Niagara filmmakers go distance for Fight!
For Niagara filmmakers Erica Sherwood and Jason Lupish, the fight began two years ago.
Long nights. Exhausting days. And no script.
In two months, they can finally ring the bell for “Fight!,” their hard-hitting drama about a single mother (Sherwood) who resorts to the world of bare knuckle fighting to support her daughter. Along the way, her path crosses with an adopted teenaged girl (Gabriella McAlpine) whose stepmother is trying to expose the violent underworld.
For Lupish, who also made the 2012 drama “A Kind of Wonderful Thing” with Sherwood, filming without a script was his response to the tired, formulaic feel of most every movie he sees nowadays.
“I was taking this Terrence Malick approach to filmmaking,” he says. “Werner Herzog is another example. His scripts are not really scripts, they’re just kind of stories. He gives these stories to the crew and says ‘Capture the essence of this.’
“It was an experiment. It wasn’t something that …”
“We want to do again,” Sherwood interjects with a laugh.
It was a Plan B that worked out. Lupish started writing a script, but realized “it wasn’t working out.” Instead, he watched Malick classics such as “The Thin Red Line” and downloaded Herzog’s Masterclass online tutorial. That’s when he decided on a “collaboration” to tell the story instead of using words on a page.
“I want the actors to come in and be those characters, as opposed to just delivering dialogue which sometimes doesn’t feel natural.”
“We hate writing dialogue, too, because it just seems so unnatural,” adds Sherwood. “So (we told them) when you get a character, just be themselves in that character. It becomes more organic.”
Beyond the improvised dialogue, Sherwood had to prepare for a brutally physical shoot, with her character involved in several bloody fight scenes. She prepared by doing some Muay Thai fighting and participated in the 2015 Pearl Gloves charity boxing event.
“I know what it’s like to be pummelled pretty hard,” she says. “Almost knocked unconscious. They threw in the towel for safety my first (Muay Thai) fight, it was insane. I was up against this Godzilla woman who has fought since she was four.
“Just like in the movie, there’s a scene where I fight this big woman … there’s a scene of me getting pummelled by her, and then I get revenge. But it was definitely easy to get into that mindset.”
Though she had help from a stunt choreographer, Sherwood wasn’t about to let a body double take her lumps.
“I’m really good at being thrown around and not injuring myself,” she says.
For the fight scenes, Lupish didn’t want the quick-edit, headache-inducing style of modern action movies. He went back to the groundbreaking boxing scenes from Raging Bull for inspiration.
“There’s something about that movie… the fighting in it is not like anything you’ve really seen,” he says.
“Fight!” will have a red carpet premiere June 22 at FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre, which will also serve as a fundraiser for Jarico Films For Youth, the nonprofit company Lupish and Sherwood have started to create filmmaking opportunities for Niagara’s youth.
“The long term goal is to create a film industry within Niagara,” says Sherwood.
“We’ve been going about it the traditional route, trying to just make movies and find people to fund them,” adds Lupish. “All these theatre companies are all not-for-profits, so why are we not running a film production like we run a theatre company?”