We caught up with Sean Durkin, the writer-director behind the critically acclaimed The Iron Claw to unpack the film’s powerful themes.
Warning: contains mild spoilers for The Iron Claw.
It seems only fair to ask what film was the last one to make Sean Durkin cry. After all, his new film The Iron Claw made me sob uncontrollably and led to a very awkward encounter at a Waterstones after the film. Reminder: I need to buy waterproof mascara…
The Iron Claw brings the almost unbearably tragic story of the Von Erich brothers to the big screen. Zac Efron leads a pack of some of the finest young actors of our age as Kevin Von Erich, son to Fritz Von Erich, who particularly feels the pressure his father is putting the brothers under.
By the time Fritz died of cancer in 1997, five of his six children had passed away, and that is precisely the story Durkin, a keen wrestling fan himself, wanted to realise in his film.
We sat down with Durkin at a very posh London hotel to chat about The Iron Claw, the Von Erich brothers and whether you can ever tell a true story truthfully on screen.
What was the last film that made you cry?
We started a tradition of watching Little Women at Christmas, my daughter’s seven and my wife read the book to her this year. We watched the Greta Gerwig one on Christmas Day and I found myself crying a lot. I also realised, there’s a real crossover between Little Women and The Iron Claw.
How come?
I think just the sibling love and the beautiful, complicated nature of those sister relationships and how each one of them is an individual and different, going through highs and lows together.
You’re a wrestling fan and were already familiar with the Von Erich brothers’ story. And I read that you remember Kerry’s death particularly well. How come that had such a big impact?
I’d seen him live a few times. It was the 80s, so you would just get pieces of information, I never had the full picture. I knew other brothers had died, but didn’t really know why. I read about it in magazines, I’d get an old copy of something and backorder stuff. Reading about Kerry, in particular, was really impactful because I had seen him live three times. And also, my dad’s brother had died recently before that. My dad came from a similar family of six brothers, tough father, so I think I made some sort of connection there.
It’s one of those stories that’s almost stranger than fiction. What was the point where you realised that actually, this would make a very good film?
In 2015, it just literally came to me. I’m very interested in how we communicate in families or how we don’t communicate in families and why we believe what we believe, you know, and how much our family systems affect why we believe what we believe. I always wanted to make a sports film. And there was this notion of the curse. I’m always interested in a genre element, a sort of mythical element.
You’ve never made a documentary, but did that ever cross your mind, to do it in factual form? Making it into a fictional feature, what did that give you as a storyteller?
I just thought the atmosphere of it is really unique. You have the emotional silence and inarticulation of the family, but you have the wrestling, which is extreme shows of emotion, ridiculous shows emotion at times, right? Like extreme pain, extreme joy.
There’s storytelling to it.
Yeah, the sort of good versus evil storytelling, the simple forms of wrestling. It just felt like a really rich, unique template to tell a story, also of the time and place of Texas at this time, and this really celebratory, brotherly love. These guys became like rock stars of their time, but [there was] this looming curse and tragedy.
It’s such a tragic story. Kerry and David, they become almost like mythical characters. But presumably, your job as a writer and a director is to kind of crack that surface. Was there a character that you found particularly difficult to crack?
Fritz was complicated. I wouldn’t say difficult to crack, but difficult to balance. Fritz in real life was very, very tough, very overbearing. And to portray that can get tiresome. He’s so tough on them, but he thought he was doing the best thing for them. There’s that mentality of, ‘I’m gonna teach my boys to be tough and successful, and that’s gonna save them from this horrible world that we live in.’ And that was his worldview and it was hard to balance that.
There’s a line in the first scene where he says I wants a safe place for the boys to grow up in, but he kind of becomes the villain in this story. Or is he the villain in your eyes?
He probably takes on a narrative, traditional antagonist’s role, but I wouldn’t say he’s the villain. Parents often think, ‘Well, what I needed was this so I’m going to do this for my kids’ and in doing so, are short sighted in seeing how there can be negative effects. I think that’s very common and we wanted to explore that. Fritz is trying to build a world that he thinks is going to give them the best life, but there’s short sightedness in not seeing what the negatives of that are.
When you’re casting, what is it that you look for? What cracks the character?
It’s often just a gut feeling, honestly. Kevin’s a very quiet character. He’s an unusual lead character, because he’s quite passive, a lot of other people make decisions for him. But Kevin at his core is this incredible athlete, this incredibly talented wrestler, but he’s quiet, he’s a bit shy. He’s purely sweet and loves his family. I think I was looking for a sweetness.
I think great actors can do anything but also, when you have a particularly quiet, more passive role, I don’t think someone who doesn’t have that sweetness can perform that sweetness, it has to be inherent. I saw that in Zac when I met him, that was really the thing for me. I had no doubt about physicality, his athletic ability. That’s all been, maybe not to this extent, but you’ve seen traces of it in his other work. Holt [was] the same, he just knew Fritz, he understood him in all of his layers. Lily (James) just got the energy that Pam needed, that contrast, that ease, that truthfulness in a world where no one speaks the truth, because they don’t necessarily have the words for it. She was the articulation of all that.
We won’t talk about Chris Von Erich because you’ve already spoken so much about not including him in the film, but I do think there’s a larger conversation about true stories and biopics here. You didn’t reach out to Kevin until quite late in the process. Do you think any true story, something that is looking for at least a version of the truth, can ever be authentic, if the people who are being portrayed are involved in the process?
It depends on the story, because no movie ever is going to fully capture a family or a person. If I made a movie about my own life, it’s not going to be accurate to the facts of my life, because it’s just my experience. It’s not the experience of other people around me.
I tried to make a Janis Joplin film for years, and I met all these people who knew her. I got invested in them and their stories. When we put together the script, and sent it to them, they were all irate that their version of the story wasn’t the one. Even though they were there with her, they were unable to see that she was one person with them and something else to another. We are different things to different people and a film can never capture that. You can only capture a piece, an essence, an experience, but nothing more.
Part of why I didn’t reach out to Kevin was because of that experience I had on Janis. I wanted to keep a distance so that I could keep a view of the family that I could keep an emotional distance. I didn’t want to love Kevin even more than I already loved him and have to make decisions with his voice in my head. I don’t think that makes good work. There was so much out there to research [Kevin] that I had a real understanding of him, so I felt like I could write him based on that. In the end, I was able to make decisions for myself, based on what I felt the best version of the film I wanted to make [was].
When he and I spoke for the first time, he said, there’s a lot of gossip on the internet, there’s a lot of stuff said that’s not true. And the first thing I said, I am only using things in the film that I’ve heard you say directly someone in your family say, or the very few reputable sports sources and wrestling journalism. He was so appreciative of that. And then he said, Sean, the only thing I care about is that you show my brothers and I love each other.
That’s what the movie is, that’s the core of the movie. It’s about brotherly love, it’s about siblings. I navigated that from a place of sensitivity, coming at it from a place of wanting to make a loving movie about this family, but also a truthful movie about the difficult topics too, to get into meaningful discussion about mental health and suicide and emotional articulation.
I keep hoping that we’ve come a long way since the 80s and how we talk about mental health, specifically relating to men. Do you think if the Von Erichs grew up in today’s world, things would have been different?
Kevin has raised his boys differently. I think things are getting better, but even since I started writing the film, it’s changed massively. Mental health being mentioned in sports [happened] in the last two, three years maybe. Thankfully, some people have been really outspoken about it, and it’s really helped. I think we’re heading in the right direction, but it’s nowhere near what it needs to be in. All of these trends of masculinity are still completely prevalent and damaging.
The Iron Claw is now in UK cinemas.
