When Ben Ratner talks about what drew him to boxing in the first place, there’s little mention of the physicality of the sport: the punches and the gloves; the sweat and the blood; the adrenaline and the crowd and the sound of a body hitting the mat.
Instead, Ratner – writer, director, and star of Ganjy, a short film about an ex-boxer fighting dementia pugilistica – speaks about boxing as something spiritual, soul-stirring, and transformative.
“Boxing is a culture,” says Ratner during a recent interview with Reel People, co-star Aleks Paunovic (Numb), and producer Tony Pantages (3 Days in Havana). “It’s not a sport. Boxing is like jazz. Jazz isn’t a type of music. Jazz is a culture, so boxing, if you feel it in your soul, it never really leaves you.”
Ganjy premieres on Oct. 2 as part of the 35th Vancouver International Film Festival. Ratner stars as the titular ex-boxer, and local actors Paunovic, Zak Santiago (Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency), and Donny Lucas (Wayward Pines) portray Ganjy’s boxing friends who reunite after many years to talk him out of a bug-infested motel room and into a nursing home.
Pantages isn’t a boxer, but “I’m close to a bunch of cowboys, and as far as I know, it’s only boxers and cowboys who would do what they do for the love of what they do knowing that the end game is probably not going to be as pretty if they’d gone to college and become a doctor,” he says. “But you can’t deny that if you love something enough, it’s past your ability to reason with it, and it turns you almost into a philosopher.”
For Ratner, who directed 2013’s Leo Award-winning feature Down River, Ganjy is something he’s been preparing for since he was a 10-year-old kid living in Kitsilano and riding a bus across town to train with the seasoned pros at Hastings Community Centre.
Ratner’s boxing career ended at the 1982 Canadian Junior Championships, but boxing never left him. The years since have been dedicated to showbiz – acting, directing, writing, and teaching – and Ratner says he was motivated to write Ganjy for a number of reasons, not the least of which is “feeling like Ganjy, and feeling like I need to prove that I’ve got a lot of fight in me, and I need to take control of my life, and do something great.”
Paunovic has a similar boxing background to Ratner’s, and similar sentiments about the film.
“I feel like I prepared my whole life for this,” says Paunovic, a champion boxer turned actor whose boxing career ended when he blew out his shoulder boxing for Canada at the 1999 Pan-Am Games. “All of my life experience in the ring, seeing people that we’ve seen: we’ve been preparing through our whole lives, unbeknownst to us, for this moment.”
As far as moments go, Ganjy is right up there with another singular moment, or rather, an evening of singular moments: when Paunovic and Ratner met their idol, Muhammad Ali.
In 2009, the longtime friends wrangled jobs backstage at a fundraising event where they spent a few hours looking after Ali and his entourage: Ratner got The Greatest popcorn and iced tea, and found a stool to put under his feet so that he’d be more comfortable; Paunovic worked security at the stage door. This time with Ali – which was captured in a photo that is central to Ganjy – left its mark on both actors.
“When you meet your hero, and your hero is so vulnerable and you actually have an opportunity to give something to them, and to help him out…” Ratner pauses. “If anybody ever told me, ‘You’re going to help Ali out one day,’ I wouldn’t have thought that possible. And it happened. We ended up being there for him at a time when we were backstage at that event – Aleks and I taking care of Ali and his very small entourage – and that’s with us in the film.”
That theme of caring – for your boxing brothers; for your fellow human beings – is a significant one in Ganjy. “Love was in the air,” says Ratner. “It’s like when you’re working with your friends, you want to love each other while you can, because you know some day you’re going to die. So you’re looking at each other and thinking, ‘this is rare, this is rare that we get to do this.’”
To prepare for Ganjy, the four actors (boxers all) trained like boxers, says Pantages. “They were getting together and working out, the same way that boxers train,” says Pantages. “After each one of their rehearsals, Ben would phone me and tell me what had changed in the story, and it was never the script; it was the moments, and the emotions.”
They filmed over one cold, drizzly weekend in February, in a motel room that Pantages describes as “the most depressing place you could ever imagine having to spend a night.”
The shoot was not without its humour: the crew had to babysit a couple of cockroaches who feature in one of the shots – “The bugs lived on top of our hard drives while we were shooting so they could stay warm enough,” chuckles Pantages – and Paunovic and Ratner had to spend the night in the dismal motel room in order to protect the gear.
But otherwise, the shoot was thick with emotional resonance. Pantages remembers a two-hour stretch where the crew huddled silently behind a monitor in one cramped room while Ratner and Paunovic filmed a climactic scene in the next. “It speaks of the craft when everyone is silent,” recalls Pantages. “No one was talking or whispering. It was a great exercise in watching two people trust each other.”
Paunovic says he called upon the boxers he’d known in his life – his father, his friends, Ali, himself – to inform his character and his interactions with the others.
Every boxer knows a Ganjy, according to Paunovic: the fighter with the most heart who “pushes past the uncomfortable.”
“In a fight process, everybody goes, ‘wow, he won’t stop, he just keeps on going,’ and when a career ends, that’s when that punishment comes back,” says Paunovic. “You feel bad that the person’s going through that, and yet, had they not boxed, we wouldn’t have had those amazing moments watching how we could push ourselves. So there’s love-hate, admiration, and sadness in there.”
Ali passed away in June, when Ganjy was nearing the end of its post-production journey. “That made things even more resonant for us,” says Ratner.
Ratner says he plans to develop Ganjy into a feature-length film. “It’s taken on a life of its own,” says Ratner, whose previous feature, Down River, won Most Popular Canadian Film at VIFF 2013. “Everyone who is seeing the short is encouraging us to make it into a feature.”
Ganjy has its world premiere at the Rio on Oct. 2. It screens before Marrying the Family, the indie comedy from director Peter Benson and screenwriter Taylor Hill.
Tickets at http://mustseebc.viff.org/shorts. More information about the film at https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ganjy-film#/.
