Ben Younger: ​‘I had to bor­row mon­ey out of my mom’s 401k, it’s not a good look’

Motor­cy­cles and movies are Ben Younger’s two biggest pas­sions, but it’s been over a decade since the now 44-year-old New York­er indulged his love of the lat­ter. Back in 2000 his testos­terone-fuelled finan­cial thriller Boil­er Room was being talked up as the most excit­ing debut fea­ture in years. Now he’s back from the wilder­ness with a new atti­tude and a new film, the punchy, crowd-pleas­ing Miles Teller vehi­cle Bleed for This. Just don’t call it a box­ing movie…

LWLies: You’re over in the UK scout­ing for a film about the Isle of Man TT Race. As an adren­a­line junkie, did a box­ing movie just feel like a nat­ur­al fit?

Younger: Box­ing doesn’t do much for me, I’m not a fan. But I don’t real­ly regard this as a box­ing movie. I was actu­al­ly just look­ing for some­thing I could write, I wasn’t think­ing about direct­ing again. I’d tak­en some time off to get my pilot license and I was work­ing as a chef down in Cos­ta Rica, doing some surf­ing, and I heard of this guy’s sto­ry. It just seemed inter­est­ing to me.

There have been a few high-pro­file box­ing movies in the last year or so. Why now?

I sup­pose. South­paw is unwatch­able though. And I didn’t real­ly care for Creed. My approach was: don’t treat it like a box­ing movie, just treat it like an all-time great­est ever come­back sto­ry. Rag­ing Bull is the one for me, but again I wouldn’t call that a box­ing movie.

Scors­ese was an exec­u­tive pro­duc­er on Bleed for This. How did that come about?

He called me in to talk about Boil­er Room a few months before Wolf of Wall Street came out. He told me that he had used Boil­er Room as ref­er­ence mate­r­i­al. It was one of the best days of my life. And then he asked me what I was work­ing on. So I gave him the pitch, he got excit­ed. He asked if he could read the script, so I gave him the script. Then he called me two weeks lat­er and it just went from there. When we were mak­ing the film he was shoot­ing Silence, so I didn’t real­ly see him after that. I hope no one com­pares the film to Rag­ing Bull though.

Is it right that you made this movie for less than Boil­er Room?

Yeah. It was fuck­ing noth­ing, man. And we didn’t even get the amount we need­ed for the 26-day shoot we had sched­uled. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, just some account­ing mix up with Rhode Island, the amount of tax per­cent­age that you think you’re get­ting or some bull­shit. So I stu­pid­ly put my whole salary into the movie, and I end­ed up hav­ing to bor­row mon­ey out of my mom’s 401k. That’s not a good look.

Is it your job to make the most out of what­ev­er bud­get you have?

That’s the fun­ni­est thing, ​’cause you piss and moan and fight for more mon­ey, but if they had giv­en it to me the movie wouldn’t have been half as good. At the time you feel like you’re mak­ing a huge con­ces­sion. You fight tooth and nail for what you think you need but in hind­sight you’re often wrong.

How much of direct­ing is about man­ag­ing egos? Your own included.

It used to be the case a lot more so when I was young. I was com­bat­ive and pret­ty inse­cure back in the day. Inse­cu­ri­ty is the biggest breed­er of the ego.

So why the break?

I felt like I could take five years between movies, like I was fuck­ing Ter­rence Mal­ick or some­thing, and I put all my eggs into this Isle of Man TT movie bas­ket. It was and still is my pas­sion project, but if you’re a young direc­tor in Hol­ly­wood you need to have four or five projects on the go, min­i­mum. You can’t just take your time and only make the thing you want to make. I found that out the hard way.

What kinds of films do you want to make going forward?

After the Isle of Man project I’m going to make a movie about the prison sys­tem in the US. It’s about the pri­vati­sa­tion of the fed­er­al prison sys­tem – a young woman wrote it, and it’s fuck­ing cut-throat, man. Oh, and anoth­er film called Sexed, about monogamy in Amer­i­ca. And a west­ern, called 17 Bul­lets. Hope­ful­ly that will keep me busy for a while.