Fighting Talk
THE ART OF SELF-DEFENSE I Jesse Eisenberg’s new comedy wants to karate-kick the sports movie...
Remake The Karate Kid for adults, add the satirical bite of Fight Club, and turn the whole thing into an offbeat indie comedy with a weirder sense of humour than The Favourite and you’ve got about half the measure of The Art Of Self-Defense. “To be honest, no one else really got what I was going for when I was pitching it,” laughs director Riley Stearns, “but in my head it just all made sense…”
The story of Casey, a socially awkward accountant (Jesse Eisenberg) who starts learning karate after he gets beaten up by a biker gang, the film takes a simple set-up and runs with it – with the oddly mythic figure of Sensei (Alessandro Nivola) dragging us through a swirl of Kentucky night-fights, jealous students (Imogen Poots) and dachshunds to find the funny side of toxic masculinity.
“I wanted to go at it really literally,” says Stearns, drawing on his experience of learning martial arts to poke fun at the social issue that most men are too manly to talk about. “I wanted to go in full force, be super on-the-nose about the masculinity thing. I wanted to beat you over the head with an idea, but I never wanted it to feel like school.
“I wanted it to be fun, I really wanted to subvert people’s expectations for what a sports movie could be.” So, making his second feature after the
underappreciated 2014 thriller Faults (starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, his ex-wife), Stearns walks a tonal tightrope between dark comedy and light horror to craft a film that looks and feels like nothing else – even though it wears its influences on its baggy white sleeves.
“I found a lot of inspiration in the styles of certain directors,” he says. “Everyone from Hal Ashby and Paul Thomas Anderson to the Coen brothers and Yorgos Lanthimos. I try not to be specific about it, but I do look to them as benchmarks. What’s cool, though, is that I’m now finding I’ve built my own style, and it’s a style that
I like. Even if it is a hard one to maybe put your finger on sometimes.”
ETA | 4 NOVEMBER / THE ART OF SELF-DEFENSE IS AVAILABLE TO DOWNLOAD NEXT MONTH.