Girlfight writerdirector Karyn Kusama began boxing in 1992, when she was fresh out of New York University’s film school. At Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn, a world away from chic Manhattan fitness centers, Kusama started to see boxing as a very pure sport in a way, as controversial as it may be.The ideas and emotions which inform her powerful debut film were germinating at Gleason’s; never more than the first time she sparred with a man.When I was being very tentative with him, she describes, and he was being tentative in response, in terms of throwing out punches, he got me into a clinch and he whispered in my ear, ‘Hit me, you can hit me.’ It was one of those moments that was like a bomb going off in my head. A lot of the appeal of the sport became very clear to me. It’s so much about permission, and this private interaction in a ring that only those two players can really understand.The intimacy of the sport, and its inherent contradictions, informed the creation of Girlfight’s central character, Diana Guzman, a Latina teen living in Brooklyn’s Red Hook projects who finds an outlet for her anger and restless energy in the boxing ring. Diana subsequently enters into a tentative romance with Adrian, a fellow boxer with the same name as Kusama’s sparring partner. Their romance is a combustible mixture of attraction and competition, in part because both characters are true yinyang hybrids.The real Adrian, says Kusama, was this young guy who had a sort of feminine beauty, but he was a very skilled boxer, and I thought it was interesting that his name could be for a woman or a man.

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