Director David Mamet on the set of Redbelt Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

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The whole gang of David Mamet regulars, including Ricky Jay, Joe Mantegna, Rebecca Pidgeon, and David Paymer are back for Redbelt, but mostly in pop-up supporting roles as a sop to the long-time fans. This time the stage belongs to Chiwetel Ejiofor, who first gained attention for his work in 2002's Dirty Pretty Things. Ejiofor is Mike Terry, an L.A.-based martial arts expert who devotes his energies to training students and shuns the idea of putting his skills to use in competitions. When a series of unexpected events leads Terry to get sucked into the Hollywood machine, he gains some new insights as well as a thicker skin, while also getting pulled along towards doing what he wants least — competing. Premiere recently had the opportunity to chat one on one with Mamet about the film's noirish undertones, its particular view of the Hollywood system and the reality of fighting with one hand tied behind your back.

After I saw the movie, I thumbed through "Bambi vs. Godzilla" to look for something on the fight movie as a genre, but you don't really touch on that. Does it have unique themes? Have you put down your thoughts on that?
No, I haven't. That's a real good question. I think it's a subgenre of film noir. Film noir is a combination of violence and irony. In tragedy and comedy, we are cleansed; salvation comes from an unexpected corner in comedy or it comes from the cleansing of our soul in tragedy and we understand the nature of the universe and that God is good. In film noir, although the hero is defeated we aren't quite sure what the nature of the universe is. So there's kind of an asterisk about whether or not good wins and the fight film is, you might say, film noir aspiring towards the cleansingness of tragedy more than regular film noir. In regular film noir Sterling Hayden pulls off the perfect heist, the suitcase falls off the thing because a little poodle runs and all the money flies away. His girlfriend says "Run" and he says "What's the use?" In film noir, it's an individual fighter against a hostile universe, but at the end there is some redemption in every film noir. A perfect example of a film noir fight film is Night and the City, the original Jules Dassin film.

Chiwetel Ejiofor as Mike Terry in Redbelt Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

Redbelt struck me at times like a screenwriter's story, not only because of Mike's foray into the world of filmmaking, but also the scene between Mike and his prospective student Laura (Emily Mortimer), where she admonishes him for "telling" instead of "showing" her, forcing him to demonstrate his craft.
Well, I think that finally we can only tell stories about ourselves. Just as every character in the dream is the dreamer, every character in a drama is the dramatist. I thought about that often, but not about it from Emily's point of view, but from Chiwetel's point of view. We all have this beautiful vision of the universe and how pure we are and so forth and sometimes we can even sustain that vision but we can't sustain it unless we can control all the variables. So, it's easier to be pure in a monastery than it is to take the monastic vision and get out into the real world and start mixing it up.

He gets to mix it up when he visits the movie set with all of those craftsmen, the self-starters doing the hard work. That seems to be you telling us he's good people because he fits in there.
I think that's absolutely right. To me that's a very wonderful moment in the movie. He's welcomed onto the set and the "Boom Boom" Mancini character says "Hey, come on over here." It's like, all religious people, all clerics undergo a crisis of faith, periodically. They say, "Lord, I want to serve you and it's so easy to serve you in the seminary, in the shiva, but it's impossible to serve you trying to be out here with all of these human beings," but that's what the cleric is there for, moment to moment. I think every profession, every dedicated profession, whether it's the priest or the cop or the fireman or the teacher or the doctor, they say, "Lord, I think you missed the boat here in making people so goddamn complicated. I could help this kid if he'd only stop squirming."