Rory Karpf is best known to wrestling fans for creating the incredible Ric Flair ESPN 30 For 30, Nature Boy. It was an in-depth look at one of the greatest performers in wrestling history, and it also told stories that even long-time wrestling fans did not know. It was also another film in the recent surge of wrestling focused films.
Humza Hussain spoke with Rory Karpf about the rise in wrestling films, his experience working with Ric Flair, the perception of wrestling in 2018, and even the possibility of a Hulk Hogan documentary.
Over the last few years, we’ve seen a rise in wrestling documentaries. You directed Ric Flair’s ESPN 30 for 30, there was the Resurrection of Jake ‘The Snake’, and now HBO’s Andre The Giant documentary. Why do you think we are seeing so many wrestling focused films?
I think in the last couple of years, WWE has been more open to working with outside people. For a long time, from what I understand, they wanted to control the narrative, and I know they produced the Andre The Giant documentary. But the fact that they would even want to put something out on HBO is pretty big. They’ve worked with ESPN, not just on the Ric Flair film, but they also did a special on NXT.
To me, wrestling is just a fascinating world because you’re not really sure what’s real and what’s not. These guys live these fascinating lives, and they play these larger than life characters. And what is a character and what’s not? I think there are tons of stories that still need to be told, like Hulk Hogan and Bruno Sammartino.
WWE controls so much of the footage. So whoever is making a film on a big name, they really need to work with WWE on some level because if you saw in the Andre documentary, they had such incredible archive footage. That really helped make the movie.
What made you want to make Nature Boy?
I grew up a huge fan of wrestling, but I think the fact that Ric’s still alive means that you can film with him compared to a subject like Macho Man or Andre The Giant. Also, I found it really fascinating how much he lived his gimmick. Wrestling provided Ric with this outlet to live this crazy life, and I really like the duality of that. On one hand, he’s so admired by people for how he lived his life; I mean they released a rap video with him in it called The Ric Flair Drip. So he’s very relevant.
At the same time, he paid the price when he lost his son. I found him to be a really complex person too. I mean, he was so boastful, but there’s a part of him that has low self-esteem. I just found him to be such a fascinating subject.
Also, he’s arguably the greatest of all time. He kind of checks all the boxes because he was so great in the ring and he was a great talker. He’s also had this real resurgence in pop culture over the last few years that other wrestlers haven’t. His heyday was the nineteen-eighties, and now he’s being quoted, people are making rap songs about him, everybody does a “woo” at sporting events. So in a way, he was ahead of his time.
People have always had a fascination with wanting to know more about their favourite celebrities. In the world of wrestling, especially in the seventies and eighties, fans only saw the stars in the ring. Do you feel like that plays a part in these big mainstream companies wanting to tell these stories about wrestlers? They want to pull back the curtain.
I think so. Now with the current wrestlers, the curtain has been pulled back. You know a lot about their personal lives. They are on social media as themselves not as their characters. But it wasn’t like that in the nineteen-eighties. I think if you’re of a certain age, everyone’s kind of been touched by wrestling at a certain point, and most people know someone like Hulk Hogan. So it kind of transcends whether you even like wrestling now or not.
In the Andre The Giant documentary, wrestling historian David Shoemaker said: “He is at once a real human, but at the same time, he’s a mythological figure.” He was describing Andre, but you could argue that describes a lot of wrestlers from that era. Stars like Ric Flair and Andre are legends, but they have been built up as these mythical figures. Would you agree with that?
Yeah, I do. Especially during that time period too, those guys were so muscular, and they looked like something out of a movie. Guys like the Road Warriors or the Ultimate Warrior; you didn’t see people like that in your everyday life. There are huge wrestlers now like Roman Reigns and John Cena, but you also have guys like AJ Styles and Daniel Bryan. They are more like people you would see in the gym or down the street. They’re incredible athletes, but you can relate to them a little bit more. They’re not necessarily mythological.
As I mentioned before, there are a lot of stories surrounding these wrestlers, and so we think we know everything about them. But in Nature Boy, there’s the now infamous “ten thousand” women line. And it’s something that shocks us, and it’s something we’ve never heard before. Going into that film, did you expect Ric to open up as much as he did?
Well, I did not expect him to say that he slept with ten thousand women. That was a pretty big revelation. I think to his credit, he recognized that the 30 For 30 was something different, and he wanted to do a good job. I told him to tell the truth, and everyone has their own version of the truth. When you’re talking to a wrestler, it can be hard to verify stuff, like the ten thousand women thing. I can’t call women up and ask them if they slept with Ric in nineteen-seventy-eight.
I think he told his version of the truth, and I think he came across pretty genuine, for better or for worse. I’m appreciative. I think it really helped the film, and he was kind of an open book. He never said something was off limits, and we went into a little bit of everything.
We’ve seen interviews with Ric over the years, and you got this sense that he was holding back. That definitely was not the case in this film.
If you look at a lot of interviews that are done with wrestlers, they usually fall into two categories. They’re done by somebody who is very inside the wrestling business like a website, and they are so inside that they talk about things that the casual fan may not even care about. The other side of the coin is someone interviewing them that seems ignorant to wrestling. They’ve never watched it, they kind of look down on it in a way. They are a little condescending even if they don’t mean to be.
I didn’t have notes when I would do the interviews; I knew a lot of stuff off the top of my head. And I think wrestlers like The Undertaker, Triple H, Shawn Michael’s, and Ricky Steamboat, they recognized that I saw their work and respected it, but at the same time, I had questions about it. I remember Steamboat telling me that he had never really been asked this because I was asking him about how tough Verne Gagne’s training was and if it was the toughest thing he’s done athletically.
A lot of these guys do so many interviews that they have canned answers that they just go to. So some of Ric’s best answers were from follow up questions. I tried to dig a little bit deeper.
The fact that you elaborated on things like selling for the casual viewer, really helped the film.
Well, in the film he talks about how he tied a string to a doorway and worked on throwing a punch for three years. So I don’t think he’s ever said that, and that’s something that gets lost in Ric’s story. The partying and the lifestyle kind of overshadow his work ethic. He had a tremendous work ethic, and he took wrestling really seriously. And he was really good at making other people look good, so people wanted to work with him.
I wanted to explore that side of it, how much time he put into wrestling. While he was partying all the time, it never seemed to interfere with his work. He talked about how even if he partied all night, he would always make it to the gym every morning. He never missed a town, he never missed a date, and he really took a lot of pride in being the champion. And I wanted that to come across.
One of the things I find so fascinating about these films is the multiple lives these wrestlers live. It’s almost a different hat for every event, and because of their lifestyle, I think it’s difficult to find people like that outside of the wrestling business. To me, that was one of the things I found so fascinating about Nature Boy. There were so many different stories about Ric as a performer, a husband, how he was too much of a friend to Reid.
I think that’s true in life. You can work with a guy in the office and think he’s a jerk, but he’s somebody’s father or husband, and they like him. I didn’t want people to come on that have a problem with Ric. I thought people like his ex-wife and his children; they had some validity in coming forward with negative aspects of his personality. He’s got good qualities and bad qualities, but I guess it’s up to the viewer to decide which he has more of.
I think it also comes down to whether you can admire someone for their job and not necessarily their personality. I think with our culture, especially with celebrities, we kind of go all in. If we like their movies, we wanna like them as a person.
It’s maybe a morality question which I don’t really know the answer to. Can you still appreciate what someone did with their performance or craft, but not necessarily admire them as a person?
When I interviewed Diamond Dallas Page about Nature Boy, he said that Jake ‘The Snake’ Roberts was originally supposed to be interviewed for the Chris Laettner 30 for 30 that you directed, but he turned it down. Do you feel like if you interviewed Jake, that you would have made a film about Jake and not Ric?
That’s a pretty good question. I was looking to have someone that portrayed a villain for that Chris Laettner film. Jake lived in Atlanta, so I simultaneously reached out to both of them. He wanted to do the interview, but the timing didn’t work out. We wanted to do something quickly, and we only had a couple of weeks to do it, and Ric was available.
That was what led to the film about Ric. Ric’s appearance in the Laettner film got such a huge reaction online. He appeared in one interview byte in the entire film, and it garnered such a huge reaction. To ESPN’s credit, they noticed that and wanted to do something with it.
For the longest time, professional wrestling was something the mainstream world was not overly fond of. Do you feel that with more wrestlers starring in big Hollywood films and these documentaries coming out, we are seeing a shift in the way people look at wrestling?
I do. I think a lot of that is because the curtain’s been pulled back. I think people for the longest time looked down on it because they felt like the wrestlers were trying to put one over on them. Almost like insulting your intelligence. You can watch it and know something is not on the up and up, and yet people are telling you its one hundred percent legitimate and not planned out ahead of time. So I think there was a little bit of goofiness.
Now, the WWE also has some incredible athletes. I mean they are getting people that are great football players, and even someone like Ronda Rousey. So I think there’s a real appreciation now for how much skill these athletes have, and the fact that they can be great talkers. People kind of value wrestling for what it is, almost like a movie. So I do think there’s a lot more respect.
Now it feels like films are being made about wrestling not because it portrays the sport in a bad way, but it’s just because the wrestling world has content that can make really good cinema.
I think that’s also because, after the Attitude Era, wrestling was in a real lull. Now I think there’s a big resurgence going on, and I think maybe it’s a credit to Triple H because they’re bringing in so many different kinds of wrestlers now. For the longest time, there seemed to be no one below six feet tall. Now there’s an influx of all these different talents, and NXT is so incredible, and the women’s division is so good.
I also want to mention that Triple H was so great to work with on Flair. He really was a champion for the film, and it probably would not have happened without him. I think he’s a really great guy for them to have. He’s a wrestler, and he also knows how to be in a corporate environment. He was also a fan growing up, and that really matters.
You can see how important Triple H was to the film when watching it. He tells a lot of important stories.
For sure. He really values the wrestling side of wrestling. He’s been credited with bringing back Bruno Sammartino and Ultimate Warrior, and also bringing in Sting. I think sometimes he doesn’t get enough credit for all the things he’s done over the last few years. From what I understand, NXT is like his baby, and that’s sometimes better than the main show.
I had lunch with Sean Waltman, and he told me that coming up a lot of wrestling trainers were kind of like bullies, and they were usually guys that didn’t make it in the wrestling business. When I visited NXT and the training facility in Orlando, it was a very positive environment. It was almost like you were visiting an NFL combine.
Is there a current wrestling star that you would like to make a film about?
I would love to do something on The Rock, he’s still somewhat dabbling in the world of wrestling, and I find him really interesting. And I still go back to Hulk Hogan. There hasn’t been a proper film done on him, and I really hope that he goes back to WWE. Granted, he made a mistake, and he made some vulgar comments. But people make mistakes, and he apologised.
If Mel Gibson can come back, and direct movies and star in movies after the thing things he did. I think Hulk Hogan can apologise and return to WWE. That’s where he belongs, and he is wrestling for a lot of people, including myself. How many people were involved in both boom periods of wrestling? He was the face of the nineteen-eighties, and he was kind of the face of the Attitude Era with the NWO.
I just don’t know at this point what people want from him. He seems very humble, and I think fans would love to have him back in the fold. So I hope he comes back, and I hope there’s a film done on him where you can encapsulate his whole life.
Originally published for Total Wrestling Magazine in August 2018
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