UNDISPUTED had its origins when writer-producer David Giler sat down to lunch with his longtime partner director-writer-producer Walter Hill and the two filmmakers looked through the daily sports pages. “We were talking about the Mike Tyson story – this was right after he had gone through all of his trials and tribulations - and how much the film business had changed,” Giler recalls. “In the old days, Hollywood would have churned out five films based on that story by that time. But up to that moment, there hadn’t been a single one.”
Hill and Giler agreed the opportunity was ripe to center a major motion picture around a heavyweight champion who is sent to prison. However, while the project may have initially been inspired by Mike Tyson, the working script started to move away from that one specific case. “There are a number of prize fighters and champions who have had trouble with the law,” Walter Hill says, “and our story started to take the form of how a real tough guy and celebrity would handle life in prison. The more we wrote, the more we wrote away from the Tyson story.”
As a longtime fan, Hill – the director of such acclaimed films as “48 Hours” and “The Warriors” – was especially excited at the prospect of capturing the world of boxing on film. “Boxing is a unique and totally universal sport. It’s really the most basic sport of all. You put two guys together and see who wins. That is the basis for the popularity of boxing around the world. There are no artificial boundaries or goals and you don’t have to understand any complicated rules.”
In crafting a setting for their story, the filmmakers opted to frame the main action around a prison rather than a more familiar boxing venue such as Las Vegas or Madison Square Garden. “Setting the film in a prison freed us from having to focus on the circus-like atmosphere and commercialism that consumes modern boxing: the hype, the press conferences, the infighting, the questionable decisions. For the final fight in the film between Wesley Snipes and Ving Rhames, we employ the London Prize Rules (as revised by the Pugilistic Association in 1853), which simply means a fight to the finish”.
Throughout the writing process, Hill and Giler had one actor already in mind for one of the two lead roles: Wesley Snipes, an international star whose body of work demonstrates his ability to tackle both action (“Blade”) and dramatic (“Jungle Fever”) roles. Hill met with Snipes to discuss the story even before the script was even completed. “Wesley expressed great interest in the project, even though we didn’t know how the script would turn out and which would be the more interesting character for him to play”. When the script was finished, both filmmakers and Snipes agreed on the answer – he would take on the role of Monroe Hutchen, a fighter whose career was ended in his prime by a prison sentence.
For the role of George “Iceman” Chambers -- Hutchen’s ultimate competitor and the reigning Undisputed Champion of the world – the filmmakers tapped Ving Rhames, an actor already accustomed to working around the confines of a boxing ring. Rhames came to the project on the heels of an acclaimed performance as legendary boxing promoter Don King HBO’s “Don King: Only in America,“ a role that earned him both an Emmy and Golden Globe Award.
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