Real Steel - Shawn Levy interview

SHAWN Levy talks about some of the challenges of making Real Steel, including getting to work alongside Steven Spielberg, stepping out of his comfort zone and working with real robots. He also talks about casting Hugh Jackman and working with Sugar Ray Leonard.

Q. You’ve directed some amazingly successful films (Cheaper by The Dozen, Date Night) but it must still be a pinch yourself moment when you get a phone call from Steven Spielberg…
Shawn Levy: It was! I feel like that phone call was my reward for the other movies doing well. It was never my intention to become a comedy director and yet I found I had an affinity to comedy but when that call came in I was editing Date Night and even when he and Stacey Sneider of DreamWorks said to me that it was a robot boxing movie, I didn’t know. But then I read it and I really had a specific take on how I would make it, which was different to how other directors might make it, but I knew I wanted it to be a genuinely humanist, rousing sports movie – more than a robot movie, a sports movie. And they were down with that and they really let me make exactly that movie.

Q. Did you go back and take a look at The Twilight Zone episode?
Shawn Levy: I did and I re-read the Richard Matheson short story [Steel] upon which that episode was based, and while our movie is different what I absolutely used from that story is the kind of lonely desperation of the protagonist. In the case of the story, that guy is so desperate for a pay-day that he risks his life to get in the ring at the end of the story. And so in the opening of our movie, with Hugh Jackman driving that truck down that lonely highway, going fight to fight, pay cheque to pay cheque, that was very much inspired by the solitary, desperate protagonist in the Matheson short story.

Q. I’d imagine this takes you out of your comfort zone, especially during those first 20 minutes where you have a robot fighting a live bull and a father attempting to sell his son…
Shawn Levy: Yeah, I made a decision after the second Night at the Museum that I could either have a potentially long and lucrative career making family comedies or I could start to have the satisfaction and challenge that comes from leaving the comfort zone. It’s why I made Date Night, it’s why I made Real Steel and I must say that I’m really loving using different muscles every time out.

Q. Were those two opening scenes I mentioned a deliberate way of showing the audience that this was going to be more gritty than perhaps they were expecting?
Shawn Levy: Yeah, it’s always good to have a tone setter in your opening. What’s interesting to me is that on the one hand, I knew that having a robot fighting a bull would be a weirdly compelling opening sequence. But the other thing that is a tone setter, that the American writer for the Los Angeles Times commented on, is that I really wanted that opening credit sequence to a tone setter. It’s nothing but this Alexi Murdoch song, Hugh Jackman driving through this Americana landscape, and the audiometer of the miles on his face. It really kind of said: “Yeah, this is going to be a popcorn, fun, robot movie but it’s also about this guy. So, we’re going to spend the first three minutes just on this guy’s face because that’s who you’re going to need to care about for the robot fighting to matter.” So, that was also a tone setter by design.

Q. It’s also quite rewarding for your leading man to know that because I would guess that this role requires an actor who has a lot of humility. I mean, he could be over-shadowed by the robots or by his young co-star…
Shawn Levy: Exactly and Hugh knew… the truth is he was on the fence about doing this movie and in my first sit-down with him I explained the character I wanted him to play and the fact that the movie was going to have crazy, terrific robot action but it was going to be about this guy’s redemption. Actors want to be in hit movies but they want something to play and hopefully I’ve given Hugh a lot to play. Certainly, the reaction to his performance has been really nice because we’re used to seeing Hugh as the fun song and dance man, we’re used to seeing him as the kind of taciturn, hardened Logan [Wolverine] but this is a different kind of character for him and I think he manages to play so many different characters to this guy. I mean, he’s a real ass-hole up front but he’s f**king heartbreaking by the end.

Q. Did he work with Sugar Ray Leonard a lot?
Shawn Levy: Oh yeah. The Sugar Ray aspect was one of the greatest treats of this movie because on the one hand he contributed to the choreography of the boxing fights. But he also spent time with Hugh and I talking about the mentality of a fighter and the mentality of an ex-fighter, which is what Hugh Jackman plays, and the psychology of the corner-man, which is really what Hugh is. He’s the corner-man operating these robots. So, Ray would talk to us about Angelo Dundee, who was Ali’s corner-man as well, and would come on a month before every Sugar Ray Leonard fight and he would talk about the connection between the corner and the fighter. A lot of that found its way into the movie and how Hugh thought about the character.

Q. Were you a boxing fan already?
Shawn Levy: Yeah, more in my teenage and earlier years than now. But I think it reflects the kind of transition of the sport itself. I used to love watching Sugar Ray Leonard fight and even though Tyson. I used to love watching a Tyson fight because you would watch with this blood-lust, waiting for the f**king carnage that you knew was coming. So, it’s interesting because what we’ve seen is that the popularity of boxing has waned while the popularity of MMA [mixed martial arts] via UFC is rising. I think it speaks to the premise of the movie, which is robot boxing has emerged because people got increasingly bored with human violence. It’s why boxing has given way to MMA, which has a wider range of violence permissable in the ring. So, the idea in this movie is that when people tire of that too, they will devise a spot that isn’t limited by the human body and its frailty. So, I’ve been to a few Manny Pacquaio fights recently and I still love them and I’m still amazed at the primal, electric rush of watching a good boxing fight.

Q. What does Sugar Ray think of the current state of boxing? Did he talk to you about that?
Shawn Levy: I think Ray is saddened by it a bit. He acknowledges that it is not what it was and I think that he also recognises that it’s not just people’s thirst for a certain kind of spectacle, it’s that there aren’t the same personalities. You know, Sugar Ray, Duran, Hegler, Hearnes, Ali, Tyson… there was a narrative to these fighters and it’s what made you root for or against them. Now, I think we don’t quite have those narratives and there’s not the same vulnerability to the boxers’ narratives. I think Ray thinks that it’s going to come back but that it’s going to be tied to the rise of a new generation of fighters.

Q. How did you enjoy bringing personality to your robot boxers?
Shawn Levy: Well, that was great fun. We designed 18 robots for this movie and we wanted each of them to have a very specific look and a specific personality. We cast a different fighter for every robot because, again, these aren’t animated fights, these are real fighters in a ring wearing these mo-cap suits. And so, I cast a certain fighter to play Midas, a very different fighter to play Noisy Boy or Metro or Ambush. Obviously, our robots don’t speak, they aren’t people, but they do have a personality in the way that they move and in the way that they fight.

Q. Were these all emerging boxers?
Shawn Levy: Some of them are emerging boxers, some of them are has-been boxers and some of them are stunt-men who also box. So, a range of talent.

Q. I also read that you were seeking a kind of Wall-E style influence in Atom?
Shawn Levy: Well, Atom… I haven’t ever seen a live action robot movie that makes you feel. I’ve seen it in animation. I saw it in Iron Giant and I saw it in Wall-E and the paradigm for this movie, or at least the way I wanted to make it, is that on the one hand it would have amazing, bad-ass spectacle, but that it would be an emotional ride in the way the great sports movies are. And Atom has an innocence to him, kind of like Wall-E I suppose, where on the one hand he’s a machine, so he’s inscrutable… he doesn’t talk or show or prove that he’s a sentient being. But the movie flirts with the possibility that he might be.

Q. How important then is to have a kid that’s not too precocious?
Shawn Levy: I would say this… on the one hand Dakota [Goyo] has some experience but this was absolutely his big break. But I would say this – if you put any 10-year-old boy in front of a real, moving, eight and a half foot tall robot, something is going to happen… because it happened for Hugh and I! We’re 40-something men and when we stood in front of Atom and we moved our head one way, and Atom would move his head to shadow us, it’s both chilling and kind of amazing. And so what you see in the movie… that boy loves that robot and that wasn’t acting; that was what really happened when you put a boy in front of a moving robot for real.

Q. Was he hard to find?
Shawn Levy: We saw hundreds and hundreds of boys but, again, to speak to your point I knew I needed a great actor but I needed something more; I needed something more pure and that’s what Dakota had.

Q. How important was it to you to give Dakota and Hugh real robots to work with, as opposed to CGI ones?
Shawn Levy: I just think that the real robots not only maintained a high bar for the visual effects because we wouldn’t accept a pretty good looking visual effects shot because we knew what the real robot looked like because it was standing in the room with us. But also the real robots gave a kind of emotional reality to the performances. I’m telling you, I’ve done a dinosaur skeleton as a tennis ball on a stick. Hugh has done tennis balls on sticks in all his X-Men movies. There was something different here by virtue of it being a real, moving, live machine.

Q. So, Atom can really mimic human behaviour?
Shawn Levy: Yes, this robot was animatronically piped with hydraulic fluid, so I was able to literally… there was a puppeteer who operated this remote control for Atom and his upper torso and neck and head. I would tell Dakota to do whatever he wanted. So, he moved and we watched to see what the robot did. And then I went to the puppeteer and said: “You mirror this kid no matter what…” And so everything that the kid did, the kid didn’t tell us what he was going to do, but the robot just followed him and you could see the boy could not believe that he was being shadowed by this huge machine. But that’s hopefully what gives the movie its lyricism.

Q. Were Dakota’s dance steps choreographed?
Shawn Levy: That was choreographed… in fact, we lucked out because it was choreographed by Anne Fletcher, who has gone on to directorial success. She did The Proposal as a director. And Timbaland, who is obviously an artist I love, because he wrote and produced a lot of music for Justin Timberlake among others, I brought him the movie and I showed him the movie and he said he would write an original song for it. So, it’s a song by Timbaland, choreography by Anne Fletcher and Dakota had never danced before. It’s part of why the dancing comes off fun rather than cheeky or silly. Even I wasn’t sure whether the dancing would work. I was prepared to cut it out. But the first time I saw, and then the first time I saw it in front of an audience, and saw the way they reacted… you don’t think it can work but there’s something so winning about it that it kind of gets the kid in all of us. In a way, I think the movie as a whole is similarly kind of defying of expectations. Everyone says: “Well, how is it not rock ‘em, sock ‘em robots? How is it not Transformers?” At a certain point, Hugh and I now find ourselves simply saying: “You’ll see.” And indeed, the people who have seen the movie invariably say: “Oh, it’s actually ‘X’ or ‘Y’.” And that was important. I know what the expectations will be based on a poster or a commercial or a trailer, but hopefully the movie has a lot of different colours in it.

Q. Are the robot effects that you do employ even further advanced than those in Avatar?
Shawn Levy: Well, they’re different and further advanced in this regard: they borrow a great many pages from Cameron’s book. But Jim Cameron did motion capture and then plugged those beings into the created world of Pandora. We plugged our motion capture creatures, our robots, into real world settings, which is called Simu-Cam B, and that has not been done before to this extent.

Q. Jon Favreau said he was given an iPad as a starter present by Spielberg that was packed with loads of Westerns for him to watch before he directed Cowboys & Aliens. Did he do anything similar like that for you?
Shawn Levy: I’m still waiting for my ET puppet. But while I didn’t get that, what I did get – and this is honest – was the greatest mentorship of my life. I had real, meaningful, week after week input with Steven. Obviously, this movie has some Spielbergian motifs to it, not by design. But any movie that is about a boy discovering a redemptive bond with a creature is going to have Spielberg overtones. But in the creature design, in the design of the robots, in the script, in the choreography of some of the action, Steven was a great mentor… never over-stepping but always there and I would often… Just to be able to make that call: “Hey Steven, I was thinking about doing this in a scene, what do you think?” It’s been one of the greatest experiences.

Q. So, what is the biggest lesson you think you’ve taken away from the experience?
Shawn Levy: It’s the re-doubling of the lesson that I learned on Night At The Museum, which is not to be afraid of technology that I don’t yet understand because once you master it, it just becomes another tool in your kit to tell your story. So, after Real Steel, I’m not daunted and the lesson is that everything needs to serve that character’s story and in Real Steel hopefully that’s what we’ve pulled off.