The journey towards articulating my creative practice as a filmmaker began at the side of boxer Randolph Turpin's grave, where I knew my greatest (research) challenge as a screenwriter was coming to know a man I could never meet. If Randolph had been alive he would have been my key interviewee and, like Martin ScorseseScorsese, Martin's relationship with Turpin's contemporary, ‘Raging Bull’ Jake LaMotta, I would have had the opportunity of getting to know Randolph, of conducting a life-story interview through which I could come to know, through an inter-subjective process, Randolph's ‘identity as life story’ (McAdams in Imagination, Cognition and Personality: Consciousness in Theory, Research and Clinical Practice 37:2018, 361). But Randolph Turpin is dead and, for a man who gained such fame as a world champion boxer in the 1940s and 1950s, he left remarkably few personal traces of his existence. So how could I fill the gap between events as depicted on the public record, and the interiority of Randolph Turpin, the man? A starting point for a methodological approach to exploring this question stems from the formative years I spent as a postgraduate filmmaking apprentice at the UK's National Film and Television School (NFTS). As my research progressed, NFTS founder Colin Young’s notion of the contemporary filmmaker as an ethnographically-engaged ‘cultural producer’ became foundational in developing a working definition of a narrative fiction filmmaking methodology.