In the Ring: James Madio and Steve Loff on “The Featherweight”

Set in 1964 and 1965, “The Featherweight” is a stylistically daring movie about an aging real-life boxer, Willie Pep (James Madio), who held the World Featherweight championship twice between 1942 and 1950 and invites a couple of documentary filmmakers modeled on the Maysles brothers to record his daily life as he attempts a comeback in his ‘40s. The result is an insightful, often haunting look at the drive to recapture past successes and the toll that a famous professional athlete’s career takes on his friends and family. 

Directed by debut feature filmmaker Robert Kolodny, regular cinematographer for the esteemed documentary director-producer-editor Robert Greene (“Procession,” “Bisbee ’17”), “The Featherweight” is also a rare mockumentary that never breaks aesthetic character and cheats to get information into the story that a camera probably wouldn’t witness. The look of the movie (which was shot partly on Super 16mm film, but otherwise on digital made to resemble film) is the result of carefully studying documentaries that were shot in the 1960s. The movie is meticulously thought-out at the level of the performances as well as the visuals. Madio, a seasoned character actor best known for “Band of Brothers,” leads a cast (including Stephen Lang, William Fichtner and Ron Livingston) that largely avoids contemporary mannerisms, seemingly channeling personal memories of how Americans behaved on-camera in the early 1960s, when not everybody had a tiny, high-resolution moviemaking device in their pockets. 

On a personal note: I know two of the key people who worked on this movie, Madio and screenwriter-producer Steve Loff. And that’s why you’re reading this piece: because I’m very proud of what my friends have done. Loff has worked with me on multiple projects over two decades, including my own debut feature “Home” (where he was a co-producer and lead cameraman) and Loff’s first feature “Desert Rain” (which I co-edited). Steve told me in 2008 that he’d written a film about Willie Pep and wanted to get it made somehow, starring Madio, a journeyman actor who was not a bankable movie star by any stretch (I met Jimmy, as he’s called by friends, at a party in 2009 and felt like I’d just met a time traveler from 100 years earlier; truly an old school New York actor, with a sing-song Bronx accent). 

I was enthusiastic and encouraging. But of course in the back of my mind I thought, “We’re decades on from the release of the original ‘Rocky,’ a boxing drama that had a barely-known lead but became a giant success. The industry is mostly not set up to allow these sorts of movies to get made anymore. I hope Steve’s spirits don’t get crushed.” 

As the years wore on and “The Featherweight” didn’t materialize, I tried to put it out of my mind, assuming the likelihood of its existence would lessen each year. The industry moved further away from having an economic model that could make medium-budget period pieces without stars viable. Plus, Jimmy wasn’t getting any younger (none of us were!) and the idea of casting a 40+ year old performer as a boxer in the prime of his career would likely be another strike against a project that was already a tough sell.

Lo and behold: “The Featherweight”—rewritten by Steve to move the story into the 1960s and make it a perfect age fit for Jimmy—exists. And it has gotten excellent reviews (including glowing notices from The New Yorker’s film editor Richard Brody) plus film festival recognition (it played the Venice International Film Festival, and Kolodny got the John Schlesinger Award for Best Director of a narrative film at the Provincetown International Film Festival). 

It’s always a thrill when people you know succeed at a quest they’ve been pursuing for many years, and the result is not only good, but excellent, and gets seen by people who don’t know the artists personally. This, happily, is one of those rare cases. 

Sixteen years later, at long last, “The Featherweight” is out in the world. Did you have doubts?

James Madio: Well, I have to admit—and Steve could back me on this—that I don’t think there was ever a time in all the years of trying to get this movie made that we didn’t think ‘this may happen.’ I think we always felt that we were going to make this film, through all the different renditions that it went through, all the attachments that it had. And we were right. Steve and I never lost faith. As many hoops as we had to jump through, and then have to jump back out of the hoop and reconfigure things and restart, I don’t think we ever looked at each other and said, “Are we done? Like, is this project done?”

We just knew it was the right movie to make, and how to make it, so it was a question of when we were going to make it, and which way we’re going to make it, and how we were going to adapt it and tailor it and spin it. That all just came to fruition from sweat equity. We had to keep lowering the budget, lowering the budget, lowering the budget. Coming up with a different approach. Steve came up with this documentary approach, so now we had both a great subject and an incredible way to highlight Willie Pep’s life and complete the process. Then Steve met with [documentary filmmaker] Steve James. Steve James hooked us up with Robert Greene. Robert Greene hooked up with Robert Kolodny and [producer] Bennett Elliott, and it just took off from there.

Can you guys walk me through the different incarnations of the story? It wasn’t originally set in 1965, was it? I remember it being a different movie, originally.

Loff: It was something else. You know, the first draft was a 240-page vomit draft I wrote over two months, December, 2008 and January, 2009, and it was basically cradle-to-grave, right? It was cradle-to-grave, and that draft just became a source document. And then I whittled it down, whittled it down! It probably took, like, a year before I got to a point where 75% of [the draft] was Willie Pep’s career in the 1940s and ‘50s, and 25% was set in 1965, which is where I started the movie. 

So, kind of a parenthetical structure, where you’re in the present, i.e. 1965, but regularly going back into the past?

Loff: Exactly. And so we went out with that version, but it got a tepid response. The movie was dying a little bit. 

Madio: Also, this was gonna be like a $30 million budgeted movie that took place over three decades, when Willie’s 20, 30 and in his 40s. There’s probably only three directors in the world that can get a budget for a movie like that.

Loff: Yeah—that was a big idea!

Madio: And the reality was, no one was gonna make a movie with a $30 million budget spanning three decades with James Madio as the lead, about a subject that not too many people outside of boxing fans even know about. So we started to tailor down our expectations. And then we got linked up with Appian Way, Leonardo DiCaprio’s company, and having that weight behind us and hooking us up at Steve James resulted in a big momentum shift.

Loff: Well, the big shift for me was, one day I’m on the Q train coming home from a production job, and I’ve got this script that’s like, just a traditional narrative, and I’m watching a lot of documentaries by the Maysles Brothers at that point, and—you know how much I love their movie “Salesman,” of course.

Yes. We’ve talked about our shared obsession with “Salesman” many times. It’s a sacred text.

Loff: And so all of a sudden I think, What if the Maysles brothers had caught wind of Willie Pep wanting to make a comeback six years after he’d retired? What if they had a chance to do a fly-on-the-wall, cinema verite-style movie that followed his day-to-day routine in fall of 1964, and kind of pried into his life leading up to this comeback? The question was, would the Maysles brothers go up there and do that? 

Sure, they would! Especially if they thought he might fail.

Loff: Exactly. The Maysles were the nonfiction pioneers of the train-wreck-on-camera genre, like we now see on reality TV. And that realization changed everything. I did a page-one rewrite. And I think that made people look at it and go, “Oh, wow, this is something different.” I truly believe that’s why we got into the Venice International Film Festival, right? Because the Venice Film Festival is looking at the film and going, It’s a boxing film, it’s a family drama, but it has this unique approach. I think it also helped us that we were applying this faux-doc style to a dramatic film. The format is usually reserved for comedies like “The Office” or, going back a while, something like “This is Spinal Tap.” The faux-doc style doesn’t get applied as often to dramas.

Somehow this movie managed to overcome the problem that affects almost every faux-documentary at some point, which is, I’m looking at the movie and thinking, I don’t actually believe that a camera would be running at this point and capturing this moment. There’s a lot of cheating, usually. And often there’s a point where a faux-documentary just kind of forgets that it’s a faux-documentary and turns into a regular movie, but with shaky camerawork.

Madio: Well, that was the difficulty with it. When I would talk to Rob, as an actor talking to his director, I’d kind of go, “Where’s that fourth wall? I’m allowed to break this fourth wall right now? I could just go ahead and spike the lens? I could just walk past the lens? Or could I push it out of the way if I have to get to something? Or I could just know it’s there and act with this lens?” There’s a lot of freedom with all that, for sure. As somebody who’s been acting for thirty-something years, I wasn’t used to it. But I really leaned into it, and I enjoyed it thoroughly, and Robert allowed me to explore that as much as I could. 

The funny thing is, as an actor who’s been doing it for so long, I knew that, even though they say ‘Cut,’ these are documentary filmmakers, and for documentary filmmakers, that camera’s never really off. Even though somebody said ‘Cut’ they could turn it back on or they could have kept it running. So I stayed in character all the time, knowing that was going on. And that was the beauty of it. 

Another thing I found interesting is, you’re giving a two-layered performance. Meaning, you’re playing Willie Pep. But you’re also doing Willie Pep’s performance of “Willie Pep,” the legend he wants to present to the camera crew. And you also have the question of, “What would prompt Willie to decide, I’ve had it with these people, and I don’t want this moment on camera?” Because he’s a real guy, not an actor.

Madio: Yeah. They catch him accidentally a few times, slipping. I talked about these issues with Rob. I’d also ask stuff like, “Would I let you into a scene where my father’s passing away? Would I allow you here while I’m fighting with my son? Like, how if you’re giving me the freedom to react, and I see that you’re there while I’m arguing with my son, I may say “Oh, it’s done. Get the camera out of the house.” You know? And Robert would say, “Do it. Do what you gotta do. I’m gonna try to stay out of your way and not make it too obtrusive, but you just do what you do.”  

Were there any rules, even in a general sense? Like, “We know we won’t do this, but we will always do that”?

Madio: Off the top of my head, no, I can’t say there were any rules. I know that maybe instinctively in the back of my head I knew the places I could go and the ones where I might not be able to go.

How did the details of this production allow you to embrace a kind of “documentary performance” idea?

Madio:  Because of the way we shot it, a whole set would always be dressed, for the most part, and that meant the actors were able to just do what they wanted inside of a room. I could have walked over and opened a drawer and taken a book out of it. I could have done anything I wanted and it should have been able to work. A light switch should have been able to work. A period pillow could come into focus. You had that flexibility. Our production designer was incredible. The wardrobe was incredible. 

Loff: They were also allowed that freedom because a lot of the movie is single takes and there’s a lack of coverage. Rob said it was almost like it was a play—like the cast was on a stage and they were able to move around on it.

Madio: Yeah, it was a lot of fun. We’d rehearse a little bit and kind of say, “This is the general idea of where I may move, this is the A, B and C of where we want to get.” And you’d rehearse a little bit. But you would never know what would happen when the cameras were rolling. We would stay true to the script. Obviously, you want to respect the writer and translate it to the audience. But there was a lot of freedom. 

This movie was lightning in a bottle. Every single department, every key department, did their job at the utmost top level, and really respected their art, their craft, and we all just came together, and I think it showed on the screen.