Off the Cliff

by Becky Aikman

  After a buildup, the players tried out different scenarios on the bed, the floor, the top of a dresser. Chairs, lamps and props went flying. Brad had more than the mechanics of the action on his mind. “One of the dilemmas an actor faces in those scenes is what happens if the ‘soldier’ starts to salute,” he said, admitting, “I ran into that predicament as well.” At times, his nerves took a toll. He knew the hair dryer scene was the showpiece for J.D., “but I flatlined that day and failed the scene by a few degrees,” he said. “It was Geena’s performance that made mine. Her ability to be carefree and comfortable in each take led the way for me.”

  Ridley gave Brad the full ingenue treatment, lighting him to perfection and personally spritzing Evian on his abs, the better to make them glisten as the camera panned up his torso. “Muss his hair up a bit,” Ridley said. “Wet it down. Twist to the left a bit, yeah, yeah, just to catch the light.” One of Ridley’s talents was making beautiful people look even more beautiful than they did in real life. His painterly eye turned Brad Pitt into a celluloid Caravaggio.

  Ridley, hello! Geena wanted to say. I thought I was the girl in this scene!

  Ridley doesn’t remember paying less mind to the female star. “No, she looked pretty damn good,” he says, replaying the scene in his head. “Maybe she was watching him and not me. All I had to do with Brad was, well, he put on his hat, and of course he had that six-pack. You can’t miss his six-pack. The rest was all on her.”

  That may be so, but the most heralded aspect of that scene was that it marked the blazing dawn of Brad Pitt, Movie Star, and launched him into the firmament of leading roles. Ridley’s camera work had a lot to do with it. But lost in some of the sensation Brad set off with that scene was the importance of Geena’s reaction to him. She ogled his body with such libidinous, googly-eyed wonder that her gaze of clear delight made him a sex symbol as much as those Evian abs and easy charm. The audience saw him through her eyes. Together, Geena, Brad, Ridley and Callie had invented a new language: they had created a movie sex scene from the woman’s point of view.

  —

  THE LUNCH BREAK DRAGGED ON. Susan Sarandon cooled her heels waiting for word about whether she was needed in the afternoon. “What’s going on?” she asked a crew member.

  “They’re still watching the footage of that scene.” It was perhaps the only time the crew ran over schedule from watching dailies. Word was they were so racy, the movie’s rating would have shot past R if Ridley had left the sequence uncut. Hans Zimmer, who saw a full fifteen-minute version during editing, said, “It was truly the most incredible love scene since Don’t Look Now,” a 1973 film so notorious for its graphic outtakes that they once won an award at an underground porn festival.

  —

  MEANWHILE, IN ANOTHER ROOM at the motel, Susan Sarandon and Michael Madsen grappled with how to approach their own encounter, the one that had bothered Susan from the first. Meant to be intercut with Thelma and J.D.’s erotic romp, the original romantic scene in the script had once featured Jimmy proposing to Louise and references to their making love. It had been through a couple drafts since then. Jimmy still presented Louise with an engagement ring, but the final version had cut such touches as Jimmy’s setting the mood with a dozen roses and champagne and the two of them singing a lovey-dovey song before acting out some half-serious impromptu “I do’s.”

  Callie had defended her original draft following earlier read-throughs. She wanted a nice moment for Louise, she said, after the years she’d spent waiting for her lover to commit. “They kind of agree to be together for the rest of their lives or until it gets light, whichever comes first,” Callie explained. But in Susan, Ridley and Michael Madsen, the script had run up against collaborators who were incapable of sentimentality. This would be the only sequence in the film to be reworked almost entirely on the set.

  Even with changes in the final draft, Susan still believed that the proposal scene would relax the tension of the story so much that it couldn’t recover. “It’s too much of a leap out of the pressure that is needed to make driving off a cliff feasible,” Susan said when she and Michael met in the motel room to plan the scene with Ridley. The room, just down the row from Geena and Brad’s, had the same dated wallpaper but harsher light and less comfortable furniture for a less comfortable situation. “I don’t know if I could get back into that state of mind after this scene.” More than ever, she was convinced that her character’s guilt over killing Harlan and the anxiety of life on the lam would overpower any inclination toward romance. And however intriguing, the orgasm-breakdown scene she had once suggested would have been too much.

  Susan found she had an ally in Michael Madsen. The laconic, sleepy-eyed actor had objections of his own. “It’s not real,” he said gruffly. “It’s just stupid. Nobody would do this.”

  “Why not?” Ridley asked. He didn’t mind eliminating the Jimmy-Louise love scene, but as a practical matter, something had to be intercut with Thelma and J.D.’s tryst.

  “Because I’m a heterosexual male, and I know a little bit about women,” Michael responded. “I don’t think that Louise would have anything to do with anybody who wasn’t a little volatile, or didn’t have a little bit of balls. I can’t play Jimmy as a dummy or a pushover, like Chris McDonald’s part.” The prospect of making an ardent proposal to a reluctant Louise struck him as emasculating.

  Michael believed that among the roles he’d played in his career, the Jimmy character was the one closest to himself. He couldn’t see Jimmy doing anything Michael Madsen wouldn’t do, especially anything that made him appear vulnerable or weak.

  “I understand masculinity,” he says. “There’s a physicality to it, there’s a body language, there’s a tone of voice. You either have it or you don’t. I also understand tenderness; I understand love; I understand forgiveness. I have a duality in my own personality that comes out in spades in Jimmy.” He understood Jimmy’s conflict—he probably did love her, Michael thought, but was disinclined to be tied down. “You feel her slipping away, and you’re just trying to take a shot at holding on to her,” Michael says. “Maybe the reason she loved you in the first place was because you were a little hard to get, so you want to maintain that attitude.”

  The clock was ticking as the three of them thumbed through the script.

  “Look, I think I would get kind of mad at the whole situation,” Michael finally said.

  “Yeah, I guess you would,” Ridley agreed. At the time, he thought Michael’s instinct might be to slap her. “She’s afraid of him at that point, I think,” he explains later, “because he may be a bit of a beater.” But to Michael, he argued against striking Louise. “No, you’re losing something of great value to you. Your life will change once you’ve lost her.” He left the two of them together in the room to make something up.

  When he returned, they acted it out for him once, then put it on film. Michael found an outlet for his urge toward violence by flipping over a table with abrupt force. “If you’re having trouble with dialogue,” he explains, “it’s always interesting to take it out on an inanimate object. In the environment I grew up in, furniture is fair game in a situation like that.”

  Susan darted toward the door, but Michael, realizing the mistake, stopped her with a conciliatory gesture. The moment had arrived for him to propose, but he had his own ideas about that, too. He wouldn’t pose a question as he held out the box with the engagement ring inside, not even the half-hearted one in the script: Will you wear this? Instead he shoved it in front of her without looking her in the eye. The script didn’t call for him to fall to one knee, but still, the custom was on his mind. “I never understood that whole thing,” Michael says. “What a dumb way to start a relationship. I wasn’t going to be that guy.”

  Ridley liked this lukewarm approach to courtship—“It’s classically difficult for a man to say he loves a woman,” Ridley says. The little bit of gallantry Callie had
tried to insert into the story bit the dust.

  Susan continued along the same lines. Instead of acting flabbergasted, as the script suggested, and telling Michael the ring was beautiful, Susan substituted a jaded Why? Why now?

  Michael did keep the next line Callie had put in the script: You didn’t see that one comin’, did ya?

  The scene evolved into an all-night back-and-forth between a couple combing through the shards of a broken relationship with resigned affection. By this time, Ridley saw Susan’s point about the characters not making love. He thought Louise was a fair-minded woman who wouldn’t give Jimmy false hope. Michael wasn’t so sure. “In true life, I probably would have fucked her, to be blunt,” he says. “If only for old times, or one for the road.” But he saw the logic in not having every character in the hotel going at it at once. “I suppose Jimmy could have forced the issue,” he says. “But at least we kissed, and that was nice. Susan’s a good kisser, for sure.”

  The actors were pleased with the way the scene worked out, impressed with each other’s ability to improvise. Susan told Michael there were only two men in her life she would allow to call her a broad, and he was one of them. “I took that as a compliment,” he says.

  But it didn’t sit well with Callie that they had gutted the scene and turned one of her more sympathetic if flawed male characters into the kind of bruiser who busts up furniture. “I thought it was a mistake,” she says. “Louise would have been out of there in a second. She would not have been with a guy who was acting like that.”

  The end result was freighted with competing perspectives and a jagged sense of cross-purposes. Each collaborator had contributed a different note: Callie’s desire for romantic wish fulfillment, Susan’s concern for the consistency of her character, Michael’s defense of the male ego, Ridley’s natural embrace of pessimism. There was certainly a male-female split on the import of violence between men and women, not to mention what constituted a proper proposal of marriage. The scene ended on a minor chord of disillusioned attachment, especially in Susan’s final close-up and her tender delivery of the line Chalk it up to bad timing.

  —

  THE SCENE WHERE SUSAN AND MICHAEL parted in the motel coffee shop the next morning proved to be one of Ridley’s favorites in the entire movie. Susan’s kindness as Michael slid the ring back across the table to her was heartbreaking, and Ridley loved a good heartbreak. It was clear she knew the lovers wouldn’t see each other again, that she was destined for a desolate fate. Ridley lit her face around the rim to highlight a few fine lines, and her complexion and large oval eyes beamed radiance. “She was particularly brilliant in that,” Ridley says. Michael’s tough-tender duality came through again. Susan thinks it was “a nice little scene-scene, with people talking to each other. Ridley was probably happy we weren’t in the car for once.” He also loved the gleaming surfaces of the diner as the sun washed in, and he moved Michael to one side of the screen to pick up rays on the tufted leatherette banquette beside him.

  Geena as a walking sight gag signaled a quick change of mood once he left. The hairdressers had created a tangled masterpiece of morning-after hair for her arrival at breakfast with one of the widest, goofiest grins in all of movies to tell Louise about her first-ever world-shaking sex. Michael thought she looked like a cross between Daffy Duck and Grace Kelly.

  I finally understand what all the fuss is about, Geena said.

  Susan delivered the next line like a proud mama: You finally got laid properly.

  —

  THE MOTEL LOCATION HAD BEEN challenging for all the actors, but there was one more morning-after setup to go before the whole production left Los Angeles. It was a scene that would test the actresses’ mettle and establish their characters for the rest of the film. When they realized J.D. had made off with all their money, Louise had to break down in the love-nest motel room, and the flighty Thelma, for the first time, would step up and take control. She would order Louise to get herself together, to gather her stuff, to Move! Ridley saw it as the most crucial turning point in the story, when Thelma ceased to behave like the child or little sister and the two became true friends.

  The sequence would be challenging for Geena, whose character had never witnessed her rock-steady friend fall apart before, but even more so for Susan, who would have to sob for hours. They were scheduled to film in the afternoon, when her acting juices were flowing, but the light was wrong, and Ridley asked if she could pull it off at eight o’clock in the morning. He stepped between the two of them, his arms around their shoulders. “If you can’t get to that, we’ll try to do it again later,” he said.

  Susan got there, and Geena fed off it, summoning convincing power as the roles reversed. Ridley grinned with satisfaction. The transition worked just as he’d intended when he cast them in the film.

  The men may have exerted some muscle in molding their parts, but it was clear the women weren’t taking a backseat in this picture. “A lot of people were saying very chauvinistically, ‘What is this chick flick, who are these girls? They’re not going to blow up a truck, are they?’” Michael Madsen says, looking back at the production. “There was a general feeling that this was like an episode of Scooby-Doo. But the movie set the bar for women. It said, ‘Hey, man, these gals are pretty cool.’”

  CHAPTER 22

  OWNING THE ROAD

  The T-bird barreled down a highway with tractor trailers screaming along on either side, horns blasting, chrome gleaming, headlights piercing the darkness. Susan Sarandon at the wheel and Geena Davis in the passenger seat shouted their lines over the noise. Scene completed, skidding to a stop, they turned to each other and shrieked, “We’re in a Ridley Scott movie!”

  On Friday, July 20, their simple road picture hit the road. The move to central California hurled the production into the core of the story, where the relationship between the characters deepened and transformed. Louise would push forward in the face of guilt and fear, her big saucer-shaped eyes looking into an abyss. Thelma would morph from homebody ditz to Amazon road warrior. The friendship of the characters would reach a level of feeling rarely achieved between two women on-screen. This was the moment when the creative tension that started to simmer when Callie entrusted her baby to a grandiose action director could reach a rolling boil. Would Thelma & Louise emerge as a thoughtful character study or a flashy action film?

  For the most part, mutual respect prevailed. Ridley stuck to the script as he lavished attention on the visuals. Geena and Susan worked to stay true to their parts. But they all had to broker underlying tensions as Susan, in particular, fought to defend the values of her character and the conscience that would give meaning to all the dazzle.

  An activist actress, a guy’s-guy director—it was a classic yin-yang matchup. “The experience was an interesting collaboration, because you had me at one end of the spectrum and Ridley at the other end of the spectrum,” Susan says. “The atmosphere was very male. The guys on the crew were all shirtless with their T-shirts around their heads, like a band of cigar-smoking marauders. They adored Ridley and would follow him off a cliff.” Together they chased sunrises and sunsets, making spectacular shots of the two women in the car. “The joke was the whole movie would be voice-over,” Susan says. “Because he was getting such fabulous footage, why do scenes?”

  Nothing in the script indicated that the intimate story needed such an opulent stage. “He brought that to it,” Susan says. “We filled in the emotions and the people.” Once she saw the finished film, she understood: “Because Ridley put us in this heroic setting, the film had the impact it did,” but that wasn’t so apparent at the time.

  The actresses would plan subtle emotional adjustments for a scene, only to arrive on set and discover that there would be a train passing through the shot. “Or now there’s a cattle drive all around us while we’re having an intimate talk about sex,” Geena said in a newspaper interview when the film came out.
“We just did it. We just said, ‘Well, okay, I guess we’re shouting this scene.’”

  “We were shouting all the time,” Susan agreed. “Every time Geena and I got on the set, we were shocked by what was going on around us.”

  Their concerns for their characters distracted Ridley, prompting him to grumble in the same interview: “Every scene was a bloody debate.”

  —

  THAT DIDN’T STOP HIM from sticking to his storyboards and packing every shot with trademark visual density, a particular challenge in the San Fernando Valley, which had to fill in for the Oklahoma flatlands for seven shooting days. The wide, flat agricultural fields and long, straight highways wouldn’t crack any guidebook lists of scenic drives. Their visual interest would probably strike some directors as nil. But Ridley Scott was fascinated with settings that most Americans would consider plug-ugly—“All those watering machines and those railway lines, where any Englishman goes nuts because he doesn’t see that in the UK.”

  He dug into his bag of favorite tricks. Instead of smoke, now he had . . . dust! Instead of ghastly furniture and kooky lamps, he sought out backgrounds with irrigation sprinklers, telephone poles and oil pumps that bobbed like feeding birds. A sorry motel off a highway in Gorman hit all the right notes as a one-night shelter for the fugitives. The ground rumbled from trucks on the too-close freeway as Thelma, wearing an absurd ruffled bikini and still trying to salvage a sort of vacation, tried to sun herself beside a pool surrounded with cracked concrete, a John Register painting come to life.

  Norris and Anne added layers of artifice to enhance even the most barren settings. They didn’t go anywhere without their supply of fake boulders, tumbleweeds and strips of reflectors to line the highways and make them shine. They brought along weather-beaten billboards and a stash of satellite dishes to project the feeling that no matter how remote the territory, the outside world was encroaching, even watching, as the heroines tried to disappear. Ahrens dressed up a gas station with shiny pinwheels that spun in the wind. She etched graffiti into the glass of the phone booth where Thelma called her husband and said, Darryl. Go fuck yourself. And to break the monotony of the open space, the prop people designed little structures, like a concrete sinklike form for Brad Pitt to sit on when the women encountered him on the road.