MICKEY ROURKE : l'homme blessé
"Mickey Rourke: The Wounded Man" is a 52' documentary film about Mickey ROURKE's painful path from boxing to cinema.
The structure of this film, written and directed by Laetitia MASSON, is based on an ambitious narrative exercise that sequences the film into 4 rounds. Like a tragedy, Laetitia MASSON methodically constructs a story in which Mickey Rourke's films and what happens in the ring when he fights are intimately intertwined. Traumatized as a child, as a young boxer, then as a promising young comedian and finally as a successful actor on the edge of a cliff, he returns to boxing for reasons no one understands.
This tragedy of Rourke's life, with its archive footage, interviews and film excerpts, is yet another example of Laetitia Masson's characteristic creative independence.
We, you, you, they, would be drawn in by her incredible talent for encountering the intimate, the delicate and the strange truth about Mickey Rourke.
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A documentary by Laetitia MASSON based on an original idea of Brigitte COQUELLE
Coproduction: REDSTONE & RnB!FILMS
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A few words from Brigitte COQUELLE
"Following a little more of the path that makes up an actor's art can lead to another dimension where the artist and the human reveal a 3rd character.
Marilyn Monroe immediately springs to mind, a woman who continues to fascinate not so much as a sex symbol and actress, but as an unknown woman whose image is taking shape as a result of the many investigations that have been carried out into her life.
The Actors Studio method is no stranger to this phenomenon. “Making your character exist, recreating organically (through the senses) all that there is to recreate in order to truly experience imaginary circumstances through your emotional memory”, was not without danger for Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift or Marlon Brandon.
This was also the case for Mickey Rourke".
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When I first saw Mickey Rourke in a movie, I was 17. He was 31. It was in FF COPPOLA's Rumble Fish, a singularly shaped film in which Mickey Rourke plays Matt Dillon's older brother, and I remember a shot of him arriving on a motorcycle with a melancholic smile, a modern beauty, and above all a soft voice that contrasted with his bad-boy side. I immediately found him intriguing: neither too handsome, nor too raw, he had an ambiguous grace, a kind of candor mixed with darkness that gave him an unprecedented mystery. I didn't yet know where he'd come from, or what his destiny would be, I didn't yet know what his suffering was, I didn't yet know that he was entering the Hollywood spotlight as if on a Ring, and that for him, the battle was beginning. Nor did I know that this metaphorical fight would become real, that one day he would give up cinema to take up boxing. It was only when I saw him gradually disappear from the screens in the 90s, then come back almost 20 years later, wounded, destroyed by real blows, but still there, still standing, still ready to fight, that I understood that his life had taken on a tragic dimension that deserved to be told in a film one day, and that his films, seen again in the light of his downfall, in a way told the story of his life.
He wrestles with his inner enemy and loses what he has left to lose.
- Laetitia MASSON
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"I have to stay clean every fucking day because of the monster that lives inside me.
I don't want to wake this asshole . He's out of control. Every day he wants out."
- Mickey Rourke