“There’s nothing better in this world than movies and television about people who struggle and don’t have much, and still fight,” declares “Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist” director Craig Brewer. For our recent webchat the “Hustle & Flow” and “Empire” director adds, “Some of the films that I’ve done, you could put under a category of a particular type of Black cinema, but I feel it transcends that. Movies like ‘Rocky,’ ‘Claudine,’ I grew up on a lot of these movies in the eighties where you rooted for people who the deck was stacked against, and I think that that is a uniquely American story.” Watch our video interview above.
SIGN UP for Gold Derby’s free newsletter with latest predictions
“Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist” features a star-studded cast including Emmy and Grammy-nominated actor and comedian Kevin Hart, Oscar and Emmy nominee Taraji P. Henson (“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “Empire”), Oscar and Emmy nominee Don Cheadle (“Hotel Rwanda,” “Black Monday,” “House of Lies”), Oscar and Emmy nominee Samuel L. Jackson (“Pulp Fiction”) and Oscar nominee Terrence Howard (“Hustle & Flow”), with Berman helming the stylish crime drama’s explosive pilot, in addition to three other episodes including the limited series’ finale. The Peacock limited series was created by Shaye Ogbonna, based on the 2020 podcast of the same name that fictionalizes a real-life armed robbery at an Atlanta party on the night of Muhammad Ali‘s October 1970 comeback fight. In a city bursting with fight night anticipation, streetwise hustler Gordon “Chicken Man” Williams (Hart) plants himself at the center of the action. His big ambitions, and even bigger talk, put him on a collision course with ruthless criminals, each consumed by their own insatiable hunger for the spoils of the event. As dawn breaks on a city reeling from the heist, JD Hudson (Cheadle), a pioneering Black detective, is thrust into a high-stakes game of cat and mouse as the body count rises. With time running out, JD and Chicken Man race against the clock to clear Chicken’s name and survive the dangerous forces closing in.
The crime drama’s action-packed pilot features a tension-packed “oner” (i.e. a “long take” or single, continuous shot without any cuts or edits), in which the heist unfolds at the after-party, juxtaposed in a split-screen with the “Star-Spangled Banner” performed ringside at the main event. Brewer says, “It is my first first ever real oner! It’s something that I’d been thinking about on the day, but it wasn’t something that I had planned where I sat down with a diagram or anything,” he explains about not doing what filmmakers typically do to prepare for oner, i.e. planning and choreographing the scene and where the camera would move through the set to capture all of the action and dialogue in real-time. “I started to just rehearse each moment and little by little. My cameraman, and my fantastic director of photography started to glare at me a little bit,” he smiles, “and little by little, it started to dawn on them; ‘are you thinking about doing this all in one continuous take?'” he says, adding that he kept putting of that discussion as the cast and crew continued rehearsing the sequence. “By the time we got to like going down the staircase, it was quite obvious. They were like, ‘you’re planning on doing this in one continuous take!’ Then there was this excitement throughout the whole soundstage and everybody was coming out of the offices and actors who weren’t even in the scene were coming out of their trailers and everybody was gathering around the monitor as we did this and I have to say, we only did about 3 passes on it, and I think we took the second take on it. It was one of the most exhilarating moments in my career,” he admits. “An all hands on deck moment where you cannot do it without a fantastic cameraman. You can’t do it without actors hitting their mark exactly. And you can’t do it without a great narrative, and we had a great script and a great story to tell.”
