“It was strange and thrilling,” he tells EW.
“I sent two texts.
I’m like, ‘Somehow we are trending on Netflix.’
Hugh Jackman and Evangeline Lilly in ‘Real Steel’.Melissa Moseley/DreamWorks
An airport meet-cute
HUGH JACKMAN (CHARLIE): I remember meeting Shawn in an airport lounge.
What city was that?
SHAWN LEVY (DIRECTOR):It was New York, and we were strangers.
Atom and Zeus robots from ‘Real Steel’.DreamWorks
I believe we were both with our families.
I could see he was a phone-charger short.
JACKMAN: I didn’t have anything; my phone was about to run out.
Sugar Ray Leonard advising Hugh Jackman on his boxing stance in ‘Real Steel’.Mark Fellman/DreamWorks
I asked Shawn [for a charger], and we never stopped talking and became friends.
I remember, finally, Shawn said, “I’ve got it.
I’ve got the thing for us.”
Hugh Jackman’s Charle Kenton walks out the robot Ambush for a carnival brawl against a bull.DreamWorks
LEVY: The script was good, but it was definitely about boxing robots.
JACKMAN: And we met here.
Didn’t we meet at my place [in New York]?
Anthony Mackie and Hugh Jackman in ‘Real Steel’.Melissa Moseley/DreamWorks
So, we met at Hugh’s place.
I was a decade younger; I was a decade less experienced.
I’d done theNight at the Museummovies, but that was all poppy family comedy.
Shawn Levy standing behind the robot Atom on the set of ‘Real Steal’.DreamWorks
This movie is not that.
Going to pitch Hugh the movie was one of those nerve-wracking trips.
I would go back to that apartment many times after that initial meeting.
Hugh Jackman and Dakota Goyo in ‘Real Steel’.DreamWorks
I probably did that seven, eight times.
The whole thing was all predicated on the last round of the last fight.
It has to be Hugh Jackman shadowboxing and getting his redemption moment, not just for himself.
More importantly, his kid needs to see it.
I just got goosebumps talking about it.
JACKMAN: I think we got goosebumps there at my dining room table.
LEVY: We did have a conversation early on about the haircut.
That was our very early meeting.
I want him to feel like an everyman.”
I didn’t mean any of that because we’re still a movie after all."
I mostly hired you because I was lonely.
Evangeline and I couldn’t be the only Canadians onReal Steel.
DAKOTA GOYO (MAX): It was a big thing.
There were about four auditions, two on tape and then two in person, if I remember correctly.
At 10 years old, you are not too nervous.
Everything is taken care of for you.
I walked out of there probably the happiest a 10-year-old could possibly be.
LEVY: I remember the kids who almost got the part, some of whom are now famous.
But Dakota was beautiful in a Spielberg-ian, Amblin [Entertainment] way.
That is the formula ofReal Steel.
JACKMAN: Dakota is a really, really great kid.
He’s not a kid anymore; he’s the age of my son.
I was always aware it’s his first [big] movie.
He’s on a massive Hollywood set; there are thousands of extras.
I just knew that this situation only works when everyone’s relaxed, everyone’s comfortable.
And if you’re 11, you’ve got to have fun.
We did the scene, and I noticed that Dakota would mouth every other line.
I was like, “Buddy, buddy, hold on.
You don’t need to say Hugh’s lines.
He’ll take care of the words he says.
You just have to say your words.”
By the time Levy approached Lilly to be inReal Steel, she was ready to leave acting.
It was you sitting there across from me in a chair, and you just were all heart.
It was the first time I felt really like my ideas were being heard.
I would come to a scene and say, “Here’s what I’m thinking.
I think this is how I want to play it.”
I think you could credit him to a certain degree for the fact that I’m still acting today.
LEVY: I feel like I should be sharing directing credit onAnt-Man and the Wasp.
I feel like Peyton Reed should be sending me half of his residuals, right?
I really wanted to show that this woman lives and breathes these robots.
Like, somebody bringing a really cool but busted-up car into a mechanic’s shop.
Everybody else in the room might be going, “Wow, look at that hot rod!
That’s so cool.”
The mechanic’s going, “How am I going to fix this?
I know I can fix this.”
But mostly, it was about being loose enough on the day.
We could do part 10."
I wanted it to be like theFast and the Furiousseries.
I was coming from another job, so I came in late.
It really opened the door for me to just relax and be myself.
Even some of the crew I knew.
LEVY: Those were real, 9-foot-tall robots with puppeteers who move them with remote controls.
It gave the actors, especially Dakota, the magic of looking into that machine’s eyes.
It’s all over that movie.
There was no other way to put it.
It was just real.
JACKMAN: Wasn’t that Steven again?
Didn’t he say what he learned onJurassic Park?
LEVY: Yes, good memory!
That was more good Steven advice.
But it was not cheap.
I remember upfront, Snyder and Steven told me what the budget had to be.
I’m not one of these directors who wants to play this cat-and-mouse game with the budget.
It was going to cost an extra $1,000.
They gave me a little extra money for that.
I always recommend it to younger filmmakers and to my children.
MACKIE: You saw the grandiose nature and how massive these things were.
It’s like watching a heavyweight fight, when heavyweights were heavyweights.
When George Foreman came in the room, everybody knew who George Foreman was.
He’s a bear of a man.
You look at these robots, and it’s the exact same thing.
They had metal sparks flying.
So we were getting real-time views, and you could see if we were off [the marks].
So, just duck occasionally."
I thought, the poor visual effects [team] got to go around this bad acting.
LEVY: We made a bible.
It was for every robot, what year it was designed, who designed it.
This would probably be helpful if I ever succumbed to the endless requests for a sequel.
It’s not even that we took it seriously.
We thought it was really cool.
MACKIE: It was likePokemoncards almost, where you’re reading about these different robots.
And he does this, that, and then that."
All the robots were so very different because they were scrapped together.
And there were so many different arenas that the robots fought in.
Pour some Sugar on Ray
Ray Charles Leonard, a.k.a.
former professional boxer and Hall of Famer “Sugar” Ray Leonard, served as an advisor onReal Steel.
He showed Jackman some moves and worked on the movements for the robot fights.
I actually have video somewhere.
We’re like, “Come on, Ray!
Show us something.”
JACKMAN: Yeah, that was a huge role.
I asked him, “Any of your kids box?”
And he goes, “Dude, no champion came out of Beverly Hills.”
And I was like, “Got it.”
It’s the people who were in the back seats in the stands.
It was really fun to just be able to hang out with a living legend.
He said, “You sleep the most, you work out the second most.”
JACKMAN: Shawn gave me a CD of the music that he imagined for the movie.
With most movies, you don’t always get the money for that.
But that opening song, I was sitting in the truck, and it was so moving to me.
LEVY: I learned certain key lessons about being a producer from the way Spielberg produced me.
I gave it to Hugh.
Hugh was there listening.
Then after about 30 seconds, I said, “Action.”
And he drives a truck.
Steven Spielberg was directingWar Horsein the U.K. And so it was Spielberg who didn’t just watch dailies, and watch every take.
He watched before I even called action, and he found this moment that is in the movie.
JACKMAN: Let me reveal what I was thinking about.
It’s apropos of the theme of the movie.
I was waiting there and I knew I had time [before filming].
A thought flashed through my head about my dad, just out of nowhere.
The song brought that up.
If you want to go back and watch the DVD, that’s what’s going on there.
Kevin Durand [who plays boxing promotor Ricky] was on day one, and he was so good.
JACKMAN: The last day we shot at that fun fair, there was a tornado.
I had never experienced a tornado.
“Everyone off set!”
We had a Ferris wheel.
Off the Ferris wheel!"
I was in my trailer, and everyone just bolted.
Oscar’s there; my son was 10 or 11.
He was like, “Dad, is that…?”
I said, “Everything’s fine.
Don’t worry.”
In ran my stand-in, Taris [Tyler].
He is from Australia [and] never encountered a tornado.
He ran into my trailer without seeing my son.
“Oh my God!
There’s going to be a tornado!
It’s going to be huge!”
And he sees us, he goes, “Yeah, I mean, like inWizard of Oz.
There’s a tornado in theWizard of Oz, and everything’s fine.”
Oscar’s like, this is the worst acting I’ve ever seen in my life.
The robot boxing underworld
Filming continued around the Detroit area.
That was a 100-year-old Model T. Ford plant.
That was the energy that we got from those extras in those real venues.
I feel like one of the most forgotten iconic people in the history of showmanship is Don King.
Really hype this crowd up, like you’re selling them the best thing in the world."
This guy [Finn] really is like the Suge Knight of underground boxing.
There was a few things I tried to do that he said was too much.
That was just Anthony coming out.
So, he had to tone that down a little bit.
GOYO: At some point, it felt like life or death.
It’s not like they just slung me off the edge.
At 10 years old, I was scared.
There was a lot of preparation.
I would really enjoy going down that slide.
At a certain point, it became fun for me.
This is work."
LEVY: It’s the most Spielberg-ian moment.
I didn’t even try for it to be, but it’s so Steven.
It’s also now veryStranger Things-ish, which is weird.
I now realize that I just keep revisiting these magic childhood moments.
It’s like E.T.
I look back on it.
Dakota had no self-consciousness.
You’re just having fun.
So, honestly, there was no confidence issues whatsoever.
She did that as a favor.
She was a choreographer when she was first coming up.
I do remember there’s an energy and electricity in those arenas.
JACKMAN: I loved that final sequence.
I got some serious air on that final last punch, and I get it in slow-mo.
LEVY: No, you did get air.
LILLY: I can’t remember why, but I was gone, and then I was called back.
In the meantime, I had gotten pregnant.
There was a spattering of, I think, 200 extras around me.
I’m in this enormous auditorium, and it’s like echoing-ly empty.
I had no Hugh to watch, no Dakota to watch.
There’s nothing else going on, and I felt a little bit like a lunatic.
But then, watching the movie became a double treat because I didn’t know what to expect.
I didn’t know how it would all work.
That final scene, to this day, will choke me up every time I watch it.
She gets so emotional and so intense in the way she cheers.
She is the grace note in the evolution of that fight.
I’ll never forget this moment.
I could barely say “cut” because my throat was so tight with my own emotion.
It was just as I dreamt it.
GOYO: What a great metaphor!
It’s a line I wrote for Evangeline.
“He was something.
He was beautiful.”
For me, it was never about Atom winning.
We came up with this idea of the people’s champion.
Atom always lost, but we needed to give the audience and the characters some kind of victory.
They only care about Max and Charlie and Atom.
LILLY: It’s funny what you said about that beautiful scene.
That was the audition scene for me, and they say audition scenes are cursed.
I believe that to be true.
I knew when I did it, the thing that’s supposed to happen happened.
GOYO: I think it’s got the same beauty as the very firstRocky.
The journey is always going to be a hard fight, and you are not always going to win.
The lessons that you get from it will help you in the future.
LILLY: I love that he doesn’t win.
If you have love around you, that’s all you really need for a perfect ending.
The Real Steel cinematic universe?
How far did aReal Steelsequel get?
JACKMAN: The sequel never happened because I don’t believe in them.
Are we sure we can top it?
We never got to that draft.
Then also, just being honest, the movie made like $300 million.
That was never the spirit of it.
So we did well, but not well enough.
It wasn’t like we had $500 million and a sequel was a no-brainer.
So, the economics were on the bubble; we didn’t have the perfect script idea.
MACKIE: I’ve always advocated for a sequel.
So just do the movie just so it’s possible for you to sell the toys.
It’s a great business opportunity.
I’m sure Dakota is 20-something years old.
Him being a kid and showing the relationship with his dad is kind of out the window.
But it’s funny, I think the possibilities are endless.
I always thought about the idea of going to the underground world and seeing what the reality is.
I feel like you’re free to do aMad MaxmeetsReal Steel, and I could be Tina Turner.
That’s for kids.
I think that would be a great storyline.
Quotes have been condensed and edited for clarity.
