Superfly was the nickname of a boxer going by Tony Browne. It was designed as a fly-on-the-wall day in the life of an extraordinary lifestyle.

It helped him gain notoriety, sponsorship and recognition. It had a dedicated following week to week from the boxing-interested public in Dublin. Eight episodes, ten to twenty minutes each.

A gym I knew nobody in

What I found tricky initially was ingratiating myself within a culture and a gym that I didn’t know anyone in, and trying to simultaneously maintain relationships with all the different people associated with him while also getting raw and interesting footage.

Finding the story in the evenings

It would end up that I would follow him around for the day and then find the story in the evenings.

It was always filmed in the lead-up to a fight, so it would be elements of his training. Family and friends in one of them. His history. The difficulties of training, weight cuts, good days, bad days, how you handle them.

It taught me how to project narrative and find stories within a documentary.

Quiet moments in the car

Sometimes Tony would have a bad spar, and he would be down and wouldn’t want to talk to camera. He wanted the camera around.

Rather than forcing him to work for the camera, or to make himself act in a way that he wasn’t feeling, I would just let him sit. We would have quiet moments in the car where I’d just be filming, and he would populate the silence with things that would distract but would also give a certain amount of internal revelation, because of the distance between what we were seeing and what he wasn’t saying.

Just me and a camera

It was made on a shoestring budget. Just me and a camera, no crew. Day to day, he’d collect me from my house and we would tour around shooting.

It didn’t really cost me anything. But producing something within such a small time period, and editing through the night to get something up for the next day, is a difficult task.

It’s on the site because it is some of the most cinematic stuff I’ve shot, in my opinion. Boxing is intrinsically cinematic. It was a human story. There were some great narratives in there. The stakes are always real with boxing, and it was hard to do.