The next day — or maybe even the same day, I can’t recall — we were doing the scene where the hurricane is approaching. We had a wind machine going and this local character actress was projecting as loud as she could, because that’s the tendency when you’re working with one of those things. You instinctively talk louder because the wind machine is so loud. Because of the wind machine, I knew we were going to have loop the dialogue so I didn’t worry about it too much. Craig pulled me aside and said, “What do you think about this woman’s acting?” I said, “I think she’s doing a good job.” He said, “You think so?” I said, “Well, she’s not Meryl Streep. We have to loop this scene anyway. I think it will be fine.” He said, “It just seems kind of big…” I said, “Well, it is big, but don’t worry. I’m going to go over this in the looping session and it will be fine.” I was thinking to myself, She really isn’t bad. But Craig seemed to be looking for things that weren’t working for him, so I at the same time I was thinking: Okay, that’s strike two for the director.
On the third day, we had this huge scene at the Red Cross Center with about five hundred extras, all in futuristic costume. This is the scene where Craig and Bonnie Bedelia find each other again, and then he has to explain to her that they’ve lost everything. He didn’t renew the family insurance, so they’ve lost everything in the hurricane. It’s a huge moment between these two people. They’re relieved that they’ve found each other alive, but they’re also learning that they’ve got no place to live, no money; everything is gone. So I was watching his performance and, for my taste, Craig was really pushing the emotion too far. The way he was going about it just did not ring true to me, so I kept going in and giving him notes. But it still was too big. He started to get more and more upset with me, until finally he just snapped: “Look, what is your problem with the scene?” I said, “To be honest with you, it’s just coming across too melodramatic.” And he glared at me, like I had just called him some kind of racial slur. He said, “Melodramatic?” I said, “Yes sir. We need to bring it down a bit.” He kept glaring. “So my acting is melodramatic?” I’m thinking, Oh shit. Then I started back-peddling. I said, “No, it’s heading towards melodramatic…”
After that he did bring it down. Everything worked in the next take. But that was strike three. So at the end of the day, we were wrapping up and the Unit Production Manager came to me and said, “Mr. Nelson wants to see you in his trailer.” I said, “Yeah, I could see this coming.” So I walked into his trailer, and Craig was pacing like a panther. And Craig is a big guy. He said, “You know what? I don’t think this is going to work. So I’ve called my agent and I’m going to quit this picture. I just can’t take this.” And I said, “No, no — look, you’re more important to this show than I am. You’re the star. If my working methods don’t work for you, then I need to leave.” “No, no, no — I’m leaving! I’ve already made the decision — I’m leaving!” “You can’t, you just can’t.” He said, “I can and I am.” He was so angry. He felt like I was more concerned about staying on schedule than taking care of my actors. In his mind, I wasn’t trusting him and so he didn’t feel that he could trust me. I don’t know how I managed to get this in but I said, “Give it one more day. If tomorrow doesn’t work for you, one or the other of us will quit. Maybe both of us, I don’t know. But if you could just hold off until tomorrow…”
So I came out of the trailer and the UPM was standing there, biting his nails. He said, “What just happened?” I said, “Basically I just bought myself one more day.”
The next day we were at the same location, shooting a family scene with Craig and Richard Farnsworth — who I absolutely adore. He’s like the grandfather that we all wish we’d had. It was a dream come true having him in that film. We were rehearsing this scene and it was almost lunch time. My A.D. came over and told me, “We’re getting close to lunch.” And I had this moment of inspiration. I turned to him and I said, “Look, let the UPM and everybody else know that I have to do something. Whatever happens, just realize I’m doing it for the sake of the movie.”
So we’re rehearsing the scene and the A.D. yells, “Tom, we really have to break for lunch.” And I just went into a tirade. “You know what? Fuck the lunch! We’re rehearsing here! When we’re done, we’ll have lunch! Are you okay with that?!” “Well, I just…” “ARE YOU OKAY WITH THAT?!” “Yeah, okay, fine.” And I turned back and saw Craig do one of those [pulls his fist down in a celebratory manner]. From that point on, we were good. He just needed to see that I was concerned about the actors and the work. I always am, but he just needed some strong proof. I won’t say that we didn’t have a few more skirmishes along the way, but after that we began to truly understand and trust each other.
Up until then, I’d never had that kind of argument with an actor. Maybe because I was always working on smaller projects. Something to Live For was so much about the emotional content that it was easier to focus exclusively on the actors. With The Fire Next Time, I had to work on this huge canvas. I had a great Director of Photography, Shelly Johnson, and we wanted a lot of big, wide shots, so we carried a crane from state to state. That’s unheard of on a production like this — dragging a crane from Los Angeles to New Mexico to Louisiana to Pittsburgh. Somehow I convinced Robert Halmi that it was a worthwhile expense. In the end, it was a great experience. It taught me so much as a director. Unfortunately, my A.D. Jonathan Zimmerman got fired when we started to fall behind in New Mexico. He’s a terrific A.D. and it wasn’t his fault. He took the bullet for me. The show was extremely ambitious.
How long was the shoot?
I want to say it was forty-five or forty-six days, which for something like that is very difficult. With travel days, it was quite a long period of time. And we had a lot of crazy things happen. We’d show up on the location and none of the set pieces would be there. Somehow, something was mis-communicated. The guy who was supposed to be in charge [in the art department] ended up leaving the show and his successor didn’t get the information…And anytime there was a setback, it cost us quite a bit. And the schedule left no room for error. We had to finish in one place on time because all the plane tickets had been booked for the next day, and we had to start shooting in the next location on a specific day.
At the same time, there were some very complicated setups that went amazingly well. We closed down a bridge in Pittsburgh during rush hour traffic, so that we could shoot the Canadian/ American border scene with all those extras. I think we were able to pull that off because of some sort of questionable connections. I saw all these tough-looking guys under the bridge in suits, just talking, and then suddenly I had the bridge. The same thing happened when we shot in the French Quarter on the weekend. Again, somebody talked to the right people and it all came together.
Let’s talk about the script. The Fire Next Time is not exactly fun-loving, light entertainment. It offers a very bleak vision of the future.
Although it takes place thirty years into the future, in my mind it was a Radio Shack future. Instead of having incredible high-tech toys, like something out of Blade Runner, they had affordable devices that help them simply survive day-to-day. Most of the technology is retro-fitted, because they’re trying to save power but still make things look cooler. I was really fortunate that we were able to get the services of Syd Mead, from Blade Runner. He was a futurist who worked with an artist to create a lot of these things, and he was really amazing. I was so grateful just to be in his presence, throwing crazy ideas back and forth. We had a great time.
And it paid off. Fifteen years later, all of the gadgets in that movie seem believable…except for the pay phones.
We were trying to be conservative. We sort of did what the silent movies did in the 1910s — Chaplin’s in particular. They would dress up actors more like it was the 1890s, to give viewers a sense of familiarity.
In The Fire Next Time, we tried to introduce things that were relatively new when we were making the movie. The cars were difficult, because we
had to get the latest models and then retrofit them in a way that made them look old but still recognizable — because the car company would get upset if we made them unrecognizable. We tried to come up with little tricks to make them look different. With the truck, we put these Venetian blind things in the back window to block the sun. Some of those things looked pretty cool. I wish we could have gone a little further. Syd had tons of ideas.
There were other gadgets in that movie that we need now, but haven’t invented yet — like carbon-allotment cards…I think the movie is probably more interesting to watch now than it was in 1993, because people are starting to seriously think about these things as more than science fiction.
The DVD keeps getting re-released with new cover art. I don’t know what that means, other than somebody’s finding a way to keep selling it. The place where it really took off was in Australia, because global warming is such an important issue there. The kids there do have to put on that high-end sunscreen.
Maybe they also recognize the Mad Max aesthetic.
Maybe. Another interesting thing about the production was the hurricane. Hurricane Andrew hit Morgan City about six or eight weeks after we left. We were watching the news and saw some of those folks who’d been extras in The Fire Next Time standing in the same Red Cross staging area where we shot. It was chilling to see the fiction turn factual.
I think what made the story interesting was the fact that, in a future where there are so many problems, the biggest villain was the weather. That and the idea that when people are suffering and have lost so much, they can help each other and make the best of it. In that scene at the end of the first half, all these people are on this barge going up the Mississippi and the thing that brings them together is the music…
The Cajun music?
Yeah. It certainly wasn’t the kind of cliffhanger that we had in In a Child’s Name, but I really wanted to go for that Grapes of Wrath image, with all these homeless families heading to an unknown future together. I had a very specific shot in mind, with the bridge and the orange sun that was clouded over with smog and smoke.
It’s interesting that you keep coming back to images of weather. You talked about something similar on your commentary track for Friday the 13th. You said that Capra suggested putting natural elements into a movie, like you did with the wind and the rain in that film, to make the action and the drama of the story seem bigger. As a viewer, I’m aware of weather in just about every scene in The Fire Next Time. Except toward the end, in the utopian upstate New York community…
That was the section where I was most concerned about the story being dull, because the conflict was so internal at that point — mostly between Craig and his wife, when he was feeling jealous of Jurgen Prochnow. It’s not as interesting as the sections where they have to get out there and fight the storm, or fight to get their daughter back.
But it was such a bleak movie that it was nice to have that reprieve. The same thing is true later on the Amish farm. Life gets back to basics in those scenes. The characters are just trying to respectfully co-exist with the rest of the world…
I think what writer James Henerson did very nicely was to get back to basics. There was so much of what people go through in life — birth and death, parents and kids fighting — but all set against this huge backdrop. Craig was great as the bullheaded father. One of his best scenes is the one where this group of eco-hippies is taking his daughter from him. The scene rested on his shoulders, and on the actress who was playing his daughter Linnie [Ashley Jones]. My recollection is that this was one of her first acting jobs, but she had such a great quality when she looked at him and said, “Daddy, this is what I want.” As a father, I know now what I didn’t know then — what Craig obviously knew and put into that moment. There are times when you have to let go. If she really is truly happy, I don’t want to drag her away…but how can I accept this?
Plus it was a young Paul Rudd that she was leaving for. Maybe if Craig’s character knew how big a star Paul Rudd was destined to be, he wouldn’t have been as reluctant.
You must have won over Craig T. Nelson at some point in the shoot, since he was willing to do another movie with you (The Lies Boys Tell) a year later.
Craig actually asked for me specifically on that, because he was thrilled with the way The Fire Next Time came out. And by the time we got to the end of the movie, we really had bonded. I love Craig. When we worked together it was very intense, but then we could be very lighthearted away from the set. A lot of people don’t realize that Craig is a comedian. He once had an act with Barry Levinson and Rudy DeLuca. And his comic side would always come out between takes and after hours. There was one night where he went into this hysterical routine and we couldn’t shoot because everybody was laughing too hard. At that moment, I
remembered the third day on The Fire Next Time and thought, Wow, how far this relationship has come.
When we began shooting the Amish scenes in The Fire Next Time, things started to really lighten up. That was a great role for Nancy [McLoughlin], who played the pregnant Amish wife. That scene where she’s having the baby is an exact recreation of what I remember her going through with our first child. She did a really great job. When the shooting was over, I remember I did not want to leave that farm. It was every bit as tranquil there as (hopefully) it was in the movie. I thought: Why can’t life be this simple? The way the Amish lived and the way they communicated showed how easy life can actually be. It was such a breath of fresh air in so many ways.
That’s what gives the ending so much power — Craig’s character is willing to go back out into the chaotic world and start over, instead of staying on the farm and letting his family go. It’s very much like the choice at the end of Sometimes They Come Back.
I think this film would have been really interesting on the big screen. The story could have been pared down into a two-hour structure. It’s the simple family dynamics that made it so worthwhile…right down to the Charles Haid character, the rich uncle who was financially exploiting the global warming situation. This guy is selling himself and the future, and he had that hustler quality. His brother could see right through him, but his nephew thought he was really exciting because here’s a guy who isn’t trying to hold onto old ways.
He’s a man in control of his destiny.
But he’s also arguing that the future’s not a bad thing. That had a very interesting quality to it. For me, the strongest message of the whole movie is stated in the opening title card: “For our grandchildren.” The whole time I was making this movie, I was thinking: We are making this movie as a piece of entertainment now, but the truth is that this is what’s very likely going to be happening one day.
And the current generation is embodied in the Farnsworth character, who says “we were the last generation that had a chance to turn the tide…”
I have to tell you one of my favorite Richard Farnsworth stories. We had to do a ton of looping for this film. There’s hardly any line in this thing that wasn’t looped, because we had these young rock n roll sound guys that didn’t really know how to record dialogue. Everybody had to come in for looping.
So we brought up Farnsworth from his ranch. He comes in and I say, “Richard, what’s going on?” I’m expecting to hear about the next movie or something — the usual Hollywood talk. Instead he pauses and says, “I have this new baby fawn that was just born on my property. She’s the most beautiful thing.” And that was it. That was what was going on. That’s what made Richard so wonderful. He was just a salt-of-the-earth kind of guy.
He was great in the film. It was also nice to see Louise Fletcher, as the leader of the militant group operation on the U.S.-Canadian border.
Louise Fletcher was a great blessing as an actress. When she said to the little boy Jake, “Come over here and sit next to me,” she seemed so motherly…but with all those cold militant guys standing around her, it was really kind of creepy.
Your next project, Murder of Innocence, was a
nother very intimate, very personal film. It’s also very different stylistically, because it’s told from a perspective of madness. There’s a lot of attention to unsettling details…
The first time I saw a Fellini movie in the early ’70s, I said, “That’s exactly the feeling of what I saw at the mental institutions when my mother was sick.” Fellini would have the actors look right into the lens and say things in Italian or French (or gibberish), and later it was looped in English. I knew that it was looped, because it was such a terrible match to picture, but there was something even more surreal about seeing somebody say one thing and hearing something completely different. It had a subconscious effect on me. I found myself really connecting immediately with Fellini movies for that reason. And the same thing with the films of Luis Buñuel.
A lot of the details in Murder of Innocence are like that…they’re just a little bit off. Like the scene where Valerie Bertinelli is vacuuming the hardwood floor…In context, that’s a really unsettling image, because it makes you realize that she’s not all there.
A Strange Idea of Entertainment: Conversations with Tom McLoughlin Page 13