‘Day Of The Fight’: Read The Screenplay For Jack Huston’s Debut Feature About One Man’s Fight For Redemption

Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the scripts behind the buzziest awards-season films continues with Day of the Fight, the indie drama written and directed by Jack Huston.

Michael C. Pitt, Nicolette Robinson, John Magaro, Steve Buscemi, Ron Perlman and Joe Pesci star in the pic, shot in black and white, which had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in its Horizons sidebar. It was released by Falling Forward Films first in Los Angeles and New York and then wider beginning December 6.

Huston’s feature directing and writing debut centers on Mikey (Pitt), a once celebrated boxer who is gearing up to get back in the ring for the first time since leaving prison. Set across the day ahead of the fight that night at Madison Square Garden, Mikey journeys through the streets of Brooklyn, reconnecting with those he loves the most as he attempts to write the wrongs of his past. In the meantime, he harbors a secret: he is putting his own life at risk in the ring due to a medical condition nobody else knows about.

Huston told Deadline in Venice that he was inspired to dig into his first project as writer-director partly after watching Stanley Kubrick’s 1951 short documentary film of the same name, following then-world welterweight champ Walter Cartier on the day of a fight also at Madison Square Garden.

“Nothing very exciting happens,” Huston says. “He visits his twin brother, he goes to the park, he drives around with his dog, he goes to Mass. He does all these things that all led to him going to Madison Square Garden and fighting for the title. I sort of sat there and imagined if you took that day and turned it into a narrative-driven movie, but you made it his last day.

“What’s the guy fighting for? It’s wonderful, the idea what is it to be a fighter anyway in life, what you’re fighting for. and what if actually what you are fighting for, if you’re under the knowledge that the thing you’re dong will kill you. It is in essence that sort of penitent man, it is that journey for forgiveness.”

The intimacy of that journey was not lost on Pitt, whose Mikey attempts to work out his complicated relationships with his father (Pesci) and lover (Robinson) during his travels, attempting to set things right the best way he can.