The Shining Star of Losers Everywhere
How Japan fell in love with a magnifcently terrible racehorse.
After Mickey Duzyj screened his animated horse racing documentary at South by South West, a man approached him in the cinema.
“He said, ‘I don’t like documentaries, I can’t stand horse racing and I hate animation.’ I was like, why were you even in the theatre?
“But he said, ‘What you did really touched my heart and it’s going to stay with me’.”
It’s a great testament to the power of The Shining Star of Losers Everywhere (2016), which I have gone back to many times since I too saw it at SXSW.
(I wasn’t the baffling stranger).
((Although boy, what a twist that would be!)).
Mickey was in art school when he first read about Haru Urara, a Japanese race horse who became a phenomenon despite – or rather because of – constantly losing races.
He saw it as a delightfully unAmerican story, this celebration of a loser that became a patron saint of perseverance.
I think his film was very prescient. Nowadays there are books, podcasts and TV shows about failure (Mickey went on to make a series about failure in sport for Netflix.).
Business leaders are told they need to be more vulnerable. FuckUp Nights around the world gather people together to hear stories about things that went wrong.
But at that time, our collective ideas about success (good) and weakness (bad) felt more fixed. These norms change slowly, but the right story can light the way.
I spoke with Mickey over Zoom from his home in New York. You can see more of his work on his website and his Instagram.
Why did you want to tell this story?
I didn’t think this was a story that could happen in America. That was my knee-jerk reaction, and I wondered why. The celebration of failure is something Americans recoil at, because we like to see ourselves as winners, which is lame. And short-sighted.
But I do think Americans can be very sentimental, and I felt like this story, if framed in an artistic way, could win people over.
So I told the story in a meeting with ESPN, and they said yes. I left their offices, walked out into Central Park and I remember thinking ok, how am I going to make this?
The best thing in my creative life is when anyone takes a chance on me to do something that I haven’t already done before. That’s a real blessing, and as much as those are moments of existential terror, that’s what it’s all about.
What were the biggest challenges?
At the start I learned two things. Number one, the horse was missing and was taken away from the track in this really traumatising way.
And number two, because everyone at the track felt so sore about it still, they had collectively agreed to never speak to the media ever again.
So I had no horse, and no-one to talk to, but I was still on the hook to make this film.
I started writing letters, especially to the trainer, who I think is the spiritual centre of this story. Then a fortuitous thing happened, and to this day I don’t know if they were connected in some weird way, or if it was just the universe conspiring to make this film.
A small farm outside of Tokyo came out to the press to say that Haru Urara was alive and being taken care of. And so the people at the racetrack changed their minds and invited me to Japan.
What would you do differently if you made the film again?
The shoot schedule was really aggressive. My producer Yuka Uchida conducted the interviews in Japanese, but it was very run and gun.
I didn’t actually know what we had on the hard drive when I was flying back to the States. That gave me a lot of anxiety.
I remember trying to work through my jet lag, waking up in cold sweats not knowing if I had it, but knowing that I couldn't afford to go back and do any reshoots. I would do that differently to give myself more solace.
What are you most proud of?
The heart that comes through on screen.
I sometimes feel embarrassed that I wear my heart on my sleeve. People who know me know I swing between telling lots of jokes and being very serious. I found both of those in this story – things that were charming and funny, and things that people found inspiring.
Also, I’m proud of just being able to finish it. There was a real poetry in persevering to finish a film about perseverance.
It took me over a year. Our wife had just given birth to our second baby, I was feeling a lot of career pressure, staking a lot of my future on this losing racehorse in Japan. This refrain of never giving up was a visceral part of my reality.
How did making this film change you?
As a young filmmaker I was insecure about a lot of things. I had just started my company, I was convincing collaborators to take a chance on me not knowing if I could really land the plane.
But it proved to me there isn’t any way to feel perfectly prepared for everything that’s going to come at you.
You just have to jump into the deep end. And there is this mysterious but powerful thing that can happen when a team comes together.
In docs especially, a lot of directors like to pre-interview everyone to get a sense of what the film is going to be.
I don’t really operate like that. There are surprises you learn along the way, and if you hold room for those surprises, it can be a really exciting adventure.
After the film came out, it created a gravitational pull for me to meet more producers, editors, shooters, who wanted to go on these kinds of adventures. That’s another part of the gift that taking this kind of chance gives you.
Mickey had so much to say about overcoming the imposter syndrome that every artist experiences. But he didn’t talk about it in a glib way; he was honest about how hard making art can be. For younger creatives in particular, that may be a useful reminder.
Thanks to Mickey, and to Jessica Best for editing this interview. And thanks for reading – I’d love to hear your thoughts, comments and suggestions, so please comment or reply to this email.
Next week, we’re taking a tour of New York with a unique artist…