David Mamet turns to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in ‘Redbelt’

David Mamet, the playwright, novelist, filmmaker, and Oscar-nominated screenwriter with credits that include THE UNTOUCHABLES, RONIN and WAG THE DOG has turned his attention to martial arts for his latest film, REDBELT, which opens in theaters this week.

Chiwetel Ejiofor as Mike Terry Photo by Lorey Sebastian, © The Redbelt Company, LLC, courtesy Sony Pictures Classics. All Rights Reserved.

There are two distinct strains of “martial arts” movies. One is the exaggerated, action-oriented kind with stylized choreography that Hong Kong filmmakers have specialized in since the advent of film. The other is the martial arts drama, films that take a snapshot of fighting arts and their culture and attempt to recreate them onscreen with a greater degree of authenticity while using them primarily as a tool for character development. Martial arts dramas include films like Sylvester Stallone’s boxing drama ROCKY, Ryoo Seung-wan’s CRYING FIST and Shunichi Nagasaki’s recent karate drama BLACK BELT.

Mamet’s REDBELT fits squarely into the category of martial arts drama and the writer-director would be quick to make the distinction. The film largely centers on the art of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, which in recent years has become widely popular due to its dominant presence in the mixed martial arts circuit.

Chiwetel Ejiofor (SERENITY, AMERICAN GANGSTERS) stars as Mike Terry, a Jiu-Jitsu teacher living with his wife Sondra (Alice Braga) and struggling to make ends meet in Los Angeles. He has intentionally stayed away from the prize-fighting circuit and potential fame to follow a more humble lifestyle as a self-defense instructor with a samurai’s code.

An accident involving one of his students, a police officer (max Martini), and a distraught lawyer (Emily Mortimer) changes the course of his life dramatically as he is introduced to fight promoters (Ricky Jay, Joe Mantegna) and movie star Chet Frank (Tim Allen). In order to pay off mounting debts and regain lost honor, Mike must step into the ring for the first time in his life.

Left: John Machado as Augusto Silva. Right: Director David Mamet Photo by Lorey Sebastian, © The Redbelt Company, LLC, courtesy Sony Pictures Classics. All Rights Reserved.

MMA fans may wonder how an award-winning writer of Mamet’s stature known to some for his poetry and essays might handle the hard-biting action and culture of Brazilian Jit-Jitsu. For five years, Mamet has trained with Jit-Jitsu master Renato Magno and has associated with his colleagues and cousins, the Machados and Gracies. It was this exposure to their disciplined and holistic approach to the martial arts that presented Mamet with the inspiration for revealing the moral character of modern martial arts in REDBELT.

Action choreography was provided by Renato Magno, Brazillian Jit-Jitsu master and instructor John Machado and wrestling champion and RAW founder Rico Chiapparelli. The film also features some highly talented professionals from the martial arts, MMA and film stunt world including Randy Couture, Ray Mancini, Enson Inoue, Simon Rhee, and notably Dan Inosanto, a former student of Bruce Lee who has gone on to earn enormous respect for his continued humble approach to learning new fighting techniques well into his 60s.

Perhaps the biggest challenge faced by Mamet in this production was capturing the details inherent in Jiu-Jitsu, a martial art that is as much about strategy and positioning as it is about physically besting your opponent. Unlike kung fu, Taekwondo or boxing, specific maneuvers of Jiu-Jitsu fighters can often go unnoticed to the untrained eye. Translating these subtleties onscreen has been a challenge for Western action director generally lacking the experience and screen fighting insight of their Hong Kong counterparts. In FLASH POINT, Donnie Yen was able to effectively adapt MMA fighting and some of its complexities to the enormous demands of Hong Kong’s stylized traditions.

Center: Chiwetel Ejiofor as Mike Terry. Photo by Lorey Sebastian, © The Redbelt Company, LLC, courtesy Sony Pictures Classics. All Rights Reserved.

For the six fight sequences in REDBELT, Mamet was chiefly concerned with authenticity and relied on Magno’s expertise to flesh out the sequences with enough diversity to make mostly simple, functional moves that emphasize realism over flash look good.

This choreography would be wasted if not for the dedication of the actors tasked with bringing it to life. For his role, Chiwetel Ejiofor spent months in training for the film’s demanding fights. “With Jiu-Jitsu, because it’s a completely new skill to me, it was really helpful to get all the basics down and to get everything, to get all the basic moves or as much of them as I could get,” said Ejiofor. “Then you put that into the fight and you sort of request…you say, ‘Can I do the one where I throw the guy through the thing? I really like that one. I was practicing it.’ So then that kind of finds its way into the fight. So it’s kind of useful to be able to do both things – to have the choreographing obviously, but then also to have the good grounding foundation of it all. I was quite fortunate as well, because John Machado, I fight him in the movie and he was also instructing me in jiu-jitsu. So you’ve got this sort of double advantage. I mean Jack Gill is the stunt coordinator, but John Machado and Renato were really hands on in the actual sort of pulling together the fight, because obviously they know jiu-jitsu very expertly. So it’s a great help to have somebody who is teaching you and he’s also in the movie. I mean I’ve never experienced that before. I don’t know many people who have. But that was great.”

One of the more interesting aspects of REDBELT is how Mamet approached the subject of martial arts in film and the influences he drew on.

“One is the samurai film, about the hero with no name, popularized by Clint Eastwood,” said Mamet. “But really what that film is, is that spaghetti western, is Sanjuro Yojimbo, he’s the fellow, the lonely warrior that was the film that Akira Kurosawa made many, many times. And the other strand is the American fight film, which is a film noir. A film like the original “NIGHT AND THE CITY” or “THE HARDER THEY FALL” or “THE SET-UP” or “CHAMPION” or “SOMEBODY UP THERE LIKES ME” or the Jake La Motta story, which is called “RAGING BULL.”

“I think the audience for this film should be massive,” said Mamet. “Why? Because the market for mixed martial arts films is big and more importantly because it’s a really good film. It’s a traditional American story and it’s also a traditional Japanese story. It’s a samurai film with an American samurai.”

REDBELT opens nationwide May 9th courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics. An interview on “All Things Considered” with Chiwetel Ejiofor about his role in REDBELT can be heard at NPR.org.

Read on for Sony’s complete press release that contains a full synopsis and in-depth production details.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
I spent five years change training with a great jiu-jitsu master, Renato Magno, and associating with his colleagues and cousins, the Machados and the Gracies. They, in their demeanor, their generosity, and their understanding of the world, offered to me, and their other students, a vision of the possibility of correct, moral behavior in all circumstances. This understanding was and is, in perfection, a modern stoicism. As such, it seemed the perfect encapsulation of the hero, and the world of martial arts, the perfect arena for its exploration.

SYNOPSIS
Set in the west side Los Angeles fight world, a world inhabited by bouncers, cagefighters, cops, and Special Forces types, Redbelt is the story of Mike Terry (Chiwetel
Ejiofor), a Jiu-Jitsu teacher who has avoided the prize fighting circuit, living by the mantra that “Competition weakens the fighter.” Mike has instead chosen to pursue an honorable life by operating a self defense studio with a samurai’s code.

Of course, such a code runs in stark contrast to the demands of the material world, and though Mike continues to teach his students the art of Jiu-Jitsu, he and his wife Sondra
(Alice Braga) are struggling to keep the Academy open and make ends meet. Mike, while concerned about their financial situation, believes everything will work itself out in time.
Sondra, who also runs her own fabric business, a business whose funds she has dipped into to help Mike’s school, isn’t so sure.

On a dark, rainy night, Laura Black (Emily Mortimer), a lawyer dealing with her own
demons, is distraught when the local pharmacy closes before she is able to pick up her medication, and in her haste, she damages Mike’s truck, which is parked outside the academy.

Laura enters the academy to give Mike her information and make restitution for the damage to the truck, but as off duty police officer Joe Collins (Max Martini), one of
Mike’s top students, approaches her harmlessly from behind, she nervously grabs his service revolver and fires, narrowly missing Joe and shatters the academy’s plate glass window.

All are shaken, but Joe, who has identified himself as a police officer, refuses to arrest Laura, opting not to bring dishonor to Mike’s school. This selfless act will put in motion a series of events that will force Mike to question everything he believes in and will change his life and the lives of those around him forever.

Mike is forced by Sondra to ask her brother Bruno Silva (Rodrigo Santoro) for a loan to fix the broken window and help keep the Academy afloat. Mike learns that Bruno – a club owner as well as an unscrupulous fight promoter who keeps trying to convince Mike to fight professionally – hadn’t paid Joe, a former bouncer at Bruno’s club who got the job through Mike, for months, forcing him to leave the job. Joe, again looking for an honorable solution, never told Mike that Bruno wasn’t paying him. While at Bruno’s club, Mike tries to resolve the situation with Silva, but to no avail. At the same time,
Hollywood star Chet Frank (Tim Allen) has walks into the club and is soon embroiled in a brawl with local toughs. Mike comes to his rescue and saves Chet from certain disaster and slips off into the night.

All seems well soon after, as Laura takes care of the damage she caused to Mike’s gym, and Mike receives an expensive thank you gift (a Rolex watch) and a dinner invitation from the man he rescued from the night before, Chet Frank. Mike goes to the local police precinct, to award Joe his Jiu-Jitsu Black Belt, not only for becoming a proficient martial artist, but for upholding the code of honor necessary to teach and carry on the morals of the art. Mike also gives Joe the watch he had received to make up for Joe’s unpaid work at Bruno’s club, advising him to pawn it.

The dinner with Chet, his wife Zena (Rebecca Pidgeon), and producer Jerry Weiss (Joe
Mantegna) is a big success. Sondra finds lucrative opportunities for her fabric business with Zena, and Mike is invited to the set of Chet’s latest movie after he explains his philosophy on fighting and tells of a particular ritual he has involving three small balls. In this pre-fight ritual, which he learned from his Jiu-Jitsu master, Joao Moro (Dan Inosanto), three marbles – one black, two white – are placed in a bowl. Before the fight, the combatants reach into the bowl and pull a marble out. If it is white, the fighter will engage in a normal fight with all limbs. If a black marble is pulled out, the fighter will have to fight with a handicap, such as having one hand tied up.

The next day, on the set of the war film, Mike, meets up with an old friend the film’s fight coordinator George (Ray Mancini). They execute a fighting exhibition that catches the attention of Chet, who asks Mike to come onboard as a producer of the film in order to give his insight into combat as well as Jiu-Jitsu, obviously intrigued by the story of the three marbles he was told the night before.

Mike eagerly agrees. He sends extensive notes to Chet and Jerry Weiss, who sees Mike’s expertise as something he can use for his own means later.

In the meantime, Mike and Sondra appear to be on their way to realizing all their dreams.
Even Laura seems to be on her way to straightening out her life after revealing her dark secret to Mike that she is a rape victim. Mike listens to this revelation and shows her that by learning to defend herself, she can find an escape to any situation. She then begins her road to recovery by beginning her study of Jiu-Jitsu and self-defense.

But soon things start to unravel for Mike, beginning when he finds out that Joe was suspended from the police force for trying to pawn stolen property – the Rolex watch originally given to Mike by Chet Frank. Mike assures Joe that he will straighten everything out with Weiss. At dinner later that evening, Mike tells the producer his dilemma. Weiss abandons Mike at the table in the restaurant.

Sondra, who had taken out an enormous loan from a local loan shark (David Paymer) to pre-order fabric for her new business venture with Zena Frank, is also left in the lurch after the aborted dinner between Mike and Weiss, with no phone calls being returned from the movie star’s wife.

After many unreturned calls, Mike, interrupts a meeting between Weiss and the upcoming fight card’s promotional team and realizes that he has been had by the unscrupulous producer. Weiss has stolen Mike’s ideas (including the concept of the three marbles) and sold them to a fight promoter (Ricky Jay), who is about to put on a fight card containing a tournament and a main event match between Sondra’s brother, Brazilian Champion Augusto Silva (John Machado) and Japanese Champion Taketa Morisaki (Enson Inoue). This match is being rigged in Morisaki’s favor to set up a more lucrative rematch later.

Sondra, livid at the dilemma her husband has left her in, begins to carve out her own plan to salvage her business, even if it’s at the expense of her marriage. Mike, hoping for a non-violent resolution to his situation, and with Laura by his side representing him, threatens legal action against Jerry and the promotional team. The promoters refuse a settlement, instead suggesting that Mike forego his principles and fight in the undercard to possibly win the $50,000 grand prize and settle his debts. He refuses. Laura instead threatens to see the promoters in court, only to have the accident at the Academy brought up and used as a threat against them as well as Joe. This chain of events leads to a tragedy as Joe, vowing not to bring dishonor to Mike and the school to the end, commits suicide, and Mike, with his back against the wall, has no choice but to fight on the
undercard to pay off his debts, and more importantly, regain his own honor.

Preparing in the dressing room with loyal student Snowflake (Jose Pablo Cantillo), Mike is focused but obviously conflicted with what he is about to do, especially with his Jiu-Jitsu master in the arena to witness the main event match.

Mike makes his way to the ring for his fight, and finds out the truth about the main event fight when he sees local illusionist Jimmy Sakata (Cyril Takayama) working his magic on the three balls used to handicap or free up fighters before their bouts. Mike confronts promoter Marty Brown (Ricky Jay), and is assured that he will not be handicapped for his bout. This is unacceptable to Mike, who then finds out that his brother in law Augusto Silva will also compete in a fixed fight, throwing the bout to Morisaki and betraying all the principles he has been taught for all these years. In the room is Jerry Weiss, who reveals that it was Sondra, his own wife, who – in keeping with the ‘cash above all’ philosophy of her family – betrayed him to the promoters’ lawyers by informing them of the fateful night at the academy that kicked off this entire series of events.

Mike, turns away from the ring and leaves, refusing to fight and wondering what his life has become. On the way out, he encounters Laura Black, who slaps him for not standing up for the honor code that he has believed in and lived for years.

It is the wakeup call he needs. Mike makes his way back out into the packed arena, not to fight, but to let color commentator Dylan Flynn (Randy Couture) know that the fights being waged are not on the level. He is stopped by security and Sondra’s two brothers, Bruno and Augusto Silva. It is here, in the tunnel leading to the arena, where Mike will make his final stand against Augusto Silva in a battle with no referee.

When the heated contest is finished, Mike will emerge victorious, but his true victory comes not with this win, and not even after being presented with the Moriskai’s
Ceremonial Prize Belt, but when his Jiu-Jitsu master meets him in the center of the ring and gives him the most sacred honor he could ever hope to receive – the redbelt.

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION

Never one to fear the road less traveled, writer / director David Mamet has once again strayed from the pack to create the film Redbelt, a project which he makes great pains to point out is “not a martial arts movie.”

Instead, Redbelt takes a look at timeless themes such as honor and respect through the art of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and the fast-growing sport of mixed martial arts – two subjects which have never been featured in a major film before.

But this is not a case of cashing in on the latest craze in the sports world; Mamet’s love and respect of jiu-jitsu goes back five years, when the former high school wrestler, boxer, and kung fu practitioner began studying Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in Los Angeles with Renato Magno, a Black Belt and the fight choreographer on Redbelt. So what is the essence of this martial art, which originated in Japan and which was perfected in Brazil?

“Jiu-Jitsu is a martial art just as boxing is a martial art and savate is a martial art,” said Mamet. “The main principal of Jiu-Jitsu is that understanding will defeat strength. And although it’s philosophical, it’s really extraordinarily practical. Don’t use more force than you need to; knowledge will conquer force. If you take two forces that oppose each other, one of them is wasting force, so eventually one of them is going to run out of steam. If you’ve got a stronger guy and a weaker guy and the weaker guy can exhaust the stronger guy, the guy runs out of steam, the weaker guy can now bring his skills to bear. It’s like (John) Machado was saying to me, “Jiu-Jitsu doesn’t make you punch proof. What it does is it gives you the opportunity potentially at the last moment to turn the fight around.”

Currently a purple belt in Jiu-Jitsu, Mamet was immediately taken in by the techniques and philosophies of the art, and when he is on the mat, nothing else matters for him.

“He’s terrifying,” said Chiwetel Ejiofor, the star of Redbelt. “He gets a look in his eye like he’s not messing around and then he just goes for it. I saw him throw down, and he’s strong and really skilled at it.”

And even more than learning the nuts and bolts, Mamet was fascinated by the culture and people around Jiu-Jitsu, inspiring him to document what he had seen and learned.

“I decided fairly early in my experience with Jiu-Jitsu that the world was fascinating because it was cut across many different strata of society,” he said. “The guys you train with, some of them would be cops, some of them would be bouncers, some of them would be Navy SEALs or SWAT guys. Some of them would be stuntmen and some of us would just be regular guys who wanted to learn how to defend ourselves. I was inspired because I wanted to write a story about these guys, I wanted to write a story about these fighters, but it took me a while to figure out exactly what that story was.”

Eventually, Mamet began writing, and as fate would have it, the story ended up close to home in Hollywood, with the center of the action always coming back to the Jiu-Jitsu Academy owned by main character Mike Terry (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor).

“There’s a lot of cross-pollenization in Hollywood between the martial arts and the movie business. The movie business has films that involve fighting in them and there are stunt people doing the stunts, almost all of whom study mixed martial arts for various reasons.

Also, because there are movie stars, they need people to protect them, so they have bouncers and security agents and all of that stuff. And so Redbelt is the story about these different people meeting through the academy. So it wasn’t so much that I decided to set it in Hollywood, but that I was looking at the culture of martial arts in Hollywood and writing about it.”

While writing, two distinct influences colored Mamet’s work, and they were far from typical.

“One is the samurai film, about the hero with no name, popularized by Clint Eastwood,” said Mamet. “But really what that film is, is that spaghetti western, is Sanjuro Yojimbo, he’s the fellow, the lonely warrior that was the film that Akira Kurosawa made many, many times. And the other strand is the American fight film, which is a film noir. A film like the original “Night and the City” or “The Harder They Fall” or “The Set-up” or “Champion” or “Somebody Up There Likes Me” or the Jake La Motta story, which is called “Raging Bull.”

At the core of Redbelt though, was lead character Mike Terry, a Gulf War veteran who owned and operated a financially struggling Jiu-Jitsu school, but who also lived by a code of honor that he passed down to his students.

“Mike Terry is a guy who is sort of an uncomplicated character in many ways, which doesn’t mean that he’s simple,” said Ejiofor. “But he’s uncomplicated and he has an existence that makes sense to him in Los Angeles as a trainer at his academy. He teaches Jiu-Jitsu incredibly seriously and it’s based both on his own experience and knowledge and understanding, and also on his belief in the philosophies of Jiu-Jitsu. He attempts to apply those things to his life, even when the situation seems like it’s impossible. Obviously a situation like that kind of conspires within the affluent surroundings of Los Angeles life.”

Included in Terry’s code of living was the adage that “Competition weakens the fighter.” So, despite the big money temptations of competing on the pro mixed martial arts circuit, Terry stayed true to his art and his moral convictions. Yet over the course of the film, Terry will be forced to question these convictions and eventually deal with breaking his code.

“The movie is about a guy who doesn’t train fighters to compete, but he trains fighters, he says, to prevail, and he trains them to come out of the alley rather than in the ring and he is forced to participate in a competition. So, in a sense it’s a samurai film because he has dedicated himself to a higher calling. If you’re a priest and you dedicate yourself to a higher calling, you take a vow of poverty. That’s what you do, and you know that if you become a priest you take a vow of poverty. So this guy is taking, in effect, a vow of poverty, and through certain things he’s forced to give away that vow of poverty; not because he’s become greedy, but because several things he did created a need in his life for money for his wife and the people he’s responsible to and therefore he puts aside that vow of poverty and certain things happen to him.”

There was just one thing missing, and soon Mamet found the piece that completed the puzzle for his story.

“This is a script that was always kind of looking for the hook, the thing that would make the script really make sense,” said Producer Chrisann Verges. “And at the moment that he

(Mamet) came up with the idea of the three balls and choosing what your handicap will be, it all came around to him.”

In Mamet’s story, Terry engages in a ritual in his gym which he learned from his Jiu-Jitsu master (played by Dan Inosanto). Three balls – one black, two white – are placed in a bowl. Before a fight, the combatants reach into the bowl and pull a ball out. If it is white, the fighter will engage in a normal fight with all limbs. If a black ball is pulled out, the fighter will have to fight with a handicap, such as having one hand tied up. This ritual plays a key role throughout the film, and it tied up all the loose ends for Mamet, who finished the script for Redbelt and then proceeded on the adventure to get the film made. It wasn’t going to be easy though.

“At that point,” recalls Ms. Verges, “pretty much no one was interested in doing a movie about mixed martial arts.”

In Hollywood, boxing, karate, and kung fu action movies have enjoyed great mainstream success. Mixed martial arts, a sport that didn’t launch in the United States until the first Ultimate Fighting Championship show in 1993 had never seen a major motion picture use it as a backdrop. And the industry, much like mainstream America until the last few years, was leery of this sport, which combined jiu-jitsu, wrestling, boxing, and kickboxing in one exciting event.

“Mixed martial arts is just that, it’s a mixed sport,” said Randy Couture (Dylan Flynn), a three-time heavyweight and two-time light heavyweight champion in the UFC and a former Olympic alternate in wrestling. “And no matter what sports background you come
from or what martial art you practiced, this sport, and jiu-jitsu in particular, showed us that there is no one style of martial arts that encompasses everything that could potentially happen in a fight. So the jiu-jitsu practitioner had to learn kickboxing and had to learn some Muay Thai and had to learn some wrestling skills to deal with athletes that came from those particular backgrounds. Me, coming from a wrestling background, I had to learn the striking and I had to learn some jiu-jitsu, and it becomes a true mixed sport, where you have to learn all the different pieces to be a well rounded fighter. If you neglect one of those areas, somebody’s probably going to point that out to you, and in pretty quick fashion.”

As the sport became regulated in the early part of the millennium, got back on cable television and secured a reality series entitled ‘The Ultimate Fighter’, fans came to the sport in droves, and soon, UFC events were packing arenas outselling boxing events on pay-per-view on a consistent basis. Why? It was real.

“I often liken it to kinetic chess,” said Couture. “And I think that people, once they kind of get over their initial shock over the sport and kind of tune into the tactics and the technique and the discipline and all the things that the guys do to be complete fighters, as well as the many dimensions to this sport, it attracts a lot of fans. People get hooked on it.”

One of those people was David Mamet.

“It’s more interesting because there are more possibilities,” he said. “And after you’ve watched mixed martial arts, especially if you understand something of any of the various techniques, watching boxing is generally like watching paint dry. Boxing’s a standup game. The whole point of boxing is to render your guy unconscious, give him a concussion so he blacks out and falls to the canvas, and knock him out. So that’s more or less the only thing that can happen, or the referee can step in and award the fight on points. But in mixed martial arts, a lot of things can happen. You can win on points, the opponent can pass out or he can do something which you don’t find in boxing, which is he can tap out. Which is to say that a person can be put in a position whereby if his opponent applies a little bit more pressure, the victim is either gonna pass out or break something. And so the fellow who’s getting beaten can simply say, “Tap, you win.” And he can do that because he’s being punched, because he’s exhausted, because he’s put in a choke hold, he’s being chocked out or because something is about to break.”

So it was no surprise that the world of professional mixed martial arts became a big part of the Redbelt script. The question was, who would step up to get behind the film. That question was soon answered by Sony Classics’ Tom Bernard and Michael Barker, who greenlighted the film. Five weeks later, pre-production on Redbelt began.

“We had quite a short pre-production period, but we realized immediately the one thing we had to do was get the actors in training,” recalled Ms Verges. “So, first we had to cast the movie, and we cast Chiwetel fairly early on in the pre-production process. He lives in London, so we had him train with one of the Gracies from the famous Gracie family of jiu-jitsu. So he trained for three weeks in London. We brought him over three weeks before we started shooting and he did an intense rehearsal period and instruction. He was in the studio every day. And then as we cast the actors, we would get them together a couple times a week and work through the fights, which really paid off once we started shooting.”

For Mamet, the choice of Chiwetel Ejiofor to play Mike Terry was an easy one.

“I’d met him several times because we have the same agent,” said Mamet. “And before I ever saw anything that he did, we were at dinner and our agent was with me and Chiwetel walked in and our agent said, “I wanna introduce you to this guy, he’s the best actor in the world.” And I said, “Oh, that’s good. Nice agenting.” And then I saw a couple of Chiwetel’s movies, notably Dirty Pretty Things and Kinky Boots and I said, “This agent John Burnham, he has a point. And I was watching Fail-Safe, one of Sid Lumet’s many great movies. And I was watching Henry Fonda, who I think was perhaps the greatest actor who ever lived. And Henry Fonda’s always telling the truth, always simple and never making anything up. And Chiwetel’s the same way, he has that – it’s a great gift from God. And he uses it spectacularly and generously and simply and is a great, great actor.”

What drew Ejiofor, who has also been seen in American Gangster, Children of Men, and Inside Man, was the fact that the script of Redbelt didn’t contain your typical “fight film” story. There was much more there and the script allowed him to touch on subjects rarely seen in combat sports movies.

“I had to read it a couple of times because it was just so new,” said Ejiofor of the script. “There was no way of really predicting what was gonna happen. It wasn’t like a skip, where you could skip forward a few pages or just sort of half read stuff. Everything had real detailed relevance and everything was really important. And then by the end of it, I felt like I had to start over and just read it all over again because it was much bigger than I first thought. I guess when you start reading a script that you know is about Jiu-Jitsu or about martial arts, you kind of think it’s gonna fit a certain kind of formula. And you’re reading it, sort of with that in mind, that it’s gonna be a certain kind of movie. So here’s this guy and he’s got this martial arts training and so obviously there’s gonna be a problem and then he’s gonna use the martial arts training. You kind of feel like you know the script. And with this, it just hit so many deeper levels. By the end, it was really a story about people and about how people utilize what they have in order to survive in any situation. And how things haven’t changed and that certain terms and certain ethics and morality have kind of disappeared from literature and movie writing in some ways. There are really big things in people’s lives. Like how they choose to live their lives and that’s what this film’s about.”

Emily Mortimer, who accepted the role of Laura Black, concurs. “There’s a conflict involved in what it is to be a hero; whether it’s possible to do entirely good in the world and how sometimes striving to do good in the world ends up causing pain and disaster. So I don’t think I have ever read a script before that is so married to this sort of plot and the theme and he (Mamet) is just an extraordinary expert writer and it’s amazing because on one level, this film is an action movie and yet it’s so cerebral and so interesting and I guess it’s kind of like a samurai film in that way. It works on all these different levels and that’s why I loved it.”

With Ejiofor and Ms Mortimer on board, the casting of the rest of the characters in Redbelt was going to be key to the success of the film. Luckily, the depth of the project and the opportunity to work with Mamet brought in a cast of some of this generation’s finest actors, including Alice Braga, Tim Allen, Joe Mantegna, Rodrigo Santoro, Ricky Jay, Max Martini, and David Paymer.

“Casting’s more than really key,” said Mamet, “it’s the whole movie. If they can’t act or they’re the wrong person for that part, you ain’t got nothing. So it all comes down to casting.”

Adds Ms Verges, “This film, he’s gone a little out of his norm. I see it as a cross between some of the Mamet regulars – Ricky Jay, Joe Mantegna, J. J. Johnston, David Paymer, Rebecca Pidgeon – and then we have the Brazilian element with Rodrigo Santoro and Alice Braga, which was just delightful, and then Chiwetel, of course, was our good fortune.”

You can’t set a film in the world of jiu-jitsu and mixed martial arts without fighters though, and while on paper it might have been a tall order to find fighters and Jiu-Jitsu
Black Belts who could act as well as fight, the local community eagerly stepped up to lend a hand.

“Renato Magno’s my teacher and the movie’s very much inspired by him and his world,” said Mamet. “And he also had the capacity to, because he knows everybody and is vastly respected, to reach out to the greatest fighters and these guys would come in and either appear in the movie and/or suggest moves for the choreography which Renato did. And it’s like doing a movie about music and somebody’s gonna call up Slava Rostropovich, dead though he is, or Yo Yo Ma, and say, “Come here, what do you think? How should this go?” So these guys did this very graciously.”

“We wanted to do the best we could,” added Ms Verges. “David is very involved in the jiu-jitsu world, everybody wanted to help him out, and we just got the best person to start advising us, which was Renato Magno as our main jiu-jitsu consultant. He brought in his cousin, John Machado, and Rico Chiapparelli. They became our fight choreographers. And then I found Jack Gill. I went through a process of really looking at all the good stunt coordinators out there who would be right for this film, and we came up with Jack, and Jack and Dave got along famously. So then you have the two elements – you have the Hollywood stunt coordinator and then you have the Brazilian choreographers for the fights.”

As for the fighters cast in the movie, Mamet brought in a wide array of athletes from both past and present, such as Judo legend Gene LeBell (Ex-Stuntman), martial arts great Dan Inosanto (Joao Moro), UFC Champion Randy Couture (Dylan Flynn), former lightweight boxing champ Ray ‘Boom Boom’ Mancini (George), Jiu-Jitsu masters John Machado (Augusto Silva) and Renato Magno (Romero), wrestling standout Rico Chiapparelli (Sanchez), and mixed martial arts contenders Enson Inoue (Taketa Morisaki) and Frank Trigg. Some would say that such casting was a risky move. Not Mamet though.

“A category of people who have to do it when the pressure’s on in front of an audience is fighters,” he said. “And ‘Boom Boom’ Mancini, for example, a champion of the world, is in a movie. And John Machado and Rico Chiapparelli are champions; a lot of them are – because they do it when the pressure’s on and it (acting) ought to be simple. And they don’t bring a lot of bulls**t to the equation. It’s much simpler to take a non-actor who might have a gift than to take an actor who’s been to drama school.”

With casting done, most directors would rehearse with the actors.

“He doesn’t rehearse,” said Ms Verges. “He’ll meet with the actors, he’ll talk, but no rehearsal.”

The writing process kept on rolling though.

“The writing process goes on forever,” said Mamet. “Sometimes forever is a month, sometimes forever is ten years. And then when you start doing preproduction on the movie, you’re always rewriting because you go to a location and you say, “Well, wait a second. I see now that what I wrote is not gonna work because, for whatever reason, I didn’t understand what the location was like or we don’t have the money, blah, blah, blah.” So you’re always rewriting during the preproduction period of the movie, which is the most important period in making a movie, other than post production. The actual shooting is, curiously in many ways, the more foreseeable and so in many ways, the easiest of the three periods so you’re writing it constantly, constantly, and then rewriting it in preproduction. And also you might find out you just don’t have the money. You say, “Ooo, I found the location, the exact location I want. But if I shoot it here, the producer says, ‘You aren’t gonna have the money to shoot that other location on Mars.’” So you’re constantly rethinking the script in terms of what would – might be called non-artistic considerations.”

Shot on location in Los Angeles and Long Beach, the first order of business once casting was complete was to get Ejiofor in the gym in London with Jiu-Jitsu standout Roger Gracie.

“I’d heard the term,” said Ejiofor of Jiu-Jitsu. “I always thought it was kind of a funky word actually, Jiu-Jitsu. If I’d ever thought about it, I always just thought it sounds like it could be interesting, so I was kind of excited when I heard that it (Redbelt) was about Jiu-Jitsu, just to learn more about it. And then you find out that it’s a martial art, it’s also a philosophy. It’s a lot of different things. It also has this incredible history from Japan to Brazil. Just discovering that and finding out about that was really interesting.”

Then came the workouts, and needless to say, it was a new world for the UK actor.

“I think the difference is that the actual contact is so intense because it’s grappling,” he said. “So much of it is wrestling and grappling that a lot of it is about just intuition and just being intuitive to what responses are, and really sensing every different position and the chess game of being able to sense whether somebody is letting you do something in order to get advantage somewhere else. You know once it’s developed to a higher level and that’s the addictive quality of it. That’s why people just get kind of lost in Jiu-Jitsu, because it is so physical, but also so skillful. Then you apply this whole philosophical aspect to it and you find that there are huge life lessons that you can learn from this martial art. This is why David became fascinated with it and that’s why we’re all here.”

Even Brazilians Rodrigo Santoro (Bruno Silva) and Alice Braga (Sondra Terry), neither of whom fight in the film, got engrossed in Jiu-Jitsu and took classes with Renato Magno and John Machado once shooting began in California.

“I had a couple of classes with them and it was adorable,” said Ms Braga. “I asked Chrisann and David and the boys, Renato and John, to have some classes just to feel it because this girl grew up in this family that is completely from Jiu-Jitsu. So she is someone who probably knows about it and I wanted to feel in my body, to understand what it was. It’s a really beautiful martial art in my opinion because it’s not about the fight. It’s about how to avoid the fight. It’s not about hitting but it’s about making your way out. And it’s really mental, so it’s beautiful.”

Santoro agreed.

“Jiu-Jitsu is not just a fight and it’s not just physical,” he said. “It’s very mental, it’s very philosophical, and spiritual in a way that you have to set your mind and just be calm. It has to do with how calm you are, how focused you are. Sometimes, watching those (UFC) fights, I saw really big guys go in there, and because of the crowd and the whole thing, they kind of lose their attention for one bit – done. And it’s all about that. You gotta be confident, you gotta stay calm, you gotta stay focused, and you gotta know what you’re doing. So a lot of it’s up here (points to head); that’s what I’ve been learning.”

For a month and a half before shooting, Santoro practiced the art celebrated in his home of Brazil, where it is not just sport, but a way of life.

“I grew up hearing stories and watching all those guys in Rio, where I live,” said Santoro. “Jiu-Jitsu’s very, very big, it’s like a religion. A lot of people do it and you hear about it all the time.”

And with Brazilian culture running throughout Redbelt, it was important to have actors from the country portraying roles in the film, an authenticity Mamet insisted on.

“People can portray Brazilians certainly, but they’re different, culturally they’re different,” he said. “Like any country is different, they (Brazilians) have their own rhythms, their own inflections in speaking English. And you look at Alice’s work, again, she’s something of a gem. Who better to play this role? I saw her in Children of God, of course, and Lower City. She’s quite something. And Rodrigo is – well he’s their Montgomery Clift. We saw him in 300 and a couple of things like that and he’s the guy in Brazil, he’s the Matinee Idol. We got real, real, real lucky with these actors. And as

Hamlet says of the actors, you’re better off having a bad epitaph than a poor rapport during your lifetime. So to have actors say, “Yes, I’m thrilled to come over and work with you and work too hard and not get any sleep and cost myself a fortune,” that’s a great compliment.”

Santoro and Ms Braga were the lucky ones when it came to the International cast, as they were Brazilians portraying Brazilians. Ejiofor and Ms Mortimer, as natives of the United Kingdom, apparently had a more difficult task in playing Americans. But for these two vets, all it took was a little practice.

“Chiwetal and I were both saying to each other that it’s fine until the point where someone says ‘oh yeah, just improvise a few lines at the beginning of the scene,’” Ms
Mortimer smiled. “Then you’re like, ‘Oh my God, what? I don’t know.’ And you go home and you learn how to say your lines with an American accent and then you come on the set and you say them and that’s great until someone says something different to you and then you are just dumbfounded. And you could probably do it, but you lose confidence. If you haven’t practiced it, you think you can’t say it. So yeah, it’s a bit hairy but I’ve done three films now back to back in an American accent and I am now feeling like I almost would dare open my mouth without having practiced it before.”

Once filming commenced, Mamet was in his element, and even with a new cast of actors around him, there were enough familiar faces who had worked with him before to bring a light atmosphere to the set.

“It’s very familial because very often you’re seeing people you’ve known and been friends with all your life,” said veteran actor Joe Mantegna (Jerry Weiss), who has worked with Mamet for years. “David is loyal beyond anyone’s reasonable imagination to think anyone would be, which makes him the special human being that he is. He doesn’t forget and so very often on these sets there is a good mixture of old and new, and you know, I blinked and I became part of the old, which makes me realize I know a lot of the faces and some I don’t, and that’s the new. And that’s what’s great. So, there’s a continuity about his sets in the sense of there will be people not just in the cast and the crew and everywhere that have been somehow in the circle of his life for many years. So, there’s something very familial about it, and it’s nice, it’s really nice.”

By the second day, Mantegna got a crash course in “the new” with the various characters on set.

“It’s typical in a sense that Dave usually tries to surround himself with people that he knows are going to jibe with the program,” he said. “It’s a collected group, and that’s what I like about it. I met everybody from old active friends from Chicago to two guys who chop people up in Brazil with martial arts training, which is great. So, we have a mix in terms of professions, we have people mixed in terms of nationalities, races, backgrounds and everything else. So it’s really wonderful, and we’re all on the same page in a sense that we all are here because of the will and desire of this one man who was instrumental in bringing in all the ingredients, mixes them together and we’re going to make a cake.”

Another familiar face to filmgoers on set was Tim Allen, the beloved actor on the hit series ‘Home Improvement’ and star of a host of comedy and family films. Yet what may shock many is that Allen doesn’t go for laughs in Redbelt.

“There’s nothing funny about this character,” said Allen, who plays Hollywood action hero Chet Frank. “And I like it that way. He’s tone deaf to me. I did a movie with Marty Short once that we had to do a serious scene in and now I totally relate. Comedy is so natural to me, and without any comedy in the scene it’s seems like there’s really no reason to pay me. And that worked out fine, because they’re pretty much not paying me. (Laughs) But that’s what I do. Instead David’s been very good about pushing my other buttons and just using other muscles which is wonderful.”

Allen certainly won’t garner any laughs from filmgoers for his rock-solid portrayal of Frank, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t cracking jokes on set for the cast and crew.

“He’s hilarious,” said Ejiofor of Allen. “And he’s great to work with. There are certain ways of casting, and you can go with people who have very little relationship to the actual character, but will convince as the character. And then there are people who are exactly the same as the character. And then there’s this sort of this example of somebody who is very different in many ways to the character he’s playing, but also has the same sort of world. That’s a fascinating bit of casting, and I think the audience is going to see a different side to Tim Allen with Chet Frank, and that’s gonna be really interesting.”

For Allen, like most of the actors in Redbelt, the appeal of the story was not that it’s a knockdown, beat ‘em up type of movie, but that there are layers deep beneath the surface that eventually reveal themselves as the story progresses.

“It’s a morality play,” said Allen, “and it was really engaging. It was wonderful reading it. I’ve had several scripts by my desk over the years that you can’t wait to put up and this was the same thing. It was really well structured and brilliant to watch.”

Couture, a world-class professional fighter, wasn’t as sold as Allen was the first time he read the script, especially since lead character Mike Terry frowned upon prizefighting.

“When I first read the script I wasn’t sure I liked it,” said Couture. “It kind of went against what I spent the last ten years of my life doing, which is fighting, and the main character doesn’t really like fighting – he thinks that fighting weakens the combatant, because of the rules and that sort of thing. It’s sort of a traditional view of martial arts and how it applies. So it took me a little while to warm up to it and I kind of saw it as a kind of an American samurai story with one of the students committing suicide because of honor, and honor became involved. So once I put it in that perspective, it made a lot more sense to me.”

Yet for Couture, who has fought before tens of thousands of people in the UFC and has appeared on television countless times, being on the set with Mamet and a cast of renowned actors could have been more intimidating than fighting a highly-skilled opponent with knockout power in either hand. But Mamet, who has been down this road before, put the mixed martial arts champion at ease almost immediately.

“I think David has a little bit different approach in that he’s not too caught up in the script,” said Couture. “He seems to say, ‘well, just say what you would say there,’ and it’s little bit different than having to spend hours memorizing lines and sticking to it word for word and it’s a little more free flowing. It’s almost living and breathing, which is nice. It creates an atmosphere where you feel comfortable. You can adapt things to your own language and syntax.”

Filming mainly took place in Terry’s Jiu-Jitsu Academy, and in the arena where the fights were filmed, with trips to the Terry house, the local police precinct, and Chet Frank’s mansion in between. The starkest contrast though, was going from a well-worn fight gym to a packed arena with screaming fans.

“Days can feel very different to one another,” said Ejiofor. “So the stuff we did at the academy, which is rundown, you know there are no frills, and it almost seems like a completely different movie to the luxurious surroundings and the stuff we’re doing elsewhere. So, there’s a sense that everything sort of moves in its own way and these different worlds are sort of combining, which is exactly what’s happening. And what’s great about that is that different people are coming in and out of the set and then you have a completely sort of different movie experience. So although some days there’s a kind of calm reverence to the whole thing and then sort of some jovial kind of aspect, on other days, there’s a kind of just sort of frenetic, hectic sense when we’re doing all the fight sequences.”

And when it was time to do those fight sequences, everyone who wasn’t working at the moment dropped what they were doing to check out an art they may never have been exposed to before.

“The fight stuff is so new, they’re really excited about it and they want to know more about it,” said Ejiofor.

Translating the subtleties of jiu-jitsu to the silver screen was not going to be easy though, and Mamet saw this problem coming.

“When I was a kid they had a show called Kung Fu, which popularized a form of martial arts, which was a striking form,” explained Mamet. “And so Kung Fu was so popular and the films of Chuck Norris were so popular and the Billy Jack films were so popular that there was 30 years worth of films about Kung Fu. Great. Jiu-jitsu is not a striking form. It’s a grappling form. And so people really haven’t seen a movie about the form of jiu-jitsu. It’s completely different than the striking forms and, therefore, the way that you film it has to be very different. The thing about a striking form is it’s very filmable. The people come together, they go apart. They come together, they go apart. The audience can follow it. I get it. I saw that punch land over there. I get it. They guy reacted and came back, oh, now the other guy is closing the distance. One of the reasons maybe that there hasn’t been a jiu-jitsu film previously is that most of jiu-jitsu happens in a way that if you don’t know what you’re looking at you can’t understand it, because the guys are tied up and the most dramatic thing can be one guy working for x-minutes to get his hand under there and that’s what’s going to turn the fight around.”

It was a situation where shortcuts could have been taken to make the fights more ‘Hollywood-esque’ or spectacular, but Mamet would have none of such talk, insisting that the authenticity of the fight sequences was paramount.

“It’s important to me to be completely authentic, because that’s the point of this movie,” he said. “It’s a movie about jiu-jitsu. So, since this is a sport and a science and an art that I feel very deeply about, out of respect to my teachers and to the art which they’ve created, it’s important that it’s completely authentic. Nothing in this movie isn’t authentic. They’re actual jiu-jitsu moves, and not only are they actual jiu-jitsu moves, they’re all the basic moves because those are the ones that are going to win a fight.”

Enter Renato Magno, the first Black Belt under Rigan Machado and Mamet’s teacher. Under his guidance, the actors and real-life fighters were choreographed in fights that are as real as anything you will ever see on screen.

“The choreography is really due to Renato,” said Mamet. “We had six fights in the film and knew that each one had to be a little bit different. And Renato not only choreographed them but produced them. That is to say he was responsible for calling in the other guys to help with this, calling in other guys to help with that, and the fight scenes are very realistic. That’s what a fight looks like, and we have very different kinds of fights in the movie. So, what I’m trying to do throughout the movie is show fight by fight the different ways in which today in Hollywood these actual guys, most of whom live in Los Angeles, use jiu-jitsu. Who are the people who use it? The cops use it, the bouncers use it, the stunt men use it, the special forces use it. So, there are different fights about how it would be applied in each of these situations.”

Yet despite the authenticity of all the fights throughout Redbelt, filmgoers won’t truly be immersed in the realistic action if lead character Mike Terry doesn’t perform up to snuff when the bell rings. That’s when Ejiofor’s months of intense training on the mat paid off.

“With Jiu-Jitsu, because it’s a completely new skill to me, it was really helpful to get all the basics down and to get everything, to get all the basic moves or as much of them as I could get,” he said. “Then you put that into the fight and you sort of request…you say, ‘Can I do the one where I throw the guy through the thing? I really like that one. I was practicing it.’ So then that kind of finds its way into the fight. So it’s kind of useful to be able to do both things – to have the choreographing obviously, but then also to have the good grounding foundation of it all. I was quite fortunate as well, because John Machado, I fight him in the movie and he was also instructing me in jiu-jitsu. So you’ve got this sort of double advantage. I mean Jack Gill is the stunt coordinator, but John Machado and Renato were really hands on in the actual sort of pulling together the fight, because obviously they know jiu-jitsu very expertly. So it’s a great help to have somebody who is teaching you and he’s also in the movie. I mean I’ve never experienced that before. I don’t know many people who have. But that was great.”

But for the final word on the authenticity of the fight scenes in Redbelt, you may be best served by asking a fighter.

“I think that what I’ve seen technically has been pretty authentic,” said Randy Couture. “They’re using real athletes and all the guys are getting skills in jiu-jitsu and fighting technique. I think anything you do for the fight genre for camera is a little bit ‘Hollywoodized’, there’s no way around that. We can’t sit out here and punch guys in the face, unfortunately, but it seems pretty realistic to me.”

Finding a place to film the final fight sequence might have been the toughest fight of all. Just ask producer Chrisann Verges.

“We surveyed the available arenas, most of which are quite large,” said Ms Verges. “But none were available. We were starting to really get worried about that and the arena we did use (in Long Beach) actually shut down a woman’s volleyball tournament in order to accommodate us. So, that was lucky.”

Maybe so, but the finished product that is Redbelt had nothing to do with luck. What made this movie was the vision of David Mamet and the outstanding work of a stellar cast and crew that truly reflected not only the culture and art of jiu-jitsu and the pro fight circuit, but of a deeper meaning of honor, loyalty, and integrity, and what that means in today’s world. In other words, it’s got Mamet’s stamp all over it.

“I think the fight part of it is new, but all of the elements are classic, classic Mamet,” said Ms Verges. “How can you get much better than this David Mamet script and some fighting?”

“I think the audience for this film should be massive,” said Mamet. “Why? Because the market for mixed martial arts films is big and more importantly because it’s a really good film. It’s a traditional American story and it’s also a traditional Japanese story. It’s a samurai film with an American samurai.”