When sitting down with the cast and director of Bleed for This, – including Ben Younger, Miles Teller, Aaron Eckhart, and Katey Sagal – one truth became resoundingly clear: that aside from wanting to tell the incredible and nearly unbelievable story of Vinny Paz, this independent film was also a result of its own rising from the ashes. With years of effort to get it financed, combined with a three-and-a-half week shooting schedule, hard work and passion prevailed for everyone involved.

“I didn’t make a film for twelve years, which is like having a broken neck in Hollywood.” This is how Bleed for This director Ben Younger mentally dug into Vinny Pazienza’s real-life story and one of the best comebacks in sports history (or possibly of all time). Paz, known familiarly as The Pazmanian Devil, is an Italian boxer from Rhode Island whose career in the 1980s and on resulted in five title championships in two weight classes and a car crash neck injury that threatened to put him out of the ring right when he was hitting his stride. An inspirational story, no doubt, Younger was drawn to writing and directing the film “simply because of the comeback. Vinny won 50 fights and I’m sure to real boxing aficionados that would be an exciting thing. I’m not one of them. For me it was all about the crash and the comeback.”

In the words of Sagal, who portrays Vinny’s mother Louise Pazienza, “What I think is so wonderful about the film is that against all odds, here you have a person that wills his way into what he really believes is his path in life. To me, any kind of human story like that where you do the impossible really opens us all up to what’s possible.”

Considering that this film will be following the likes of Creed, Hands of Stone, and Southpaw all within the past year, it would be safe to say that it will in the very least draw comparison. According to Teller, he personally didn’t have the ghost of other boxing movies going in. “My job on this was just to play Vinny.” Bleed for This shot two years ago and Teller says “at the time we didn’t know [about the other films],” adding, “I finished this movie before Mike (Michael B. Jordan) shot Creed… it’s interesting how people kind of get the same idea at the same time, but for me I was very excited to play a boxer. I didn’t know I would get that opportunity at that point.”

With production beginning as early as it did, with a rushed filming schedule, the timing may have been just right for Younger. Being much more interested in the legendary figure of Pazienza rather than the boxing world, Younger found that with the boxing cliches “those are easier to avoid”, a fact that led him to focus on getting the characters right. “I had faith that when I started rolling camera, I’d pave my own way.” Ironically, Younger didn’t feel the pressure put any sort of damper on the film’s output, saying “in a good way there was too much on the line. If you make a movie every two years then some of them are fairly successful either commercially or critically. You get a few ‘you can screw this one up’ free passes. You go to director jail for six months or whatever they say. But if you don’t make a movie for twelve years, you don’t have a choice. If I didn’t nail this one it was game over.”

Getting it right was an uphill battle for the entire production, especially with only 24 days to shoot. For star Miles Teller, that presented the biggest challenge in getting his physicality up to par. Ahead of the shoot, he spent 8 months on a very strict diet and exercise regime. “I lost 20 pounds, but got down to 6% body fat for the first fight and then Vinny moved up [from lightweight to junior middle]. I started at 168, then had to gain 15 pounds to get to the 183 in two and a half weeks. That is also something very unique to Vinny’s legacy – he and Roberto Duran were the only two guys to win titles in those two weight classes specifically.”

For Eckhart, who plays Pazienza’s trainer Kevin Rooney, the intensive shoot couldn’t have worked out more favorably. “In independent film, you’re not getting all the coverage. Doing everything in two shots and master shots, that means you get to communicate; Everybody’s working at the same time, and that’s better for an actor. We could overlap each other, we can be more natural, and that’s why I think independent film, oddly enough, is a better experience overall for audiences in term s of cinema verite or reality.”

Katey Sagal was equally Zen on-set. “Ben set a very non-panicky tone, as did Miles. There wasn’t tons and tons of footage and retakes. It was a very efficient way that we worked, which as an actor is great, I find. They were able to capture the way the film looks, which is like a documentary in a way.”

Behind the scenes, things were not all sunshine and roses for Younger, who put his entire salary into the film in order to get two more days of shooting. On the one day that his parents visited set, the scene being shot was not working and had to undergo rewrites, and that same day Younger got the unfortunate news from his producers that they were going to have to cut one day off of the shooting schedule. With an unsuccessful day of shooting already underway, he sent everyone home early. “Then I went to a restaurant met my parents for dinner, I had sent them home after we had got that news. It was just too much. So, they sat across the table from me and slid me a check for $100,000 so that I could get the day back. My mom is a social worker. My dad is a math teacher. They are middle class at highest. It was from my mom’s 401k.” When asked if he accepted the money, he confessed “I started crying, I was done. I couldn’t even help it; I was just openly weeping in a restaurant.”

Bleed for This hit close to home for all those involved, and in more ways than one. Aside from Younger making his own professional and financial comeback in the process, the story, along with its film adaptation, was a family affair and took a village. Aside from personal triumph, this is also a story about family and relationships at its core. Both Younger and Teller stress the importance of the support Vinny had around him. When the real Paz came to the set and saw the movie, “he was crying, and not at the parts you would think,” revealed Teller. “He was crying at the dinner scenes around the table, because his parents aren’t around (anymore). It was very touching for Vinny. I’ve gotten to talk with him about it, and that means everything.” Younger added that “we created his family life in a way that moved him. I knew we’d done a decent job, but when he started crying, I was like, ‘That’s it.’”

Finding the right actors to pull off his vision, Younger looked to stars that had that same quality of surprise, that would bring something unexpected to the table. For Miles “I hired him pre-Whiplash. I just loved him in Spectacular Now. Even in his other mainstream, commercial stuff, you can see… in Footloose there are still moments where you go ‘wait a minute, what was that’, combined with the fact that he’s just not a pretty boy.” With Aaron, it “was about finding someone who was respected and [you] know was a great actor, and make them unrecognizable. In every movie I take someone and show you something you haven’t seen. For Boiler Room it was Vin [Deasel] or Uma [Thurman] in Prime.”

With awards chatter surrounding Eckhart’s performance, this risk seems to have paid off. Eckhart, who worked briefly with Teller for Rabbit Hole, dove deep into the mentality of Kevin Rooney in order to build their chemistry. “The trainer-fighter relationship is sacred, there’s so much trust; it’s so dangerous. It’s so vulnerable that you have to have total trust there and the stakes are at the highest level. I have to make Miles look at me like I have the keys to kingdom.”

Eckhart also revealed how he went to thorough lengths in order achieve this strong bond between actors. “As a supporting actor, your job is all about defining your hero, and so very early on, Miles would be in the gym with his trainer choreographing fights and I would come and I would just sit there, and all of a sudden I just picked up the water bottle and started watering miles and started toweling him off, then I would start telling him what to do. As an actor I create my job right off the bat, so nobody gives Miles water but me, nobody towels Miles off but me, nobody massages Miles but me… that way when we’re in the movie, it’s just so natural that he just expects me to give him water and when I come to him he opens his mouth. It’s not like now I’m going to come to him and he opens his mouth, that’s too late, we’ve ruined the reality.”

It is that passion for the characters being portrayed and the story being told that really drove the entire production. Younger had a similar mentality throughout, saying “[Vinny] doesn’t have an arc; he’s all in at the beginning, he’s all in at the midpoint when he crashes, and he’s all in at the end. The reason that it works is that his desire is so strong and I felt that was the thing that centered the movie, and me, and every scene with Miles.”