How Rachel Morrison Upended the Sports Movie With The Fire Inside

In an era when Hollywood retreads and corporate trends have become the backbone of blockbuster filmmaking, a crop of up-and-coming directors, unburdened by an adherence to Hollywood’s established norms and conventions, are approaching their movies with fresh, uninhibited perspectives. of ignorance in the face of industry conventions. Their work spans traditional genres, from coming-of-age comedies to sports biopics to prestige adaptations. Budgets range from streamer-funded to scraped-together. And while all of this results in different styles of filmmaking, their commonalities are much more salient. To find out why, we asked Eugene Kotlyarenko, filmmaker and host of the Director’s Commentary podcast, to speak with six early-career directors with big dreams and bigger ambitions. In the fourth of five installments, he talked to Rachel Morrison about the The Fire Inside, a riveting look at the turbulent rise of female boxing superstar Claressa Shields, that updates and upends the sports biopic.

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EUGENE KOTLYARENKO: So you were saying that you guys finished the movie a million years ago.

RACHEL MORRISON: Yep, when I was young and didn’t have wrinkles, and was perfect for doing press. We got caught in the pandemic, we got caught in studio mergers. Disasters.

KOTLYARENKO: So you guys started shooting it during the pandemic or before the pandemic?

MORRISON: We had shot for two days. Then we stopped.

KOTLYARENKO: Oh, wow. So did you ever think, “I guess the movie’s not happening?”

MORRISON: Oh, many times. But it’s coming out on Christmas and it’s a Christmas miracle that the movie exists. If I knew all the things I didn’t know back then, maybe I wouldn’t have tried so hard to keep it going, but I’m glad I did because somehow the miracle came true.

KOTLYARENKO: Well, it definitely fits thematically. It’s a great underdog story and  you really do feel that energy up on the screen. I’m a big believer in the film gods and that everything happens for a reason, even if it’s torturous in your filmmaking journey.

MORRISON: I think so, too. It’s been done for quite some time, but actually this year with parity in women’s sports being so topical and lots of other reasons, it feels like  we were meant to release exactly when we’re releasing. The pauses in the shoot got Ryan to train twice as much as originally planned.

KOTLYARENKO: Ryan is amazing as Claressa. She’s iconic while being very complex, which is the best you can ask for in a biopic. And Brian [Tyree Henry] also brings a really different take on the coach-athlete relationship. You got very powerful performances out of them, in your first feature as a director. I know you shot a lot of great movies and I was thinking about the special relationships DPs have with actors.

MORRISON: I mean, it’s really the operator relationship. As a DP, I always operated. And actually, my cinematographer on this film was kind enough to let me operate a lot, so it allowed me to be really present with my actors. There have been so many times as an operator where an actor will give this profound performance and if the director is around the corner at a monitor, the first person they look to is the operator. And just remembering those moments I thought, “Wait, I want to be that person for them. I want them to know that I’m with them, seeing them, feeling them.” So that was definitely how I tried to direct, even when I wasn’t operating. If it was Steadicam or whatever, I was right next to the camera.

KOTLYARENKO: It’s kind of like the intimacy of the ring, in a way. 

MORRISON: Yeah, I was in the ring with them for sure.

EUGENE KOTLYARENKO: This is a very unique coming-of-age sports film because it’s about a female boxer, which gives different arcs and conflicts. For instance, her falling in love with her sparring partner is quite unique. I guess I’m just wondering about your approach to some of these tropes and conventions?

MORRISON: Well, this movie really upends the inspirational sports movie conventions, and that was kind of what attracted me to it.

KOTLYARENKO: Absolutely.

MORRISON: Nothing quite follows the line of the convention. And for me, that was really appealing. Lately, I feel like I’ve seen films where they switch the gender of the protagonist and don’t really change anything else around that. It’s like John Wick, but female, it’s Jason Bourne but female. And it’s like, how do you make an authentic film without gender informing the world around them? So in this case, her lived experience was that it wasn’t enough to be great at what she did because she was female in a sport that was traditionally male. We got to look at it through the lens of all the things that made her story different, because had she been that good as a male boxer, she’d be making 200 million dollars a year. Instead, nobody knows who she is. It’s crazy. Nobody knows who she is, still.

KOTLYARENKO: Well, they will now.

MORRISON: Hopefully.

KOTLYARENKO: We’re talking about, just for clarity, a two-time gold medalist at the Olympics.

MORRISON: But we’re also talking about a 15-0 fighter that nobody can beat in any weight class on a professional level, and she still has to tow an impossibly narrow line to be able to then monetize her value beyond athletic dominance.

KOTLYARENKO: I think one of the more unique qualities of the film is where most sports movies end, not to spoil it, this one hits upon a cold reality and keeps the story going in a significant way. I really felt like that was a meaningful contribution to the genre.

MORRISON: To me, that third act is sort of the heart of the film. I also weirdly just think it’s way more relatable because it’s like, who gets to stay on top? Most people have a high point or two in their lives, and then you still have to get up the next day and get on with life. I think that even if people can’t put their finger on it, there’s something profoundly relatable about not just having it cut to credits at the high.

KOTLYARENKO: Claressa goes through these crises where it doesn’t matter that she’s the best because there’s a ceiling to it. Did you feel that way when you were coming up in a traditionally male profession? Is the movie personal for you in that way?

MORRISON: Absolutely. There’s double standards in our industry. If a male DP or director is quiet, they’re an artistic genius. If a woman’s quiet, she’s indecisive. It’s crazy but it’s true. If a man is loud or has a lot of “conviction,” he knows what he wants. If a woman is loud—I mean, ultimately I just loved the work, and that really was enough, and I think that was really what Claressa had to get to as well; ultimately it’s what she loves and it’s what defines her.

KOTLYARENKO: It’s very clear that the movie has that personal feeling to it.

MORRISON: Yeah. I also played sports that were not traditionally female. I played ice hockey growing up, and we didn’t have a women’s ice hockey team when I got to college, and so I had to play on the men’s ice hockey team. It’s just kind of what I know.

KOTLYARENKO: Barry Jenkins wrote the script, right?

MORRISON: Yeah. Barry and Elishia [Holmes], our producers, brought it to me. He wrote it always thinking that it would be best suited for a female director, and we were acquaintances, respected each other, and he knew my work. They probably thought from the experience I had shooting action and the things that I tend to be drawn to, that I would be a good fit for it. 

KOTLYARENKO: Did they know about your hockey past?

MORRISON: I don’t think they knew about my hockey past, but I love sports and I love an inspirational sports movie, so I think it really was my sweet spot in finding details and a relatable perspective, in a world that I actually really live and breathe and care about. When I look back at the very few scripts that I’ve been interested in, they’re actually all sports stories, which is maybe not forever.

KOTLYARENKO: Also just to be real, most scripts are bad.

MORRISON: Most of them are bad.

KOTLYARENKO: I’m sure Barry’s script was a rare gem. I know when I get a good or even mediocre script that I can relate to, I treat it very seriously. 

MORRISON: It’s true. To that point, I think I read scripts for five years before choosing this movie.

KOTLYARENKO: Totally. Did you do some revisions and drafts with Barry or work on your own to put in these personal touches?

MORRISON: Yeah, but also out of necessity, because when we got back up after the pandemic, our money wasn’t worth as much, so there was a little bit of pre-cutting before we went into photography. And then, figuring out how to really make this unconventional structure work.

KOTLYARENKO: I thought the structural gambit worked so seamlessly. There is kind of a tragic element to the arc that you can feel. Also, one thing that’s notable about the film is the Flint, Michigan milieu hanging over everything. As a viewer, you’re wondering if the other shoe will drop about everything we know, and I think it’s a pretty interesting choice not to ever go there.

MORRISON: Some of that is just the real timeline of the water crisis, but we wanted the subtext to be there. In a weird way, the city is a metaphor for what Claressa experiences. The contrast between the American Dream and the American reality.

KOTLYARENKO: Did you do a lot of rehearsals with the actors? I felt like the coach-mentee relationship and other relationships in the film felt uniquely observed.

MORRISON: Actually, I got so lucky. The chemistry between Brian and Ryan was almost instantaneous that I didn’t need to create it. I think with some of the secondary cast, it was more of a delicate balance because the characters are well-intentioned but flawed, which actually drew me to them, because that’s also reality—really modulating that so that you could understand that there was so much love there, but sometimes it was misplaced. Nobody was trying to acutely harm one another.

KOTLYARENKO: Yeah, there’s no explicit villains, besides the circumstances. I think the point you’re making that people are well-intentioned, but ultimately subservient to their selfishness or their perception of what is good for them, is just real. And to grapple with that in a movie that could be way more sugar-coated is really refreshing.

MORRISON: I think for me, that’s the one thing I have such an aversion to, is schmaltz. And the second it crosses the line, I disengage. I feel like I’m watching something instead of living it, and I really wanted this to feel like we’re in the photo album, in the video, that it’s a lived experience and real, and that it inhabits a humanity that we believe because it’s true. 

KOTLYARENKO: Did that give you pressure? I mean, that’s a kind of added weight because it’s a true story. Did you hang out with Claressa a bunch? Did she see early cuts and stuff?

MORRISON: Not early cuts. We showed her the script before we went into photography and originally to kind of get her sign off on some of the more sensitive material, which she was totally fine with. It was interesting, some of her notes were how she would punch or how dominant she was as a fighter.

KOTLYARENKO: Right. Yeah, I could see that being a sensitive subject for such an athlete. I liked when she was angry that she wasn’t going to be able to get revenge on her Olympics qualifier opponent, because she’s almost begging for the revenge narrative that we all want. So the reality becomes another interesting twist.

MORRISON: And believe me, I think it would’ve been so much easier for Barry and me if in reality she got to fight the nemesis. 

KOTLYARENKO: Yeah and the fact that Claressa wants it too, that’s an interesting commentary on what we expect as viewers from these types of stories.

MORRISON: But then she did get to fight her 10 years later. And that was as we were finishing, and I think I chewed my nails off being like, “She has to win. She has to win.”

KOTLYARENKO: [Laughs] Is that where she got the million dollar purse that you guys mention?

MORRISON: Yeah. It was great, but it was close. That rematch was her closest fight. Savannah’s good. She’s the only fighter that I think could maybe take her on a different day.

KOTLYARENKO: Okay, well maybe there’ll be a sequel.

MORRISON: [Laughs] It still feels weird to be in this bubble where some press and some producers have seen it, and the world hasn’t, but it’s getting there.

KOTLYARENKO: I know that feeling. You must be so excited.

MORRISON: I am. I found out recently that they’re trailering in front of both Gladiator 2 and Wicked, which is really cool.

KOTLYARENKO: Wow, nice. That’s the demo, right? I hope that’s a really fun experience for you when it comes out and people get to engage with your work and the story.

MORRISON: Thanks! I worked too hard for it not to be.