Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Stephen Merchant, his backstage sports movie
There’s a scene in Stephen Merchant’s new film, Fighting With My Family, in which a nebbish couple go to dinner with a family thoroughly obsessed with WWE-style wrestling. The couple, remote and reserved to a British fault, look increasingly alarmed as the family, led by a patriarch (played by Nick Frost) who looks like a mohawked prison mope, and a matriarch (Lena Headley) who would look at home backstage at a Ratt show, start rhapsodizing about their shared passion for mixing it up in the ring.
It should come as no surprise the somewhat panicked husband is played by Stephen Merchant, the longtime comic foil to Ricky Gervais, well accustomed to playing an aggrieved fish out of water. What is certainly more interesting, is Merchant wrote and directed this ode to wrestling, and its endearing love of all things spandex and violently choreographed.
This unexpected turn Merchant himself readily cops to (he wasn’t a particular fan of wrestling before this project came to him), but the well-spoken director has come to appreciate the form, as well as the real life British family
that inspired the film. Ostensibly, the film documents the rise of WWE Superstar Paige (played by Florence Pugh), but from Merchant’s POV, it’s a lot more about family ties, and — wait for it — the plight of the passionate and misbegotten within Britain’s stultifying mainstream culture. He met with us recently to talk about the genesis of the film, the difficulty of Dwayne Johnson playing himself, and how to make a film’s climax exciting, even if it had been completely worked out ahead of time.
So, right out the gate, this seems a bit out of left field. Were you a big wrestling fan to begin with?
No, but I am now, having done it. But when I started, I had never seen wrestling. I didn’t know anything about it. The only wrestling I’d seen was when I was growing up my grandma used to watch British wrestling, which in the ’70s had no athleticism. It was just big fat men bumping bellies. It was inordinately popular on TV. They took it off TV because they asked for too much money, [and] they never got back on which is kind of why this family is now sort of living hand to mouth. There was a documentary
about the family that was on [BBC] Channel 4. I hadn’t seen it. Dwayne saw it, and he and Kevin Misher, the producer, teamed up and sent me the documentary. I don’t know why in particular they thought my sensibility would be a good fit, but I watched it and I was completely in love with this family, the wrestling seem irrelevant to me. It was the passion for this thing and they were so committed to it. They talked about it like it was a religion. They were funny characters in themselves, the way they looked, the way they spoke. You know, there’s a line in the documentary where, which I put in the film, where the husband says, “I was in jail three times before the age of 21.” And the mother says, “Mainly violence.” There was something very open and honest about them, no pretensions. I just really loved that story, particularly that brother and sister relationship and that idea of the brother being groomed for success in this very masculine world and the daughter is the one who kinds of gets it and she was really that interested and he gets left behind. I just thought that was a really sweet moving chord to the story.
On the one hand, it’s a well-worn story, but it has its particular twists and turns.
What intrigued me was
we’ve seen stories of sort of sporting exceptionalism, but the people that get left behind is a less covered territory. I do think it’s a particular British thing about celebrating failure, or not so much failure, but how you recalibrate what’s meaningful, when you don’t get the dream, when the thing doesn’t work out. I thought it was important, particularly in an age in which success as a celebrity is so valued. Although the sort of underdog story we have seen before, I also thought what was interesting, of course, she did win the belt in her first ever match and that does seem like a natural point to end the story, but this is not Rocky in the sense that the final punch is not real, right?
Right.
We understand it’s a kind of contrived sport so in that regard, what’s the victory, right?
That was one of my questions.
And so it becomes not about can she land the killer punch but did she go over with the audience? Did she win them over, which I think puts it closer to a backstage musical from the ’30s. You get your shot, kid. Go out there. I was thinking about those rags to riches entertainment stories as much as the sport stories really.
How hard was it to cast
for Paige?
I saw about 60 different women either on tape or in person. They needed to do the physical stuff, have the charisma that you could believe they could become a superstar, have the acting chops to carry the movie. You know [Florence Pugh] had the hardest job, because the fourth day of shooting she had to go out in front of 20,000 people at the Staples Center and re-create a match that many of the people in that room had seen before. She was just ice cold, amazingly calm, and I was terrified for her and she wouldn’t let me be around because I was making her nervous. She’s just an amazing talent and a real kind of force of nature. I kind of wish I could buy shares in her.
How difficult was it for Dwayne Johnson to play Dwayne Johnson?
My joke is that I didn’t want Dwayne to play the Rock. I didn’t think he was up to it; I wanted Vin Diesel. But the joking aside, the moment where he tells her that she’s going to go onto her big match, that was true. That happened backstage at WrestleMania for real. It was one of the things she told me when I was researching, and I spoke to him about it and he confirmed it. So, I always knew that was an authentic moment of their lives and he had been
very inspirational for her, so at least I wasn’t completely concocting a fiction just to crowbar him in. People talk about Dwayne being one of the nicest guys in Hollywood and he is that way. He does give up his time and is very gracious, so how he acts with them, that he’s slightly impatient but gives them the time of day, is exactly what he’s like.
It’s relatively easy to bust on wrestling for its false, contrived narratives, but that’s not really so much different from a Hollywood drama or a rom-com, or even an opera, right? It’s just that wrestling plot points usually end in a suplex.
It seems to me there are various versions of this film that could have existed. There’s the [Darren] Aronofsky version which just ends with tragedy with the brother, just watching him in despair, bitterly moving through a fog of booze, as he watches his sister succeed. There’s the meta-version, where I use the levels of artifice in wrestling to somehow comment on the levels of artifice in life and celebrity or whatever. Or there’s the kind of Rocky version. I didn’t really have to massage much to have that story. But like you say, it seems to me that whether it’s a superhero movie or any, what you might
term, mainstream entertainment, there are only really two outcomes. They win or they lose. It’s pretty binary.
Yeah, unless you do the Rocky thing where they lose but win.
That’s right, but it’s still a victory. Being men, it’s loaded when Rocky says, “If I can go X rounds then I’ve won.” I mean, we knew she was gonna win, or she would have lost. It was one of the two. There aren’t many options. It’s funny because we experimented with the scene in which Dwayne tells her about the big match. I shot a version where he tells her she’s going to win. And we tried that in some test previews, because I was interested, I was like, “Could I make a film where you still are cheering at the end even though I literally told you the outcome.” Turns out I can’t. The audience doesn’t want that. They want the moment when the victory happens. They want to be sitting in the match like you would if you were a wrestling fan. Where you don’t know the outcome even though you know that it’s predetermined. It’s like the chorus girl gets her chance, and the bitchy diva hurts her ankle and there’s her chance to shine, right? You only get one shot to impress the critics. You know, it’s Gladiator, right? It’s thumbs up or thumbs down from the crowd.