Karyn Kusama on the ‘wonderful and painful’ process of revisiting Girlfight for Criterion

polygon.com:

Not every filmmaker gets their debut feature enshrined in the Criterion Collection. But not every filmmaker’s debut feature packs the punch Girlfight does.

Decades after release, Karyn Kusama’s debut movie, Girlfight, still holds up — it’s no surprise that it launched her career as a director of subversive horror drama (Jennifer’s Body, The Invitation) and memorable television (Yellowjackets, Halt and Catch Fire, The Man in the High Castle), along with launching Michelle Rodriguez as a star. Girlfight is coming to the Criterion Collection on May 28, with a brand-new 4K digital restoration supervised by Kusama, new interviews and commentary from the director, and a slick new cover by Jillian Adel.

Girlfight, the story of a troubled high schooler who takes up boxing in secret as an outlet for her frustrations, aches with high school emotions in and out of the boxing ring. At the same time, it subverts boxing-movie tropes. Rodriguez plays Diana Guzman, a teenager who’s frequently in trouble for fighting at school and alienated from her father (Paul Calderón) at home. When she tries boxing in secret to get some of that tension off her chest, she shows a real talent for the sweet science. At the gym, she meets a boy (named Adrian, making Diana the Rocky in this equation) and a new father figure in her trainer (Jaime Tirelli).

Making Girlfight was a long process for Kusama, who wrote the movie after taking up boxing herself in 1992. Production companies begged her to cast a white woman in the lead role, but she stood her ground, insisting on a Latina lead and finding Rodriguez in an extensive audition process focusing largely on non-professional actors. After financiers backed out two days before pre-production in 1999, legendary filmmaker (and Kusama’s former mentor) John Sayles and his creative partner and producer Maggie Renzi stepped in and helped fund the film.

Polygon spoke to Kusama on a video call ahead of the movie’s Criterion release. We spoke about revisiting