‘There Were Punches I Didn’t Want to Pull’: Why Dev Patel Needed to Make ‘Monkey Man’

All Dev Patel knew was: The man was wearing a rubber monkey mask. Past that, everything else was a mystery.

The 33-year-old actor had this image stuck in his head. There’s a young man, sweaty and battered, standing in a crude wrestling ring located in what Patel excitedly describes as “the armpit of India.” There’s a crowd there, already whipped into a frenzy. They’re screaming, howling insults, throwing garbage at the fighter. He seems unfazed by all of it. Then the figure pulls out that simian mask, slips it on and puts up his dukes. Patel had no idea how this character in his mind’s eye arrived at this moment of reckoning. He just felt like the moment was so visceral, so intense, so palpably real to him, that he could not shake it.

Patel was a lifelong lover of action movies, ever since he’d snuck down the stairs as a child and caught scenes from a Bruce Lee movie playing on his parents’ TV set. Over the years, his cinematic diet had included any number of movies featuring kinetic stand-offs and limb-blurring fight sequences from South Korea, Hong Kong, Indonesia, India and, occasionally, Hollywood USA. He sensed that this imaginary brawler was a hero who “would take a beating for a living, but he was righteous. All that masochism was tied up in trauma. It was just a question of: What was this person’s trauma? But I could sense it. It felt like a sort of starting point for …something.”

As for the mask, Patel had not yet connected it to the stories that his grandfather would tell him when the family went to visit the elderly man in Kenya. But later, he’d recall the stories of Hanuman, a mythological character in the Indian epic Ramayana known as “the Monkey King” who led an army of warriors in battle against demons. He represented strength, honor and courage; go to any gym in India, Patel says, and you’ll see Hanuman’s picture on the wall. The mask may or may not have been a subliminal nod to this figure who loomed larger than life in his imagination as a child, but eventually, the line between the two — a mythic superhero and a guy in a mask — would make itself explicit.

“But at first, I just wrote those two words down: ‘Monkey Man,’” Patel recalls. “I had no idea where it would lead or what it meant. But now …” He laughs, as his face registers a sort of wide-eyed shock and he gestures at a poster of his silhouette, framed ominously in a doorway against a red background. “It led to this.“

Both Dev Patel’s directorial debut and his bid for entry into the action-hero pantheon, Monkey Man follows his character — an underground fighter known only as “the Kid” — as he infiltrates the inner workings of a club catering to the big city’s elite. He’s got revenge on his mind and a target, a corrupt police chief (Sikandar Kher), in his sites. As the reasons for his vengeance become clearer, the scope of his rage expands — soon, he’s taking on not just one villain but an entire caste system rotting from the top down and rife with religious exploitation.

Patel originally envisioned this idea of a man in the mask, fighting to avenge a childhood trauma, as a potential role for himself. Eventually, he’d become the film’s co-writer and director as well as its star, going through the looking glass from longtime action-movie fan to first-time co-ordinator of fists-and-feet-of-fury chaos. “I’ve loved this genre for so long, and have felt like it never quite gets its due,” Patel says, leaning forward and practically vibrating off the hotel couch he’s sitting on. “There have been a lot of incredible action movies over the past decade, don’t get me wrong. But as a fan …it’s like watching a girl you you’ve always admired, or been madly in love with at school, who’s always dating the wrong guys or are constantly with people who treat her badly. I’m like, ‘You’re way too good for them. You deserve better. You are worth so much more!’”

After that initial image presented itself to Patel around 2014 or so, and the Oscar-nominated actor wrote those two words down, he filed the idea away. But he kept bringing it up to folks around him, describing random scenes or detailing how a fight in, say, a restaurant’s kitchen might play out via certain camera angles. “He’d be describing takes of this movie in his head in between takes of the movies he was acting in,” Jomon Thomas, Dev’s longtime producing partner, says. Certain elements would come and go — for a long time, Patel says, the bad guy was an industrialist — but he had the basic concept and what was more or less a three-act structure down pat.

Eventually, he hired a friend of his, Paul Angunawela, to write a screenplay. After several months, Angunawela pulled him aside. “He told me he’d been struggling with it, and nothing was really moving,” Patel recalls. “He was like, ‘This movie is already in your head. You’re the one that can get out of there and onto the page.’ I stopped taking jobs, settled in L.A. and then we’d go to this cafe in Koreatown, eating two ramens a day and Korean BBQ at night, then just wrote like fiends for a year.” (Both Angunawela and Hotel Mumbai’s John Collee are credited as screenwriters; Patel has a “story by” credit.)

Once the script began to shape up, Patel reached out to Neill Blomkamp, who he’d worked with on 2015’s Chappie. The South African filmmaker was intrigued by the movie that Patel was describing in great detail, until finally he asked him point blank: Why are you coming to me with this? “He was basically like, ‘Dev, you know, every frame of this film is in your head. You’re already talking about costumes. You need to direct this, man.’

“One of the reasons that the Hanuman mythology resonates with me, if I’m being honest, is that he was punished by the gods and lost faith in himself,” Patel continues. “He lost sight of his powers. He had to be reminded of who he was. And as someone who struggles with anxiety and has a lot of issues around competence and self-confidence, I love that. I love underdog heroes. So after Neill said that to me, it went from ‘I could never do this’ to ‘Maybe he’s right, I have to do this.’ It really became this opportunity for me to put the film in my head on the screen.”

And did he have any idea what he was getting himself into? Patel shakes his head and sighs. “I wouldn’t be talking to you right here, right now if I had.”

The story behind the production of Monkey Man has already become its own epic tale of obstacles overcome, suffering injuries and interruptions, being knocked down and getting back up again against all odds. But before that Job-like tale could begin in earnest, Patel had to get his feet wet. When he went to Thomas and told him that he wanted to direct and star in this action movie, his partner told him he’d have his back. But, in order to let potential financiers know that Dev could handle double duty, Thomas wanted him to do something a little more modest first. “It wasn’t going to be a proof-of-concept type of thing,” he says. “I just wanted him have some experience behind the camera.” The result was Home Shopper, a 16-minute short about a woman with an addiction to shopping channels that premiered at Sundance at 2018. It was enough to get the ball rolling.

There was also the issue of Patel’s ability to pull off camera-ready fight sequences, given that his previous roles had rarely called on him to go full John Wick against his costars. He’d studied martial arts as a kid — “a little bit of tae kwon do, a little bit of karate” — and an academy in London’s Rayner’s Lane neighborhood offered him an outlet. “That hyperactive boy in class became a different kid when he stepped in the dojo,” Patel recalls. “I think I was the youngest person to earn a black belt in class, and ended up training the child students we called ‘the little dragons.’” Still, it had been years since he’d competed and trained. “I was a bit rusty, to put it mildly,” he admits.

So Patel began devoting himself to training, spending months getting to the point where he felt “that muscle memory buried deep down in my body” could start to take over. By early 2020, he and a friend relocated to India, doing what he called “mini-location scouting.” He said he could feel some friction with the financiers, who were eager for him to start shooting. A crew was assembled, everything seemed to be heading in the right direction, and then Patel began hearing about some virus in China that was causing headlines. “We’d just started filming in one of the biggest slums in India when the pandemic hit,” Patel says. “I got the last seat on the last flight out of Mumbai.”

While the world was grinding to a halt, Thomas had reached out to someone he’d met in Singapore at a film festival. This person owned a hotel in Batam, a city located on the Riau Islands in Indonesia. They came up with a way to keep the film crew “in a bubble” and shoot the project there. When Patel and Thomas first got to Batam, the first-time director remembers thinking, “‘Fuck. The lighting here is completely different. We’re going to have change a few things.’ But it was a total lifeline.” They reassembled as many crew members as they could, and recast parts “with the local tailor and the local accountant” since there were issues regarding the borders and bringing actors in. Soon, they were ready to call “Action.” And that’s when the real trouble began.

“I mean, if you can imagine a problem that would plague a film shoot, it happened to us,” Patel says. He’s not exaggerating. Right before they were set to restart production, a stunt man accidentally stomped on Patel’s foot and broke several toes. (“Which makes doing a scene in which you have to spin on one foot and kick someone in the chest a little difficult,” Patel notes with a laugh.) While filming his first fight scene, Patel immediately broke his hand; Thomas recalls taking him to a doctor, watching Patel getting a screw put into his knuckles, and listen as the director-star was told that any further strain could permanently damage it. Patel then went back to the set and immediately started trading blows for the camera once again, liability be damned. “We had to thoroughly walk the stunt-men through every single punch,” the producer says.

The hits kept coming: The film’s gaffer suffered fatal a heart attack, “which hit everyone like a cannball to the chest,” and his son took over. Patel contracted a nasty eye infection while shooting a fight sequence in a dirty bathroom. Walking into a bar set designed to house one of the movie’s climactic showdown, Patel noticed there were no glass tabletops. Where’s the glass, he asked the set decorator? “He goes, ‘Sorry, no money,’” Patel says. “Everyone’s ready to shoot, I have to go to the account and there’s like, like $75 left. That’s it. So we’re running credit cards and shooting above the shoulder one day before we can go and get the glass cut and do the rest of it.”

Necessity became the mother of invention. If equipment stopped working, he adds, you couldn’t fly new gear on to the island, so Patel had to resort to using his mobile phone and GoPro cameras at times. A staircase on set was too narrow to shoot a melee, so they used the staircase at their production office. Patel remembers a crane breaking on a day that a studio executive was visiting, and him asking Thomas to distract the visitor while he set up a camera on a rope and swung it over a crowd. “Which wasn’t something that I think that person would have signed off on,” he adds.

And yet, despite the one-step-forward-three-steps-back waltz that Patel, his crew and his actors were forced to do, he loved what they were getting on film. The movie that he saw in his head was becoming a reality. Once he wrapped on Butam, and did a few “guerilla shoots” of his own once he was able to go back to India (Patel estimates that 98-perecent was shot in Indonesia, while sequences like an elaborate pickpocket scam was done run-and-gun style in Mumbai), he began working with editors on assembling a rough cut. They had made it through the bad times, Patel thought. It was merely the end of one set of headaches, however, and the beginning of a fresh batch of new ones.

When Netflix sent out its slate of upcoming releases in the early part of 2022, Monkey Man was among the titles listed as highlights for the year. The streamer had expressed interest in Patel’s directorial debut, and while Thomas mentions the fact that a theatrical run was unlikely if they went that route, both he and Patel eagerly signed on to work with them. The title was eventually bumped to a 2023 release, and soon seemed to disappear altogether. Then, this past January, a trailer appeared online with a Universal logo attached to the front and a spring release date. What accounted for the switch?

Here’s where things start to drift into the territory of hearsay and industry gossip. Rumors began to go around that Patel’s film touched upon some sensitive areas regarding India’s caste system and the way that the mix of religion and nationalism had become an unfortunate part of the nation’s contemprary landscape. The folks who would be releasing Monkey Man were thought to be wary of alienating or outright offending folks, especially in a lucrative market. Changes to the film that would temper its more incendiary jabs may or may not have been requested. Said edits may or may not have been balked at, which may or may not have led to the relationship dissolving.

Netflix has not commented publicly on any of this in the lead up to, or the reception after, the film’s premiere at SXSW in March. Mention these rumors to Patel, and you will witness the most extraordinary poke face ever. He doesn’t confirm anything. Nor does he deny it. He merely goes, “Hmm,” takes a moment, then makes a joke about whether a sniper’s laser scope has been trained on him or not.

“There were certain punches I didn’t want to pull,” Patel finally says. “Do you know what I mean? There were certain things in the film that I knew would be divisive. There were certain points I wanted to make about a country I love very, very much. There are parts of a culture that I love and that I wanted to share, and that criticizing other aspects of it might ruffle feathers. Without those elements … it wouldn’t be the movie I wanted to make. Lots of other stars could make that movie. I just couldn’t. There would be no Monkey Man without that.”

Suddenly, the film found itself without a home. Patel, by his own admission, “just walked away from it.” Thomas began making inquiries about other potential interested parties. Both Patel and Thomas mention that the it had been accepted as a submission for a major fall film festival — the same one, each respectively notes, that helped launch Slumdog Millionaire all those years ago — and Thomas hoped to attract buyers there. Then, out of the blue, Patel got a phone call from his agent.

“He asked me if I was a fan of Jordan Peele,” he says. “Which is a ridiculous question, because who isn’t a fan of Jordan Peele’s?! We happen to share the same representation, and my agent had sort of slipped a copy of Monkey Man to Jordan. ‘He’s seen it three times, and he’s going to call you.’ We ended up having this long conversation where Jordan told me, ‘Look, I totally get what you’re doing here. I love the film. It’s exactly the kind of thing we’re trying to do at [Peele’s production company] Monkeypaw. And I hope you don’t mind, but I showed it to the folks at Universal and they want to put it out.’ It was around that point that I just fell out of my chair.”

Once the deal was finalized, Thomas and Patel pulled the film from the festival and Universal gave them extra funding to polish a few postproduction elements. When Peele introduced Patel at SXSW to introduce the first public Monkey Man screening, the latter could barely contain his emotions. After he returned to the stage while the end credits ran, he openly wept. It was the image of that man in the mask that he first had, but as part of a journey that had happened on- and offscreen. For Patel, it was a dream come true.

“I was an executive producer on this documentary called To Kill a Tiger, which was about a 13-year-old girl who was assaulted,” he says, referring to Nisha Pahuja’s Oscar-nominated feature. “It’s one of the most compelling things I’d ever seen. And the fact that the audience for something like that is, unfortunately, so limited …it just broke my heart.

“So I wanted to talk about issues like violence against women,” he adds, “and police brutality, the caste system, religion — and specifically, the kind of duality of religion that see not just in India but in so many places around the world right now. Religion at its best is actually a uniting and unifying force, you know. It should make people fight for each other, instead of against each other. But all of that stuff is connected, and so much of my rage over these divisions made it into this film. I had so much anger in me when we were writing this.”

Patel takes a long breath and exhales before he goes on. “What I realized early on, however,” he says, “was that I didn’t want to make a history lesson or a polemic. I wanted to make a gateway drug. I wanted a sort of Trojan horse, you know, in terms of action films. I wanted to give it a relevance and kind of cultural and social weight as well as that adrenaline rush. Again, it goes back to loving action movies and feeling like so many people underestimate audiences when they make them.

“But also,” he adds, “I’ve realized that there is an entire generation out there like me, that grew up on Korean action movies and Shah Rukh Khan blockbusters and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jim Carrey. I wanted to give those of us who want our own hero our own story. I wanted to make an action film that both said something and that a movie that Little Dev would have watched over and over again. And I think I actually manged to pull it off.”

From Rolling Stone US.