Then in the summer of 2009 while I was recovering from various surgeries, Tracy Letts called. We hadn’t spoken for—how long?—at least a year. In a cheery voice, he said, “Hey, Bill. Would you be interested in making a film of Killer Joe?”
Letts wrote Killer Joe with a deep-rooted sense of anger. After a series of readings and a gestation of three years, it had its first production in 1993. The first review of that Chicago production described it as “a hideous carnival of brutality and degradation that leaves you feeling dirty.”
The story is set in a trailer park on the outskirts of Dallas. A young drug dealer, Chris Smith, owes six thousand dollars to the local crime boss, Digger Soames. Digger will have him killed if he doesn’t pay up. Chris enlists his low-life father, Ansel, and his raunchy stepmother, Sharla, in an attempt to kill his real mother, Ansel’s first wife, Adele, for her fifty-thousand-dollar life insurance policy. The policy is payable to Dottie, Chris’s younger sister. They try to hire Joe Cooper, a Dallas detective, the essence of cool, who moonlights as a contract killer. Joe’s price is twenty-five thousand dollars, up front. Chris and Ansel are broke but Joe will accept Dottie as a retainer, to which the father and brother readily agree. Though outwardly low key and charming, Joe is a thundercloud who can weep or kill, a force of nature. By inviting him into their lives, the Smiths have let in a monster and must deal with the consequences. Ansel and Sharla’s marriage is flawed, forcing them to face the truth of what they’ve become. Yet even in their terrible relationship, there is intimacy and genuine caring. The violence between Chris and Ansel is dangerous, but also subversively funny.
Letts believes Joe was probably “ex-military, an escapee from an abusive, dead-end childhood.” He tries to bring order to the chaotic lives of the Smith family and when they resist, he explodes. Chris is beaten to a pulp by Digger’s men and by Joe; Joe forces Sharla to perform fellatio on a fried chicken leg.
Chris senses there’s a moral order to the world, but he can’t quite grasp it. He has cunning and a sense of humor, but he’s redeemed only by his love for his sister. His fatal flaw is in sacrificing her for his own preservation. The story begins on a night of lightning, thunder, and rain with Chris calling for Dottie. Though it’s beyond his comprehension, she is his salvation. Dottie is not retarded, not slow, not brain-damaged. She is innocent, with a kind of resilience. She also has a sense of humor. Letts describes her as “the keeper of rage of all women.”
I was completely drawn to Letts’s film script. But who would finance it? It takes place in a morally ambiguous world with no character an audience can root for. I didn’t realize how long or difficult the process would be to get it made.
I met with potential actors and producers. Ellen Page was interested in playing Dottie. She was twenty-one years old and already on the road to stardom. I loved her in the film Juno and in an earlier film she made called Hard Candy, in which she lures a rapist to his house, tranquilizes him, then tortures him. It was a stunning performance. We had a meeting during which she said she’d commit to the picture. Two days later, her agent called to say she changed her mind.
Kurt Russell was interested in playing Joe but he told me he was afraid of the role. His companion of many years, Goldie Hawn, said she’d leave him if he did it. After two weeks he called to say he’d have to pass.
Perhaps you’ve observed a pattern. My films would pass from light and hope into darkness, despair, and back. Sometimes they’d end in success; often failure. I worked as much on the failures as the successes but they were all equally difficult to realize. In adapting four plays into films, I started with the conviction that they were well-constructed dramas to begin with, with fully developed characters I understood. I wasn’t interested in changing them.
As I recall my experiences in the world of Independent film I now realize how much of my time was spent on trivia that stifles the imagination. I would have been a better director if I had been part of the studio system that prevailed through the 1930s and ’40s. Directors were on staff and given assignments by the heads of production. You could direct as many as four or five films a year. You were handed a budget, a schedule, a cast, and a script that was developed by the studio heads. Actors and technicians were also on staff and the pictures were consistently well made and sometimes great. You didn’t have to worry about raising money or finding a cast and crew. Reputations weren’t destroyed on the basis of one film. Now, every new film is like reinventing the wheel.
Almost a year later, I was still without a producer or a cast for Killer Joe. Watching television one night I saw an interview with Matthew McConaughey. It turned out to be providential. McConaughey is obviously a handsome man, but on this program he was also intelligent, sensitive, and soft-spoken with a lilting East Texas accent. I was leaning toward an older, more grizzled actor for Joe, until I saw this interview. McConaughey’s work in the 1990s was a mixed bag of serious films, comedies, and a horror film. By 2000 he was the go-to guy for romantic comedies, “rom-coms.” Matthew said that “doing these rom-coms was tougher than anything more serious.” I had a hunch his good looks could work “against type.” There was no reason Joe couldn’t be suave, and even-tempered, disguising a basically evil nature. I sent him the script.
When he read it, he threw it across his living room into a trash bin. He wanted to “take a shower with a wire brush.” But one of his advisers told him they had seen the play and that it was funny (in a dark sense) and about people Matthew grew up with in East Texas. He pulled it out of the trash bin, read it again, and said to his agent, “Maybe I better meet with Friedkin.”
We met at his house on the aptly named Wildlife Road in Malibu, surrounded by three large Airstream trailers. It was a beach-style house, not on the ocean but within walking distance. There was a basketball hoop and a lot of toys strewn around the lawn where Matthew and his two-year-old son Levi and baby daughter Vida were playing under the watchful eyes of his future mother-in-law. Matthew and I talked about the script and how Joe’s outwardly placid nature was a cover for what lies beneath. We agreed that the humor had to come from “playing it straight,” never going for the joke. I told him I planned to do the exteriors first, then shoot everything inside the trailer on a set and in sequence. I said we could make the film in twenty-five days. I wanted the actors to bring their “A-Game” to the set and go for performance on the first take.
Shortly after our meeting he called to tell me he’d commit and his agency, CAA, offered to help set the picture up. At least a dozen producers passed before CAA arranged a meeting for me with Nicholas Chartier, the thirty-six-year-old producer of The Hurt Locker, winner of six Academy Awards including 2009’s Best Picture. Born in France, he was twenty years old when he worked as a janitor at Disneyland outside Paris. He came to Los Angeles to write pornographic shows for cable TV and went on to become a foreign sales agent, mostly for straight-to-video movies.
Foreign sales are the life’s-blood of independent films. They don’t always cover the full cost but they provide enough cushion, along with television and home video rights and, hopefully, a domestic distribution advance to get the film into production. The producer has to cover the difference, but pre-sales determine the budget. Chartier is headstrong and impulsive. He is said to have mortgaged his house to raise the $15 million to make The Hurt Locker. I asked him why he made the film after every studio passed on it: “I thought Kathryn Bigelow was a talented director and I wanted to work with her,” he said. The film made no money but he was justly proud of it. His background was in the world of low-budget quickies but his own tastes were more refined. He moved easily between both worlds. He said he would try to set the picture up and he was happy McConaughey would commit, at much lower than his normal fee, and that CAA would help with other “name” actors. A short time later, Jennifer Lawrence came to meet me.
She was twenty and nominated for an Academy Award for a small but affecting independent film, Winter’s Bone. Rolling Stone magazine called her
“the most talented young actress in America.” She’s beautiful, also intelligent and compelling. As soon as she sat down she said she “was the only actress in America who could play Dottie.” At that moment I believed her. She said she wanted to do challenging roles in quality independent films. Chartier sensed her trajectory and felt she would be a star by the time Killer Joe came out. But by mid-July, with nothing firmly in place, she dropped out to take a role in X-Men: First Class.
For the next three months, Chartier tried to pre-sell foreign territories while I attempted to pull together the rest of the cast. For this, we hired Denise Chamian, who cast Rules of Engagement and The Hunted for me. She was casting nine other films that year but found time for Killer Joe. The foreign sales were slow-moving, with small advances. McConaughey in this kind of film was not worth a lot of front money to foreign buyers. Denise suggested Emile Hirsch for the role of Chris. A great choice, but Chartier wanted another actor he thought would bring higher foreign advances. Fortunately, McConaughey’s agents had cast approval and they would only approve Emile. He was twenty-five and had been working steadily as an actor since he was eight. I saw him in Alpha Dog, Into the Wild, and Milk, and thought he had a quality like James Dean and Montgomery Clift. He understood the script, loved it, and saw it as we all did as funny in a disturbing way.
We then went to Thomas Haden Church, a brilliant and underrated actor, to play Ansel. Tom grew up in Laredo, Texas, so, like Matthew’s, his accent was perfect. I thought he was wonderful in the film Sideways, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award as best supporting actor. Tom is the real deal. You never see him “act”; he inhabits his characters and is careful about his choices. I cast him over the phone without a meeting. Letts suggested Gina Gershon to play Sharla and, to my surprise, Nick immediately approved. She’s smart as well as sexy, and at one time Tracy wanted her to do the play onstage but she turned it down, saying she could never do it six or seven times a week. When I went to her for the film, she was ready. Denise then sent me an unsolicited audition video by a twenty-year-old actress named Juno Temple. I had never heard of Juno nor seen her in a film. Her audition was the seduction scene between Dottie and Joe, with her ten-year-old brother playing Joe. I watched the video in awe. She was pitch-perfect. (Her brother wasn’t bad either.) She was a little kooky, blond and cute. I thought she was a perfect choice for Dottie.
Chartier didn’t agree: “Not sexy enough . . . “ “Too childlike,” . . . another of many disagreements I was to have with him. He had other actresses he wanted me to consider and I saw some of them two and three times but I held out for Juno, without having met her. I invited her to Los Angeles and she was every bit as captivating in person, but to my surprise she had a British accent! Yet she could sound like a Texan at will.
The long casting process with many stumbles finally produced an ideal cast. I asked Caleb Deschanel if he’d photograph the film and though he had a thriving commercial company and was in constant demand for big features, he accepted. I told him we had to do the film in twenty-five days, were all working for scale, and would have to shoot with digital cameras. He said he’d put some other commitments aside and agreed to do it. “I haven’t shot this fast for forty years,” he said. “It would be a hell of a challenge and the script is great.” He convinced the ARRIFLEX company to let us rent the prototype of their new compact digital camera, the Alexa. The capabilities of this camera are superior to film especially in post-production where you have a wider latitude in achieving color, definition, and density.
I put together the rest of the crew: Michael Salven, Dave’s son, would be my assistant director for the fifth time. He’s the best and most organized A.D. I’ve ever worked with. Franco Carbone, the production designer, and Peggy Schnitzer, costumes, worked with me on Bug and I came to like and respect them. Nick wanted his own production staff. I had never heard of any of the films they worked on and my problems with them multiplied each day. I felt they were pennywise and pound foolish and I mostly let Michael Salven deal with them.
And so we all went to New Orleans, which would double as the outskirts of Dallas—again because of the generous tax credits. The city had recovered from Katrina, except for areas like the Ninth Ward, which still resembled bombed-out Europe.
Though I continued to have many clashes with Nick’s production people, I respected his opinions, which he was never shy about expressing. Often he was right. He was on the set only a few days but he saw the dailies and his line producer would repeatedly tell me Nick hated them: “Why doesn’t the camera move?” “This scene is boring . . .” “The film has no pace . . .” I was grateful to Nick for getting the picture made but I never felt he really understood it or that we were on the same page.
There were also problems finding and clearing locations, which was the responsibility of the production manager. In Tracy’s script, the murder of Adele, the mother, occurs when Joe sedates her and he and Chris push her car onto a railroad siding at night. The car is demolished by an oncoming train. No railroad line in Louisiana would give us permission to stage such a scene but I didn’t get this information until days before we had to shoot it. The producers had no alternative. Tracy was acting in a play in Chicago and was unavailable to write a new scene. I emailed him my solution: Joe sets the car on fire in a deserted parking lot after making it look as though Adele was drunk and smoking grass. Chris watches, horrified, as the car explodes.
During a location scout, I found a deserted area on the outskirts of downtown New Orleans. Old red brick and rubble, chipped cobblestone streets, an area that looked like a war zone. I improvised a little chase scene in this area in which two bikers hunt Chris down, trap him, and beat him to a pulp on orders from Digger Soames, to whom Chris owes money.
We found a funky old trailer park and used the exterior of a dilapidated trailer, whose interior we duplicated on a soundstage. I rarely did a second take for performance. We would only do another if there was a technical problem, and the atmosphere on set, even for the most controversial scenes, was relaxed. We shot five-day weeks but rehearsed upcoming scenes on weekends. By the end we all formed a bond. I said to Juno, “I’d like to adopt you.” She gave me a hug and said, “You can be my American father.”
We were sad when it was over, twenty-seven shooting days later, but Darrin Navarro and I finished a first cut in sixteen days. It ran two hours and ten minutes. I brought Nick into the cutting room several times and his notes were perceptive. The film’s running time came down to one hour and forty minutes. Tracy came in for two days and gave us notes; mostly he wanted parts of scenes we had taken out restored. I told him I was concerned we might get an NC-17 rating. “You’re wrong, Billy,” he said. “There’s way more objectionable stuff out there playing with an R.”
With Aaron Levy, the young sound mixer I first worked with on Bug, we finished the mix in seven days, a new record for me. When we were done, Chartier said he hated the music I had chosen, a kind of country rock score. My first reaction was to resist him with extreme prejudice but I was impressed that his passion was as deep and obsessive as my own. He asked Tyler Bates, a prolific film composer, to see the film. Tyler was best known for lavish orchestral scores on big budget pictures such as 300, Dawn of the Dead, and Watchmen. He offered to write and perform a new score for us, using no other musicians. We talked about a new approach. I told Tyler that if we were going to abandon the original score, I wanted softer textures, nothing melodic, except for a brief “Dottie’s Theme” that would be based on Franz Lehar’s Merry Widow Waltz. I felt this could suggest the notion of a warped Cinderella story; she finds her Prince Charming but he turns out to be a hired killer. Tyler would select one of the many exotic stringed instruments from his collection, start to play something, and I’d say “Yes, like that.” He’d scribble a few musical notes on a page then record something and play it back at a different speed or distorted with echo. These were “mood” lines that in the final mix we played at the lowest possible
level. The score is barely perceptible but gives the film a sustained, nervous undercurrent. Nick was right in persuading me to change the score. But there were conflicts with the line producers to the end. In the final stages of color timing, we encountered problems that required more time than was budgeted. I received an email from the associate producer informing me that due to deadline and cost restraints, no further changes to the film could be made. This, to me, was his attitude throughout. “We can’t do this,” “we don’t have permission to do that.” He was usually the heavy. I felt that he and his cohorts were obsessed with making the budget, not the film. I ignored him and didn’t make delivery for a couple of weeks. By then the film was accepted in competition by the Venice Film Festival.
Not the paintings of Canaletto, Bellini, Giotto, nor the evocative prose of John Ruskin can do justice to the experience of being in Venice, especially on the Lido when the film festival is on. I’ve shown films there many times but Killer Joe is the first I’ve had in competition. The audience and critical response was fantastic and Chartier was getting offers from foreign territories. On the night before the prizes were given, the head of the festival, told me he thought Killer Joe was going to win. It was the choice of most of the journalists. But the top prize deservedly went to a Russian film, directed by Andre Sokurov.
Audience reaction at the Toronto festival was slightly muted, I thought, but the reviews were strong, and Nick worked his ever-present cell phone closing more deals. When the overwhelmingly positive reviews appeared, Nick sent me an email: “The film is great.” The domestic distribution rights were bought by LD Productions, a new distribution company formed by a financier named Mickey Liddell, and David Dinerstein, former head of marketing at Miramax, Fox Searchlight, and other independent companies. Killer Joe would be their first release and with great enthusiasm they set up test screenings in Paramus, New Jersey; Austin, Texas, and elsewhere. In each market the film played great but there were dissenters. At a screening in San Francisco, a woman approached me after an audience Q&A: “I’m just a normal audience,” she said, “but I always look for redemption when I see a film. Where is the redemption in your movie?” I had to tell her, “There is none.”
The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir Page 43