Smash hit

“I felt it go in the second round. I’m driving to the surgery to get an MRI scan and I don’t know what it is, but I know it’s serious. I’m calling Ron [Howard] and the producers and I’m saying, ‘Boys, I want to let you know what’s going down. We’re in deep shit.’”

Two days after surgery, on February 1 last year, he was having physiotherapy on the shoulder. “By the end of week three we did ten rounds on the hand mitts,” he says. “I was sparring again by the end of week four.” He now believes that the extra time – the start of the production was pushed back two months – was beneficial for the film. “Frankly, because of the injury it extended the time we had to prepare, and the skill level, the body, the choreography, everything moved forward, everything was given more space and as a result everything was more successful.”

On set, Howard has what looks like a keyboard slung around his waist. It’s a mobile control unit with mini-screens showing what his five cameras can see and, with earphones and a microphone, keeps him in constant communication with the key members of his crew.

When the filming starts he retreats from the ring to a bank of monitors. Inside the ring, another cameraman is in close with a hand-held camera. Howard yells “Action!” and the two men circle each other, close in and jab. From where I sit, it looks violently convincing. Sweat glistens on their faces, the grunts and the screech of leather boots on canvas are loud, and the gloves seem to make contact with vulnerable flesh.

Russell Crowe making a boxing movie has a certain irony about it, of course, and he knows that. “Yeah, but you know, regardless of certain reputations, I’m not into boxing at all. All that is tedious. You know, the process of it all, it smells and I smell and the person you are boxing with invariably smells, too,” he laughs.

Crowe has a reputation as a hot-head – a man with an explosive temper that has landed him in trouble in bars and even at a Bafta party in London where he held BBC producer Malcolm Gerrie, who had cut his acceptance speech, up against a wall. That temper flared again in New York earlier this year, when he allegedly hurled a telephone at a receptionist in a plush hotel (more of which later). Where better to channel that aggression than in a boxing ring?

According to Angelo Dundee, who has trained 15 world champions, Crowe is a natural in the ring. “He could have been a fighter, sure,” says the 84-year-old. “He’s that into it, he loves boxing. See, you have to like it, and he loves it. He’s got the sweetest left hook.”

But choosing Cinderella Man wasn’t about showing his prowess in the boxing ring, argues Crowe. “I’m not saying that there isn’t something in the cliché about finding some truths about yourself when you step into a ring with a guy. The boxing in Cinderella Man is the thing that takes up most of your time and preparation, but to me it’s the least important thing. For me, the most important part of the story is that it’s about a family, his [Braddock’s] buoyancy with his kids, and the battle with two people who love each other but have completely different views on boxing.” James J. Braddock, who grew up in an Irish immigrant family in New Jersey, was a promising fighter who was doing all the right things – investing in a taxi business, taking care of his wife, Mae (played by Renée Zellweger) and being a good father to his three children. Then it all went spectacularly wrong.

Through a combination of injuries, bad luck and ultimately the Depression taking away every cent of his savings, Braddock found himself virtually on Skid Row. But he refused to let his family become another casualty of the great crash. His determination led, ultimately, to a ferocious showdown for the heavyweight championship of the world in 1935 with the defending champion, Max Baer, a brutal fighter who had already killed two men in the ring. Many feared that an out-classed Braddock could be a third. By then, the writer Damon Runyon had already given Braddock the nickname that had lodged in an adoring public’s psyche – a public desperate for a folk hero to lift their trampled spirits. Braddock was, quite simply, the Cinderella Man.

“I always loved it,” says Crowe of the story he first read some eight years ago. “And it kept coming back to me in different guises, different drafts, and I’ve probably read it 24, 25 times by now and it still holds true. It still gives me goosebumps.”

Over the years there were various other directors attached, before Crowe convinced Ron Howard to take on the film. It reunites the Oscar-winning team who made A Beautiful Mind – Howard, Crowe, producer Brian Grazer and writer Akiva Goldsman. For Crowe, Cinderella Man is all about one of his watchwords – passion. “It’s the only reason I do what I do. I was passionate about Cinderella Man because it’s a great story about an honourable man.”

Along with that passion comes a certain code that Crowe has tried to use as a template for his career. You take the role because you believe in it – not because of the pay cheque. Easy to say when you are one of the biggest earners in Hollywood, of course, but he’s always been like that, he insists. “I never had a period when my decisions were based on commerce – they were always about what was the best, most challenging job offered to me at the time.” Crowe served his time – playing in bands in his native New Zealand, stage and television roles in Australia – before breaking into films, first Down Under and then in America. Did he never take a job purely for the money? “I did three commercials and when I did them it wasn’t ‘Russell Crowe’ doing a commercial, it was a young actor taking on a role. Yes, they represented money, but they also represented work in front of the camera.”

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