The Pure Vision of John Hicks
The Pure Vision of John Hicks – Interview with The Smalls
We tend to forget that the sport of boxing is inherently lonely.
The fighter – even though with an opponent, and surrounded by supporters, fans, and detractors – is really on his or her own journey.
John Hicks’ ‘The Hardest Fight’ looks at a former champion in the autumn of his life, and we can almost reach out and touch the solitude of this quiet hero:
The use of voice over further enhances the atmosphere of this beautifully put together film. While his body may only be a shadow of its former self, it is still formidable, and incredible to watch. With Dave Payne’s own weathered voice narrating as he trains by himself in a warehouse, we gain incredible insight into his background, drive and state of mind in a mere three minutes. Kudos.
An award-winning DoP and film director, John Hicks continues to stun us all with his sharp eye for story and character. We asked him to share a little bit of himself and the story behind The Hardest Fight.
” I started out in photojournalism before realising that the cut and thrust world was not for me and then moved into a very successful commercial career in fashion and sport advertising. Along the way I dabbled in film but wasn’t able to get seriously into it until the Canon 5D burst onto the scene. Before that video was not a cinematic option and 16/35mm film was just so expensive and involved such a big team that I couldn’t dedicate myself to it along with my photography career. So to have a professional level film option like the Canon 5D in the camera that you use for stills and to be able to employ the same lenses to create amazing quality HD footage just made filmmaking accessible to anyone with a camera and a computer.
Technology helped me get back into film, but my photography already had a very cinematic style. I’ve always like to shoot stills on the horizontal because and I’m known for shooting motion capture on location so all this combined to make my move from stills to film that much smoother. I think my background in photography is a strong element in my style of film making and the way my eye sees the world. I want to tell visual stories and the first short film I made was the story of Dave Payne – a 70 year old champion boxer and bare knuckle fighter.
First I set out to find a location because visually I wanted to avoid the cliché of the gym or the ring and to look beyond the brutality and violence associated with a sport like boxing. I found the abandoned warehouse and one of the first things that struck me was the incredible light it gave – it was almost cathedral like. It seemed like a lonely place – a place where a man like Dave would go to train and instinctively I knew straight away that I would film the solitary figure skipping from that high observer vantage point as the intro to the film.
I made up a storyboard – which is something I always did as a stills photographer and that really helped with the edits. I knew I wanted to film certain sequences but it was the work I put into the storyboard that enabled me to piece it all together like a jigsaw.
At first I made the classic mistake of working like a stills photographer but I soon realised that to tell a story it’s not enough to simply record the action. You have to create drama and suspense by moving the camera, you have to involve the viewer emotionally as well as visually and you have to get as many interesting angles of the same shot as you can to sustain interest.
So primarily I worked the images because I’m visually minded, then the edit pretty much followed the storyboard and finally I worked on the narration and music. I knew from the outset that I wanted a voiceover but Dave was reluctant so I just got him to talk by asking him a series of questions and recorded his responses. When I asked him about the hardest fight he ever had his spontaneous reply sent shivers down my spine and I knew I had my title and a killer quote.
For me it’s a very personal, honest film and I made it because I wanted to so I was surprised when it received such a great reaction – first from the Converge Film Festival 2011 where it was selected as one of only 3 finalists to be shown on the big screen at the British Film Institute and then again at the London Short Film Festival 2012 and just recently at The Smalls Film Festival 2012.
Because of its success and the emotional response it gets I’m about to embark on a fund raising campaign to source finance to make ‘The Hardest Fight’ into a full length feature film. The brutally honest true life story of a boy born into East End post war poverty who survived bullying, cruelty and rejection before finding some kind of redemption through the noble art of boxing and the journey that it took him on is a fascinating account of one man’s trials and ultimate triumph over adversity.”
