Lexi Alexander, Green Street, 2006
“I was teaching a martial arts class and a couple of guys showed up in my class. They were talking about my team, Mannheim, and because of the way they were dressed and because they were talking about my team, I immediately knew they were hooligans, they were in a firm. Being 15 and having this whole urban myth about hooligans, I was like, ‘You got to take me to a game. I want to stand with you guys.’ They were like ‘No, no, no. No girls allowed.’
I said: ‘You have to take me because after all I’m teaching you martial arts here, so you can’t really convince me that I can’t take care of myself.’ So, in the end, to the guys and in general, I was like the little sister. One they could accept. I wasn’t necessarily a girl’s girl. They took me and for two years it became somewhat of a family for me. Everything I portrayed in the film was really what I saw. Like I thought it was really cool and really fun. I thought it was their way of choosing an extreme sport, they were just adrenalin junkies, it was alright; they didn’t hurt anybody that wasn’t in the same game. They didn’t attack families. They basically were 30 guys running against 30 guys from another team who wanted to do the same thing. I thought, ‘What’s the big fuss? Why can’t they just let them do what they want to do? They’re just a bunch of boys wanting to get into fisticuffs.’ So at first you think it’s very cool and you see a certain attraction about it, and then you start noticing what happens when somebody does break the rule, you know? You notice that even though they have this unspoken law of don’t kick anybody when he’s down, there will always be somebody who breaks it. You just cannot rely on a bunch of guys all following these rules. Even in a boxing fight you have a referee because somebody will always go low.”
https://www.netribution.co.uk/people/filmmaker/lexi-alexander-up-green-street-with-the-pack
