“Training Day” Director To Take On Eminem’s “Southpaw”?

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Eminem is set to hit the silver screen in his first movie since ‘8 Mile’ in a Dreamworks film about a welterweight boxer’s career. The upcoming movie is set to be directed by Antoine Fuqua, who previously directed such gems as ‘Training Day’ and ‘Brooklyn’s Finest’. The film, titled ‘Southpaw’, is about a world champion boxer who hits rock bottom before deciding to turn his life around for the sake of his young daughter. Sense a metaphor in there somewhere? Yep, you’re absolutely right. Kurt Sutter, the movie’s screenwriter, revealed in an interview with MTV that the movie contains allusions to Em’s own personal struggles:

“I took meetings with Marshall’s producing partners over the past seven years, looking for something to do together. I know he’s very selective and doesn’t do a lot. But he shared so much of his personal struggle in this raw and very honest album [Recovery], one that I connected with on a lot of levels. He is very interested in the boxing genre, and it seemed like an apt metaphor, because his own life has been a brawl.”

“We are doing a metaphorical narrative of the second chapter of his life. He’ll play a world-champion boxer who really hits a hard bottom and has to fight to win back his life for his young daughter. At its core, this is a retelling of his struggles over the last five years of his life, using the boxing analogy…I love that the title refers to Marshall being a lefty, which is to boxing what a white rapper is to Hip Hop; dangerous, unwanted and completely unorthodox. It’s a much harder road for a southpaw than a right-handed boxer.”

Reportedly the first draft of the screenplay is set to be finished by February. Spotted at HHDX.

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