You know what you’re getting into when you go see a film called FIST FIGHT. The specifics of the plot almost don’t matter when you know all roads lead to an epic brawl in the film’s final 30 minutes. What does make FIST FIGHT a little different is that this high school-set comedy isn’t about two students getting into a battle royale (a la THREE O’CLOCK HIGH), but two teachers, played by Charlie Day (HORRIBLE BOSSES and PACIFIC RIM) and Ice Cube (RIDE ALONG), who are as different in their teaching styles as they are in their fighting techniques.
The movie is directed by Richie Keen, a sometime actor who became a successful television director on such shows as “New Girl,” “Maron,” “The Goldbergs,” and most prolifically on Day’s long-running series “It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” Keen grew up just north of Chicago, in John Hughes territory, so the fact that his first feature is set in a high school is no accident. And by focusing more on the teachers than students, it gave Keen and his screenwriters the chance to make a few subtle points about the current state of public education and the way teachers are treated in general. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a message movie, but it pays to listen to the between-fighting dialogue. It was also just announced that Keen has signed on to direct the LAPD-centered action-comedy PARTNERS for New Line Cinema (who also made FIST FIGHT).
I had the chance to sit down with Keen and Day recently in Chicago, and we covered many topics—from bullying to fight choreography to the top-notch supporting players. With that, enjoy my conversation with Richie Keen and Charlie Day…
Capone: I will admit, my first thought even just hearing about this movie, before I even saw a trailer, was that there is no way Ice Cube would sign on to a movie like this and not win. So I applaud the fact that you did it in a way that he doesn’t have to lose, but you don’t have to just go down like a wuss. But was that a thing you had to factor in?
Charlie Day: I agree. I feel like we can’t print any of this before the movie comes out, but we certainly couldn’t have him win.
[Everybody laughs]
Richie Keen: Here’s what my goal was, because especially when you set up a premise where the poster is: “Ice Cube and Charlie.” You think it’s going to be a one-punch fight, if there’s even going to be a fight. In fact, a lot of people on the internet, when the trailer came out, I remember they were saying things like, “Oh man, you know this is going to be lame. They’re not actually going to fight. They’re going to fight the administration.” One of my goals in designing the fight, which had been written to just take place in the parking lot, was to have it be like the end of a horror movie where the final chase goes through all the places you’ve been already, and ideally we tried to set things up—like the baby oil and the car and things that would pay off as you went along. so Charlie could in some ways, what he lacked in brute strength, he could use his smarts and use his scrappiness. And with Cube, it was a matter just making sure that he was cool with the choreography of the fight, and he didn’t feel like it would be unbelievable how the fight went down.
CD: It’s funny too, the story does borrow a little bit from ROCKY in this strange way, where you have a man who’s not supposed to be able to fight the champ.
Capone: Or go the distance.
CD: Or go the distance. Who doesn’t actually want to even be in the fight, and that’s where the humor is coming from, but then when he does have to be in the fight, his goal is “Well, I’m just going to give it my all because I have nothing to lose.” It’s sort of the same as ROCKY. When a guy is really pushed into a corner, what is he capable of?
RK: I said to Cube the same thing I said to Charlie, which is we need it to be THEY LIVE.
Capone: You can look at my notes [I slide my notepad of question to Keen to show him I’ve written “THEY LIVE” in big letters]. That’s the first thing that came into my head.
RK: Which is in my opinion the greatest. I’ve watched that fight…I worked with Keith David a few years ago, and all I wanted to do is talk about the fight in THEY LIVE. I said to Cube straight up “If we’re going to beat THEY LIVE, it can’t be just Charlie dodging the whole time. He’s going to have to get scrappy with you.” He was a great sport about it. I think in a lot of ways he did things in this movie he doesn’t normally do. He said to me going in “I want to do something different than I normally do. Let’s get there. Let’s find a way there.” That was just one of the elements.
Capone: I’ve interviewed him a couple of times before, and he’s always been upfront about “I know what I’m good at, and I just want to be the best at those things. I’m not trying to like do Shakespeare.” At the same time, I think he is doing a little something different here.
CD: Yeah, within what you know him from. I read a great interview once with Jack Nicholson back when he used to give interviews, and he was saying he knows if he can just do—I don’t want to misquote him—but it was along the lines of, if he can just do something as good as what he’s done before, he’ll know it’s good enough. He’s not always trying to one-up himself or top himself.
RK: To that point, it was important to me that Ice Cube not just be the shark in JAWS, swimming around Charlie. We wrote the sequence of the mythology of Cube. I wanted to take the stink off it, I wanted to see him play the piano. I wanted to see him have a laugh when Charlie is on the roof yelling. We tried to find the places where he could react to Christina Hendricks like, “Damn girl!” We just didn’t want him to only be the straight man all the time.
CD: And it helped giving him a point of view of accountability and living in a culture where there’s a lack of accountability and the point of view that he’s handcuffed in his ability to teach so that he had an understandable motivation for this fight.
RK: Charlie said early on to me, “Every kid gets a trophy. Fuck a trophy.” You said that to me early on, and we started working on this idea that, for me as a director, the only way to justify—
CD: And you know why? Because I didn’t get fucking any trophies. I got none; I still have none!
RK: Yep. And I felt like the only way to justify a fist fight was A), to make each teacher care about being a teacher, right? It couldn’t just be big scary guy, small wimpy guy. Seeing that Charlie’s in a newer school, he wants to inspire the kids. If someone takes out their phone, he’s going to take a selfie with them. Cube says, “I don’t need to be liked. I need to educate.” He catches you on your phone, he’s going to break it. And the idea that we added all these absurd pranks to show this boiling pot, so that by the time Cube snaps you can say “I understand why this guy’s had enough” and hopefully then justify what happens next.
Capone: I know a lot of teachers and I know that there are things in here that you’ve managed to squeeze in between the funny stuff. That fear of losing your job because of budget cuts, it’s there every minute of every day, and the idea of unruly students, which you guys play for laughs, but that’s like a real scary thing sometimes.
CD: I would imagine.
Capone: Did you ways to include these more serious themes in here?
RK: Yeah. We talked a lot about it. To me, growing up in suburban Illinois in John Hughes country, growing up sneaking on the set of FERRIS BUELLER literally, this is a rated-R John Hughes movie. It all takes place in a day, takes place in a high school, it’s the day that changed someone’s life. But we felt like this can have a little bit of heart here and there, it can have enough of a reason, and then we throw ANIMAL HOUSE in it as well.
CD: It does also put my character constantly, throughout the entire movie, between a rock and a hard place so that he’s able to really have this worst day of his life that pushes him to the physical brink and to standing up for himself in a way he never would have.
RK: Which is one of the reasons when we did the rewrite work on the principal and ultimately cast Dean Norris, we laughed about this. I called Charlie and said, “What about Dean Norris?“ I kept thinking, Charlie in between Cube and an angry Dean Norris is a tough situation.
CD: Yeah, right. It’s a lose-lose for me.
RK: When you see Dean Norris… I grew up with a guy like Dean Norris as our vice principal, and I felt for the dude. He was middle management. He wasn’t trying to be mean to everyone. He had his own pressures going on. He was just trying to keep it all together. I actually would say this to Dean, “I empathize with you in this movie. It’s a tough spot.” But by the time Charlie is next to Cube and they’re in front of Dean, that scene always kills me because I’m like “I don’t know what I would do.” It’s a tough spot. Cube’s just sitting there saying nothing, and Dean yelling at you saying “One of you guys or both of you guys are getting fired.” So, yeah. We definitely played with those real-life teacher themes.
Capone: I also love that you establish right off the bat with that courtyard shot that this is a prison. This school is a version of a prison.
CD: That’s all Richie. Let me brag on you for a minute. Richie had a great visual approach to this movie and a great strategy that was not there in the script but was Richie’s idea for how to best tell the story. I’ll let you take it from here, but it was really a great move to start.
RK: I said it was a prison-riot movie. You’re the first person who’s even used the word “prison.”
Capone: You even have that image in the trailer of all the kids swarming in around the fight, and it looks like a prison riot.
RK: I said this should be the prison guards verses the inmates. And speaking with a lot of family and friends that are teachers, just talking about what that feels like, which is why you don’t see the students messing with each other, you just see them messing with the teachers. I’ll geek out real quickly with you which is that—and no one will ever study this in film class—but the idea was that Charlie would walk in, he’s the cowboy in the white hat, he would be in lighter colors, his classroom is white, the sun’s pouring in, there’s a white dry-erase board right behind him.
Cube would walk in darker colors, he’s in a dark-blue room, grey chalk board behind him, blinds are drawn. And as the movie goes on, and Cube starts making a little more sense, his light gets brighter. And as Charlie’s descending into his chaos, his light gets more and more grey, even in the classroom, until we get into the Model UN room, which is like Purgatory, where he’s in Israel and Cube’s in Iran, and it’s black with dollops of light. I remember one of the first things I said was, “I want this to look like the war room in DR STRANGELOVE.”
And again, not that anyone would ever notice it, I just had a strong point of view. I wanted it to feel like a falling-apart high school. Other movies like 21 JUMP STREET have nailed this so well. I didn’t want this to be a glossy, blue-sky-looking high school. I felt like to begin to justify the fight, it had to be a cathartic experience for everyone in the movie, so that’s why I lensed it that way.
Capone: I know that Ice Cube is an executive producer on this. Did he have this and bring it to you? Who brought the script to who?
CD: Richie and I both saw it separately. Richie was aware of it, I think just thorough your agent, right?
RK: Yeah, it was a weird piece of synchronicity that Max Greenfield on “New Girl”—
Capone: I saw that he has a story credit on this.
RK: It was his idea. Two teachers have a fight. He went to Shawn Levy, our phenomenal producer, they hired these two writers [Van Robichaux & Evan Susser], they brought it to New Line, I got it, I was obsessed with it, and no one had any interest in hiring me to do a movie. No one would meet with me on this movie. I had no chance. I’m just a measly old cable TV director. I started trying to convince the studio, and around that time, Charlie signed on and I was like “Of course he did. We have the exact same taste.” Then it started to make a lot more sense because we both started talking. I made a trailer. This was my big sales tool. I took a bunch of footage of Charlie in his movies and Ice Cube in his movies and made it look like they were in scenes together and sold it that way.
CD: I always have this point of time in the spring when I’m making “Sunny,” and I don’t know what I’m going to be doing in the off season and I have a panic moment and call my agent, and in that panic moment, I called and said, “Send me every script that’s in development hell, and maybe I can breathe some life into something, do a re-write or what have you. And my agent said, “This thing just came across my desk called FIST FIGHT,” and he broke down the story for me, and I said, “Send it; that sounds interesting.” So I read it that night, and I called the next day and said, “Call New Line. Tell them I want to do it.”
Fortunately, I’m in a position where that meant something to New Line, and very quickly they pitched to me Ice Cube, which had not occurred to me, but it really solidified what the movie could be in my mind. “That’s amazing if we could get him.” And that’s around the same time that Richie was calling me saying, “Hey, what do you think about me for the director?” And I thought “I hadn’t thought about that, but I’d love to work together,” and I wasn’t so sure, and he sent me this trailer, and I called him back and said, “Richie, if you can make the movie half as good as you made this trailer, you’re the guy for it.”
From then on it was very easy for me to go to to bat for Richie and very easy for the studio to understand that he just had a take on this movie, which was both comforting for me, because of our experience on “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” to be working with someone that I could collaborate with and trust, but also that had a vision. Often times, you want to go with the most excited person who really has a take on a movie and isn’t just looking for their next paycheck. And also, there’s something good about a guy who’s trying to prove himself, that guy who wants a chance to get in the ring and show people that he can knock out the champ.
RK: And our partnership, it was the kind of thing where there are certain things I was scared to do, and I’d go to Charlie, and we decide let’s do it. For example, in the script, in the talent show, there was a Kanye West song. It was a very sweet moment. We found out right before shooting we couldn’t afford it, and I was like, “Oh my god. We’re going to lose this Kanye song. It’s Kanye! How can you replace Kanye?” So I listened to like 100 songs, and I heard the Big Sean song [“I Don't Fuck With You,” which happens to be co-produced by Kanye West], and I was like “Can I do this? This changes everything.” And I sent it to Charlie, and he was like, “We’re doing this.”
CD: Hearing that song changed everything, because suddenly it gave us the idea that “Now what we can do is we can make this moment a joke and not a sentimental moment, but it feels sentimental,” which also led us to the idea of creating the fact that the daughter had been bullied, which really broke the script open for us. So we set about making those changes. I don’t think that scene would be in the movie if we hadn’t done it that way.
RK: No, I agree. The two characters were both being bullied.
Capone: I was going to say, the bullying message is what drives this whole movie though to the end.
CD: Yeah, you have to have that in there.
RK: He’s scrappy. I grew up, I did get bullied, I even got challenged in fights, but I wouldn’t show up. I was too scared, man. I didn’t know how to fight. To this day, I’m all bark and no bite. I think when I read the script and knew what it could be, I was like “This is my fantasy of if I actually finally stood up for myself. You know what? I might get killed, but I’m going to go do this,” and then began our process of making sure Charlie’s character got there.
Capone: Let’s just talk about building the fight scene. How many days did it take? What did you have to do to get ready for it? Is that all the two of you? It feels like it is.
CD: You mean is the fighting all the two of us?
Capone: Yeah, yeah.
RK: Between him and Ice Cube? The fighting? I defy you to find a stunt double. There’s one move where I think there’s a flip. Eight days. Eight days1 I didn’t use everything I shot, but my mantra was “We have to deliver on the promise of the title.” It’s a sports movie, and the third act of the game. I have to make sure we nail this, and the way I went about doing it was I had a fight choreographer who would take his stunt guys and he’d take a couple of iPhones, and he’d shoot the fight with his guys, edit it together, and send it to me. And then I’d say, “No, no, no. It’s got to be brutal here, and this has to be funny, and then that kick looks like a Marvel kick. I don’t want a Marvel kick.” And he’d go back. It was the most interesting process of noting the fight until I finally saw the sound doubles do the fight the way I wanted to, and then it was time to hand it over to Charlie and Ice Cube.
CD: We learned certain sections of choreography of dodge, dodge, duck, throw, throw, throw, dodge. So that we could shoot long chunks of it, and you really had to time it out right, otherwise you were going to get clocked, and then we did everything. I can not tell you the amount of times I got thrown into that school bus and dragged along the ground. I was in such physical pain at the end of every single day. So black and blue, I could no longer feel my foot, and I developed a sciatica, which I’d never had before. I got a cortisone shot at one point in time. We just had to keep going.
RK: As Charlie said, Ice Cube is a very committed actor.
Capone: Did you at least get a few in yourself?
CD: Absolutely. He got his fair share of bruises. It was the blocking that hurt more, because you would go to throw a punch, and when the block went up, it would be the elbow instead of the forearm, so you would just throw a punch into an elbow. It was a lot of throwing each other on the ground, take after take.
RK: I’ve got to be honest with you, man. I went up to both of them and said right at the beginning, “I’m counting on you guys, I need you to tell me if you need a break, if you need to stop.” First of all, of course Ice Cube’s never going to do that, and Charlie’s trying to be a pro, and there was just one day—I forget which day it was—where Charlie came up to me. He was quiet and said, “Does he have to throw my head into the bus again? Are we good?” “We’ll move on. We’ll move on.”
CD: “Did you get it? I’m pretty sure we just did it five times, the camera angle is not changing, and I see three Richies right now.” [Everybody laughs] But somehow, some way we survived it. Actually, I will have a lingering pain in my hip the rest of my life unless I get a surgery.
RK: Next time we do an action movie, let’s do an action movie and not a fight movie.
CD: I saw the movie BRONSON shortly after that, and he was like fighting all movie long, fighting naked and stuff, and I’m thinking “That poor son of a bitch. What a terrible job that must have been.”
Capone: One of the very wise things that you do is surround these two with some very, very funny people. I’m beginning to look forward to any time Jillian Bell shows up in anything, as well as Kumail Nanjiani, but then also Tracy Morgan. I was so happy to see him in this back.Talk about the process of pulling those people together?
RK: I had a couple goals in casting. One goal was find the funniest people on the planet and put them next to people you didn’t know were the funniest people on the planet, so find that combination of Christina Hendricks next to Ice Cube, and Tracy Morgan next to Dean Norris. Those roles were not written for those people. Jillian’s role was a dude. I called Charlie late one night. I had seen 22 JUMP STREET again, because I was watching Ice Cube movies to figure out what he hadn't done and what might be interesting, and I just said, “This should be Jillian Bell.”
CD: We basically wrote it for her. Kumail, that character wasn’t even in the movie, and Richie said he talked to Kumail and said he’d be willing to do the movie, and I had an idea for a character.
RK: He sat in my living room and over 90 minutes wrote all of Kumail’s scenes. I don’t think they changed. Once I called Kumail, who I’ve worked with and is a friend, and said, “There’s a part for you in this movie, I just don’t know what it is. Are you filming ‘Silicon Valley’?” He said, “I am, but if you can shoot me in X amount of days.” And Charlie sat down and just wrote that security guard character. Tracy, no one had seen him on TV yet. He hadn’t even been back yet. People didn’t know if he could walk or if he had brain damage.
CD: I think people were also thinking of a younger guy for the coach, and I think it helped the demographic of the school having everyone not be the same age, and then of course to get the talent of Tracy Morgan and to be able to be his first movie back.
RK: We had a really nice moment, because he was nervous his first day, and I could see he was nervous. And it just occurred to me: “This dude has not acted since he got hit by a truck. He had no idea if he was going to walk again, and here he is,” and I’m about to say action, and I went over to him and put my hand on his shoulder and I just said, “This is really special for me too. I can’t believe I’m a part of this. I’m going to be a part of the next chapter of your career. Just so you know, I got you. It’s going to be great. If you do anything dumb, I’m not going to use it. Just have fun.” And he lit up and from that moment on he’s exactly what he was in the movie.
Capone: Charlie, I wang to ask you real quick. Have you shot your PACIFIC RIM stuff yet?
CD: I’m in the middle of it! Yeah, I was in Australia just like five days ago.
Capone: What can you tell me, because you’re one of the only people carried over from the first film. What’s happening? What’s the vibe like? What are you doing?
CD: I can tell you that there’s a new cast of young people—the future of the cadet program.
Capone: They keep releasing pictures of John Boyega.
CD: Yes, I don’t think it’s a secret that he’s the son of Idris’s character. Anything else will be in my deposition.
Capone: People might ask about that tonight.
CD: That’s true. They will, but I’m going to get sued if I say anything [laughs].
