A sense of community has also come through like vivid technicolor to Huston, even as he toiled over ensuring his first directorial feature would be black and white (never an easy fight to pick in the 21st century). It indeed took a village of old friends and colleagues sticking their necks out to get Day of the Fight made, including again that Boardwalk Empire connection via the HBO series’ Emmy-nominated star, Steve Buscemi.
“It was an uphill battle,” Huston says of the process of getting the movie made. “So it was incredibly important for us, in order to get the film financed, that certain people showed up.” In the case of Buscemi that meant combining two minor tertiary characters from Huston’s earlier drafts into a larger role that would allow Buscemi to reunite with his former onscreen protege, Michael Pitt.
Huston recalls, “We got a hold of Steve’s manager, and they were like ‘absolutely not.’ Like it has to be [a much bigger part]. So I was like, ‘I’m just gonna call Steve.’ I made a phone call and I think I sent him the script the day before Thanksgiving, and the day after Thanksgiving, I got a message saying, ‘Yeah, I’ll be there first day.’”
Buscemi showed up on set for a day and took the bare minimum SAG pay for his work. But it helped get Day of the Fight made. “That’s the stuff where you get emotional, because… this film is impossible without these guys who actually showed up when it mattered. And there’s a lot of people in my life who showed up when it mattered, and there’s some people who don’t.”
Huston’s experience on the project is filled with dozens of similar stories, including convincing Joe Pesci to come out of retirement again after The Irishman for a small but pivotal part. It took those contributions plus a million others to get the film as Huston imagined on the screen, complete with haunting black and white interspersed with flints of color.
“Black and white is almost like a magnifying glass into the soul,” Huston says. “There’s something about when you put a camera on somebody and you see in black and white, it’s almost like I’m looking inside them. And I found that very early on with Michael that I could put the camera on him and it harkens back to the old [Marlon] Brando, [Paul] Newman, [James] Dean.”