The appearance of the Virgin is seldom if ever portrayed literally in today’s secular world. It’s usually suggested by the shadow of a crucifix crossing the stage or a bright white light or the illumination of a stained-glass window. Often it’s mocked as an insane hallucination.
I cast a young actress to appear “magically” in the blue-and-white garment of the Virgin of Guadalupe. When I started to rehearse the Virgin’s descent, the conductor, James Conlon, asked if we could speak privately.
“Please don’t do that,” he said quietly.
“Why not, James?”
“I was raised Catholic,” he told me, “but I’m no longer a believer.”
“I understand,” I said. “But this is not about your beliefs or mine. Puccini in his stage direction says ‘the Angel of Mercy appears.’”
“You don’t have to do it literally. I’m asking you not to do it,” he repeated. “I think people will laugh or ridicule it.”
“I don’t care,” I said.
We had other conflicts. He would ask singers to look right at him during performances. This gives conductors control of the tempi but destroys the singer’s ability to “act” and not just “sing the role.” Late in rehearsal Conlon wanted the offstage chorus, dressed in full nun’s habit, to sing the finale from a box in the audience. I was furious. Not only was the chorus fully audible backstage, but their voices had an ethereal effect. I felt it was payback for my defying his request about the Virgin.
I took Placido aside and told him that if he allowed Conlon to do this, I would publicly resign and state my reasons. Placido spoke to him privately, and the offstage chorus remained backstage. From that point on our relationship was frosty, but in the end the production was an unqualified triumph: sold-out performances and ecstatic reviews from around the world. Placido hugged me after the opening and shouted, “You will make all Los Angeles Catholic with this production.” The truth is that Conlon conducted the music brilliantly. The young American soprano Sondra Radvanovsky’s magnificent voice and acting made Suor Angelica a memorable event. Grown men in tuxedos and women in evening dress of all faiths or no faith were sobbing. And so was I at every performance.
I knew Sondra had the ability and desire to be a Suor Angelica for the ages. There was nothing I could tell her about singing, but we worked intensely on her dramatic portrayal. There is a portal to every artist that when unlocked will open a wellspring of emotion. Sondra told me the death of her father hit her harder than anything in her life. I would quietly remind her to revisit that time at each rehearsal and it was this sense memory she brought to her performances. I consider Il Trittico the absolute high point of my work as a director. Sister Mary Jean, along with other members of the Sisters of Mercy, expressed their gratitude and enjoyment to me, which was the best review.
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CATHARSIS
“The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.”
—JOSEPH CONRAD
I had committed to two more operas for 2005, Saint-Saëns’s Samson and Delilah in Tel Aviv and Aïda in Turin, Italy, both of which were consistent with my standard dark fare. I spent a year preparing them. It was a year since The Hunted and I had no prospects for another film.
There comes a point when your days as a film director are numbered. Doesn’t matter what’s on your résumé or that you won an Oscar. Time, once having smiled upon me seductively, was now laughing in my face. The major studios weren’t going to give me one of their franchises and I had no interest in them.
As fate would have it, some friends in New York suggested I see a play called Bug before it ended its run in a small theater in Greenwich Village. In the fall of 2004, I went alone to the Barrow Street Theater, not wanting to waste Sherry’s time in case it turned out to be a dud. The play was as powerful and compelling as anything by Harold Pinter. It took me completely by surprise. It was the work of a young playwright who was destined to become an exciting new voice in American theater. Tracy Letts is a fine actor as well as a playwright. His first play was Killer Joe, written when he was twenty-five in 1991. It had its initial performance two years later in a forty-seat theater in Evanston, Illinois. His second play, Bug, was first performed in London in 1996 but didn’t reach an American stage for four years. In 2004, it won a bunch of awards off-Broadway including Outstanding Play.
Bug is a one-set play with only five characters, but I felt it could become a disturbing character-driven film. The play blurs the line between reality and illusion. Agnes, a waitress in a lesbian bar who is haunted by the disappearance of her young son, lives in a seedy motel on the outskirts of a small town in Oklahoma. She is hiding from her abusive husband, Jerry Goss, who’s just been released from prison and is stalking her. A friend and fellow waitress, R.C., introduces Agnes to Peter Evans, a drifter, who tells her he’s a Gulf War veteran and that he was subjected to military experiments in which lethal bugs were injected into his bloodstream. Agnes feels compassion for him and invites him to move in with her. Lonely and vulnerable, she gradually comes to believe Peter’s wild stories and theories. Cocaine plays a large part in their hallucinatory behavior. The cramped motel room is a metaphor for their demented inner lives. Agnes is outwardly self-sufficient; inwardly she lives with fear and regret. Peter, at first shy and tender, is psychotic. A man claiming to be someone named Doctor Sweet, Peter’s personal physician, pays an unexpected visit that leads to murder and self-immolation.
Bug is black comedy, pitch-black, a folie à deux, wherein delusional beliefs pass from one person to another in a kind of shared psychosis. It was certain to offend audiences even as it challenged their expectations.
Tracy was forty years old when we met; tall, thinning blond hair, pink-skinned, wearing dark-rimmed glasses. He had the bearing of a college professor but there seemed to be an inner sadness behind his bright smile. He grew up in Durant, a small town in southeast Oklahoma, and lived with his parents for a while in a trailer park. His mother and father were college English teachers. His father, Dennis, became an actor and his mother, Billie, wrote a best-selling novel, Where the Heart Is, that later became a movie. At seventeen he moved to Dallas to become an actor, without much success, and in the late nineties he went to Hollywood, where he got a few small acting jobs, not enough to earn a living. When he auditioned for and didn’t get a small part on The Love Boat, he moved to Chicago and became a member of what is considered the best theater ensemble in America today, the Steppenwolf Company.
Letts’s play shows how paranoid connections feed on themselves. I didn’t realize it at the time, but in making the film I would delve into my own paranoid tendencies. I don’t believe helicopters are following me or little green men have access to my brain but I often get a sense that whatever can go wrong, will. The phone call that was supposed to come, won’t. The deal that was supposed to close will fall apart. Out of a black cave march the Seven Dwarfs of Ignorance, Fear, Disappointment, Anxiety, Insecurity, Anger, and Depression.
Tracy was skeptical when we first met. He didn’t believe anyone would want to make a film of Bug and he initially thought my call might have been a practical joke, but he agreed to come out to Los Angeles. I put him up at the Sunset Marquis, where I first stayed almost forty years before. For the next two days we talked about how we might adapt Bug into a screenplay. I wanted to be faithful to the play. Though it was claustrophobic, I felt it was cinematic. I told him I wasn’t sure I could get it made but I would give it my best shot. We agreed to open the play up slightly, to show the exterior of the motel, the bar where Agnes works, the grocery store where she remembers losing her son. I told Tracy that if at all possible I would cast Michael Shannon, who created the role of Peter onstage. I could think of no better actor, certainly no major star who would be more effective. Shannon was thirty-six years old, shy and soft-spoken. He had small parts in at least twenty films before I saw him onstage in Bug. I’ve never known an actor more focused, d
edicated, or capable of reaching the outer ranges of human behavior.
I optioned the play for five thousand dollars for one year and Tracy started writing the screenplay. I asked him if he wanted to show the bugs and he said, “I don’t think there are any bugs.” Like Pinter, he was reluctant to interpret his own work.
The independent film world is an alternative to the major studios. The films are often edgier and cost less. I was able to get the film financed by Lionsgate, a kind of “little engine that could” production and distribution company known then for small-budget films. It was run by vice-chairman Michael Burns, a smart, decent man with a keen sense of humor. Bug wasn’t his idea of a commercial film, but if I could make it for four million dollars or less he could market it as a horror film “from the director of The Exorcist,” and get in and get out before audiences realized it was deeper and more disturbing psychologically than viscerally. The film had shocking elements and “shock” was good for a Lionsgate picture.
“But I need two stars,” Burns said. “I’m not gonna do this with Michael Shannon.”
I agreed to make the film for director’s scale, and the actors would have to work for scale as well. Though the story is set in Oklahoma, we opted to shoot in tax-credit-friendly Louisiana, the go-to state for most film production and a lot of the television shows produced in the United States. The Louisiana Motion Picture Tax Incentive Act provides incentives that can reduce the cost of all production money spent in the state over three hundred thousand dollars. The more local personnel you hire, the bigger the tax credit. The state benefits by adding more jobs to the payroll as well as creating a higher demand for goods and services, hotels and restaurants. Other states have adopted this idea but none as successfully as Louisiana.
Tracy and I were determined to keep Michael Shannon, though a lot of well-known and capable actors wanted to do this role. An agent suggested Ashley Judd to play Agnes. She’s beautiful, of course, but when we met I discovered the quality that most appeals to me in an actor: intelligence. Ashley understood Agnes, having experienced her own “chaotic and dysfunctional” childhood. By coincidence she had previously starred in Where the Heart Is, the film version of the novel by Tracy’s mother.
In an early scene between Peter and Agnes, he tells her:
People can do things to you—things you don’t even know about. They try to control you. they try to force you to act in a certain way. They can drive you crazy, too . . . You’re never really safe. One time, maybe a long time ago, people were safe, but that’s all over. Not anymore, not on this planet. We’ll never really be safe again. We can’t be, not with all the technology, the chemicals, and the information. . . . Sometimes, though, when you’re lying in bed at night, you can feel it. All the machines, people working their machines, their works, humming. I don’t like to go on about it, ’cause it freaks people out. I wish I didn’t think about it either, but they don’t let you forget. They want you to know they’re there. Nothing makes them happier than knowing the people are aware the machines are up and running.
Shannon delivered this speech so simply and with such conviction, and Ashley became so caught up in it, it was a magical confluence of writer and actors. I don’t believe it can be done better. Though delivered by a troubled, possibly damaged man, the ideas are prophetic.
The camera knows when an actor is faking it. When he doesn’t believe what he’s saying. Ashley and Michael gave meaning and life to Tracy’s creations.
For the role of Goss, Agnes’s husband, I met with a number of actors but nothing clicked. In April of 2005, Sherry and I went to the opening of Steve Wynn’s new hotel in Las Vegas where we sat at a table with Harry Connick Jr. and his wife, Jill Goodacre, a former Victoria’s Secret model. Jill was curious about The Exorcist and how we achieved certain effects and I answered her at some length. At one point, Harry cut in: “Bill, don’t you think you been talkin’ to Jill for a long time?” I looked at him. His expression was cold and threatening. I started to apologize, when he broke into raucous laughter. “Hey man, I’m only kidding.” He shook my hand and said, “I’m your biggest fan. If you ever have a part for me, I’d love to work for you.” In that moment, I had seen exactly what I was looking for in the character of Goss. It was casting against type but I asked him if he would be available in his hometown of New Orleans after the Fourth of July, and when he said he would, I hired him on the spot to play Goss.
My casting director, Bonnie Timmermann, came up with a wonderful New York theater actor, Brian F. O’Byrne, to play Doctor Sweet, and Lynn Collins to play Agnes’s friend R.C. Largely because of the casting of Ashley, Lionsgate gave us a tentative green light and reluctantly approved Michael Shannon.
I hired an energetic young line producer, Holly Wiersma, and a talented director of photography, Michael Grady, who lit quickly and operated the camera himself. Franco Carbone was a production designer whose work on a variety of low-budget films impressed me. He and Holly sent me photos of possible locations around New Orleans. There were no available soundstages but we were able to rent space in the large gymnasium of the Grace King High School in Metairie, Louisiana, near Lake Pontchartrain. The school would be out of session for summer vacation so we had from early July to early September to complete our shoot. I was in daily contact with Holly while final negotiations with Lionsgate dragged on. There were times when it looked like the picture would fall apart over legal minutiae.
I arrived in New Orleans on July 5 to be greeted by Hurricane Cindy, the first hurricane of the season, though unfortunately not the last. Seventy-five-mile-an-hour winds, sheets of rain all day long, three hundred thousand homes without power in Louisiana and the Gulf, the worst blackouts in forty years. Debris was all over the streets while we tried to scout locations.
We rehearsed on-set for a week. I let Ashley choose her own personal effects to be placed around the rooms and Franco Carbone expanded the single motel room to include a separate bedroom, living room, and small kitchenette. Franco’s set was dark, seedy, and unkempt. We later wrapped it from floor to ceiling in aluminum foil and it was lit only by bug-zapping hurricane lamps, when Agnes and Peter insulate the rooms to prevent the “bugs from transmitting signals to the outside world.” The earlier warm tones gave way to an icy blue for the final scenes.
There is no greater joy for a filmmaker than to watch a cast perform difficult material at so high a level. There were times when Ashley and Michael performed with such raw energy, I was afraid they would hurt each other. Grady lit the set and operated the camera imaginatively. Sometimes we’d use two additional cameras so we could limit having to redo a scene from different angles. While the content was often disturbing, the mood on the set was focused and relaxed. I would occasionally look at the dailies with Darrin Navarro, the editor, but I didn’t start editing until the shooting was finished. I wanted a completely fresh attitude in the cutting room without the pressure of filming each day.
In the final week of filming, daylight was gone by noon. Fortunately, we finished our New Orleans locations and were on the soundstage. Darkness, rain, and thunder persisted for days. On what was to be our twenty-first and final shooting day, we filmed the sequence in which Agnes and Peter prepare to die together, fearing any further contact with the outside world. They pour kerosene over each other and light a match, sending the rooms up in flames. The special effects team poured flammable liquid over the aluminum foil walls and I set three cameras on different lenses at the furthest wall from the one that would be ignited.
When the wall was aflame, the fire quickly leaped across the room, singeing the faces of the camera crew who quickly abandoned their cameras and jumped off the set, avoiding certain death. The effects crew had mistakenly used too much fluid. Everyone freaked, but fortunately no one was seriously hurt. Franco set up another aluminum foil wall overnight and we set the cameras in the same positions the next day but operated them remotely, with no one on-set. The effects crew prepared the wall correctly this time an
d the New Orleans portion of the shoot was over.
I flew back to Los Angeles and two weeks later, on August 29, Hurricane Katrina blasted New Orleans. The levees collapsed and eighty percent of New Orleans was flooded, including our “soundstage” at the Grace King High School.
By November of 2005, Darrin and I had our first cut and we ran the film for Tracy. He was enthusiastic and gave us helpful suggestions. We incorporated most of them. The executives at Lionsgate wanted to hold the release and send the film to Cannes, where it was turned down for the main competition but accepted by the Directors Fortnight along with twenty-one other films. The Fortnight is traditionally reserved for young filmmakers. I was seventy years old. “This is a lineup about youth,” said Olivier Pèré, the artistic director.
Tracy and Michael Shannon paid their own way to Cannes as Lionsgate refused to bring them over. But I had them join me for every interview and the film was received enthusiastically. Bug was given the highest award of the Fortnight, the FIPRESCI Prize, by the International Federation of Film Critics, which has more than two hundred members. So much for “youth.”
After many postponements, Lionsgate opened Bug in 2007 on sixteen hundred and sixty-one screens, advertising it, as expected, “from the director of The Exorcist.” It was an ill-advised campaign and an overly ambitious release. But it was a return to essentials for me: a few actors, a small but efficient crew, and no special effects; just a tight story that holds its mysteries. It’s exactly the film I wanted to make and I would pursue a similar course for whatever time was left to me.
In the four years after Bug came out, I made a series of false starts and had no tangible prospect of making another film. I directed Richard Strauss’s opera Salome in Munich, then Puccini’s Il Trittico, and I thought I might devote the rest of my life to directing for the stage.
The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir Page 42