a feminine, pretty and petite actress to play a muscular boxer who gets roughed up over and over, it seemed a stretch. But Michôd was thrilled that people underestimated her.

“I really love feeling like I can see something in an actor that is not something other people are familiar with,” he says. “I knew she had the acting chops and I knew she had a fight background.” But what sealed the deal for him was her energy. “I loved that the movie started with a kind of young, naïve, ray of sunshine that slowly gets darkened. I knew Sydney would bring that to it, you know, just that delightful energy. Sydney was one of the most beautiful, intuitive actors and so easy to direct. It was play, you know? She was really good at just turning the process of acting and directing acting into the play that I think it should be.”

On a deeper level, casting Sweeny parallels Christy’s journey in the film. So many people underestimated Christy for being a woman, for being gay, for being cute. But she proved them all wrong the same way Sweeny proves she’s a fine actress, perfectly capable of inhabiting this role. With both Christy and Sweeny, we are pleasantly surprised by the outcome. 

Ben Foster plays Jim Martin, Christy’s controlling husband. It’s a role Michôd approached with careful restraint.

“His actions were abominable. But when I was researching coercive control, I learned that no one is a pure monster. There’s always a broken person underneath,” he says.

For writers, the takeaway is that villains need vulnerability.

“There’s a moment after Christy leaves him, he looks bereft. That’s when I knew Ben understood him.”

To make their relationship even more complicated, Michôd points out that Christy saw opportunity in Jim and willingly enters into this match made in hell. Michôd says she didn’t marry a villain, she married a stepping stool. “She was marrying boxing more than marrying Jim Martin. She saw a ladder she could climb. And she would do whatever she needed to do to climb that.”

Of course Christy’s need to help herself get a leg up doesn’t justify what Jim did to her, but it helps to understand a character’s motivation to make bad choices. 

As evidenced in the movie, the real Christy isn’t a person who trusts easily. But Michôd and Faulkes knew from the get-go they had to earn her trust. 

“I think Mirrah and I both knew from the outset that if we didn't gel with [the real] Christie very quickly, that we probably shouldn't do it, because it was going to be a long and intimate process,” he says, adding that given everything she’s been through, he wasn’t surprised by her guarded nature. 

“She's from the boxing world, which is pretty gangster. Christy came in with her guard up. I think one of her main fears was that her story would be turned into a Hollywood cartoon, and I think it was an advantage for Mirrah and I being Australian. She started to realize that we were good eggs. We definitely started to glean very clearly that she was a good egg,” he says.

After Foulkes went to Florida to spend a week with Christy, she got on board and gave the filmmakers her full trust. “She surrendered to the process. It wasn’t a struggle to work with her at all. It's only weirdly in retrospect that I realize what a gift that was.”

The film is also a gift to fans of the boxing film genre. Christy opens in theaters Nov. 7.