Monkey Man deploys an underground boxer in Mumbai, who dons a monkey mask in the ring, to explore the iconography of Hanuman, God of Wisdom, Strength, Courage, Devotion and Self-Discipline. In making the visceral action film, Dev Patel couldn’t have had a more difficult road to getting his feature debut out of a movie industry boxing match and into the world.

Just before filming, the global pandemic locked down most borders, and many department heads that Patel had hired were forced to stay in their home countries. Production moved to Indonesia, where Patel broke his hand on the first day of shooting. Local set designers were later promoted to production designers, stunt choreographers were bumped up to the camera department, and eventually additional artisans were able to quarantine for two weeks in order to visit the Indonesian set. The resulting film was bought by Netflix in 2021, in a bidding war that escalated to $30 million. And then it just sat on the digital shelf.

For a story about a man (Patel) fighting his way, level-by-level, up a Mumbai skyscraper, where extra privilege (and extra security) is afforded on each new floor, Patel’s own journey of making the project was starting to mirror his experience of releasing it. It tested his wisdom, strength, courage, devotion and self-discipline. When I sat down to interview Patel, he called Jordan Peele “an angel” for rescuing Monkey Man and putting it in theaters via his aptly named Monkeypaw Productions shingle.

At the told the audience, “This is a film that simply demands to be seen in a theater with a huge, raucous fucking audience.” And, so far, the audience response has indeed been raucous. Sydney calls Monkey Man “a gritty, crackling mosaic of culture and action inspiration from all over the world. And, you know, I love the old ultraviolence.” AmandaTheJedi says she “saw one of the best action movie kills of my life” in Patel’s first feature.

For the purposes of our interview with Patel himself, selomeee’s review lists the CliffsNotes to prepare you for Monkey Man, writing, “ok didn’t know this was gonna be about the Hindu caste system and revolutionary violence hello????? also I loved all the BITING.” But before the star of The Green Knight and I got into his Monkey Man character’s penchant for biting foes, we kicked things off by discussing his formative action movies and what influenced his revenge tale. We worked our way up to the caste system, and finally, like the film’s journey itself, to Jordan Peele.

What were your formative action films that made you want to explore this genre?Dev Patel: Formative action films. Okay, so the first one, I snuck downstairs and watched this film through the banister. It changed my life; it made me wanna be an actor. Bruce Lee, Enter the Dragon. Just breathtaking to watch him. Just blistering on the screen. In my room, every inch of wall space became Bruce Lee. So that one, and then all of his other films, subsequently. There’s a bit of Game of Death in Monkey Man, working up the pagoda, that kind of vibe.

And then Korean cinema, on the other side. They, for me, make the best revenge films. Anything from Oldboy to The Man from Nowhere, I Saw the Devil, A Bittersweet Life. I mean, there are so—sorry, that’s too many.

No, there are never too many for us.
Korean cinema is pretty amazing. I’m sure there’s a lot of homage to those films in there. Also, I should say, a bit of Indian cinema, too. Bollywood, there’s an audacity to this film and a colorfulness to it, which has also been infused by my exposure to those kinds of films.

You said “visceral”, and that’s actually how I describe the film as well. There’s visceral hand-to-hand combat; it’s also kinda face-to-face. I did want to ask: was your character always a biter, or was that found through the choreography practice of finding the fights?
Now thinking of it, subliminally, I think there’s a film with Bruce Lee—I forgot what film it is now. He’s locked in something with a character, and all he has left is his mouth to bite. [Note: one biting instance by Lee does occur in Fist of Fury.] But I was like, if you’re a cornered, caged animal with nothing to lose, what would you do to get out of this scenario?

It’s life or death. You’d bite, you would spit, you would claw your way out of the situation, and real violence is very messy. We were constantly trying to find a way to make the choreo more jagged and less balletic.

We do have to talk about your own spin on the Rocky training montage and the music that you use for it here, which is so amazing.
When I wrote the script, I always wanted to pay homage to those great Rocky Balboa training montages. Immediately, I was like, look, India has a relationship with music, and one of our oldest classical art forms is Indian classical music. And there’s this guy Zakir Hussain, Ustad. They call him Maestro. He’s the greatest to have ever touched that instrument [the tabla]. He’s one of one.

I begged, and he came out to the island, spent two weeks quarantining to play for three days. We did this, what they call in India, a jugalbandhi, which is a call and answer. The concept was me on this dusty rice sack that I’ve made, and him on this tabla, and he teaches me the rhythm of how to fight without really speaking. He’s talking to me through his instrument so I can tune mine.

It was the first time [with] everyone on set, [and] even the troublemakers came to watch and watch him play. It was very difficult editing, ’cause we used the real sound on the day. So to try to match the hits and the punches and keep it rhythmic, that was very difficult. It took us months and months, maybe even six months, to really get that sequence down.

Watching the film now, using the building levels as story structure is amazing, very video game-like, but do you also see that as akin to getting this movie out? It was a battle to get it out, and eventually, after all that fighting, Jordan Peele’s up in the penthouse?
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s a revenge film about faith. Faith is defined by the everyman, and the guys at the bottom are worshiping something so elusive and so untouchable in a way. For me, when you think of the caste system in India, I was looking at the action genres, starting with Bruce Lee and working his way up [in Game of Death]. Or The Raid or Dredd—that’s the caste system. You can start in this building with the poor slaving away, creating these beautiful dishes for the kings above them, and above the kings should be gods, and then there’s heaven. How can we play with that concept for the film?

Jordan came in and was an angel. The film got dropped by the studio, and I thought [it would] never see the light of day. He saw it, and he changed that and brought Universal and all their clout and might with him, so it was very cool.