Director Josef Kubota Wladyka and Independent Spirit Award Nominee Kali Reis on Co-creating ‘Catch The Fair One’

When filmmaker Josef Kubota Wladyka discovered his lead actor for Catch The Fair One, he did not find her in an audition or in another film. No; he found Kali Reis in a boxing gym. In telling the story of a boxer searching for her missing sister, Wladyka didn’t just lean on Reis for her blossoming skills as an actor, but also for the heart of the story: the subject of missing and murdered indigenous women [abbreviated in this interview as MMIW]. The issue is close to Reis’s heart, who is of Native American and Cape Verdian descent. It is this engine that drives the film forward, often in harrowing ways.

Wladyka discovered in Reis not only a star for his dark thriller, but a partner in creation. Reis scored a surprise nomination for best actress from the Independent Spirit Awards for her riveting portrayal, and, together, she and Wladyka have shone a light on the grievously underreported plight of women who live on the margins of a nation which was once their own.

Awards Daily: So, I was told this was a boxing movie. This is not a boxing movie. [Laughs]

Josef Kubota Wladyka: It’s funny you mention that, because we liked the idea of people thinking it’s a boxing movie. We worked on the script and story over the course of two years collaborating together. But really the origin and what brought us together is the sweet science of boxing. I myself was really getting into it. This was five years ago. Through a friend’s boxing gym I found Kali. I started to follow her, I started to watch her. It’s one of those things where you just start watching a lot of videos because you just want to see how people do stuff. But then what was really dope to me about her was she used her platform to speak out on things that she really believed in: her motto “fight for all nations,” and what she did for her community, and being this mixed indigenous warrior using her platform. I thought “There is something about this person, I’ve got to meet her.” I was just starting to learn and research about the MMIW crisis in North America. It was becoming more and more prevalent in the news, and I had ideas of a film germinating around it and I knew it was something that she really cared about. So I just wanted to meet her, hang out with her. I took my camera and went up to Rhode Island. I just started interviewing her, and immediately we just vibed. 

I don’t know if it was because we’re both OCD Virgos or because we’re both mixed kids that had similar upbringings and confusions in a way. But the pivotal moment for me really was when (she’s in camp all the time, she’s constantly training, it’s the life of a boxer) …so she was going to work out at her local gym and I was like “Can I come along and just hang out and watch, just be a fly on the wall?” To be around elite athletes like that I think is such a gift in a way. So we get to this archetypal gym. She’s the only gal in the gym. It’s full of all these tough dudes. They start talking junk, and she gets in the ring and she starts sparring them. It’s that inexplicable thing as a filmmaker where you’re like “There’s a movie here. I don’t know what it is, but I want to spend time with her and I want to talk about this and what we’re trying to do with this movie, some ideas that I have. I want to see if she’ll act in it.” Eventually I knew I wanted  to get her perspective and bring her view onto the story and all of the things we were trying to touch on. Over the course of two years we were building all that out; as we were preparing for her to act, as we were sharing stuff that we were both learning, and then we shot in 2019 and five years after we met, we have this crazy movie.

Awards Daily: Kali, you had never acted before. So, when Josef came to you and asked you not only to be in his movie, but to be the lead and carry the film for him, what was your response?

Kali Reis: I’ve been thirteen and a half, almost fourteen years in the (entertainment/boxing) game now and you can imagine what kind of inboxes and emails of great ideas these directors have and hit me up with. When Josef hit me up on Instagram, you know how you can decipher between bullshit and nonbullshit? It was kind of one of those things. He checked out. He sent me a link to his movie and he kind of gave me his resume and I was like “Ok, ok cool.” and then he called me. I remember the first day he called me on Facetime, I was actually at the beach and I was like let me talk to this guy and see where it goes. Immediately, even just the way he approached what he wanted to do and how he asked me if I wanted to act, I was like Ok. Then he came to Rhode Island. Before he came up, I was able to read what he had – kind of a bare bones idea. He started asking me “I just found out about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, I want to know your perspective.” 

What stuck out to me is the fact that he really wanted to tell an important story – something that’s important to myself and the community I represent. But he was very self aware knowing that it wasn’t his story to tell, and he really wanted to do it the right way and get the perspective of the community that this story is about. Normally that doesn’t happen, but I had the opportunity to build the characters and go through it. I don’t know how to write a script, but he would ask me “How would you say this? How would you say that?” At the time I was living with Shelly – I call her my sister/brother – Shelly Vincent (who plays a boxing trainer in the film), and it kind of just grew from there. I’ve always been interested in acting, just being an artist at heart. I just didn’t know. I thought maybe I’d get a cameo in an Everlast commercial, I thought I had to take steps. I put out to the universe that if it’s meant for me, it will find me. A week later he hit me up and then here we are.

Awards Daily: While you play a boxer in the film, that’s really a small part of the story. This is more of a mystery/thriller with a lot of heavy drama – you couldn’t rely all that much on your experience in your profession for most of this movie. How did you get ready to play such a challenging role?

Kali Reis: It’s my nature. There are so many parallels to boxing and the entertainment business. When I’m in that ring I’m on a stage, I have to perform. I’m not the same person I am talking to you now that I am if a bell rings -so don’t ring any bells (laughs). It’s just that mentality. I’ve been involved in boxing twenty plus years now, and that dedication I have to get the best performance out of myself when I’m in that ring was something I knew I needed without Josef even trying to explain it. This is a performance, this is a character. He gave me all this knowledge that he knew as far as direction on set and hitting your mark and all those technical things. Also we worked a lot with him and his friend, going through scenes, acting it out kind of really understanding how you get in the space and get out of the space. Right before we shot, he threw me in a weeklong acting bootcamp. It was a week long with Sheila Gray – I love this woman to death and she really helped me understand what I needed to do. She’s a phenomenal acting coach and I was there for a week of improv and one-on-ones and she was able to fine tune some things so I really understand HOW to prep, WHERE I pull those emotions from, what your job is as a storyteller. 

Going back to my indigenous background, storytelling is how we used to pass down and still pass down information from generation to generation. Also in the time that we are in now things like Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, all the residential school children that are being found, and drilling through sacred lands with pipelines all coming to surface, now it’s time for us to tell our story so we can start healing. My Native name is Mequinonoag. It means “many feathers, many talents” so there’s no sense holding a gift to yourself. If you have them, you give them. That’s how I’m taught. He saw something in me before I saw it and I’m just going to see what I can do with this as well.

Josef Kubota Wladyka: Piggybacking off that, I think we just had to build a lot of trust. I knew very early on, spending time with her and exploring these scenes as we were working and finding stuff, she was just very open to being vulnerable, to take things there. I think being a fighter, there’s also something to that because you have to be vulnerable when you fight as well. As a director, she was a natural in terms of the logistical hitting your mark and all that. I don’t know if it’s because of boxing and peripheral vision or something, but she was amazing at that. She was also so willing to talk about the real emotional stuff and so was i. We trust each other. It was really important to me to explain to her the whole process of how I made my first film and how I work as a filmmaker because I am inspired and like to use real people. When you make a film…this is years and years of your life, and when you do it in that way you get more out of it than just the movie. For me personally, being educated and learning from this person and going through this process where you’re basically like family by the time you make the film, it’s just something I am drawn to.

Awards Daily: Without giving too much away, this film does not end with anything approaching an uplifting conclusion. For all of the naturally entertaining aspects of the film, you clearly decided to avoid concluding the film in a fashion that would, perhaps, give the audience what they want. I feel like you decided to give them what they need.

Josef Kubota Wladyka: It’s a dark movie. It’s unrelenting and we’ve shown it to enough people and done the festival circuit and we know that it really affects people in a very certain way. As the filmmaker, going through that is tough, and I struggled with that sometimes, but I had my partner over here to keep me strong like “No we gotta do it real, we gotta keep it dark.” In some ways you could say it’s not dark enough, sometimes just in terms of the issue it’s really touching on. And then what was also really important for the construction of the story and the character, were all these themes. There was so much to go over about the issue and the bureaucracy of all that (MMIW), but we knew we needed to whittle it down to the emotion, the pain, the loss, the regret, the rage of what this character is feeling and just put it on the shoulders of this character and in her body language and all the action that she does and keep the film focused.

We always talked about “suggest, don’t show” and really avoiding the obvious even in the casting. I always got her opinion on the casting – about how to not make these villains typical of what you would think. There’s a quiet silence to the menace to all the men in the film that I think having her perspective, having my producer’s perspective, also a woman, we had a lot of conversations about that to not make it feel…it could have easily gone in one direction and been heavy handed or just so on the nose, and we were really conscious trying to not teeter into that. The same with the action and the fighting, we wanted it to be primal and feel real. She’s a world-class boxer, but we didn’t want to make her Jason Bourne or something like that. (Laughs)

Awards Daily: In the film, to try and get to the truth of what happened to your character’s missing sister, you have to go through a version of what she likely experienced in being abducted. I know it’s a movie, but with your background, and your involvement in the cause of MMIW, I can’t help but think you felt the weight of these scenes very personally.

Kali Reis: Absolutely. Stepping into this role parallels stepping in the ring. I put my life on the line every time I step in that ring, and I have a bigger purpose outside of myself that I do it for. So you have to be very selfless, which is what I brought to this character because it’s for a bigger picture. This is not a story to fix anything, it’s just a story and a perspective and a creative way to get this issue in front of people. Putting something so bluntly on the news – because they still don’t do it – is going to maybe shock people who don’t want to look. This nation is built on “out of sight, out of mind” and nobody wants to take accountability, but something that is an (accessible) art for everybody is movies. I knew that this had to be done. It was actually a cathartic ride for me. Again, I haven’t experienced a missing loved one so close, like a sister in this fashion, but the energy I feel from all these thousands of families of thousands and thousands of victims and the genetic genocide that has been passed down from generation to generation, I know what that feels like. 

People don’t want to admit there’s a problem or don’t want to talk about how they’re sad, but if you’re relatable it creates a space for them to say “Alright, yes I know how this person feels. Let’s try to heal” so that’s kind of how I kept myself going and also being able to plug myself in to the character. The same way where I’m able to plug in boxing – I know I should have hung ‘em up probably eight years ago, this is a crazy career (laughs) – but I plug into my fighter mode and I have a “Why?” Why am I fighting and why am I making this film with this content. It was really close to home. It was almost like a release and also again being relatable I would hope to think that people from my community can watch this and feel some kind of relief in some fashion that we are fighting for our people. We are fighting to have answers. I would go down on my shield mentally, spiritually, and physically especially when it has to do with something like this that is so important to us.

Awards Daily: Because the film is so dark, and, treading carefully here, the film doesn’t end with what some might call “a success,” did it make it harder to get it made?

Josef Kubota Wladyka: Sure, especially right now. We’re in a pandemic. People want… 

Kali Reis: Happy endings. 

Josef Kubota Wladyka: They want the breezy and listen, I GET IT. I one hundred percent understand. There’s so many people that have been in so much pain for the last couple of years. In fact, we lost someone from our team from this film who we really really loved, the sound recorder Wolf Snyder, because of, I think, the state of the world. I’ve got to give a lot of credit to IFC films for believing in the film, believing in us. Yes, it’s a tough ending to swallow, but we always said that the film had to be unpredictable, but inevitable. There are certain things that we said that we knew it was going to be so that we don’t have a bullshit sort of Hollywood ending, that we do leave the audience in a place of thinking, of reflection. A lot of people who watch the film, it sticks in their head for a while. That said, me personally, I still think because this is a person…we took this really powerful warrior who is a professional fighter and we took her on this crazy ride, but one person isn’t going to overcome what she’s up against. We always wanted to make it really simple. All she wants to do is find her sister and she wants to get back in the ring and fight again. I think that there’s an element of hopefulness in the ending with that as well; a peace to her if that makes sense. 

Awards Daily: I think the film is saying that “the trying” is important.

Josef Kubota Wladyka: Exactly, yes yes yes. See, that’s great. That’s the beautiful thing about films, that it made you feel that way. Each individual audience member who watches it, has a different take away of what it means. I think that’s why we make art. Like Kali said, the film is very much our artistic interpretation, a collaboration, and it’s not perfect. I know it’s not perfect, but what was important to us was to at least be bold and try to take a swing as artists. I think the movies that do that are the most impactful, that make the audience really think and ask questions. We leave so much to the imagination with the audience. We don’t give them any easy answers. The only thing we do is ground them with how she’s feeling and the journey she’s on. That was always a conscious decision for many reasons. 

Awards Daily: I imagine Darren Aronofsky’s involvement with the film helped with bringing the film to fruition.

Josef Kubota Wladyka: Of course. He’s an iconic, legendary filmmaker. New York guy. I love his movies. The Wrestler is probably one of my all time favorite movies. I think having Protozoa and him on board helps bring eyes to the film and it’s great to have that. He also gave really good feedback on the script, but really a lot of what he contributed was more in post when we were in the cut, editing. He’s a very smart filmmaker. A lot of times you get notes on a cut that just feel like they’re network executive notes, but his were never about that. It was so insightful, because he’s a filmmaker. It was thinking about the visual grammage and the editorial language of how certain sequences were put together to just try to nail what we were trying to do even more. He has that eye. 

Awards Daily: So, Kali, do you intend to keep boxing and continue acting?

Kali Reis: Right now I’m in both. I’m the current WBO, WBA, and IBO super lightweight world champion set up to fight for the undisputed titles this year so OF COURSE, I’m gonna still box, but…thirteen and a half years in the game, being thirty-five…When I first started out I just wanted to win a world title and be out by the time I was thirty-seven, thirty-six or so. Right now, like I said, I stumbled across something I fell in love with and have a passion for just like I do with boxing and storytelling, and I believe that this career preserves me a little bit better than boxing does (laughs). I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I love boxing, and I will always be involved in boxing. My husband’s my manager and he oversees over eighty fighters, commentating – I love doing that, so I’ll always be involved in boxing. We just opened up a gym, but any kind of sport comes to an end faster than a career in the entertainment business, you know what I mean? So, I’m definitely going to pursue this full force. Right now I’m juggling both, and then when I have to hang ‘em up, I’ll hang ‘em up, and I’ll be a full-fledged storyteller.

Josef Kubota Wladyka: She’s got agents and managers already. She’s doing her thing. She’s auditioning for stuff. 

Kali Reis: I’ll be alright.

Awards Daily: And how about getting an Independent Spirit Award nomination on your first film?

Kali Reis: I know. That’s like the Lomachenko of the film world. I’m fighting for a world title my first fight, man, what?! That’s pretty awesome. 

Awards Daily: Josef, what’s next for you?

Josef Kubota Wladyka: When you make these independent films, I think what a lot of people don’t understand – especially if you’re the filmmaker – is there’s no money. In fact you lose money, and you make it because of the passion and what you believe in and this inexplicable thing that’s driving you. That’s why, however long this one took, I had to find a way to make it. Television directing is amazing, and I’m so grateful to be able to do it to pay the bills. Now that this one’s done, I gotta go shoot a Netflix show soon. I think I’m supposed to leave at the end of the month and it’s gonna be a crazy shoot. So, I’ll do that. I’m already writing and working on another feature film, another indie film. It’s again gonna be a film that’s probably going to be really hard to finance, but clearly that’s what I’m drawn to, trying to make films about people we  don’t normally see represented on the screen. My goal and dream would be to shoot that at the end of this year, but who knows. We don’t have any money, we don’t have anything set up. But it’s very different from the first two films, I’ll say that. It’s a big detour. 

Catch The Fair One is playing now in select theaters and On-Demand.