Interview (Written): Kurt Sutter (“Southpaw”)
KPCC’s John Horn interviews Kurt Sutter (“Sons of Anarchy”) about the first feature film he wrote, the newly released Southpaw, starring Jake Gyllenhaal.
I wanted to talk about your body of work, and this may be kind of too broad a generalization, but I’m going to try it anyway. Part of what you do and have done is to take stereotypes and put a human face on [them], often with people that society doesn’t often hold in the highest regard, so that audiences can understand the myths. (a) Do you think that’s fair? And (b) Is that what you’re trying to do with Southpaw?
No, I think that’s fair. In fact, I think I’ll steal that from now on when people ask me what my body of work is. As a writer, I like to bend genre a little bit. I like to take things that people might expect to head in one direction and then twist it up a little bit. That’s especially true of Sons [of Anarchy], where people had to understood outlaw motorcycle culture two ways, and one was either sort of the cuddly, goofy, teddy-bear one they would see on sitcoms, and then the other one was sort of the white-trash, meth-dealing, darker version. And the truth is, like most things, it lives somewhere in the middle, and they’re human beings with somewhat complex lives, so it was sort of fun to go in there and kind of blow up some of those myths and educate people about a world.
The title of your movie is Southpaw. Some people who haven’t seen the movie have just seen Jake Gyllenhaal and said, “Well, he’s not in a southpaw stance.” Does the title mean anything beyond being a leftie?
Yes, I think … and for me again, the origins of this project go back a few years. I wrote the script originally for Marshall Mathers …
… who we know as Eminem.
Right. Marshall, who’s a bit of an outcast and an outlaw, obviously, in the hip-hop movement when he showed up. And a leftie, I believe. The idea was to tell the second half of his life story through the analogy of boxing, and that was the origins of the piece. And then, you know, as things happened, he decided not to do it, and it moved forward and TWC, the Weinsteins, picked it up and liked it for Jake. It was interesting for me because initially it was very difficult to see it as anything else other than what I had written it for, and I was like, “Ah, I don’t know. Jake, I love him as an actor, but, you know.” And then I met with Jake and Antoine [Fuqua], who was attached to direct at that point, who was incredibly passionate about the project, and Jake had all this insight into who this guy was. He had done a lot of research. And suddenly I saw it as not necessarily an allegory or a biographic piece, but as sort of a stand-alone story of redemption. So I got excited about it again and went in and did some more drafts. But, yeah, Jake was not a southpaw, and he’s an amazing athlete, but he wasn’t a boxer. I think they felt it would’ve been too difficult to not only train him as a boxer but train him as a boxer that goes against his natural strengths. So that sort of got put to the side and then worked into the story line later. But just in terms of what Southpaw means, you know, to the boxing community, not so much now, because there’s a lot of southpaws out there, but initially, no one wanted to fight a southpaw because they were dangerous. They had a different style. A lot of promoters would avoid them, and they really were sort of the outlaws of the boxing community.
For the rest of the interview, go here.