After Goldenberg won the Oscar in 2013 for editing Argo, he was approached by various agents, managers, and producers about possibly directing. “I don’t think I felt ready before then. I don’t think I felt in control of the medium enough to want to direct,” he tells Vanity Fair. “But then I couldn’t find anything I was interested in, and I also was very busy, so I didn’t have the time to really look for the things I wanted.”
Then in 2018, Goldenberg’s friend, producer David Crockett, brought him the story of Robles, based on Robles’s 2012 book Unstoppable: From Underdog to Undefeated: How I Became a Champion. “I loved the story,” says Goldenberg. “But the thing that really sealed it for me was meeting Anthony.”
Goldenberg spent a few days with Robles in Arizona, touring ASU with him, meeting his coaches and his family, including his mom, Judy. “There’s great athletes, and then there’s special people—there’s what makes somebody a champion,” says Goldenberg, comparing Robles to Michael Jordan or Wayne Gretzky. “After I met him I felt like it was a story that I had to tell.”
When I hop on a Zoom with Robles, I quickly understand what Goldenberg is talking about. Robles has an incredible light to him. He emits positivity in a way that never rings false, and that makes you want to remain close, hoping some of that light may rub off on you. Robles says he’d been approached about making his story several times before, but he wanted to make sure he had the right partners—people who would protect his family, even when the darker parts of his journey had to be included. “I knew that in order to tell my story fully and honestly, those things needed to be told, but they needed to be told in a delicate way,” he says.
A central part of Robles’s story is his relationship with his mother, whom he calls his hero. The film reveals that Judy’s husband (Robles’s stepfather) was verbally and physically abusive toward her. The role needed someone who could capture Judy’s strength. Lopez brought her authentic maternal instincts to the role, and also uses it to showcase more dramatic acting abilities that we’ve seen previously in films like Selena and, more recently, Hustlers.