The Man Who Heard Voices

by Michael Bamberger

  Lin Lao Choi—20s—a big, tall (6 feet or so, at least 5-9) young Korean woman, average looks. She’s an endearing, intelligent young person, very traditional, yet very much of today. She’s steeped in the history of her family, and yet dresses like Britney Spears. Not necessarily heavy, but she’s a commanding physical presence. A memorable character. Has an accent. Lead.

  Cindy was five-nine. She was one eighth Korean (although she didn’t speak a word of it). She looked younger than thirty-five; she could pass for twenty-nine. M. Night Shyamalan. The word lead was not meant literally in these write-ups, but Cindy knew the role had to be significant. Cindy immediately called her agent, Paul Hilepo, namesake of a small boutique agency called Hartig-Hilepo, and asked, “Did you see that M. Night Shyamalan breakdown?”

  She didn’t know that Paul Hilepo had already received a call from Doug Aibel about the role. Doug’s casting assistant, Stephanie Holbrook, knew Cindy’s theater work. She was a fan. When she read Doug’s character breakdown for Lin Lao, she got out a glossy picture of Cindy and pinned it to Doug’s office wall. Doug had auditioned Cindy for other roles, and he liked her, too. But Hilepo didn’t tell Cindy about the call. Too much information can backfire on an auditioning actor. He said, “Believe me, I saw that and started salivating.” For once a big-name director was looking for a tall Asian actress for a studio movie. For once, Cindy had a chance.

  Several days before her audition, Cindy was given her audition scene to read, three individual pages pulled out of the script. Sides, they’re called in the business, like the name of Cindy’s play. In her scene, Cleveland Heep asks her about the word narf. Cindy looked it up on the Internet and found nothing. (There was a Native American Rights Foundation and a Nike Animal Rescue Fund, but no narf.) One line seemed funny to her: “University gives many pages of homework. What they think? I have no social life?” She remembered that Joaquin Phoenix in Signs had been funny. She decided she’d go for funny. She knew that if she got the role, she’d be working with Paul Giamatti, one of her acting heroes. She tried not to think about Paul Giamatti. She tried not to think that the role would pay a living wage. She concentrated on the words on her sides and what they triggered in her head. In her apartment at night she’d rehearse, her novelist husband filling in for Giamatti. They’d read the lines in bed before falling asleep.

  The day she read for Doug Aibel, she wore black pants and a lacy black-and-white tank top. She put on eye shadow and blush and mascara and plum lipstick. Her straight hair was curled and all done up. Doug looked at her and said, “Take off your earrings. You look too…pretty.”

  She could hear disappointment in his voice. She had made the wrong choice. A chance, a rare chance, was slipping away.

  “It said in the breakdown that she dresses like Britney Spears,” Cindy said, explaining.

  “That’s only when she goes out,” Doug said.

  She performed the scene for Doug and a video camera on a tripod. Doug read Cleveland’s lines, softly and with almost no inflection. It took maybe two minutes. Night would see the videotape if Doug felt it was worth his time. After the first stab, Doug asked Cindy to try it again.

  “Throw it away more this time,” he said. He wanted her to play it more casually. Less funny. Slower.

  She knew Doug had worked often with Night. She trusted him and did as he suggested. But it didn’t even feel like acting to her, that second take.

  She was the first person reading for the role. Plenty of others would come after her. It was a studio movie. Tall Asian English-speaking women would come out in droves. Cindy figured the odds were slim. They always were.

  Night had a wish list for his various male supporting roles. The names William Hurt, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Sidney Poitier, Richard Dreyfuss, Chris Cooper, Gene Wilder, Terrence Howard, Alec Baldwin, Vince Vaughn, Bill Irwin, Don Cheadle, Tom Wilkinson, Danny Glover, Forest Whitaker, Bob Balaban, James Cromwell, Steve Buscemi, Peter Sarsgaard, Jeffrey Wright, Vincent D’Onofrio, Wallace Shawn—and many other less familiar names, ones usually offered by Doug Aibel—kept coming up. Not counting the five smokers, Night had four remaining acting jobs for men to fill.

  He looked at a list of names, running his finger over them. The voices kicked in.

  I need angels, I need angels, who are the angels?

  One day Night was interviewing somebody for a job on Lady in the Water who had recently seen Alec Baldwin.

  Alec’s on the list. Maybe that’s a sign. Maybe that means something.

  “How’d he look?” Night asked.

  “Chubby.”

  “Hmmmmm.”

  “But he’ll lose weight if you tell him to.”

  “Is he heavy in the face?”

  “He can lose it.”

  Night looked unconvinced. He’d been down that road with other actors.

  “I want to see his eyes. He has those great eyes.”

  For Night, filling the male roles was an embarrassment of riches. He offered a role to Philip Seymour Hoffman, had a couple of conversations with him, in an unguarded moment allowed him to read the entire script. Hoffman let him down gently—loved the script, liked the role, just too much going on now—and the disappointment lingered in Night only briefly, maybe two days and part of a third. He knew there were other actors who could do it.

  But filling the two main female roles, after Story, consumed Night with worry. Where on earth would he find his Korean heavyweight, Lin Lao Choi, with her comic manner and her rolls of fat? And who would play Anna Ran, sister of the stalled writer Vick Ran, the role Night had reserved for himself?

  It would be by far the biggest part of Night’s acting career. He wondered what it would be like, the whole acting thing: finding his voice, playing off the actors, seeing himself in their eyes, applying for membership in their club, having the public respond to him in another way. He knew critics would be watching him, hawk-eyed, to see what he could do with the role and why he had cast himself. I had never heard anybody in Night’s camp, or anybody at all, challenge Night on whether he was the best actor for the part. When I asked him about it, he said, “I wouldn’t even want to make this movie if I couldn’t play Vick.” That’s a statement that a director whose last four movies have grossed over $2 billion can say. He knew he wasn’t hiring the most technically skilled actor he could find to play Vick Ran. But Night needed an actor he knew would believe in the role, and he had found him. There were other motivations. If the movie became some sort of phenomenon, the credit would come back to Night every which way: as writer, as co-producer, as director, and as an actor playing one of the leads.

  Vick Ran’s kid sister, Anna Ran, needed to be (or look) Indian, funny, and a few years younger than Night. She needed to be sardonic and confident, able to jab at Night’s character, even though the real-life Night was directing the movie.

  Doug Aibel had ideas for Anna, and Ash Rajan, Night’s cousin, boy agent at the United Talent Agency, had a candidate, too, young, cute, and Indian. Night had had mixed feelings about helping Ash get a job at UT, his own agent’s firm. Night despised any system that kept insiders in and outsiders out, where talent didn’t carry the day. But he saw in Ash, newly out of college, his own intense ambition at that age, and he knew Ash would make it or not on his own. This was the first time Ash had suggested a client to him. All Night was willing to do was take a look.

  In high school on Long Island, Doug Aibel was what Broadway people call a “second-acter,” someone who went to the great midtown theaters and sneaked into plays at intermission, on stolen nights and Sunday afternoons. His day job, as the artistic director of a New York theater, the Vineyard Theatre, was consuming, and so was his second job as a casting agent for a small group of movie directors and producers, including Scott Rudin, Wes Anderson, Tim Robbins, Night, and a few others. His tiny windowless office at the Vineyard was crammed with head shots and tapes and scripts, and his phone rang constantly. Trying to get some work done for Night one day at lunchtime, he said to
his assistant, “Absolutely hold all calls—unless it’s Scott Rudin.”

  Doug had never known a director able to make such quick, intuitive decisions about actors as Night. Over the years Doug had picked up on something that Night did subconsciously: He chose actors with good mental health. Night chose actors he knew he could live with for the half-year of shooting and editing.

  For the role of Anna Ran, Doug sent Night a dozen tapes of the auditions he liked best. When he sent them, he also included the tape of Cindy Cheung, the first Lin Lao candidate he had seen. Night gave Cindy a quick look. He thought she showed promise. She had no rolls of fat, but he figured he could be flexible about that. Still, he knew the search would be long and that many more would be coming. He moved on to Anna.

  He quickly got it down to two candidates. There was, in Night’s shorthand, “Ash’s girl,” Sheetal Sheth, young and cute and bouncy. She had recently finished work on a movie Albert Brooks was making for Warner Bros. called Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World. And there was Sarita Choudhury, a New Yorker who worked often in independent movies. Night didn’t recognize most of the movies on her résumé, but he smiled when he saw Law & Order. To him, that was like an actor having a high school diploma; it showed a survival instinct, too. If you were living in New York and trying to make a living as a working actor, you got yourself on Law & Order. There was a built-in problem with Sarita—she was several years older than Night, and he had written Anna as his younger sister—but he wasn’t going to allow that to void her chances for the job, not when Doug Aibel had such high regard for her. You could always find a negative, and there were negatives that could not be overcome. What Night was always looking for was a sign, some overwhelming positive, about why a candidate worked. Among those who worked, he tried to find the one who worked best.

  That didn’t mean he always hired the most technically skilled actor. He had, after all, cast himself. There were other factors.

  “The famous example,” Night told me once when he was going to New York for auditions, “is Back to the Future. Originally, Eric Stoltz was hired to play the role of Marty McFly. They shot scenes with him. It didn’t work. He was too actorly, too serious, I don’t know, but they fired him and brought in Michael J. Fox. He killed it in all three of those movies.” The sitcom actor was the right one for the role.

  Night saw his two Anna candidates, Sheetal and Sarita, on the same day, in a small windowless room on the top floor of an old building in lower Manhattan with a slow elevator, in an audition space called the Three of Us. Aibel was there with his assistant, Stephanie, who taped the auditions. There were acting classes and other auditions going on in other rooms, and actors sitting on benches in the hallway, reading from sides. The place was filled with dangling nerves. Many of the people, out of necessity, were wearing psychic blinders.

  Night rode the elevator with a mother and her young actor son. The elevator stopped on every floor, and Night tried gently but repeatedly to engage the kid in conversation. (His need to connect and his curiosity were interchangeable.) The kid’s answers were emotionally dead and monosyllabic, and the mother never bothered to make eye contact with Night.

  “The sad thing to me,” Night said after we got off the elevator, “was that had the mother figured out who I was, then she would have been all over me. You know, ‘Can you put my son in one of your movies?’ Like that. But rather than take a chance, she just decided that I was another kook in a New York elevator. She was too closed off from the world to let a stranger in, a stranger that could have changed their lives. She paid no attention to the moment.” He felt deflated. He had failed to inspire them.

  Sheetal auditioned first. With her plump lips and light skin and light eyes, she looked nothing like Night. Night looked beyond that. He felt you could believe her as Night’s kid sister. She had grown up in Pennsylvania, she was a scholastic star in high school, she loved basketball, she had gone to Tisch at NYU. Her engineer father had responded to her choice of profession in pretty much the same way that Night’s doctor father had with Night. Night was laughing, they were so similar.

  If she was nervous, you could not tell. The only thing coming out of her was spunkiness and desire. She wore no makeup, or very little, and was dressed like a girl in a Gap ad—the American girl (of Indian descent). When she moved quickly, you could see her flat stomach and navel above her low-slung jeans. She had brought a prop not in the script: Fritos corn chips in a Ziploc sandwich bag. Doug read Night’s lines. She seldom needed her sides. She had prepared. Night laughed and smiled frequently, moving from a metal folding chair to the floor, sitting cross-legged five or six feet away from her, looking at her as if she were the only actress in the world.

  But the Fritos were distracting him. She was doing a whole thing with them, carefully placing each chip on the tip of her tongue with the tips of her fingers, then swallowing it whole, as if to avoid getting any yellowish crumbs stuck in her perfect white teeth.

  Did she count those Fritos out before coming in here?

  Night knew he was thinking about the wrong thing, just as he had with the hedge below Alan Horn’s office. Night asked her to put the Fritos away, so he could focus on her acting. She didn’t seem embarrassed at all. She exuded confidence.

  Sheetal’s Anna was funny, annoying, cute, believable. Night felt she could play the part. He was worried, though, that she could play the role only one way, and that if, on the day—shooting day—Bryce Howard wanted to try something different, Sheetal wouldn’t have another move. When Night asked her to try different things in the audition—“Let’s go for more like ‘I’m tired of making my brother dinner every night’”—the perky, cute, funny, slightly annoying Anna emerged all over again. But Night was okay with that, because her one note worked.

  “You could see her as so annoying you’d want to kill her,” Night told Doug when Sheetal left. “I like that. She’s Anna as I wrote her.” You couldn’t ask for a better endorsement.

  Doug Aibel was a study in discretion. He wouldn’t bring anybody he didn’t think could play the role, and he indicated his preferences with subtlety. He’d say, “Now, this is an actor you probably haven’t heard of, but she’s well regarded in theater.” (You almost never heard Night or Doug use the word actress.) It was on this basis that Doug had pointed Night to Cherry Jones, a celebrated Broadway actress who had significant roles in Signs and The Village. Regarding Sarita, Doug said, “She works a lot in India and in indie film, and she’s a real New Yorker, well known in the downtown scene.” In other words, she was an artist hanging out with other artists. By Doug’s standards, that was whacking Night in the head with a script.

  Sarita came in. She was dark, voluptuous, obviously older than Night, with long dark hair and high cheekbones. There was something exotic and glamorous about her. She looked like a young mother. She also looked slightly bored, but that had to be acting—there were rings of perspiration under her arms. There aren’t many big-budget movies calling for actresses of Indian descent, and the stakes were high for her. Her reading of Anna was totally different from Sheetal’s, and different from how Night had written the role. Sheetal had screamed the line, “Mr. Heep’s a playa!” She had made it funny and exuberant. Sarita dropped the exclamation mark and the pseudo-urban pronunciation and calmly whispered, “Mr. Heep’s a player.” She made it real, something said with inside knowledge.

  Night asked her to read various lines in various ways, and when the session was done, Night said, “Wow.” They were together only about fifteen minutes, but those fifteen minutes were so intimate they had felt like a day. When Night asked Sarita about her background, it illicited a brief, rich family history. Sarita had grown up in India, England, Italy, and Jamaica and had lived in New York for years. At the audition, she spoke English with an American accent.

  Preparing to leave, she got on her toes to give Night a kiss on his right cheek. Night was a little surprised, and then there was a split second of awkwardness when she went to th
e other side to finish off one of those European double kisses. She briefly seemed undecided about whether to complete the double kiss.

  The voices went crazy.

  Got it. Okay. That’s the real Sarita.

  In that moment, Night saw her awkwardness, her vulnerability, her earnestness, her desire, her truthfulness. She had let down her guard, the years of rejection that are part of the acting life when nobody’s knocking on your door, when you’re closing in on forty and still running all over Manhattan, riding in rickety elevators and carrying a pillowy day bag that holds a swimsuit and a pack of cigarettes, your cell phone and your daughter’s artwork, the Times, and a little black book crammed with the numbers of agents and friends who have spare beds in a half-dozen different countries. In that moment of hesitation, with Night so close to her he could smell her, she won the chance to get the role. Without it, the part was going to Sheetal. With it, Night was undecided.

  Sarita left and Night said to Doug, “I don’t think I’d have to rewrite the role for her, but I’d have to rethink it. She’d be the older sister who looks out for her kid brother.”

  He called his cousin. “I liked your girl. Sheetal, right? She’s really, really good. I’m thinking about her, dude. She’s in the running.” He wanted to sound like a leader, like he was in control. And except for the Fritos, what was there not to like? Sarita was the more skilled and accomplished actress, but Sheetal was Anna. It was turning into Eric Stoltz versus Michael J. Fox—and Night had no idea what to do.

  Chris Doyle had a big reputation. Everywhere Night went, he heard the same thing: Chris Doyle is a genius; Chris Doyle cannot be controlled. He was a native Australian who lived in various hotel rooms around the world when he wasn’t in Hong Kong. His Chinese name—he regarded himself as Chinese in spirit—was Du Ke Fung, which translated as “like the wind.” There was a quote from Doyle under his biography on IMDB, a movie website: “Du Ke Fung is an extremely poetic name, as opposed to this piece of shit sitting before you. This person called Du Ke Fung with no past or parents or ID card makes these films and at night he turns back into this drunkard called Chris Doyle.” Doyle had worked extensively with the Chinese director Wong Kar-Wai, whose movie In the Mood for Love had made such an impression on Night. He had also been the director of photography on the Jet Li karate movie Hero, which Night found exhilarating, and Gus Van Sant’s remake of Psycho, which Doyle had done without having seen the Hitchcock original. Doyle had only one experience working with a big-name director on a mainstream big-budget American movie, as Barry Levinson’s director of photography on Liberty Heights.