One of the most difficult, and most dangerous, stunts involved using Jonze himself; it later got cut from the movie. Originally there was an elaborate chase scene in which Keener (Maxine) chases Diaz (Lotte) with a gun. They go through a portal and find themselves in Malkovich’s memory. At one point they are on a bus, struggling with one another, and their fall off the bus takes them out of the portal. This had to be done in front of a blue screen, and it involved a high fall off a platform, into a trench. They succeeded in pulling off the fall, but the next week as they continued to shoot the chase scene, Keener’s stunt double was running through Malkovich’s memory again, veering around a corner, down attic stairs, where she sees a little-boy-Malkovich crying, “Mommy!” The stunt woman fell and twisted her ankle. It was the end of the night, and Landay was about to call the whole stunt off when suddenly he saw Jonze putting on the stunt woman’s dress and wig. “We’ve got enough frames just to do this quick shot,” Jonze said over his shoulder as he ordered the cameras to roll. Landay was freaked that Jonze might injure himself and the whole movie might be in jeopardy. Jonze was fine, but the bus scene and the chase was almost entirely cut from the film during editing because it distracted from the main story line. The moment with Jonze in stunt-drag remains.
JONZE ASKED DIAZ TO SPEND SEVERAL DAYS WITH THE CHIMP that would play Lotte’s pet in several scenes. She hung out with the monkey for about a week, and eventually walked around the set, holding its hand. The preparation paid off in a key scene when Lotte had been locked in the chimp’s cage by Craig, who wanted to go off and have a sexual tryst with Maxine while inside Malkovich’s body. Diaz as Lotte is in the cage, with tape over her mouth, when Craig rushes in, having just had sex with Maxine, and storms around the apartment, changing clothes before storming out the door. Jonze never shouted “Cut!” at the end of the scene. He frequently let the camera keep rolling to see what would happen.
“When we shot it on Cameron’s close-up, we just let the camera roll,” said Jonze. “She was freaking out, trying to make noise, trying to take the tape off. She’s locked in the cage with the chimp, and the chimp was so scared by her being scared that he sort of panicked and tried to comfort her.” With the camera still rolling—though the scene was over—the chimp gently came over and kissed Diaz on the tape over her mouth, a tender moment that a trainer never could have planned.
The film had long sequences of puppetry, an obscure art to say the least, using both marionettes and—in a “Dance of Despair”—Cusack himself. These were some of the hardest shots and the most important to Jonze to get right. He tried to get the country’s top puppeteer, Phillip Huber, to shoot the scenes with Craig performing, but he wasn’t available. (Jonze had no idea there was such a huge public for puppetry.) Finally Huber became available, and they shot with him for two weeks, but the scenes came out horribly. The dance of despair had to be redone completely, and was finally shot in Huber’s garage.
With the shoot complete, Jonze set out to carve out the movie from the hours and hours of odd, disjointed footage. Depression set in as he moved into the editing room. The first assembly of the footage was four hours long “and it was just this miserable thing to watch,” said Jonze. None of it seemed funny at all. It had no pacing. It just felt like a long, flat, bizarre experience. A terrifying thought occurred: Will this movie work at all? Jonze thought this moviemaking business was real torture. “You feel like you’re on the brink of failure all the time. Some days it feels like it’s really working and other days you think it’s never going to work.” The editing process on Being John Malkovich ended up being much more grueling and fundamental than on most movies. Eric Zumbrunnen, who’d worked with Jonze for years on music videos, spent nine full months with Jonze trimming, assembling, finding the movie. But the director was mostly not even in Los Angeles. Instead he was in Arizona, working as an actor for the first time on the set of Three Kings, David O. Russell’s $60 million auteur movie for Warner Brothers.
Three Kings
For nearly two decades, Warner Brothers had been making movies founded on a solid partnership between two moguls, Robert A. Daly and Terry Semel. The two men had a unique collaboration that confounded the Hollywood norm of back-stabbing competitiveness. They lived near each other, drove to work together almost every day, lunched often, and shared the fruits of their successes. In an industry where the head honcho job changes about as often as you trade in the BMW for a Mercedes, these two were a monument to longevity. Daly, the elder, had been chairman since 1980, and Semel, having risen through the ranks of the studio from the mid-1970s, joined him as vice chairman, then president and finally as cochairman. By the turn of the decade, they gave no sign of slowing down.
The pair owed their success largely to having found the ideal formula for making movies in the age of corporate Hollywood. As agents grew more powerful and began to package entire movies—script, director, and star—Daly and Semel kept their clout by striking on-the-lot deals with producers like Joel Silver, David Geffen, and Rob Reiner, and by nurturing relationships with the movie stars who ruled the box office, like Clint Eastwood, Kevin Costner, Sylvester Stallone, and Bruce Willis. They gave them cushy development deals and lavish perks such as access to the company jet. As a result they churned out an annual slate filled with effects-laden action movies featuring stars’ towering images that translated into huge box office sales all over the world. The machine that Daly and Semel had honed was expert at making high-budget, high-concept movies that required huge sets, hundreds of extras, explosions, and demolition derbys on water, land, or in the air. They helped perfect the franchise film, making blockbuster hits that could then spawn sequels and spin-offs and toy tie-ins and video games, including Batman and Lethal Weapon.
In 1990 the historic Warner Brothers studio merged with the venerable publishing powerhouse Time Inc., a $14 billion deal that created one of the early monoliths of the era of media conglomeration, Time-Warner. The merger, orchestrated by the dynamic Steven J. Ross, seemed to make sense: a publishing giant combining forces with a moving pictures giant. But it didn’t greatly affect the decision making at the top of Warner Brothers because Ross gave his executives the freedom to make their own decisions. For the executives who worked under the pair of moguls, the message was clear. As one put it, “If you make money on the movies, you keep your job. If you don’t make money, you lose your job.”
But by the mid-1990s times were changing, and below the most senior executive ranks there were those who could see that Warner Brothers couldn’t forever continue to attract huge audiences with a stable of aging stars whose price tags seemed to rise exponentially. They missed the days of intelligent movies for adult audiences and were interested in making films that tested the tried-and-true limits of the star vehicle. They thought the big studios ought to be able to compete for an Oscar at the end of the year.
In 1996 Bill Gerber and Lorenzo di Bonaventura were the young rising talents at the studio; named as joint heads of production, they seemed to be on track to one day inherit the studio from Daly and Semel. Both were literate and intelligent—di Bonaventura’s father was a classical musician—and highly competitive men who believed a vehicle should have four wheels and headlights, not refer to a movie. While they both were well trained in the nuts and bolts of Warner Brothers filmmaking, they also had their eye on young talent rising elsewhere, in the independent world.
In the early 1990s they came up with two big ones. Di Bonaventura got hold of a script written by two reclusive, comic book–geek kids from Chicago, Larry and Andy Wachowski. The script was called Assassins, an action thriller about an aging hit man on the run from a younger killer. Di Bonaventura thought it was one of the best scripts he’d ever read. He bought the rights from independent producer Dino De Laurentiis and tried to make it as a non–Warner Brothers project: small, cool, with a $15 million budget. But the bureaucratic culture of the studio proved overpowering. Sylvester Stallone got the script and wanted to make the film. Of
course he ended up starring in it, with another Warner Brothers stalwart, director Dick Donner, at the helm. The combo of new blood (the writers) and old blood (the star and director) was not exactly a success. Donner and Stallone radically changed the script, fired the Wachowskis as writers, and brought in Brian Helgeland as a replacement. The 1995 movie Assassins, cost a whopping $50 million (not including marketing) and bombed at the box office, taking in just $30 million in the U.S.; and even abroad, where Stallone still had a following, it took in a feeble $47 million.
The flop was a test of the Wachowskis’ relationship with di Bonaventura, who had failed at this first attempt to nurture new talent within the Warner Brothers bureaucracy. He determined to be more protective in the future. After signing the brothers to a four-script deal, he got a look at a separate project they’d written on their own called The Matrix, a dizzyingly complicated sci-fi story about humans enslaved by machines who sucked their lifeblood while diverting the human mind into an alternate, virtual universe—the “matrix” of the title. It was a fantastically original plot, though hard for many to understand. The script arrived in early 1994, before the Internet and the notion of a virtual universe was common or even comprehensible to most people. Certainly it was not accessible to Daly and Semel. But di Bonaventura was fascinated. “It’s a mind-altering script,” he said. “I thought it was unique. Something you chase even if you don’t fully understand it.”
For the next three years di Bonaventura followed the evolving versions of the script and didn’t come up against any serious opposition within the studio until the Wachowskis said they wanted to direct the film—well, films: The movie had morphed into a trilogy.
To old-fashioned businessmen like Bob Daly and Terry Semel, unaccustomed even to e-mail, The Matrix was impenetrable to begin with. They were inclined to say no. But they wanted to support their head of production and were willing to believe in his passion. They told di Bonaventura that if the Wachowskis could prove that they could direct a traditional action picture, the moguls would consider green-lighting The Matrix. After the brothers quickly wrote and directed Bound, a lesbian crime thriller starring Gina Gershon that did well enough, Daly and Semel softened.
Semel particularly loved the noir, sexy thriller and gave a tentative go-ahead to start casting The Matrix. Di Bonaventura knew he needed stars. Brad Pitt showed interest, as did Will Smith and Leonardo DiCaprio. Val Kilmer was agitating for the role of Morpheus and came close to winning it. But the Wachowskis’ wanted Lawrence Fishburne and wouldn’t budge. Keanu Reeves chased them for the role of Neo, though at the time he was hardly a big enough star to carry what was supposed to be a $45 million, then a $63 million, and eventually a $72 million movie.
WARNER WENT DOWN ITS LIST OF MOVIE STARS. ARNOLD Schwarzenegger as Morpheus? It was a possibility, briefly. “Desperation is not the word, but we were trying to get the movie made,” recalled di Bonaventura. Reeves was ultimately cast, despite the resistance.
With Reeves and Fishburne cast as the leads, Daly and Semel wanted a financing partner. Village Roadshow, a production company, agreed to put up half the budget, and the Australian government kicked in a 15 percent tax rebate to attract the project overseas, the first of many large productions to leave Hollywood in the second half of the decade.
In Terry Semel’s private conference room, the final green-light meeting took place with the cochairman, producer Joel Silver, and di Bonaventura. The Wachowski brothers—who normally are so silent as to seem almost mute—came in carrying detailed, painted storyboards, laying out the entire movie as if it were a graphic novel. The brothers positioned themselves on either side of Terry Semel, with one telling the story of the movie—“there’s a jack in the back of the human’s head, like a plug …”—while the other provided all the special effects noises—boom, hiss, whoosh—in the background while holding up the storyboards. It was a tour-de-force performance. Semel asked, “How does their spinal fluid not leak?” One of the brothers explained. They talked about Kierkegaard, about science fiction writer William Gibson. They discussed Buddhism, Islam, and Christ’s role in the Bible. They explained the characters, what a “sentinel” is and what it looks like. They explained “bullet time” and how that would be filmed. After two hours, Semel was convinced. “This is one of the best presentations I’ve ever seen,” he announced. “Let’s go.”
ON ITS RELEASE IN 1999 THE MATRIX WAS MARKETED AS A classic action movie in the traditional Warner Brothers style. No matter. Audiences recognized something very different in the film. The Matrix quickly became a phenomena, sparking an explosion of pop interest in the concept of the movie, its look, its style, and stars, and inspiring a near religious fervor by fans devoted to the movie’s philosophy (whatever that was). It also raked in close to $400 million at the worldwide box office. And there were two more Matrix movies to come.
As a sidenote, Larry Wachowski became somewhat less reclusive in the wake of The Matrix’s success. He left the college sweetheart he’d married in 1993, Thea Bloom, for a professional dominatrix, Karin Winslow, who left her own husband to take the director on as her slave. Then he also became a cross-dresser and appeared at the premiere of the final installment of the trilogy, The Matrix Revolutions, dressed as a woman. The quality of the second and third films seemed to decline with the Wachowskis’ meteoric Hollywood success. Neither gave interviews to talk about it. Meanwhile the technophobic Terry Semel left Warner Brothers to take over Yahoo, the Internet company.
IT WAS AROUND THIS TIME, THE END OF 1995, THAT BILL Gerber saw an early copy of Flirting with Disaster, the odd comedy-drama by David O. Russell. The Miramax film starred Ben Stiller, who goes off on a search for his birth parents (played by Lily Tomlin and Alan Alda), and it was generating a lot of buzz both in the independent world and beyond. Harvey Weinstein had bought the project for distribution and cleverly gave Russell a two-picture deal at the same time. This meant Miramax had the first shot at making any new screenplay that Russell wrote. But the director had other things in mind. For one, he had been researching a movie at Princeton, a turn-of-the-century drama about spiritual death in the twentieth century, based around a family in the oil industry. Russell found the topic entirely intimidating, and once immersed in the research was wondering whether he could pull it off. Additionally, he was annoyed that Miramax had not put much effort into the video release of Flirting, slapping mediocre art on the package and using quotes he didn’t like. So Russell was intrigued when Gerber invited him over to the Warner Brothers lot to read scripts to see if there was something he might be interested in directing. If he found a screenplay to direct that someone else had written, he could circumvent his obligation to Miramax. The draw of a big canvas—and a big Warner Brothers budget—was tempting.
Russell did find something. Writer John Ridley had written a screenplay called Spoils of War. Sitting in di Bonaventura’s office, Russell saw it listed as an entry in a log of Warner scripts: “Four soldiers go on heist in Iraq during Gulf War,” it said. The story line was very different from anything Russell had done before, but that was part of what interested him. He had a long-standing interest in foreign politics, from volunteering with Nicaraguan refugees in New England in his early twenties after graduating from Amherst, and later visiting Central America. Russell’s first interest in filmmaking had come from shooting video of the refugees. Indeed, he was one of the few rebel directors of his era not to discover his desire to make movies at an early age. Instead, Russell came to the craft through storytelling and character, based on his own life and the people he met. But after making two very personal films—Spanking and Flirting—politics was clearly on his mind. Russell had considered directing Bulworth, the cynical comedy about domestic politics, but Warren Beatty directed it instead. Ridley’s idea involving the Gulf War intrigued him; the bizarre nature of the conflict, America going there to liberate Kuwait, and then leaving the Iraqis to deal with their dictator, reminded him of American cynicism in Central America.
The story “seemed like something I could go nuts with in terms of exploring every human and political dimension,” Russell said. This project would take him out of the territory of personal drama into a wholly new universe: an action-adventure war story at a major studio. Gerber brought Russell in to meet di Bonaventura, and he agreed that Russell was just the kind of young talent Warner needed to recharge itself creatively. They agreed that Russell would rewrite the script, and the studio would then decide whether to make it. But Russell was aware of the Warner Brothers culture. At the time, he thought to ask if this studio really wanted to make his kind of movies. Gerber replied, “We’re not afraid of this type of thing. We made JFK.” Before the movie was made, Gerber would be out of a job, after losing a power struggle with di Bonaventura.
RUSSELL TOOK EIGHTEEN MONTHS TO RESEARCH AND rewrite Three Kings. He claims he never read the John Ridley version, though Ridley later complained that much of the story was his own. It wasn’t, really, and in fact there’s not much to discuss here: Ridley’s script is nothing like Russell’s. After negotiation with the studio, Ridley was given joint credit for the story on Russell’s very first draft. Russell took the screenplay credit.
The premise of the story was clever but not particularly original as war capers go. It was about a Special Forces major and three reservists at the end of the 1991 Gulf War who discover a map to a cache of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s gold bullion. They decide to go briefly AWOL to steal it, but along the way they meet up with a group of opposition fighters who have been abandoned by the Americans and who are battling the crumbling regime by themselves. The soldiers are caught between their greed and their desire to help the Iraqis escape, if not fight their oppressors. They end up abandoning their quest for the gold and, against the direct orders of their commander, aid the rebels escape to the Iranian border.
Rebels on the Backlot Page 25