Rod Lurie (The Contender) directs a talented ensemble cast led by Josh Hartnett and Samuel L Jackson in Resurrecting the Champ, a movie about not only boxing but also father and son relationships and journalism ethics.

Was the 'ethics in journalism' theme part of the attraction to the material?
“Very, yeah, absolutely. I first read this while I was still a journalist in 1997. I thought the story was unbelievable.

I read it in a magazine. I thought it was unbelievable. I went to my agent and I said, ‘"It's time to leave this journalism world where I totally suck and I want to try to make a movie and this is the movie I want to make.’ He said, ‘Okay, Mike Medavoy owns it.’ I went to see Mike and I said, ‘I really want to write the screenplay.’ He said, ‘Well, okay, let's take a meeting.’ So we had a meeting and I think we had four meetings. And then they gave it to somebody else, Allison Burnett. Then a couple of years later, I heard that Mike wanted a different screenplay, so we met again and they gave it to another guy. They gave it to a third guy and eventually Mike, I think, I called him and he let me take a crack at it. So ten years later, the movie is in [theaters].”

You capture the thrill of getting a story in the film. How did you capture that visually?
“A lot of it is visual, isn't it? It's the expression on… We've all been there, right? Like when you get something, it usually comes when you get somebody on the phone that you're excited to get on the phone.

Even if you're by yourself, there's a whole body language that goes into it. I remember when I was doing a book, a true story, that involved Ross Perot. I'll never speak to Ross Perot. One day, the phone rings, 'Hey Rod, it's Ross Perot here.' We've all been there, right? When you get the ‘get’ and you get really excited. That's when you've got to take a deep breath and be really careful that you're not going to go in the direction of what you want the story to be as opposed to what it is.

So, yeah, like when he gets Satterfield's son on the phone, it's something that Josh [Hartnett] and I really worked on. I acted out what my body motion is when I would get somebody on the phone. He didn't emulate that or impersonate that, but he gave it his own spin. To a certain degree, I was, for Josh and Kathryn Morris, I was also their technical advisor. You guys will recognize this maybe. When we pick up a phone in our cubicle or home, we tend to pick a phone up and a pen up at the same time. You don't know what's coming, right? So it would be things like that. Or when the editor calls, I did this, I could be at home by myself and my editor would call and I would stand up as if he's in the room. That's what Josh does in the film as well.”

Can you talk about casting Josh Hartnett?
“You know, Josh is a very sincere kid and what's really impressive about him is when you meet him and you just smell the potential and his desire to be good, make the others around him good, are really extraordinary. He's really dedicated. He read a version of this screenplay several years ago that was 100 percent different. It was just not the screenplay. There wasn't one line. Maybe there's a scene that remains from it. And in that version, he had no kid, he had no wife. He was just a happy-go-lucky bachelor journalist and he didn't feel he was right for it at the time. That was still with Morgan [Freeman] attached to it. But then when this version got written, he felt that he was game.

He's an intense kid. When he goes on set, he runs three or four miles before the shooting day begins. I'll tell you a really good story. He really is concerned about the performances of others as well as his. He's concerned about the big picture. So to me, the antecedent of this film, as much as we talk about President's Men or Rocky, was really Kramer vs. Kramer. Not that we got to that level, I love that film and I love the father/son message from it. I showed that movie to everybody so the kid, Dakota [Goyo], is sitting on a couch. Josh is sitting in the back of the room watching the movie and then I show everybody the documentary, The Making of Kramer vs. Kramer. In it, Hoffman is talking about how he became a father to the kid and that's how the kid's great performance comes from, Justin Henry in that film. While Hoffman is talking about it, Josh goes and sits next to Dakota, ruffles his hair and became his dad essentially in the next several weeks. He was happy to, at the end of the day, give Dakota to the mom but he was so concerned about the kid's performance as well as his.

We would have talk after talk after talk about the screenplay and about trying to get things real. He had this unusual relationship with Kathryn that she's six, seven years older than he is and how that played into it. He's a very, very, very consumed guy, very intense guy, what he did with this role.”

How did you come to Kathryn Morris for the moral compass?
“Kathryn's my wife. No, I'm joking. She has been many times in my dreams. Kathryn and I have been together forever. I wrote a screenplay once that we almost got made and I wanted Kathryn to make the film. She was auditioning with every other actress, like 90 other actresses. I remember a producer did the audition and he showed her to me but he showed her to me in fast forward. He wanted to show me another actress. He went through Kathryn and I just saw this vision, this girl who looked like Jessica Lange and I thought she was just an angel to me. An angel on my shoulder.

She came in and her audition was perfect. I had lunch with her and I said, ‘I don't know what's going to happen with this movie but I swear we're going to work together. And I'm going to offer you every movie I'm going to make. As long as when you first win your Academy Award, you're going to say, 'I want to thank Rod Lurie' at some point.’ She's been in every movie that I've made. We offered her the next film but she can't do it because of the Cold Case schedule."

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