The Man Who Heard Voices

by Michael Bamberger

  “Chris is really a very sweet guy with a very good eye,” Red said. “But he’s killing himself with the drinking, and he can’t handle the camera. And the director’s got the single best camera operator in New York already working the movie. He could call him right in.” Red was referring to Pat Capone, who was operating the B camera, the shots that involved no actors—doormats, clouds passing overhead, extras walking down a corridor, things like that. It was Pat Capone who had picked up a piece of Red’s finger off a New York street one day during the Steve Martin remake of The Pink Panther after a camera mount had sliced it off. (Red sat in a hospital waiting room for hours, but the tip was a goner.) But Red wasn’t praising Pat out of loyalty. He had the movie in mind, a movie he would likely never see. He cared about a thing being done right.

  Red said there was one thing saving the show: the actors, Paul and Bryce in particular. “Two pros,” Red said. It was his highest praise.

  Barbara Tulliver, the editor, was worried about how Bryce was coming across in dailies. “It seems like every time she’s on the screen, she’s crying,” the editor said. She and Night were sitting in the screening room after another day of a crying Story. Everybody else had left. The room was dark. Barbara always had a pen in her hand, a notebook on her lap, and her hair often up in a bun. She was wearing a crisp, tight button-front shirt, her usual uniform; there was something schoolteacherish about her. Some days Night was ready to hear what she had to say, and some days he was not. In the Bristol version of The Wizard of Oz, Jimmy would have been the Tin Man, after he gets a heart; Doyle, the Lion, after he gets courage; and Barbara, the Scarecrow, after he gets a brain. (Paul Giamatti had traces of all three—plus, humor.) Barbara was Night’s intellectual alter ego, and sometimes Night didn’t feel like fighting with himself.

  “If people see her face and expect her to cry, that’s not good,” Barbara said. She wasn’t faulting Bryce’s performance but how Night was using her. She knew it was tricky, criticizing Night. She had learned that during Signs and relearned it at the read-through. To have a successful relationship with Night, you had to manage him, and that was nearly impossible. Disney had discovered that.

  “It’s one note,” Night said. He was speaking of Bryce’s performance, but he could have been speaking of his direction of her.

  Barbara said nothing. She knew when to quit.

  Night went into a slow, long, rhythmic nod. The silence was striking. The implications of Barbara’s observation were significant, both for what had already been shot and for what was still to come. Bryce was such an exquisite crier, you could shoot it all day long. Her eyes filled up and the tears rolled due south, straight down her high cheekbones, shooting off as if they were ski jumps, then landing on Cleveland Heep’s drab work shirt or whatever she was wearing.

  Bryce was the most earnest actor on Lady. (Chrismandu, Paul’s stand-in, was a close second.) The crew loved her and compared her favorably to another actress who had grown up in the business, Gwyneth Paltrow. Bryce took nothing for granted. She was polite, Night sometimes felt, almost to the point of being unreal.

  One day Bryce was sitting on the Cove’s industrial cement steps. They were between takes, and there was a gaggle of Lady people around: extras, stand-ins, actors, crew members, hairstylists, makeup artists—the usual suspects. Night was within earshot. Bryce had just seen In Her Shoes, the Cameron Diaz movie that had been shot in Philadelphia.

  “How was it?” a woman asked.

  “It was…good.”

  “We need more,” another woman said. They wanted not just Bryce’s take on the movie but her review of the costumes and the makeup and the set decoration. They wanted to know how Cameron Diaz looked and how the Shoes crew made her look.

  “I’d rather not get too specific,” Bryce said. “I’m sure there are a lot of people here who worked on it.”

  So polite.

  Bryce analyzed everything. She was like Night that way. But she didn’t pontificate. She was far more comfortable posing questions.

  One mellow summer night, Bryce was sitting on the steps of her trailer. Inside her trailer were pictures of Albert Einstein and Audrey Hepburn and Martin Luther King, Jr., among other heroes. She had Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth in her hands. Keith Jarrett was in the air, drifting out of Paul’s camper. When Paul stepped outside, Bryce asked if he had read any Joseph Campbell. Paul nodded.

  “Isn’t he amazing?” Bryce said.

  “Bunch of bullshit!” Paul answered. “Don’t believe a thing he says!”

  Bryce laughed, but nothing would deter her. She was on a spiritual quest, in some postmodernist way. She was planning her wedding during the Lady shoot and looking for a combination rabbi–Buddhist monk–physicist to officiate. On her off days, she was writing a script that had an Einstein role. She treated Night as if he had the answers to the great riddles of the universe. It didn’t make him comfortable.

  After the cry alert from Barbara, Night had several long conversations with Bryce about her performance. When they were alone, her inherent awkwardness came back, and Night was relieved to see it. To Night, that was the real Bryce, the one who never knew the right thing to say. For a long while during the shoot, Night had felt she was coming off like any other young good-looking actress telling smooth stories on some second-rate late-night TV show. (“Actors turn me off; human beings turn me on,” Night would sometimes say.) Night wanted to strip her of artifice, find a way to get back the rawness he’d felt from her on a New York stage. That was who she’d been in The Village. That’s who he needed for Lady in the Water.

  The return of Bryce was gradual. One evening Night was mocking the vampish poses young starlets, like Bryce, assume for their red-carpet shots. He had the whole thing down: left toe touching right heel, hands on hips, spinal slouch, chin on shoulder. Bryce laughed, at Night and at herself, and Night knew he would eventually get her back.

  Some days later, they were shooting a scene where Story is dragged by a scrunt over long wet grass. The scene had been worked out carefully by Jeff Habberstad, the stunt coordinator. Bryce was placed in a harness that was supposed to protect her as she was dragged through the grass. But the mechanical scrunt’s speed was so great that Bryce was rolling all over the place, as if on a carnival ride gone wild. Her legs were getting nicked by twigs and plants and the heavy, coarse grass. But she told nobody about it. In between takes, she wore a long robe so nobody could see.

  Night took safety on the set seriously. When he saw Bryce’s welts and scratches, he was upset.

  “This shouldn’t happen,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” Bryce said.

  “I’m going to call Jeff on this.”

  “Please don’t. Please don’t. It’s not his fault.”

  “You don’t realize: This is not about you. This is about the movie. I can’t have my lead with welts all over her legs. Now, what about the scenes where you don’t have welts all over your legs?” In the craft of making movies, this is known as a continuity problem. Mary Cybulski, the movie’s meticulous script supervisor—the “script girl,” Red’s old-school phrase—was always on guard for continuity problems.

  “We could maybe put makeup on them?” Bryce suggested.

  Night wondered if he should call in the nurse on the set.

  “I can’t have a reputation as a director who doesn’t protect his actors,” he said.

  But all the while, he was considering Bryce, her scratched legs, her mangy wet hair, her pale facial makeup, her ebullient eyes. Night could see how happy she was with her welts and her bruises, how pleased she was to take one for the team. It confirmed what he thought he’d known. Bryce was a believer: in the script, in Night, in the message of the movie. She helped give Night faith that the whole crazy thing made sense. She helped keep Nina out of Night’s head. Nothing could get Nina out completely, but Bryce was helping.

  Prior to his gig as Paul Giamatti’s stand-in, Chrismandu’s biggest movie job was his uncredite
d role playing a bookie on Unbreakable. Chrismandu said that Lady in the Water had a completely different vibe. Then Night had been coming off The Sixth Sense and feeling invincible. Many of the Unbreakable locations were in the path of everyday Philadelphia life—Franklin Field on the University of Pennsylvania campus—and there were thousands of extras and hundreds of people with their noses in a fence. Night and the crew and the actors were all over the city. There were two big stars around, Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson. Traffic was snarled. There were police officers and security people everywhere, and some days there were helicopters carrying photographers with long lenses. It was as if the whole world wanted to know what Night was doing. He was it.

  “This shoot is like family,” Chrismandu said. He was wearing his Cleveland Heep glasses and still working on his reddish beard, determined to look more like Paul. Night noted what Chrismandu was doing. He noted effort from wherever it came, whether it was from Red, Bryce, Chrismandu, or the young man who made the morning smoothies. You could see what Chrismandu meant, making the comparison to family: meals together, daily inquiries about health, hidden secrets and eccentricities, a dynamic father figure in Night.

  All the while, Night was a father at home, too. There was one day during the shoot when Franny got Night home at three-thirty A.M., and Night got himself up four hours later for a performance at his daughters’ school. Some days the girls were in the driveway when Night left for work, waving goodbye. When they came to the set, they watched the mechanical green scrunt and its scary orange eyes with fear and awe, fingers half over their own dark eyes. You could see they thought their father was magical, a mad scientist, an important person. They understood that the movie he was making had been their story first.

  “It’s tough to go from Clark Kent to Superman,” Night said one day when we were driving to the set.

  “Where are you Clark Kent?” I asked. “At home or on the set?”

  “That’s the thing,” Night said. “I don’t know.”

  On the set, Night had to be the answer man in times of confusion, and the rest of the time he had to give the impression that if everybody followed his instructions, things would be fine. Paul had signed on for that. His attitude was, when in doubt, do what the director wants. But Paul had his moments of doubt, and everybody else did, too. In the shoot’s background soundtrack—Night’s cackling laugh—there was the hint of hysteria.

  There was a scene in which Paul was having milk and cookies with Young-Soon and Mrs. Choi in the Choi apartment. Night had Paul sitting on the floor, childlike. At the end of every take, Paul would let the milk dribble down his bearded chin, and Night would laugh in uncontrollable bursts. Cindy Cheung didn’t get what was so funny, but she laughed anyhow, not wanting to be the person to break the mood. Chris Doyle was comfortable on the outside. He didn’t like how the milk-and-cookies scene was framed or lit, and by way of protest, he was muttering about it (“Looks like a fucking TV shot”). There were times Night wanted to say something similar but didn’t. He couldn’t afford to go under his breath like that. He couldn’t afford to set himself apart or show doubt. There were too many people depending on him to lead, too many people watching his every move.

  He was overloaded every day. He was trying to keep Nina out of his head and the spirit of Dylan in it. He was trying to find peace. In every take, he was trying to get the crew and the actors and the Warners people to see the story as he did. And when that didn’t happen, his disappointment turned into frustration, and every so often he said things with the candor and anger that people use when they’re in their own house, surrounded by family. So Night asked Glenn Kaplan when the movie would finally get in focus. And Night told Chris Doyle to simply lock down the camera, because given a long leash, Night felt the DP would at times make choices for himself and not for the movie. And Night told Red Burke—One Hundred Years of Cinema himself—that he was going too fast or too slow, even though it meant embarrassing the movie’s old pro. They were rare, these mini-tantrums. He didn’t even raise his voice to deliver them, which made them more deadly. But Night felt they were necessary, in the name of moviemaking.

  Night was good at keeping his frustration in check. For his first big scene playing Vick, the frozen writer, the hair ladies made him look like he was ready to deliver the six o’clock news. But Night was the emperor in his new clothes, and even though there was murmuring in the peanut gallery about his hair, nobody was willing to say something directly to the boss, except for Jose. Night took a look in the mirror with fresh eyes and saw how poufed and smooth and ridiculous his hair was. He headed toward the hair-and-makeup trailer to see the hair ladies. Marching over in his heavy black work boots, he said, “I’m gonna read them the riot act!” He sat himself down in one of the swivel chairs, all masculine. There was enough hair product in the trailer to open a salon, and the air smelled of baked hair. Night looked at himself in the mirror and said, “You know, maybe we see the character of Vick in different ways, but this is what I have in mind—tell me what you think.” Some riot act.

  Chris Murphy was the video supervisor. When Red went to look at a replay of a pullback shot, Murphy made that happen. It was routine for Night to say into an intercom, “Chris Murphy, last little bit of that last take,” and it would instantly appear on the monitor beside Night’s director’s chair. Murphy had worked on all of Night’s movies since The Sixth Sense. He was personable and opinionated, kind of a gadfly, a student of Night’s methods and manners. Night liked him.

  Murphy performed his job with the nonchalance of a pro who knows what he’s doing, and Night was okay with that as long as the work was good. Then came the day Night was shooting his most delicate scene with Bryce, in which Story tells Vick his future. It was Night’s close-up. Night had told Bryce to think of herself as a nurse who has to tell a patient whether he has AIDS. It was wrenching. Night shot a take and walked over to the monitor to have a look at himself and the scene.

  The moment the take started playing, Night began shaking his head.

  He said, “For once, Chris Murphy, could you get it in synch?”

  The gaps between sound and picture were so minute that a person with ordinary eyes and ears never would have picked up on them.

  Night watched through the end of the take and said into the intercom, “This is the main reason you’re on this movie, to have this scene in synch. And it’s not. You have failed.”

  I had never heard Night be so hurtful and cold. In the nurturing environment he had created, his words were so unexpected, direct, and cruel that they were a shock to hear. There were a dozen people standing around Night, and there was no sense of schadenfreude. People were just disturbed, feeling not only for Chris Murphy but for Night, too. Night didn’t do things like that, become emotionally unhinged, not when everybody could see him, when everybody was expecting him to lead.

  Murphy later told me that whenever a movie is shot on film, with sound recorded separately, it is impossible to get a perfect matchup of sound and picture in an instant video replay. He said sound always had to be marginally ahead of or behind the picture. Night felt that was not the case.

  But Night’s outburst wasn’t about mechanics. Night saw something on the monitor he did not like, and in that moment Chris Murphy became Nina Jacobson and Oren Aviv and Dick Cook. Murphy became Harvey Weinstein during Wide Awake and the computer graphics people who Night felt didn’t get the space invader to work at the end of Signs. He was Paul Giamatti not reading the script right away, Cindy Cheung not accepting the SAG minimum, Jose having doubts about Night’s teaser. At that moment Chris Murphy was everybody who could not be inspired by Night’s vision. The mechanical problem with the replay rekindled Night’s feelings of loneliness, and it triggered a public panic attack. It was as if the theme of his movie—becoming part of something bigger than yourself on faith alone—was proving false in real life. Chris Murphy’s true failure, to Night, was that he was not as committed to Lady in the Water as Night was. Nobo
dy could be, but Night didn’t know that.

  To others, the incident with Chris Murphy was much simpler. It was a systems glitch, a staple of modern life, as anybody who owns a printer knows. If you were there, you could feel Chris Murphy’s hot cheeks, his humiliation, his pain.

  As for Night, everyone just figured he was nervous about his performance, uptight, in a crap mood, in need of a full night’s sleep. Anybody could get like that now and again.

  Night regretted criticizing Red during the pullback shot. Red was a pro. He was making the movie better every day. Night had berated the wrong man that day. Preparing the shot correctly fell to Chris Doyle, and, as Night was an expert on Chris Doyle’s limitations, monitoring him ultimately fell to Night. Night saw Red crossing a parking lot, stopped him, and said he was sorry for what had happened. He got almost no response from his dolly grip. Red was pissed.

  The next day Night tried again. The problem with the pullback shot could have been avoided had Doyle rehearsed with the stand-ins, he told Red. “It’s not your fault, man. Cool?” He was apologizing again, and Red still wasn’t accepting it.

  Later that day, Red told me, “Public humiliation, private apology,” and made the international symbol for male masturbation. Red had standards from another era. Everything was not cool. For Red, his craft was his life, or at least a big part of it. He still wasn’t using Night’s name. Every time Red said the director, his eyebrows went up.