For his directorial debut, Jack Huston knew exactly how he wanted the movie to look.
“I wanted to make a film that was reminiscent of films that made me fall in love with cinema,” Huston told IndieWire. “The more gritty black-and-white dramas, human stories, adult stories, character studies, pieces.”
That meant that Huston imagined “Day of the Fight” in black and white from the start. The choice, as Huston pointed out, brought a sense of timelessness to the story of Mikey (Michael Pitt), a prizefighter freshly out of prison who spends the day before his last fight reconnecting with his past in 1989 New York City. “I think [black-and-white] gives it a sort of timeless aspect,” Huston said. “I wanted people to be able to access this film at any point. But the black and white was really a tool because I felt it was a metaphor for how he was living his life in this sort of black-and-white world, purgatory if you will.”
During pre-production, some hefty names were tossed around regarding the film’s potential DP — but then Huston saw the 2020 black-and-white indie “Fugitive Dreams,” with cinematography by Peter Simonite. “Sometimes black and white films made today on digital, I find them quite flat,” Huston said. “I don’t think they have the depth. And [‘Fugitive Dreams’] is just the most visually stunning piece of work. I saw it and I said, ‘That’s what I want. That’s the look.’”
“Jack and I were totally on the same wavelength from the start,” Simonite told IndieWire. “Jack’s as much of a visual artist as he is an actor’s director, and so we really aligned on our photographic references. We wanted to lean into bold contrasts and create images that felt really sculpted and powerful.”
Among their references were street photography by Elliott Erwitt, Robert Frank, and Matt Weber, as well as movies from Huston’s grandfather, John Huston.
“Jack and I both really wanted to find this contrast level that was almost like a silver gelatin print, where the contrast becomes a bit of a metaphor, like Jack was saying,” Simonite said. “And so you have these heavenly shafts of light in the church and in his apartment, and at other times, he’s engulfed in shadow.”
Simonite shot the film on the Alexa 35, which “gave us the opportunity to get rich color information to use that in the grade to be able to take chroma keys, and then you can change specific colors to make them darker or richer. You have even more information to work with there.”
There was also a practical aspect to the choice, as Simonite pointed out. “Look, we’re doing a period movie. It’s supposed to be Brooklyn in the ’80s, and if there’s a blue recycling bin in the distance… [With black and white] you can get away with a lot. But at the same time, we were going for something more timeless. We wanted this very classic, almost transcendent aesthetic to it.”
Mikey’s memories, though, were rendered in subtle color. “You usually have a memory because it’s specific,” Huston said. “I remember there’s one where he’s a little boy and he’s looking in the puddle and he looks up and his mother, and we just gave a nice blue to her jacket, which you can barely notice. But I always remember the color of my mother’s jacket. I remember a brown jacket that my mom had for years. We really wanted to focus in on specific parts of the memories, and that’s where we would add that little bit of color.”
Much of the film’s power comes from Huston’s strategic use of long single takes, often through narrow hallways and tight spaces. He and Simonite both cite Steadicam operatorJim McConkey as integral to that success (particularly given the 20-day shoot), while singling out someone else on the team as well. “Anthony Capello,” Huston said. “The focus puller is the most underrated and unsung heard of job on a film set bar none. You usually only hear about them when they’ve done something wrong. And it just kills me because they don’t say, ‘Oh, great!’ when it was in focus.”
“Day of the Fight” is in select theaters now.
