The director of Miguel Wants to Fight tells us how anime changed his life
Miguel Wants to Fight,Hulu’s new comedy from director Oz Rodriguez (Vampires vs. the Bronx), begins with a bunch of high schoolers wondering out loud whether the hero of One-Punch Man, a man so powerful he can defeat anyone with a single punch, would have trouble beating off. It’s a pitch-perfect bit of high school humor, not really that funny, but also not delivered in a way that’s meant to get laughs. It’s just teenagers idly trying to amuse themselves, edging their conversation toward something sexual to stave off boredom.
That moment from Shea Serrano and Jason Concepcion’s script also immediately signals what Miguel Wants to Fight is all about, for anyone who doesn’t believe the title. It’s not really a sexual movie, but it’s structured like a sex comedy, with the eponymous Miguel (Tyler Dean Flores) trying to lose his “fight virginity” before his family moves out of town as his anime- and action-movie-obsessed friends try to help him out.
Ahead of the movie’s release on Hulu on Aug. 16, we chatted with director Oz Rodriguez about Miguel Wants to Fight’s many anime references, the appeal of action movies to marginalized groups, and how to find just the right amount of humor in a movie about kids wanting to fight.
Polygon: So were you trying to make a movie with the most anime references ever? There are a lot of them!
Oz Rodriguez: Oh, man. I will be honest: My knowledge is more in action movies. But talking to the kids [in the movie], and the second-unit director, Chris Collins — he loves anime — slowly anime just started becoming a part of the process. Shea and Jason wrote the One-Punch Man conversation in the beginning, and that led to: Should we just go out and have an anime thing in this? And we worked with
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