Las Vegas Weekly

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You’ve known Tyson a long time; when did you first get the idea to make a documentary about him?

It probably happened, at least unconsciously, when I originally met him in Central Park, on the set of The Pick-up Artist, in 1985. We took a walk in Central Park; at the end of our chat, it was 5:30 in the morning, and I got a very good sense of the liveliness of his mind and of his sort of native adventuresomeness, and I kind of hit it off with him. And then when we shot Black and White, which was after he got out of prison, he was so good—he was good all-around—in that scene in the gym where he’s sort of meditative and self-reflective, I felt this would make a great self-portrait, if I could expand this Mike Tyson into a film.

Were you working toward making this movie from that point, or did it come together more recently?

What happened was, it just seemed all of a sudden like the right time. I felt a particular eagerness to start a movie, and the only way to know that I could begin a movie right away would be to finance it myself, and that’s what I decided to do. And this was the only movie that I could afford to finance, structurally. And also, he had just crashed, and had been in rehab, and I thought that was probably the ideal place for him to be if we were going to shoot this.

Did you at any point consider opening the film up to other points of view besides Tyson’s?

No. I always thought that it would work in an original way as a self-portrait, filtered through the prism of whatever aesthetic I could develop for it, but the idea was to have his unalloyed presentation of himself. … The only person I ever thought that I might want to include in the documentary was myself. And then I thought that that would become in a way a film about myself, and I thought if I’m going to do that, I should do that. If it’s going to be about Mike, it should just be Mike.

What was Tyson’s reaction to seeing the film?

He said, “It’s like a Greek tragedy; the only problem is I’m the subject.”