“Write what you know,” goes the mantra. If you’re James Toback, you know writing, gambling and boxing. The Oscar-nominated scribe (“Bugsy”) wrote the screenplay to Karel Reisz’s 1974 “The Gambler,” an autobiographical account of a NYU lit professor who is also a compulsive gambler.
Following “Fingers,” his promising 1978 directorial debut starring Harvey Keitel as a hitman, Toback’s career has moved in fits and starts, including “The Pick-Up Artist” and "Two Girls and a Guy." His new documentary, “Tyson,” is a hit with critics and audiences alike. Streeting this week on DVD, this portrait of the former heavyweight champ in his own words is a compelling, shocking and ultimately moving character study.
Can you talk about the nature of your relationship with Mike Tyson? In 24 years, did you ever make him angry?
The only time I can ever recall having even a slight flare up with him was when he decided to hire Don King. I was reminding him of something that he had said, that he would never hire him and you’d have to be insane. I said, “You’re not listening to yourself.” So he sort of got paranoid and took that to mean I was not with him anymore. And it calmed down. We remained friends, but that was a tough year.
I think that the key thing with Mike is that we both have a channel of connection that had nothing to do with the rational exchange of information, feelings, normal conversation. There was always raw, direct, almost unconscious of one speaking to the unconscious of the other. That’s what made the prospect of the movie intriguing.
Do you think it’s grounded in the fact that he’s an addict and you yourself are a gambling addict?
It is a kind of launching point, but I would say it’s usually unarticulated except in a general way to refer to it. But it definitely is. As he puts it in the movie, “The mind of an extremist can only be understood by the mind of another extremist.”
There’s so much talk of fear and paranoia in the movie. Fear is commonly thought of as an obstacle to overcome. But in Tyson’s case it seemed to be a principle component of his success. Is fear, in this case, a positive force?
Yeah, I was astonished, when we were shooting, to see how many times fear came up in his dialogue as the motivating factor behind all sorts of responses in his life. I had no idea that he was carrying so much around with him. And I think converting it into the other person’s fear -- transfer his fear onto the other person, it was probably responsible, to a large degree, for his success.
Fear also seems to be behind his reaction to the overwhelmingly positive response at Cannes. As you stood together on the podium, receiving all that applause, he was thinking, “You white people still hate me.”
I know, I was stunned by that revelation.
