The Man Who Heard Voices

by Michael Bamberger

  “I gotta tell you, that’s a very sexy look,” Betsy said. Vay-ree.

  Night shook his head. He knew better. He was playing a writer who could not finish. There was nothing “sexy” about it.

  Then there was the question of whether Paul should wear a wig. Many hours on that one. Paul gamely tried on one wig after another. For preproduction, Night had brought in a famous hair-and-wig man from England, Peter King, a jolly chap, very funny and very white, wearing shiny white shoes and a white belt. His assistant was a young black man with a shaved head, also very shiny. Their examination of Paul was deeply clinical.

  Night, you need to know this: If you cut off Paul’s beard, it’s not coming back. It’s not really a beard. A beard grows. It’s hair on a face.

  Night asked, “If he wears glasses, what are the wig-and-beard implications?”

  The wig man shot a look at Night that said the implications were so far-reaching, it would take hours to answer the question properly.

  “I’m only asking because I like the idea of the beard and glasses, that kind of look that Richard Dreyfuss had in Jaws,” Night said. He saw movie analogies in everything. He had told a set designer he wanted the apartment where Joey lived with his father to have a “Kramer vs. Kramer quality to it.”

  Beard and glasses? Peter King did not approve. That gruesome combination would do nothing but diminish the greatness of his wig.

  Paul thought the idea of him in a wig was ridiculous but said nothing to Night, not directly. With his regular beard and black heavy-framed glasses, and now with long locks taped on him by the wig men, Paul became a ringer for Bill Gaines, the founder of MAD magazine. “The transformation is magical,” Paul whispered loudly, like an old theatergoer. The look was hilarious but not, in Paul’s mind, Cleveland Heep. Paul felt Cleveland could handle his male-pattern baldness, but Night was close to putting Paul in a piece. The voices knew better. “I could have ruined the movie with that one decision,” Night said later. “Ruined it.” He wasn’t necessarily overstating it. You could imagine people spending the entire movie asking, “You think Giamatti’s wearing a rug?”

  And then there was Bryce’s wig: many, many hours on that. Bryce would definitely be wearing a wig. Night wanted her hair to be long, in the red family but leaning to orange, with bangs, kinky but not Laraine Newmanish. He was presented with dozens of options, all complicated by his requirement that her hair change color over the course of the movie, even though the action unfolds over several days. These were some of the biggest tonal decisions in the movie. When Night wasn’t getting a good read on one red hue, Peter King said the culprit was Bryce’s sweater, that the black was overamplifying the red. Bryce jumped up and pulled off the black sweater. She was wearing a loose-fitting gray singlet underneath. Night looked at her in a mirror and said, “Okay, yes, now I see it. That improves it by seventy percent.”

  The question of the pool’s drain weighed heavily on Night for a while. There was a scene in which Cleveland lifts the pool’s drain and swims through it. If the drain was big enough to accommodate him, the movie would feel more realistic. Maybe a good thing, maybe not. If it was too small for that, it would feel more like a fantasy. Maybe a good thing, maybe not. So many choices. Night’s days were filled with them. Most of the day, except when he was in rehearsals, somebody was nearby, waiting to ask him something about something. In the end, Night decided to use a duplicate of the drain used in the gutter scene from Strangers on a Train, a Hitchcock movie produced by Warner Bros. A subtle nod.

  The 70 percent thing was common. Night was forever turning the results of his work into numbers and statistics suitable for SportsCenter. He said if he could get 90 percent of the tonal decisions correct in the movie, he’d be doing well. But he didn’t want to make all the tonal choices himself. A movie had to be collaborative. If it wasn’t, it didn’t work. He took script notes from anybody. He hired people because they had strong tastes. He wanted them to make choices. He didn’t want to dictate everything to them.

  There were times Chris Doyle believed Night on all that—and times that he did not. One day the DP and Night were talking about a particular evening scene when Doyle said, “How many apartments will you want lit for it?” It was what Night would call a tonal question. The answer would tell you about the age of the building’s residents, how compulsive they were, whether they were insomniacs or maybe working on side projects. The vibe of the building would be in the answer. But it was a question Night wanted Chris Doyle to figure out for himself.

  In a calculated way, Night read him the riot act. “Don’t give me that American Chris Doyle shit, okay? You can light every fucking apartment we have if you want. You decide.” He said that even though he knew he wanted fourteen of the fifty-seven apartments lit. He was trying to free up his director of photography. He said, “I want the Asian Chris Doyle!”

  “Yezboz,” Doyle said, shuffling away. Doyle knew he was working in America. He could tell by the way a movie-set five-story apartment building went up just about overnight. On that day, Doyle would think of Night only as the bossman. Other days were different.

  Most of the actors met Doyle for the first time when they came in for their screen test, a test not for acting ability but for how the actors looked in the lighting and the film stock and the various aperture settings Doyle was considering. On this day, the Asian Chris Doyle was out, the dangerous one. Upon seeing Cindy Cheung in her Britney Spears costume, Doyle said cheerfully, “You’re looking very fuckable.” Cindy did not take offense only because he said it so publicly and she detected no menace or sexuality in it. It was how he talked, how he paid compliments, how he called attention to himself. But Sam Mercer was worried. You never knew where a lawsuit might come from. The producer knew they’d have to watch Doyle closely. It didn’t bother Night. If people were uncomfortable, that would be good for the movie. Night’s own goal was to get out of his own comfort zone. He imagined what Nina would have said, had he tried to hire Doyle on her watch.

  Night’s worry was more immediate than Doyle’s use of the word fuckable. Doyle’s screen tests were outrageously muddy. “What’s he doing?” Night asked one night after looking at them. “You don’t do that leather-vest-with-no-shirt look on the first date. You gotta get the basics first and work your way up to the crazy shit.” The screen tests didn’t represent the American Chris Doyle (they would have been technically perfect) or the Asian Chris Doyle (they would have had art to them). They weren’t inspired madness. They were just bad. Still, at least they were bad for a reason: Doyle was trying to do too much.

  One day during preproduction, Alan Horn and Jeff Robinov came in for the day to see what their $68 million (the final budget) was buying. Night made certain to keep them away from Doyle, just in case the DP felt moved to pay them one of his patented compliments. Night, still getting to know the two executives, was being uncharacteristically cautious. There was one shot in the storyboards that was purely a Chris Doyle invention, involving the character Reggie, the guy who worked out only one half of his body, assuming an outrageous pose as he stares down a vicious scrunt. It was a comic moment in a scary scene. The possibility that Horn or Robinov would focus on that one shot among the hundreds in the movie seemed remote, but Night’s worry was real, so he had the shot omitted from the storyboard wall on the day of their visit.

  In their relationship, Robinov was typically the creative executive and Horn the analyst, the businessman. But during the visit, Night could tell for the first time what was happening internally at Warner Bros. Robinov was allowing Horn to have creative responsibility on Night’s first movie for the studio. Night thought that took a lot of confidence, to allow your boss to do your job for you. He could not imagine Nina and Dick Cook having any similar kind of arrangement. It also underscored how Night had found his way to Warner Bros.—because Alan Horn called him that day in Paris after The Village had opened.

  Night was more nervous than usual as he took Robinov and Horn and othe
r Warner Bros. executives around the set, a construction site, really. When Night showed the group, about eight in all, the mechanical scrunt in action, he watched Alan Horn’s eyes closely. Night saw fear. As Horn was leaving, he said to Night, “You wowed us.” Night was relieved.

  Yet he felt a certain emptiness. Originally, they were going to come for two days, with a visit to the farm on the first day. Night wanted them to see how he lived and worked. He felt that the better they knew him, the better the job they could do with his movie. But the two-day visit turned into a visit that lasted part of one day. They had other things going on in their lives. The tormenting picture of Nina Jacobson and Co. returned to his head, and Night wondered why Robinov had ceded (it seemed to Night) the creative onus to Horn. Was it because Horn and Night had a special bond? Or did Robinov, like Nina, have doubts about the script, too? Night knew these questions were only in his head, but that brought him no comfort.

  Night was an odd sort of obsessive compulsive. He didn’t expect every day to go well, or even close to well. He would have been perfectly fine with getting, say, 89 percent of the tonal decisions right, even if it was a full point shy of his stated goal. But certain things you had to get correct. The Horn-Robinov visit, that was an important one, and Night gave it a B-plus. You had to pick the right release date for your movie, and to do that, you had to know what the mood of the world would be like on that date. (Night was betting that on July 21, 2006, the world would be ready for a soulful movie with humor, for a world population weary of war.) You had to have the right trailer campaign and the right poster. You had to have certain key marketing executives, at least one or two levels below the ultimate bosses, who truly understood what you were trying to do in the movie. You could never get all of those people on your side, but you needed some of them. Certain hires you had to get right. You had to cast the right people in the right roles, on-screen and off. Same thing there: You would never get every casting decision right. Didn’t happen even in The Godfather or in The Sixth Sense or in any movie. But there were about a dozen jobs—lead actor, lead actress, DP, casting director, caterer, maybe a half-dozen more—you had to nail. In other places, good was good enough.

  For instance, the hiring of Mary Beth Hurt in a supporting role. She was so lovely as Laura in the 1979 movie Chilly Scenes of Winter. Once married to William Hurt, the most talented actor Night had ever worked with, she was now married to Paul Schrader, the director and screenwriter, most notably of Taxi Driver, the Martin Scorsese movie starring Robert De Niro. Night had hired Mary Beth to play Mrs. Bell, the animal lover who gave up writing because her one published book “sold like crap” and was a “terrible waste of time.” At her audition, and again in rehearsals, with the script right in front of her, she would often trample the lines Night had written. There are many directors who are happy to have their actors improvise. Paul Giamatti, when shooting Sideways for Alexander Payne, had come up with the line “Write up my gay confession and I’ll sign it.” Payne used it. But Night didn’t work like that, and every time Mary Beth Hurt inserted words of her own, Night wondered if there was some passive-aggressive thing going on between her and the script or her and Night or her and her own career. But Night wasn’t too worried. She was a good actress, and she was in only a few scenes, and if you gave her enough takes, she’d get it right eventually.

  And then there was Paul. He would ask if he could stutter on a different syllable than the one Night had indicated in the script. But he had opinions, too. He felt the stutter should be particularly emphatic when he was talking about children or near them. When Night heard Paul suggest that, he knew the actor really understood Cleveland Heep. Night knew that his single most important hire had been his best one.

  Later on the whaddup bitch day, Bryce walked into Night’s office. Paul had been examining the teeth of a model scrunt and looked up.

  “Did you hear about the new ending?” Paul asked her.

  Night knew Paul wasn’t going to give it away. Night liked seeing Paul like that, a little dangerous.

  “No. What?”

  “You die.”

  Night cackled and Paul giggled and Bryce laughed, maybe a little excessively.

  Bryce began distributing a food that looked suspiciously like haggis. A few days earlier, on August 1, there had been an afternoon break to celebrate Night’s thirty-fifth birthday. (Jeff Robinov had sent Night a framed original poster of the 1939 film version of Wuthering Heights. He knew that Night had thought about the boy in it when he was writing The Sixth Sense. Night took that as a good sign—maybe Robinov did like the script.) Bryce was one of the few actors around that day. A couple dozen people—editors, tailors, set designers, accountants, prop masters, drivers, caterers, the on-set nurse, the wig people, the hair people, the makeup people, the security people—gathered around to sing “Happy Birthday” to Night and to eat cake, big slices distributed on thin paper plates. Bryce passed. “I don’t eat anything that has animal fat in it,” she explained to Night. Night was annoyed. He thought it was Bryce trying on a personality again, the vegetarian who must always announce she is an outsider.

  Several days later, Bryce came in with a gruesome-looking vegan cake made with rice and honey and soy. You’ve never seen a grayer birthday cake or tasted one so gritty. In the name of kindness, Paul accepted a piece and pretended to like it. Night passed and said, “I won’t eat anything that doesn’t have animal fat in it.” He was joking, but with a hint of hostility. Bryce ignored it.

  She had changed. Night had first seen her on Broadway, in Tartuffe, where she was raw and emotionally bare. Based on that, he gave her a supporting role in The Village. Kirsten Dunst had been hired to play the lead. But Dunst dropped out in preproduction, to take the female lead in Spider-Man. Night gave the lead to Bryce. She was twenty-one, playing a blind woman in desperate love, and she had to carry the first real movie of her life. It didn’t matter that she was the daughter of Ron Howard, that she had grown up in the business, that as an eleven-year-old she had handed out sandwiches to her father’s crew as they watched the Apollo 13 dailies. She was an apprentice, and she hung on every word Night said and played the role beautifully. Even critics who didn’t like The Village praised her. She had saved the day, at the SAG minimum.

  But since then she had worked with two artistic directors, Lars von Trier and Kenneth Branagh. She had become engaged to another young actor, Seth Gabel, and was making lists of names for her unborn children. She had lavish technical skills, and Night was eager to see her grow. But Night felt she was turning into an…actress. One of those people you see on late-night TV talk shows. He could smell neither her perfume nor her sweat. And she was one of the dozen key hires—she had to be on fire for the picture to work. From what Night was seeing in rehearsals, he was worried. Her torment felt manufactured. He wanted something more than her exceptionally cheerful and elongated “Hi, Night” whenever they saw each other. For the movie to stir people, he needed her acting soul. He needed the real Bryce Dallas Howard. She was Story, the lady in the water. She was the story. Just about every character in the movie would be trying to save her life. Show me you’re worth it, Bryce.

  One afternoon Night said to her, “Look into my eyes.” They began a staring contest. “Tell me what I’m thinking.” It went nowhere. She wasn’t doing what Cindy did in her audition, what Night did in Cindy’s audition: seize the moment, respond to what was happening right there.

  The vegan cake was eaten, sort of, and Night and Bryce and Paul descended the back steps of the old 3M office building and went into a sealed-off room with a sofa, a few chairs, fluorescent lighting, industrial brown carpeting, and brown-paneled walls. The room hadn’t been used in a long time and smelled of mildew. Night had turned it into a rehearsal room where he and his actors could go off into a drift.

  Paul picked up a can of air freshener, a product called Oust, and started spraying it all around the room, as if putting out a fire. Bryce was talking about the documentary March
of the Penguins. Night had his nose in the script. There were no windows that could open, and the only sound was a whirring fan. The room had once been a waiting area, but now the door was sealed with an accordion-style metal fence. Through the slats, you could see the frayed neighborhood across Green Lane.

  Paul removed his sandals and took his wallet out of his back pocket and sprawled out on a sofa as if he had spent his childhood in that basement room, watching Hollywood Squares and eating Cap’n Crunch, except he was sipping black coffee from a Styrofoam cup and working on a movie that was paying him (Howard Stern got him to say in an interview) over $1 million. He was not trying on personalities.

  They were working on an intimate scene between Story and Cleveland. Bryce sat right beside Paul. Night felt that the sexual tension should be one-way, from Cleveland to Story.

  “Paul, you’re like ‘If this is a date, I’m throwing off the beeper.’”

  Paul nodded cheerfully.

  “Bryce, be careful not to become Lolita,” Night said.

  Bryce had her yellow highlighter resting across her lips and was staring with her translucent blue eyes up at Night, who was standing over her.

  He pointed to her pouting mouth and said, “Be careful of that.” She quickly moved the marker to her lap.

  Night closed his eyes and put his fingers on his nose, mouthing words. He was lost in concentration. When Night was making The Sixth Sense, he had to figure out a set of rules for the living dead. One was that you wore for eternity the clothes you were wearing when you died. Now he was working on his rules for narfs, the under-the-pool species to which Story belonged, and he was talking to himself again.

  Bryce was struggling with the line “I am scared.” She asked, “Is she scared when she says that?”

  “No,” Night said. “She’s rock-solid. She’s strong.”

  Bryce considered that for a moment and said, “When I think of strength, I think of armor.”