Channing Tatum & Bennett Miller talk more about Foxcatcher, new trailer

Foxcatcher is the upcoming biographical drama based on the lives of Olympic wrestling champions Mark and Dave Schultz (Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo respectively) and their patron John du Pont (Steve Carell), which we first covered here and is currently getting very positive critical reception at festival screenings ahead of release. In an exclusive interview with Yahoo!  Movies star Channing Tatum and director Bennett Miller spoke more about the physical toll bringing this story to life took on the actor.

As Miller said:

“These guys got some injuries, but I never really heard about it until we started talking about the film after it’d been finished. I keep on learning about various injuries. Like Mark at one point collar ties Channing in a scene and he kind of cuts his ear. He hits the side of his head really hard and burst Channing’s eardrum. And in the same scene, Channing put his head through a mirror and cut himself.”

He further added that while he was initially attracted to the story because on its sensationalism, it morphed into a movie exploring motivation and mental instability:

“All of the low hanging fruit got pushed away. Over time, I became less and less interested in the spectacular, colorful, flagrant stuff. I became more and more interested in delving into the subtleties of who these people were, moving past the bizarreness…to the place where most people could even find some way of identifying.”

Tatum (a former athlete and football player himself) gave further details of the physical toll the seven months of training and shooting took on him:  

“Look, when you’re in that kind of a movie, it doesn’t matter if you’re hurt or not. You keep moving forward. I don’t think my knees will ever be the same after that, and I still have cauliflower ear. But if I came out of the movie without it, I’d feel like I didn’t do something right.”

“It was the most suffocating sport I’d ever played. You can box and hit the bag or something like that, but you can’t wrestle if you don’t want to actually do it. It’s a thankless, painful sport.”

That’s why even John Cena constantly tells you not to try this at home, and in Olympic wrestling the moves aren’t made up and the scripts don’t matter.

Below is a new trailer for the movie, which is shaping up to be something really interesting.

 

Foxcatcher is due for release in the US on 14 November 2014.

Last Updated: October 16, 2014