Murderball

[MacGuffin]

Trailer here.

Release Date: July 8th, 2005 (LA/NY); July 15th, 2005 (expands to select cities)

Director: Henry-Alex Rubin, Dana Adam Shapiro

Premise: A film about quadriplegics who play full-contact rugby in Mad Max-style wheelchairs - overcoming unimaginable obstacles to compete in the Paralympic Games in Athens, Greece.

[RegularKarate]

So glad this is getting a decent release.  This was one of my two favorites from SXSW.

It was really impressive.

[grand theft sparrow]

NPR Interview with co-director Dana Adam Shapiro and featured subject Mark Zupan.

The story of how he became quadruplegic is one of the most horrible things I've ever heard.  Can't wait to see this.

[Bethie]

This film has been Bethie Approved 8) . You should all see it.

[cine]

i approved it first.. right around the time i was first to say Me and You and Everyone We Know would be the best.

[Pubrick]

right around the time i was first to say Me and You and Everyone We Know would be the best.

and now ur saying Crash is, so..

INVALIDATED

[Myxo]

right around the time i was first to say Me and You and Everyone We Know would be the best.

and now ur saying Crash is, so..

INVALIDATED

better watch it..

Cinephile has a wicked left hook.

[cine]

i have a wicked everything.  

[ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ]

...is this based on a true story?

EDIT: The movie, not Cinephile having a wicked everything.

[RegularKarate]

It's a documentary, so you could say that it's based on a true story.

i approved it first.. right around the time i was first to say Me and You and Everyone We Know would be the best.

**Cough*Cough**

[MacGuffin]

i approved it first.. right around the time i was first to say Me and You and Everyone We Know would be the best.

**Cough*Cough**

I was first to make a thread about it.

[cine]

i was lying when i said i approved it recently..

murderball was invented in canada.. and when it was started up, i told them that i approved of the sport. so everything after that.. was spawned by my approval.

oh and as far as i know, bethie approves quadriplegics too.

[RegularKarate]

that's cool Cine, I approved your birth.  so, you know...

[Pubrick]

that's cool Cine, I approved your birth.  so, you know...

now that's a wicked left hook..

[MacGuffin]

Murderball is definitely one of the most unique documentaries you will see this year. Its about quadriplegic rugby players who slam into one another with their wheelchairs. Sounds insane but it won the Documentary Audience Award and a Special Jury Prize for Editing at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. It follows a few storylines; one is the story of Mark Zupan, the craziest guy on the American team. He became a quadriplegic after his best friend drove them home drunk and got into an accident. The next is Joe Soares, a man who was a huge star on the American team but didn’t make the cut one year so he went to go coach the Canadian team and Keith, a young man who just became a quadriplegic and is considering joining the team.

Daniel Robert Epstein: I read that this film first got started from a Maxim article. Who wrote that?

Dana Adam Shapiro I wrote it.

DRE: Then how did you get involved Henry?

Henry Alex Rubin: Dana called me. He had never made a movie and I had produced documentaries so we teamed up.

DRE: How do you guys know each other?

SHAPIRO: Through a mutual friend.

DRE: How did you first hear of the sport?

SHAPIRO: I was a senior editor of Spin Magazine at that time and I did the non-music features. I was constantly searching obscure websites, newspapers and magazines always looking for interesting stories to do. I just came across this sport right at that time when I was looking to make a film. After doing journalism for like eight years, I wanted to switch to documentary. I called the guys that ended up in the movie like Zupan and Joe Soares. We started talking and interviewing them about what happened to them, “What’s it like to become a quadriplegic?” and also “What is this sport called Murderball?

My image of quadriplegics, like most people was Christopher Reeve at home under a blanket, sipping their food on a motorized wheelchair. I didn’t think that they were smashing into each other in Mad Max style wheelchairs and driving in modified cars. I certainly didn’t think that they were having sex with good looking girls or any girls. Even in the original article they were talking about this rivalry between this quadriplegics and paraplegics, because quadriplegics can get it up and paraplegics can’t for some reason.

So all of these plots started coming up and we started thinking, “Is this a short film or is this a magazine article or is this a feature film?” This story that needs to be filmed visually because you can’t understand what it is like until you see these guys playing.

DRE: What did you shoot the movie on?

SHAPIRO: 24 hi-def, though we started off with bunch of different kinds of cameras.

DRE: Where did the money came from?

RUBIN: [Producer] Jeffrey Mendel always came through with the money. We live in New York so anytime we wanted to shoot, we needed to fly, get a hotel room, rent equipment in the beginning so it was expensive to go shoot.

DRE: When did you realize that this could be a more exciting documentary than just one with talking heads?

RUBIN: For me it was the second we saw these guys play. That’s when I was like “This has cinematic possibilities.” We knew that if we could communicate the speed and the anger and the metal grinding and all that stuff it could be an amazing film. In terms of our characters in the story, when Joe went to Canada we knew that this would be great for the movie. You couldn’t make up that first act.

SHAPIRO: The revenge story didn’t take up much time onscreen so at the end of the day the movie isn’t really about this rivalry between USA and Canada. In the same way that way Rocky isn’t about the boxing. What we did for two and half years is a universal story. We documented the relationship between Joe and his son, between Zupan and his best friend and ultimately between Keith and his new life. If it was just about the sports it would have been an eight minute segment on Real Sports or something like that. We didn’t want to make an essay about quadriplegia; we made a movie about these particular quadriplegics.

DRE: Did you realize that if you didn’t do this backstory on Joe Soares that he would end up as the villain of the piece?

RUBIN: We didn’t know where his life was going. We love and respect Joe but we do recognize that he is a very polarizing figure. We didn’t choose to make him arrive on time and hug his son at the end of the scene. It just happened then we just had to capture it.

DRE: When I first came into this room you two were having a minor argument, what did you guys argue about when making this movie?

RUBIN: I think underneath it all we respect each other enormously. It was mostly little creative and aesthetic things. Should we you know focus more on Zupan or Keith or Joe or you know and oftentimes Dana would propose shoots. Dana said that we should go to Joe’s anniversary dinner but I thought it would be boring. But we ended up getting this beautiful moment from Joe.

DRE: What kind of stuff is going to be on DVD?

RUBIN: I’d love it to be chockfull DVD.

SHAPIRO: I don’t know I have never brought a DVD because of the extras. There is a food fight that happened between the players that is hilarious. There’s a great scene in a hospital, late at night and these two black nurses with this one black quadriplegic who fancied himself to be a singer and they all did a doo-wop song.