Taglines: Every dream deserves a fighting chance.
Inspired by an incredible true story, comes the gritty, affectionately humorous, yet stirring comeback tale of the unlikely boxing hero, “Irish” Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), and his half-brother, Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale), who had to come apart as opponents before coming together as brothers in a scrappy fight to win a long-shot championship and strengthen the bonds of their family.
Years in the making, The Fighter was shot in just 33 days on the blue-collar streets of Lowell, Massachusetts. Early on, producers David Hoberman and Todd Lieberman fell in love with the story of Micky and Dicky and saw that it was about so much more than just an underdog’s athletic victory. Star/producer Mark Wahlberg, director David O. Russell and a close-knit cast and crew united behind a vision to bring Micky and Dicky’s deeply human family to life in a series of alternately comic, tender, bruising and triumphant moments that unfold as much in the living room as in the boxing ring.
The story begins as Dicky, the town’s pride who once went toe-to-toe with Sugar Ray Leonard, has fallen on hard times. Meanwhile, Micky has become the family’s fighter, with his fledgling career managed by his mother Alice (Melissa Leo). Yet, despite his gutsy left hook, he keeps getting punished in the ring. When Micky’s latest mismatched fight nearly kills him, he is persuaded by his iron-willed new girlfriend, Charlene (Amy Adams), to do the unthinkable: split with his family, pursue his own interests and train without his troubled brother.
Then, Micky gets the shot of a lifetime at a title fight, but it soon becomes clear that it will take his brother and the whole family to get him there. Defying the naysayers, he sets out on a bid for redemption that will bring Dicky, Charlene, Alice and the entire Ward/Eklund brood back into his corner, resulting in one of the sport’s most surprising strings of victories. Out of nowhere, Micky will become a champion, known as a resilient and loyal battler who fought, hardest of all, for his family.
“The Fighter is about family, love, relationships and overcoming adversity. The drama of the story is as powerful as the boxing is exciting,” explains Mark Wahlberg, who trained intensively for several years to take on the physically and emotionally demanding lead role of Micky Ward. “David O. Russell really had a great view of the script, of this world and the people in it. David got that scrappy spirit of the movie, and we did exactly that.”
The Fighter is a 2010 American biographical sports drama film directed by David O. Russell, and starring Mark Wahlberg (who also co-produced), Christian Bale, Amy Adams and Melissa Leo. The film centers on the lives of professional boxer Micky Ward (Wahlberg) and his older half-brother Dicky Eklund (Bale). Adams plays Micky’s girlfriend Charlene Fleming and Leo portrays Micky and Dicky’s mother, Alice Eklund-Ward. The film was released in select North American theaters on December 17, 2010 and in the United Kingdom on February 4, 2011. It was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, winning the awards for Best Supporting Actor (Bale) and Best Supporting Actress (Leo). It was the first film to win both awards since Hannah and Her Sisters in 1986.
From The Streets To The Screen
The story of Micky Ward’s hard rise and unexpected transformation into a sports legend was such a gritty, real-life fairy tale that many people who heard about it remarked that it sounded just like a movie. Bringing the story to the screen would take nearly as much passion, devotion and hard work on the part of a whole team of filmmakers as to match Micky’s own bid for a championship title.
What excited producers Todd Lieberman and David Hoberman was that it was also about the invincible bonds between brothers and a family’s quest for redemption. Those elements made the story worth fighting for, say the producers. “We got involved in The Fighter when screenwriters Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson brought us a 15-minute DVD on the lives of Dicky Eklund and Micky Ward,” explains Hoberman. “When my partner Todd and I watched it, we were in tears. It’s a story of overcoming the odds, of redemption in the face of adversity, and that’s the kind of story we love to do. We asked them right away if we could partner with them and they said yes.”
Adds Lieberman: “I must have watched that DVD five hundred times. It was truly inspiring to learn about the story of these two brothers and what they overcame throughout the years. We felt it had a lot of parallels in terms of its mix of drama, redemption and brotherly love.”
The story would take three years and a fighting spirit on the part of the filmmakers to get to the screen. Mark Wahlberg had long wanted to make a movie about Micky Ward and Dicky Eklund. Hoberman and Lieberman were thrilled to team up with Wahlberg and director David O. Russell spurred the production into a rough-and-ready, fast-paced production schedule that immersed the cast full bore into their characters and the crew into the world of blue-collar boxing in America.
Adds Lieberman: “From the moment we started enquiring into the story, we knew that Mark wanted to play Micky. Micky had always been one of his heroes and he knew this story as well as anyone.”
Having worked with Wahlberg twice before, including on the critically acclaimed Iraq War thriller, Three Kings, everyone was excited to see what Russell’s notably creative perspective could bring to The Fighter’s mix of visceral sports drama and emotionally exposed family portrait.
“The great thing about David is that he’s so passionate about everything he does and he’s not afraid to fall in love with ideas and things and people. I think it’s what makes him such a terrific director,” says Hoberman.
“I’ve known David for a couple of years now and we had looked at working together. As soon as I sat down with him, I saw and heard his passion for the movie,” comments producer Ryan Kavanaugh. He adds, “He was approaching it from a very artistic point of view, but understood that this was a commercial story. We told him to keep the heart and soul, but that we needed more ‘Rocky’ out of it. He gave us everything we wanted and then some.”
Adds Lieberman: “David brought to the material a real charm and sense of humor. He saw that even though these characters are flawed, they are also entertaining, revealing and loveable, and he really helped bring all of that to the screen.”
Russell also saw The Fighter as a love story. He approached it not only as Micky and Dicky’s story as brothers, but also as the story of Micky’s quest to reconcile his tight-knit family to the woman he loves, and he put the collision course between Charlene and the family at the center of the narrative. “The Fighter is about people who are really human, all too human, like every one of us,” he says. “These are the best types of film characters and they are also authentic Lowell characters. Lowell is a very particular working class town outside of Boston and this family is a large presence there.
They have a very particular way of living and being. The mother is this bleached blonde force of nature with the cigarettes and the glass in her hand, managing her sons’ careers over two decades. Then you have Dicky, who is the biggest hero out of Lowell since Jack Kerouac, who is this warm, charismatic, loose kind of guy who’s also a little outrageous. And then here comes his younger brother, Micky who is disciplined and can’t quite figure out how to separate himself from his family.”
To write the first drafts of the script, screenwriters Paul Tamasy, who produced the film as well, and Eric Johnson, who also serve as executive producers, spent lots of time in Lowell, interviewing everyone connected with the story, which turned out to be a good portion of the community. In the 1920’s Lowell, long a major East Coast manufacturing center, forged on the bedrock of hard-working immigrants, had experienced a downturn as its mills and factories began shutting down. Meanwhile, boxing became an outlet for a lot of the town’s young men and the ring became one last place they could still hope to hit it big.
“There were something like thirty boxing gyms at one time in Lowell,” explains Johnson. “It was seen as a way into a better life and out of poverty. After the mills closed, there was such high unemployment, boxing became a kind of opportunity.”
Tamasy notes that the Ward/Eklund family came across as the quintessential Lowell clan. “They’re very representative of the town in how tight they are and how much they believe that, no matter what, family is an anchor,” he says.
After an initial draft from Johnson and Tamasy, Russell continued working with screenwriter Scott Silver, who earlier penned the Detroit-set drama 8 Mile starring Eminem, to give the brothers’ story additional layers of grit and comic bite. As production approached, it became a bottom-line priority to Russell to involve the entire Ward/Eklund family, and the town of Lowell, in the process which, in turn, he says added a daily dose of real-life inspiration to cast and crew. “We wanted to be absolutely respectful of who these people are and, at the same time, be completely direct about the truth of their story,” Russell reflects, “and they inspired us to do that because they are so comfortable in who they are.”
The Fighter (2010)
Directed by: David O. Russell
Starring: Christian Bale, Mark Wahlberg, Amy Adams, Melissa Leo, Dendrie Taylor, Melissa McMeekin, Jack McGee, Bianca Hunter, Erica McDermott, Jenna Lamia, Kate B. O’Brien, Mickey O’Keefe
Screenplay by: Paul Attanasio, Lewis Colick
Production Design by: Judy Becker
Cinematography by: Hoyte Van Hoytema
Film Editing by: Pamela Martin
Costume Design by: Mark Bridges
Set Decoration by: Gene Serdena
Art Direction by: Laura Ballinger
Music by: Michael Brook
MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, drug content, some violence and sexuality.
Distributed by: Paramount Pictures
Release Date: December 10, 2010
