Mike Tyson opened himself up to the cameras for James Toback’s biographical documentary Tyson. He did not open himself up to the press, but Toback was available to speak on his subject’s behalf. The film features Tyson chronicling his childhood, rise and fall in boxing, personal struggles and prison time. The filmmaker has been longtime friends with the boxer and previously directed him in the 1999 film Black and White.

Crave Online: Was there a specific story you were trying to tell about Mike?

James Toback: Basically, a kind of structure of a tragic figure, someone who starts with nothing, elevates himself to unimaginable heights and then brings himself down by his own behavior and his own flaws. Then in the case of Mike, a double Greek tragedy because he then did it again. He got back up and again brought himself down, all through the classic Greek vice of hubris, overweening pride. A sense that he could do anything and handle anything and most of all, get away with anything.

Crave Online: You have Tyson talking about his relationship with Robin Givens, although not specifically about the abuse allegations, and he talked about his negative feelings about Don King, but not so much how he got caught up with him the first place. Did you have material on that you cut, or did he not want to go into those topics?

James Toback: I didn’t get into anything prosecutorial. The idea of the movie was to create a kind of self-portrait to be transmitted through the prism of the aesthetic sensibility of yours truly. So that was the idea, and what I wanted was to get his view of everything in his own words. I felt that the way to get him to say the most interesting things about every subject that came up was not to ask direct questions, which would feel so weird given the nature of the way we communicate, but rather let the camera just keep going, and wait until he said everything he could possibly say about whatever subject was at hand. So we had two high-def cameras going, five minutes of silence, ten minutes of silence, and then he’ll add something. Then, another three or four minutes of silence, then he’ll add something. So by the end of the movie I had him saying just about everything he would possibly say of interest about every subject that came up. To get into a kind of “what did you think about that?” and “what about this?” and “he said that” and “she said that” would have made him look at me as if I had three heads, and also lose interest in doing it. Basically the appeal was to be confessional in the same way that a Catholic goes to the Catholic church because confession is a transforming ritual, and the idea is not to get a priest grilling you on the details of what you’re saying, it’s to give you an opportunity to speak almost as if you were speaking to yourself, and that was the kind of purgative idea behind it.

Crave Online: Were there things you had to cut?

James Toback: I didn’t have to cut anything. I mean, I had total control editorially of the movie. There was no one with anything to say about it except me. There were a lot of things that were interesting that I cut because I needed a shape, but that was really my only editorial concern: can I afford to keep this in and keep the rhythm of the movie the way I want it to go, and the shape I want it to go? I mean most of it that I left out that I really liked will be on the DVD. I think I have a good hour’s worth of stuff that I think is just as good as what’s in the movie, or most of what’s in the movie, but it just didn’t fit the way the stuff that’s in [did]. There’s one thing in particular where I felt I really got the prison thing as horrifying as I could, because it was a horrifying experience and I wanted us to feel it, but there were one or two things that were particularly gruesome that I left out, and I just felt, it’s enough. Any more is going to be a mistake. But that’s one of the things of editing that you learn over a period of time, that there’s a mysterious personality to editing, and you can’t learn it and you can’t be taught it. You can’t study it, you have to have a feel for your own movie and know that certain things have to end now. Maybe it’s because my own weight needs to be removed that I don’t want any extra weight on my movies, so I’m always saying, “Do I have to have this and do I have to have that?” and I end up trying to get it right down to the bone and this at 90 minutes seemed to be the right length.

Crave Online: Was that how the elliptical editing style came about or was that something you always knew you wanted to do?

James Toback: I knew I wanted to do a split screen, moving images and multiple voices. That, I absolutely had to have. There was no way that I felt I could get across the chaos in the mind without using that, and that was just a question of how much to do, when to do it, when to stop it and just let that very powerful, tight image of the face do its work. But those were the things that made it take 12 months to edit the movie. Five days of shooting, 12 months of editing, which is an insane ratio.

Crave Online: He seemed very free with what he talked about. Were there any limits and did he suggest anything after shooting and seeing the movie that he didn’t want you to keep in the movie?

James Toback: No. First of all, that was the agreement. The only comment he made was at one point he said, “Do we have to have me beaten up so many times at the end of the movie?” and I said, “Well, we have you triumphant and at the peak of any fighter’s powers at the beginning, and we need to make that horrible ending felt.” I said, “I did cut out the Danny Williams fight,” and he said, “Gee, thanks,” because that was the only loss that I left out. But I felt that it was important to have the brutality and the humiliation of those last fights and to really have it register. Not just a knockout here, a knockout there, but to see the kind of beatings that he took after being so dominant and so confident. To go into the ring like a lamb to slaughter, knowing he didn’t want to fight, knowing he was just fighting for money, knowing that he really didn’t even to win or didn’t think he was going to win but going ahead with it anyway, which has been the fate of almost every great fighter. It was the fate of Ali, it was the fate of Sugar Ray Robinson, it was the fate of Jack Johnson. Only Marciano escaped that, and Marciano took such beatings in the fights that he won he might as well have lost some of them. I mean, he looked as if he’d lost half the fights he won his face was so mutilated.

Crave Online: Do you see two different Mikes?

James Toback: He was a different person after getting out of prison. That’s when he went through madness and when you go through madness, that’s it. I think what happened with Mike, who was not a restrained person by nature anyway, was once he was out there mentally, which happened in prison. He talks about it in the movie. He says, “I went insane” and even in the end, “I am an insane individual.” Those are not said lightly. Those are not said metaphorically. It’s like R.D. Lang’s great line which I quote in Harvard Man. “Sanity is a cozy lie” and we all kind of subscribe to it because it enables us to function but once you lose faith in it, which is what madness is and the voices are unleashed, you can’t believe in it again after that. You can’t even pay lip service to it. That’s what happened to Mike in prison. The first thing he said to me, practically the first thing when I saw him when he came out, first I told him I wanted him to be in Black and White, he said great. Then he said, “You know, I was lying in solitary confinement the 19th month of my incarceration and all of a sudden I said to myself, ‘This is what Toback was talking about. I am now insane.’” He remembered back right to that moment to when he was 19 and I had been describing it.

Crave Online: How is there footage of younger Tyson watching footage? Who would have filmed that?

James Toback: There was one guy, there was a German documentarian who actually went to make a movie about Cus [D’Amato], and the world of this old guy who had these young fighters up in the Catskills. Cus actually said to him, “The guy you gotta watch is Mike Tyson. He’s the one who’s going to be a great champion.” So only because of that did this guy, this German documentarian spend so much time on Mike Tyson, and that’s the only footage from that era. Cus knew. Cus told my friend Brian Hamill, when Mike was 13 and he first came, “This fat kid’s going to be champion,” and Brian said, “Are you crazy?” And he said, “No, he’s going to have the best punch of any fighter in history and he wants to learn and he’s smart and he’s going to be quick once I really work him.” This was when he was 13, and he just kept getting better and better and better, so everyone who went up there within a year or two was saying Mike Tyson’s the guy and there was a legend growing up around him, particularly in the Catskills and in New York. Everyone was starting to hear, “Cus D’Amato’s grooming this guy Mike Tyson, Cus D’Amato’s grooming this guy Mike Tyson.” And when he lost to that guy in the Olympics, and he didn’t really lose, he got a bad decision, at the Olympic trials, that was the one he really wanted to beat badly because it was the only amateur loss. I can’t remember the guy’s name now and I show him being knocked out by Mike. He’s the one where he said he’s squealing. There was a sadistic streak in some of those fights as there is in every boxer. People forget with Ali because he’s now become a kind of saint, but he humiliated Ernie Terrell, he humiliated Floyd Patterson. He was really out to embarrass them and humiliate them. You don’t get into boxing and succeed without having a pretty cruel streak.

Crave Online: When did you come up with the idea for this? When you directed him in Black and White?

James Toback: Right, and it was the next scene in Black and White that triggered this, the one in the gym when Power of Wu Tang Clan asks him whether he should kill Allan Houston’s character because the guy’s about to rat on him. Mike in a reflective way talks about murder and whether it’s a good idea or not and being humiliated in prison. I said, well, that Mike Tyson I could expand into a really interesting self portrait. That’s when I hatched the idea and I proposed it to him that night. He said, “Any time you’re ready.” And six years, seven years later, we finally did it.

Crave Online: How do you get your performers to be honest, from Tyson to Robert Downey, Jr. in The Pick-up Artist?

James Toback: I had that relationship with Downey. You can’t do that with Downey anymore because he’s not an individual. He’s a team. Once you’re a team, you’ve given up that individuality. He’s got a wife so that’s a we. There is not I. Certain couples remain two Is and some are a we. He’s now a we. In addition to the we, he’s got a group of people around the we so he is now on a team. He’s not an individual so you can’t go that route with him anymore, but you could. There was nobody better on earth as an artist at that, letting everything else drop by the side and just saying, “Let me see what I come up with now that I’m dancing on nails.” This guy was the best because of language and the brain. But I think he had his run with that and now he just doesn’t want to go to jail again, doesn’t want to crack up again, doesn’t want to get arrested again so he became a we and he’s getting rich and famous. He’ll become a republican in a few years.

Crave Online: Have you seen what an industry The Pickup Artist became with The Mystery Method and all of that?

James Toback: Yes, I know, I know. I know.

Crave Online: Did Mike ever talk about the Punch Out video game?

James Toback: No, but he’s got a new game coming up with Ali that’s supposed to be but I’m a game moron. I have no awareness of anything. I don’t have a computer. I don’t have e-mail. I died in the year 614 AD and I’m sort of walking around as if I really exist. I have two retarded cell phones on which I can receive text but don’t know how to send text. Other than that, that’s how I communicate.