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Fight club

David Mamet pulls some punches in his latest directorial foray, ‘Redbelt’

By Jacqui Gal

Special to Metromix
April 28, 2008

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Chiwetel Ejiofor takes a stand in David Mamet's martial arts flick

These days, cinematic “heroes”—of the noble, valiant variety—have gone the way of parodies or, if you’re lucky, Disney cartoons. But creating such a character, and putting him through the paces of a “cold, cruel, indifferent world,” was exactly what David Mamet, the writer-director of “Redbelt,” had in mind.

Set on the west side of Los Angeles, the film tells the story of Jiu-jitsu teacher Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who eschews the prize-fighting world to adhere to the noble ideals of the Samurai code. When a disturbed woman (Emily Mortimer) comes into his studio and accidentally fires a shot from a gun belonging to an off-duty policeman, it snares Terry into a series of events that gets messy.

A prolific writer, playwright and director (“Glengarry Glen Ross,” “Speed the Plow,” “Sexual Perversity in Chicago”), Mamet developed an interest in Jiu-jitsu five years ago when he began studying the martial art himself.

“[Jiu-jitsu] is really a physicalization of a quest for morality,” explains Mamet, speaking at a panel to promote the film at the Tribeca Film Festival. “The fighter goes through life with an absolute belief in their physical perfectibility. And the more they believe in giving themselves over to that, the greater chance they have of prevailing in the world.”

A high-school wrestler who went on to study kung fu, Mamet spent time training with a cross section of L.A. society—bouncers, cage-fighters, cops and special-forces types—wrapped up in the Jiu-jitsu world. “I was inspired because I wanted to write a story about these guys,” he said. “But it took me a while to figure out what that story was.”

To find his cast Mamet didn’t have to look very far. “A lot of the fighters I gained access to through Renato Magno, who is my teacher and he produced and choreographed the fights [in “Redbelt”]. …A lot of those connections came through the Jiu-jitsu Academy.”

For his lead, Mamet chose to zero in for a great actor who could be taught to fight, and not vice versa. “He didn’t have to get into the ring,” Mamet say about Ejiofor, recently seen in “American Gangster.” “He just had to be a great actor—which he is—and a sufficient good athlete to execute the moves—which he did. … I saw him in ‘Dirty Pretty Things’ and then I saw him in ‘Kinky Boots’ and I thought, anybody who can do those two films can do absolutely anything.”

Casting the fighting pros, though was a different story: “Fighters are easy,” Mamet notes. “Anyone who can do something very, very well under a lot of pressure, they’re probably going to make very good actors.”

Without giving too much away, Mamet’s hero is forced into a combative situation by what seems like a group of evil conspirators—and it’s not a stretch to see how, indeed, art imitates life.

“Life is competitive. Sometimes life is brutal, sometimes chance operates. Everybody’s indifferent, which is one of the things that defeats the character. That’s the thing that breaks his heart.”

It’s the same reason, Mamet says, that so many people drop out of show business. “It’s not because they can’t act or because they can’t direct,” he said. “It’s because they can’t stand the brutality and the indifference and the wrong-headedness of what’s just essentially the world."

Photo: Lorey Sebastian courtesy Sony Pictures Classics