Claressa Shields from Flint, Michigan, is the greatest woman in boxing history, but she has never received the same recognition as her male counterparts. Her rise to boxing success, including being the first American woman to win an Olympic gold medal in boxing, is chronicled in The Fire Inside (in theatres Dec. 25), a movie directed by Black Panther cinematographer Rachel Morrison, with the script by famed filmmaker Barry Jenkins, and the mesmerizing Ryan Destiny as Shields.
The film begins with a young Shields growing up in Flint, where she shows up at a community boxing gym looking for a coach, even though they don’t train girls. That changes when Jason Crutchfield (Brian Tyree Henry) agrees to coach her, with boxing proving to be a great escape for Claressa from her challenge home life, including her mother, played by Olunike Adeliyi, kicking her out of her home.
As Shields continues her boxing training, we not only see her take on competitors in international fights, but the film tracks her bond with Crutchfield and evaluates the inequities in sports for women versus men.
Ryan Destiny as Claressa Shields in director Rachel Morrison’s THE FIRE INSIDE (Sabrina Lantos/Amazon MGM Studios)
Using boxing matches to tell the story
The Fire Inside stands on a strong script by Jenkins, setting up this really moving story that addresses all the intricacies of Shields’ story.
“I had been looking for a long time for a script that spoke to me, both in terms of the message that it could put out in the world and ways in which I can see myself in it,” Morrison told Yahoo Canada during the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). “Claressa’s story is so inspiring and she’s such a legend and the fact that I follow females, I follow sports, I follow women in sports, and I had no idea who she was, I just thought there was something so fundamentally wrong with that.”
One of the most impressive things about The Fire Inside is the way the film actually uses the fights Shields participates in as real storytelling devices. Each one is unique and specific to a moment in Shields’ life, and it feels like if you only watch the fights right after each other you would still get a story, which is not usually the case for films in the same genre.
“I started from a place of, how do we not have fight fatigue when none of the fights are really about the opponents?” Morrison explained. Just for variety sake, I wanted to see if we could do a oner, and the one that made sense was when you’re first introduced Claressa as a 16-year-old, when there really is no story to tell except for how good she is. Usually oners get complicated, because you have to see the reaction, it’s as much about the opponent as it is about your fighter, but here our one job was to show what a badass she was. The whole fight was crafted around that.”
“The fight [at the 2012 Olympic trials in China], one of the main story points is that Jason isn’t there, and what that’s like for her. So it was, like, really important to just be in the ring, close with her. There are very few long lens shots, as opposed to some of the fights with Jason, you can tell the story from his point of view too. … The narrative dictated how we could make each fight feel very different, and the lighting, of course, and design choices as well.”
(L to R) Ryan Destiny as Claressa Shields and Brian Tyree Henry as Jason Crutchfield in director Rachel Morrison’s THE FIRE INSIDE (Amazon MGM Studios)
‘It was important to me to be very sensitive and aware of her personal life’
As great as Shields is as a boxer, Destiny is just as talented as an actor, really giving us a captivating, emotional and exciting performance to lead this film. Destiny highlighted that she appreciated being able to both speak to Shields and watch footage of her boxing.
“During our entire filming process, and even before that, I think I was thinking about her every single day and just trying to understand what was important to her,” Destiny said. “Luckily, I also had her on call whenever I needed to get some more intel, just more details about her personally. … It was important to me to be very sensitive and aware of her personal life, as well as the boxing.”
“The documentary [T-Rex: Her Fight for Gold], that … really, really helped as well, just get the entire picture. Down to her movements, the way she would box at a particular level. Luckily, we live in a world of YouTube as well, so I can literally just look up anything that I needed to and the very specific fights that we had to also put in the film.”
There’s also real power in how Destiny takes on the struggle of being a woman in sports. There’s a particularly compelling moment at the 2012 AIBA world championships when Shields is told how female athletes are expected to behave and look, and that she has to “play the game to succeed and be respected. Shields also still continues to fight for women athletes to be paid the same as men.
“She is just such an inspiring person and I even remember just thinking about what I was doing at that age, and my mindset during that age, it was not thinking about that, so she was really ahead of the game, truly,” Destiny said. “It’s just insane to have that conversation to this day and still be talking about these things that should not still be a conversation. It’s crazy.”
“But obviously we know where it’s all going, especially in women’s sports. It’s just been incredible to see these past years how it’s just on the up and up. But it was really, really cool to be in the headspace of someone who has to go through those types of things, because I can relate to it a little bit with other situations, and I think we all can. … I knew just how powerful it was. … I didn’t realize how emotional it would make me watching it back as well.”
Actor Brian Tyree Henry, director Rachel Morrison and actor Ryan Destiny on the set of THE FIRE INSIDE (Sabrina Lantos/Amazon MGM Studios)
Filming in Toronto, but being authentic to Flint, Michigan
While significant portions of the film take place in Flint, much of the movie was actually filmed in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. But Morrison, adamant about trying to represent Flint as authentically and specifically as possible, insisted on shooting the exteriors in the Michigan city.
“To be honest, for that reason I was absolutely insistent that we shoot our exteriors in Flint,” Morrison said. “It’s a very specific place. … I fell in love with it. There’s such an incredible sense of pride there and grit, for lack of a better word, but grit in a the positive, most beautiful sense.”
“It was important to me to shoot the exteriors of Flint and Flint, and then as far as the rest of it, … we were so lucky to have so much archival material. So even like when it came to the background casting, … I would send them pictures of real people and be like, ‘We need to find these people.’ And no offence to Canada, maybe it’s a compliment to Canada, the loveliest group of people. Everybody feels like they should be on a Disney show, everybody. So it was like, we really need to find faces and textures and people who feel like they’ve lived a little bit. And so we could always go back to the blueprint of the documentary, the photographs, whatever it is, and it was so important to me to get that right as well.”
While Morrison is a talented cinematographer, when deciding who to work with in that role for this film, as she moved into the director’s chair, Morrison wanted someone who would bring “different ideas to the table.”
“When you have two ideas that aren’t by definition the same, … it stays active and kinetic. And so when I found Rina Yang, she’s done incredibly beautiful work, mostly up until this point now … in the music video and commercial space,” She said. “So she’s got a very stylized approach, where I’m incredibly naturalistic.”
“I let her push me outside of my comfort zone and then once in a while I’d be like, ‘Wait, we need to put a foot back on the ground,’ it has to feel authentic at the end of the day. I wanted somebody who is going to kind of challenge my own tendencies. … I always thought I would start with a tiny indie movie and to start with a fairly bigger undertaking, I think it was the best decision I could have made to take that element off the plate.”