There’s a scene in Billy Corben’s documentary film “Dawg Fight” in which two exhausted fighters, standing on opposite ends of a small, crude boxing ring, appear to be giving serious consideration to getting the hell out of there and going home.

Both of these men will be dead before the film is finished – one from a gunshot, the other from a police Taser – though of course they don’t know that yet. All they know right then is the reality of the fight, which is brutal and sloppy and ugly and raw, the way untrained violence often is.

In one corner, a man is doubled over from exhaustion, complaining of blurred vision. In the other, just a few feet away, his opponent is busy getting the blood wiped from his face as his friends assure him that the cut over his eye isn’t as bad as he thinks.

Both seem like they’d rather call the whole thing off. Neither seems like he’s going to get that chance.

This is the point where, as I was watching the movie, I started to wonder whether Corben’s attempt to capture the world of semi-official, absolutely illegal backyard brawling in one poor Miami neighborhood – a “twisted version of the American dream story,” as Corben later described it to me – had also captured something basic about the nature of combat sports.

At first glance, this had seemed completely separate from professional fighting. It was just some tough guys who “trained” off and on in their own backyards, showing up to throw haymakers at one another’s awkwardly raised chins while paying customers from the neighborhood watched. It was savage without being particularly enjoyable. It was artless violence. It was the kind of fighting that gave fighting a bad name.

It seemed especially uncomfortable when those two fighters reached their breaking point at roughly the same time. Clearly, these guys wanted to quit. If they’d been alone in that backyard together, they almost certainly would have.

But here, the crowd (well, the crowd and the promoter, former backyard brawler and Kevin “Kimbo Slice” Ferguson entourage member Dada 5000, the film’s carnival barker of a protagonist) wouldn’t let them. The mob demanded closure. And since the approval of the mob was as big a part of the appeal as the money the fighters and their friends had wagered on the fight, the fight went on until one man lay bloody and exhausted in the dirt.

This part – the living morality play of the fight, the crowd that can stomach losers but absolutely abhors quitters – didn’t seem so different from the world of MMA. It took place in a backyard rather than a cage, and the currency of public opinion circulated as neighborhood gossip rather than as Twitter hot takes, but it seemed to be essentially the same driving force. Exactly what that said about the enthusiasts supporting either version of unarmed combat, that part remained unclear.

To find out more I spoke with Corben, the filmmaker behind “Dawg Fight,” as well as other documentaries such as “Cocaine Cowboys” and ESPN “30 For 30” episodes like “The U” and “Broke.” Here are some excerpts from our conversation.

What do you think draws people to these fights? The skill level of the fighters doesn’t seem to be very high, but still there are people paying $20 a head to come in and watch. What’s the appeal?

This is Miami. People show up for cockfights in Miami. I mean, people compared this to human cockfighting, which is not entirely inaccurate. I think the appeal, in a lot of ways, is the same as the NFL, as college football, as MMA and the UFC. The appeal is to our primal instincts. There’s the added element of the gambling that goes on around some of these bouts. There’s also an element of local pride, since people come from different neighborhoods in South Florida to fight there.

There’s a lot of talk in the film of people doing this to improve their lives, whether financially or just to put their energy into something positive. At the same time, no one seems to be making too much money, and it’s unclear how dramatically anyone’s life changes as a result of backyard fighting. Did you find that the fighters were improving their lives this way, either financially or otherwise?

By and large, no. There are exceptions to that rule, Kimbo being the role model that they’re all looking up to and attempting to emulate, that business model. You know, “I’m going to fight in the backyard, upload the footage, and hopefully get discovered by a professional MMA trainer or promoter and go pro.” That kind of thing.

With the story unfolding before our cameras, we tried to show how even these victories are somewhat hollow, because what have they really won? Even if they go pro, there’s only so long you can even do that as a human being, just physically. There were at least four fighters who went pro out of the backyard. Two of them didn’t live that long, and there might be a couple making a legitimate living. But, you know, what’s the success rate of your friends who are in bands or start restaurants? It’s a small percentage who this business model actually works for.

There are a couple of moments where people take some bad beatings or bad knockouts, and you realize, as a viewer, that things could get serious in a hurry and there’s no one there who’s really equipped to deal with it. Did you ever think, ‘Something terrible could happen at one of these things?’

On Day One. That first day for us, that was the day that Mike Trujillo got knocked out by Chocolate. It wasn’t the first day of shooting, but it was our first fight event. That was my first experience watching one of these backyard fighting events. We had nine cameras, so it was all hands on deck. I was shooting and was by happenstance covering the corner of the ring that Mike’s head landed closest to. He goes back on his heels, timber, straight back and his head falls on the outside of the ropes.

It was a surreal moment because, at first, I’m just reacting instinctually. I’m here with a camera, this is my job, so I move in on his face, and then I’m looking through the lens and also looking up at him. There’s this sort of break between making a movie and the reality. When I look down at the camera, I’m shooting a movie. When I look up, here’s this man, this young man, lying here, best-case scenario, just unconscious. Like, only unconscious.

Right then, I felt it in my whole body. There’s a real possibility that this guy never gets up. In an instant, you play out all the possibilities. There’s the personal ramifications for him and his family, his mother and girlfriend, then the ramifications for Dada, for all of us in this backyard, for the footage, which could be seized as evidence. All of this plays out in a matter of seconds, but all of these guys are here doing this of their own free will for some reason. That’s when I felt like, this is a story worth telling. There are people who really believe, perhaps tragically, that this is their best opportunity in life.

Is that because they have so few other opportunities, or because the barrier to entry for something like this is so low? It seems like all you have to do is tell Dada you’ll fight, show up on time, and you’re in.

The answer is yes to all of those and then some. People see the footage of Miami-Dade and say, “This doesn’t even look like America. This looks like the third world.” And it is the third world. It’s Miami-Dade. We have the second-highest income disparity among large counties in the United States. We have the second-highest rate of food-stamp use. Miami is the third world, and it is getting worse. It’s an example of what the rest of the country is slowly experiencing, which is the increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots.

Here you have people who are working, even working multiple jobs, still living below the poverty line. Add to that the rate at which the United States locks up minorities, particularly minority males, for nonviolent drug offenses, and you don’t see a lot of hope for an abundance of legitimate opportunities. There’s an attitude that this is their best hope.

I see it in your film, just like I saw it in “Knuckle,” where fighting is so often kind of a poor man’s sport. Why do you think that is?

I think it’s a provocative question. You see it with soccer, or football, the most popular sport in the world. Part of that is because you can play it anywhere you have a ball and some lines on the ground. (American) football is an elaborate sport, equipment-wise. It’s harder to build baskets for basketball than it is to draw two lines on the ground. Hockey is probably the most expensive sport, as far as equipment. So I think that’s part of the answer with fighting. Talk about no equipment, all you need is two fists. I think with fighting, you also have to be hungry, spiritually and sometimes literally.

Were you a fan of pro fighting, either boxing or MMA or whatever, before this?

No, not at all.

What kind of perspective on it did you come away with, after doing this film?

I appreciated the purity of this. I grew up in the era of Don King’s boxing world. It seemed like this sketchy, not entirely merit-based system. It seemed more about the art of the deal than the art of boxing. This seemed to me to be a lot more pure and merit-based. You wanted to fight, and you could get a ride down to Perrine on Saturday? Dada would put you on the card. That was it. If you were ready, willing and able, you got the chance to prove yourself. It became kind of a pure meritocracy in that way, and I enjoyed that.

With fighting we always have to talk about exploitation, don’t we? Whether it’s on the part of the promoter, the people watching, or the people covering it. I mean, you guys show up, make a movie, from which you derive some personal gain, and then you’re gone, and they’re all still there. Even those of us watching it, we might be moved but then never think of these people again. How do you reconcile those issues?

First, I have to dispel the personal-gain issue. We spent a lot of our own money to make this happen. I’m not complaining, but this project, more so than any other we’ve ever done, was a real labor of love, a real passion project. And the passion of self-distribution, hustling not unlike what Dada does, that was driven in part by the deaths of two of the fighters.

Tree (one of the two fighters in the aforementioned scene), his death last year was the one where I felt like, we have to get this movie out there. I don’t care about the money, the distribution – let’s just get it out there. We have to memorialize the lives of these men that could be just statistics of street violence or police-Taser deaths. We have a story to tell. They were human beings who were here on the Earth for a time, and that’s where the passion comes from, even if people – even people in Miami-Dade – would rather not hear some of these stories. You say people may watch it and never think about it again? I’ll think about it forever. Even if we never released it, I’d think about this and about these men forever.

As far as the question of exploitation, that’s exactly what these guys are doing there. They are there to exploit themselves, to get known, to display what they hope is their fighting prowess, and get discovered. They want to get seen. I never felt that we were doing anything more than exactly what they were doing to begin with, which is why we were so welcomed and warmly embraced in the backyard.

“Dawg Fight” is available beginning March 13 through dawg-fight.com, and is expected on Netflix by mid-April.