We’ve seen many sets of photos from David O. Russell’s boxing drama, “The Fighter,” but here’s a new variation of snaps we’ve seen before featuring the two leads Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale.
The film centers on boxer “Irish” Micky Ward (Wahlberg) and his recovering drug-addict/former boxing brother (Bale) who helped train him before going pro in the mid 1980s.
“The Fighter” has had many ups and downs, Wahlberg trained for two years straight before it happened, Darren Aronofsky, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon were all once attached to the project (Aronofsky spent considerable time developing it) and according to the New York Times, who provides this new photo, the film was almost always in jeopardy of falling apart, even when O. Russell signed on as the director last year.
“It was always in danger of collapse,” co producer David Hoberman told the Times. It seems like the only reason the picture even happened was because Wahlberg willed it to happen, being the picture’s strongest advocate and eventually convincing his “I Heart Huckabees” director to take on the gig. Apparently O. Russell “spent months watching sports television with [Wahlberg] and offered thoughts about the film before becoming its director.” Wahlberg also seemingly brought on board his (at the time) potential “The Prisoners” co-star Bale.
“Many times I thought it wasn’t going to happen,” Wahlberg recalled, even getting to the point where he thought, “if I don’t get this movie done the way I want to, I’m going to use this training on somebody in a bad way.”
The article also states that Paramount was wary of making the film (reps for the studio concede this point) and the $24 million dollar-budgeted film was made without any of their financial help (they even wanted Relativity Media, producers on the film to pay for its marketing, the studio is apparently so concerned about spending money on non-sure-fire hits). Instead Wahlberg and company had to cobble money together from various sources, work for almost scale and hope to make some kind of profit on the back end if that ever applies.
Another interesting note, and something we’ve heard about several times from test-review reports, is the increase in humor in the film. Evidently, ‘Fighter’ has tested really well with women, and while not a comedy, it is apparently tinged with dark laughs and is said to be a “crowd-pleaser.”
While Paramount sound pretty cowardly in the article throughout the process of the project, it sounds like now that they have a potential Oscar-contender on their hands, they’re going to fully back the film when it hits theaters on December 10. Go figure.