Writer/Director Sean Durkin On ‘The Iron Claw’ And The Toughest Writing Decision He’s Ever Made

It’s surprising that Sean Durkin, now, with The Iron Claw, has only made three feature films. After the success of 2011’s Martha Marcy May Marlene, it’s really surprising it wouldn’t be until 2020 until Durkin returned with The Nest (a film that premiered at Sundance in 2020 to good reviews, then got a little lost in the shuffle because of the way that year went.) In fact, I just assumed I had missed a couple of his movies. It turns out I have not, I have seen them all. As he explains, a Janis Joplin movie fell through at the last minute, followed by an adaptation of Little House on the Prairie that also fell through. Did he think the same would happen to his passion project that he spent writing for the last seven years, The Iron Claw

The Iron Claw is about the Von Erich wrestling family. (Zac Efron plays the oldest brother, Kevin Von Erich.) As Durkin says, he doesn’t want this movie to be about tragedy, but, unfortunately, that’s a little hard to avoid in this case. Usually, a movie will add in some dramatic moments, you know, “dramatic license.” But The Iron Claw does something unusual: it actually removes some dramatic moments because it’s just too much for one movie. In this case, the part removed is the suicide of Chris Von Erich, the youngest of the brothers. As Durkin says ahead, it’s the most difficult decision he’s ever made as a writer. And ahead he explains why and how he came to that decision.

Somehow The Iron Claw is only your second movie since Martha Marcy May Marlene back in 2011…

I made a TV show that was a pretty big undertaking in there, an English show called Southcliffe. It was a four-part series, which took a couple of years. Then I had a bunch of stuff fall apart. I worked on a Janis Joplin film for years that fell apart very late. We were really close to making it. I worked on a studio film, an adaptation of Little House on the Prairie, that was really close to being made at one point. So I had a couple of big things fall out in between Martha and The Nest. Then, also, some of it’s just writing. It’s like I could probably spend at least five years on a script, and Iron Claw was probably seven years on the script.

So you have a Janis Joplin film that falls through at the last minute and you have a Little House on the Prairie that falls through. Were you worried that would also happen with The Iron Claw

For sure. Yeah. I think I’ve felt that about every movie I’ve ever made. It’s all quite precarious. Also, even with the movies I’ve made, I’ve had moments where it was going to get made and then something went wrong and then you go down for a while and try to get it back up. I think when you’re trying to make work that’s a bit different or challenging in some ways, this is all a really, really normal part of the process.

I think you’re the only person I’ve ever spoken to who is such a die-hard Von Erich Family fan and isn’t from Texas. You are from nowhere near Texas.

It’s really funny. When we had the premiere in Dallas – and not just there – I had a handful of people come up to me and just assume that I’m from Texas. At the premiere, these guys came up to me and they’re like, “I can’t believe you grew up in Denton. We grew up in Denton.” It’s like, “That house party, did you shoot that in Denton” I’m like, “Nope, I’ve only been to Denton for a day. Sorry, guys.” It turns out that a college house party in upstate New York is just like a college house party in Denton.

When I was a kid I watched WWF Saturday Night Main Event and that kind of stuff, but I had friends that were hardcore who were like, “No, no, no, no, if you want real wrestling this is who you watch,” and they had the magazines with wrestlers with blood on their faces…

That was me. That was me.

Only you’re not from Texas. Or the United States. So how does this happen How do you even know who these people are

So I was watching WWF, but it just wasn’t enough. I wanted more. I was watching WCW as well. And then getting magazines, and then NWA, and then getting into finding everything I could. So I’d find old VHS tapes of NWA matches and just ultimately got to the Sportatorium at some point. Just that image of the Sportatorium and knowing that it was on TV on Saturday nights late, yeah, there’s just this whole thing. There was a purity to it. It was a bit harder. It was a bit dirtier. Just seeing Kevin Von Erich flying off the top rope barefoot and the three brothers together, they just grabbed me. Then, also, I think a big part of it, too, was just I was seeing Kerry live in the WWF at the same time as I was discovering their family. Then I remember the day that I found out he died, and it really haunted me. I felt sad and quite connected to it.

All the regional wrestling organizations at the time were pretty confusing. How much did you want to explain that in the movie

It was a really tricky line because, as a wrestling fan, you want to just show some of the details. You want to bask in those belts a little bit. But from a storytelling perspective, if you start to give too much of that, you never want the audience asking the wrong questions. You never want them distracted to the point where they’re like, “Well, what does that mean, or what does that mean” So it’s just a really a bit by bit process of how much to include so that fans of wrestling can enjoy it, but not too much where people who are not wrestling fans are too confused.

I do want to ask about Chris Von Erich, who isn’t in the movie, but also died tragically. I do understand from a narrative standpoint why you couldn’t include him, but how much did you struggle with that

So much.

Because this movie’s going to be the legacy of that family. And for a lot of people, this is going to be their only entryway into that. I don’t know how you balance making a good movie versus people who won’t know about Chris.

It’s really difficult. I’ve never had a more difficult decision to make as a writer. I care so deeply, so it was painful. But you have to make tough decisions and you have to do what’s best to get the film made. I wrote this script for seven years and Chris was in it for a long time. So there was a point where it became clear that if you separate yourself from the emotional connection to the family and to real life, you have to separate and say, okay, well, this is a movie, these are characters, and the movie just cannot withstand another death at that point in the movie.

It became that simple, which is so difficult from a human level, and that was what you grapple with. But from a storytelling perspective, it was right because the film, it wasn’t about just the grief. It wasn’t about the loss. It’s about the absence of grief and the resurrection and how Kevin gets through it. Also, just the nature of their deaths were very similar – all three brothers who committed suicide. So Chris made it into the film in the sense that the character of Mike is a combination of Mike and Chris in some ways.

Right. Because in real life, Mike’s kind of a big guy, but in this movie he’s smaller, like Chris.

Yeah, yeah. And Mike was an incredible athlete as well. He wasn’t great in the ring, but he was an athlete. So there was just a bit more of that with Chris.

When you told Kevin that you had to cut Chris from the movie, how did he react

So it’s funny, one of the reasons I didn’t reach out to Kevin too soon was because I knew I had to make difficult decisions. Coming into it as a fan, I love the guy. So I didn’t want to meet him and love him even more, which is what would’ve happened, because you need to keep some distance and you need to do what’s best for the film. So I didn’t reach out to him until I knew what film I was making. At that point, I had made the decision about Chris, and there was other stuff, too. David had a daughter that died. Kerry had a family. There’s a lot of things that we had to take out to fit it into telling a story in a film.

So I started talking to Kevin when we were in prep and had an ongoing conversation while we were shooting and told him about the story, told him what we were focusing on, and we had a really good communication. Then, finally, the week before showing him the movie, we did a big family Zoom. I’d talked to a lot of them individually, but it was like me and their whole family got together and we Zoomed. I wanted to tell them, okay, these are some of the hardest decisions I made, and this is why. I told him about Chris. And just immediately, Kevin was like, “That makes sense.”

I think how Kevin feels is Kevin survived and he hoped that this movie was going to be about the love of brothers and survival. The message that he lives by is that no matter what, even on your darkest day, you keep fighting, life is worth it. That’s what he talks about a lot. I think he just hoped the movie would be that. So when I told him about Chris and some of the other cuts, he was just totally supportive. He was like, “Yeah, absolutely, it seems like the right choice,” which was a huge relief because I spent a really long time fretting that conversation.

If he would have disagreed did he have any power to stop it

No. No. I just did my best to communicate with them and build the relationship and talk them through everything. Yeah, we’ve become quite close.

When writing this, you had so much to work with, did you ever consider making it a series

Definitely. The writing process is long. And as you’re writing it you are aware of what’s getting made, what isn’t getting made, and you explore ideas. It’s like, do we transition Do we try to look at a limited series or something But, ultimately, I think when I started writing this I felt like it was a movie. I don’t know why. Sometimes I just feel that.

Television was still pretty daring at that point. By the time the conversation came up a couple of years later about whether should we pivot to TV, I was just like, no, television is not a place where interesting things can be explored in an honest way. The balance has tipped back where I feel like television, it’s so bogged down in executives in fear of their jobs as opposed to executives excited by the possibility of how challenging something could be. I feel like, for a while, movies were that and television was this place where you could really explore and do something challenging, and now the balance is back in the film world. I just don’t think that anyone would’ve made this as an interesting series.

What did you learn making this that surprised even you I didn’t know about Kerry’s foot.

Well, I guess when I first started, I only knew a few of the highlights, things that I remembered as a kid, and so I learned it all, I guess. Somehow, I did know about Kerry’s foot. I don’t know why or how. But, yeah, I kind of learned it all at once. I have this great researcher I work with and we put together this timeline pretty quickly of everything we could find. So we had the wrestling timelines and the family timelines. It’s just this epic family story. So it was learning everything at once almost and then the difficult things, like what to include.

Kerry’s time in the WWF is almost its own tragic story…

Yeah, I think his drug use got pretty bad, and I think he had some DUIs. I think he was actually facing some jail time maybe. The horrible thing about his amputation is the way that everyone responded to it, which was to hide it and to not…

Embrace it.

Embrace it. But the wrestling world at the time, there was too much stigma around it. Then that’s something I was really interested in from the beginning. These horrible, toxic masculine values that just aren’t accepting of people as they are and tries to just put them into a box and that box crushes people. I think that’s the real tragedy for Kerry. It’s the response that he got to that and having to hide it and then deal with that pain that he was in with drugs and whatnot.

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