There could be no more perfect place for the world premiere of The Iron Claw – the story of the true-life tragedy of Lone Star State wrestling legends the Von Erich family – than the Texas Theatre. It’s not just that it’s Dallas’ most storied cinema (the place where Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested, as A-list guests excitedly discussed) but that it’s just five minutes’ drive from the old Dallas Sportatorium, the arena where the Von Erichs were the stars of the nationally televised weekly World Class Championship Wrestling show. Even more suitably, the heavy-hitter cast, including Zac Efron and Jeremy Allen White, waited to take the stage in a dirty back alley – a perfect if inadvertent metaphor for the highs and lows of professional wrestling.
A month later, and with The Iron Claw heading to cinemas as A24’s big holiday release, writer/director Sean Durkin looked back on the night. “It just felt right,” he said. “It’s such a Dallas story, and it’s so about the family and what they meant to that community. It just felt like the right way to do it.” His previous films, 2011’s Martha Marcy May Marlene and 2020’s The Nest, both debuted at festivals, “which can be quite quiet, and I can be quite precious about the screening, and this was kind of raucous. It had a great wrestling energy, and then, in the more tense parts at the end, it really settled down. It was really beautiful.”
“It’s such a Dallas story, and it’s so about the family and what they meant to that community.” – Sean Durkin
Both his earlier films were fictionalized stories, whereas The Iron Claw is his first foray into biographical drama. Well, that’s the story, anyway. In wrestling, there’s a term called kayfabe, where the story the crowd is sold extends beyond the ring, and fact and fiction often end up merging. That’s something Durkin has experienced before: He described the family dysfunction of The Nest as “reflective” of his own unstable childhood, while cult escape thriller Martha Marcy May Marlene “was based on a friend of mine. Almost the entire plot, and what she goes through, was based on her experience.” The biggest difference with The Iron Claw is that central character Kevin Von Erich (Efron) is a public figure, “but I tried not to think about it much differently than I did in my previous work – that you’re dealing with the intricacies of family, and complicated human relationships.”
Durkin’s intention, he said, was to be respectful to both the story and the people involved, but – like the dueling dual nature of kayfabe – those needs could pull in different directions. In the film, there are five Von Erich brothers: Kevin, Kerry (White), Mike (Stanley Simons), David (Harris Dickinson), and Jack Jr., who died as a child. Durkin’s script left out Chris, whose death in 1991 was part of a catalog of tragedies that bludgeoned the family. Durkin said that leaving him out was the toughest decision of his writing career. “I wrote the script for maybe seven years, and Chris was in it for five,” he said. “On a human level, there was no way that I could take him out, but on a screenwriting level I had to look at it as characters on a page.” From that perspective, Chris’ death was just one loss too many, “so what I did was take some of the characteristics of Chris that I found and mixed them in with Mike.”
Interpersonal conflict has been the hallmark of Durkin’s work to date, but wrestling is a new endeavor for him. However, as “a lifelong wrestling fan, writing wrestling came really easy to me,” he said. Yet as a fan himself he knew that “the wrestling community is going to start from a place of wanting to tear it down.” So that’s when he turned to a member of another famous Texas wrestling family, Chavo Guerrero Jr. of El Paso’s Guerreros, as his wrestling consultant. “I told him, this has to be the best. This has to be the absolute highest bar we can get, and the wrestling community has to get behind it.”
And just as kayfabe blends truth and tall tale seamlessly, so there’s a certain logic that Durkin would tell this story. The quiet kid who learned to express his feelings in the uproarious crowds at wrestling shows and learned storytelling while playing with his action figures became the filmmaker who saw the contradictions that tore the Von Erichs asunder. In the ring, he said, “They’re portraying the ultimate acts of feeling. The highest highs, the lowest lows, excruciating pain, and they’re performing all of this for the audience. But when they go home, they don’t get to show that pain. They don’t get to feel those feelings. They have to live in a very tough masculine world that doesn’t allow for an ounce of those true feelings that they’re performing in the ring.”
The Iron Claw is in theatres now. Read our review and find showtimes here.
This article appears in December 29 • 2023.
