TIFF 2024: Rachel Morrison’s Olympic boxing drama The Fire Inside is ready to tussle for film-festival gold | Canada Voices

It would not be inaccurate to call the Toronto International Film Festival the Olympics of the movie business. Like the best athletes, filmmakers spend large chunks of their lives training, lining up sponsors, and sweating the details of their craft, all in the hopes of making it to the TIFF podium. Perhaps even snagging that gold, a.k.a. the People’s Choice Award, Toronto’s vaunted Oscars bellwether.

Yet it takes a certain intensity to even attempt that journey – the kind of raw and unwavering commitment that director Rachel Morrison and actress Ryan Destiny know perhaps all too well as the pair sweated to get their new sports drama The Fire Inside from the mat of production to the arena of a TIFF world premiere.

“This film is a story of resilience, and making it was an act of resilience,” says Morrison, the Oscar-nominated cinematographer behind the 2017 drama Mudbound, who makes her feature directorial debut with this big-hearted biopic of American Olympic boxer Claressa “T. Rex” Shields. “Claressa was an incredible role model here, too – her strength as a human is what helped me keep going and fighting for this movie.”

This isn’t the kind of typical marketing hyperbole, either. Morrison was just two days into shooting the film (originally titled Flint Strong) in Toronto in 2020 when the pandemic hit, immediately shutting down production. More than two years passed before the film would get rolling again, this time under a new studio (MGM taking over from Universal) and with a new co-star (Brian Tyree Henry plays Shields’ coach Jason Crutchfield, a role originally held by Ice Cube).

“I definitely have a more positive outlook on it now, because at the time I felt like it was the worst luck. But I think I needed it – I don’t know if back then I was as ready as I thought I was,” says Destiny, who plays Shields from age 17, when the wannabe fighter rose from a no-frills gym in the blighted city of Flint, Mich., to take on all comers at the 2012 Olympic Games in London. “The fact that the film came back for a second round made me go even harder in my performance and drop into it more completely and vulnerably.”

Neatly and accidentally, the challenges of making The Fire Inside dovetail with the film’s own unique structure and themes, which set the movie apart from the crowded canon of underdog sports cinema. Adapting the 2015 documentary T-REX by Zackary Canepari and Drea Cooper, screenwriter Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) – who was initially set to direct the film before handing the reins to Morrison – tackles the expected athletic triumphs before diving into the more complicated reality of what comes after the promises of Wheaties boxes fade. This is a film as much about being the best as it is about the struggle waiting to show the world what the best even looks like.

“Making the film was a real reflection of the film itself – we literally had to make it twice in some ways, just as Claressa had to fight on the global stage twice to be seen,” says Morrison, wearing a hat emblazoned with the word “GRATEFUL” in all-caps. “Things happen for a reason. And now there is something so right about releasing a movie about the aftermath of the Olympics in the aftermath of the Olympics, in a great year for women’s sports, too.”

Shields herself was along for much of the journey, with her and Jenkins becoming Morrison’s favourite “phone-a-friends.”

“I had Claressa pretty much on speed dial, but it was more like me asking her specific questions: What were you listening to when training? What were you and Jason talking about in that moment?” recalls Morrison.

The director herself would also become a one-woman support network for her young star.

“Rachel felt like my lifeline – we built such a strong relationship as we were going through the same thing at the same time,” says Destiny, a native of Detroit who delivers the kind of breakthrough performance that recalls a young Michelle Rodriguez in the 2000 drama Girlfight. “I don’t think that’s a common thing, for a director to have that much communication with their actors. She was very open and honest throughout the entire process.”

Part of that process included making sure that Flint itself was represented – even if most of the film was shot in and around Toronto.

“When you make movies, you always have to pick your battles, but the one thing I couldn’t let go of was shooting Flint for Flint. Any day that we came in under time for shooting, that was money for the Flint piggy bank,” says Morrison, who shot almost all of the film’s exterior city shots in the actual Michigan locale.

“Flint is such a special place, and the people there have so much pride. There’s a specificity to it that nowhere else can recapture.”

As The Fire Inside heads to TIFF this weekend, Morrison must now reckon with a different kind of bout, one playing appropriately enough inside herself: Should she continue on the path of directing, or return to the world of cinematography?

“I’m a storyteller first, but what’s happened lately is that I didn’t have any idea how much a director has to fight for something to come to be,” Morrison says. “Now that I have a platform, I can use it to bring a film into the universe. I’ll fight for any story that I believe in and that is additive in the world somehow, whether that’s as a director or director of photography.”

Spoken like a tried-and-true champ.

The Fire Inside world premieres at TIFF on Sept. 7, 2:30 p.m., Royal Alexandra Theatre, with additional screenings Sept. 8, 3:30 p.m., Scotiabank; Sept. 13, 12:30 p.m., Scotiabank; and Sept. 15, 12:35 p.m., Scotiabank.