A Strange Idea of Entertainment: Conversations with Tom McLoughlin

by Tom McLoughlin

  Less so for me. I wasn’t familiar with the Ken Follett books, but I knew they were incredibly popular and remain so today. When I finally sat down and read the book, I was impressed with the writing. The screenwriter, Cindy Myers, did a terrific job of boiling it down, but it’s sort of like a Stephen King adaptation — so much of the success of the book was in the way the story was told, and when you take away that voice, it just isn’t the same.

  Casting was the first major challenge. The main character was written for a woman in her late twenties. I was picturing a Jennifer Jason Leigh type, somebody who is feisty and intelligent. Eventually Kelly McGillis was cast. I thought she was a great actress, but not quite right for this type of character. I tried to suppress that opinion, because a lot of actors are capable of many types of roles once they’re finally given the opportunity to play them.

  The next challenge was trying to find a guy to play all the clones. After a series of interviews, we cast Jason Gedrick. He had just done The Last Don with Joe Mantegna, and that made him a major CBS favorite. I knew he had done some good work, but I was nervous because this guy had to play five very different characters who were physical clones.

  Sounds like a scheduling nightmare, if nothing else.

  Needless to say, I wanted to have plenty of actor rehearsal time. I knew that the movie would only work if there was strong chemistry between the male and female leads. Two weeks before shooting, Jason got the measles. So forget rehearsal. I had to start shooting all the scenes with Kelly McGillis and the other actors to buy time while he recovered. Once you’re in the middle of production, at least on a TV movie this big, it’s really hard to start developing a rapport with actors and also keep the show moving quickly to stay on schedule and budget. I never had a chance to get fully engaged with the actors on this particular piece.

  It’s one thing to sit down with an actor when you have time to work through things. If you have taken the time beforehand to talk about the character and come to a consensus on an approach, then you’re both open to try things on the set. It’s another thing entirely when you didn’t get that time and you’re in the middle of a scene, on the second or third take, and suddenly the actor stops and says, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” I was grasping for some basic human truths that would allow the actor to get through these moments, but these were not realistic situations that either of us could relate to. I was constantly struggling with how to emotionally tell this story. I wish I could have done what David Cronenberg does and build the whole thing around bizarre set pieces, but the script was locked and we didn’t have the kind of budget that would allow us to create new scenes.

  There are two kinds of movies. There’s the kind that you make, and then there’s the kind that you survive. For me, this was a survival movie. I loved the people I was working with, but I didn’t feel confident in my own ability to turn this thing into something really special. Even in post, I felt that way. Don Davis composed a very interesting, unique score — but I felt like I kept trying to put sizzle where there was no steak.

  It’s a film about nature vs. nurture, but the nurture element seems underrepresented. The strongest nurture element in the story was the subplot about the relationship between Kelly’s character and her father, played by Hal Holbrook.

  There were two things about this film that I really responded to. One was working with Hal Holbrook, who lived up to every expectation I had of him, and then some. Such an enormously talented, sweet, wonderful man. Also, the convention of twins was fun. I loved bringing together all these people who were twins in real life, including our producer Chris Sacani. She’s an incredibly talented woman who had been working for Jaffe/Braunstein for years. When we were putting together the twins convention, she said, “Do you want me to fly my sister up?” I said, “There are two of you?! Yeah, that would be great!” And it was.

  There were a few other sequences that I enjoyed directing, like the fight with the two clones in the bathroom. Basically I had the From Russia with Love fight in my mind — the one with Sean Connery and Robert Shaw on the train. I was excited to create that kind of fight in a claustrophobic environment, but with the same actor fighting himself! I had it storyboarded. But unfortunately it was shot on the very last night and we had to change the set locations twice, so it was really rushed.

  There were some other blessings that came out of The Third Twin. I met Kwame Parker, who was my assistant on the show. We continued working together for a few more films. Then he went off to become a producer on a number of huge films, but we have remained close friends. I also learned that whenever I’m making a decision about my next project, I have ask myself: Am I doing this just because I want to make a movie? Or am I really passionate about this? If I’m not passionate, I know I shouldn’t do it.

  If I’m not mistaken, the next thing that came along for you was a chance to work with Marlon Brando…Wasn’t he supposed to play Dr. Shushan in Behind the Mask?

  After The Third Twin, I hit a wall. In retrospect, I knew I had done that movie for the wrong reasons, and I made a very conscious decision to say no to things that I wasn’t passionate about. Around the same time, I was being pursued by an agent at the William Morris Agency. I had been with CAA for nine years and I loved my TV agent there — Bruce Vinocour. But a lot of movie agents had come and gone. In all fairness to them, they had a right to get frustrated because I would go to meetings for feature film projects and we would get the ball rolling. Then suddenly the project would get put on hold, I’d get offered a TV movie and decide that I wanted to work instead of sitting around waiting, so I had to pull out of the feature film project. At that point my film agents would say, “Obviously he doesn’t want to make features. He wants to make TV movies.” That wasn’t it. I just wanted to make movies, period. Either I could sit around for the next three months to a year or more just talking about it, or I could go off and actually make a film and get paid for it and, in the process, get better at the very thing I want to do. Every time you make a film, you get better at your craft. You find out what you can and can’t do, and that hands-on experience is very important.

  Because I felt like I had hit a wall, I was open to a change. With great reluctance about leaving CAA and a great hope that this was going to help me get back into the world of feature films, I signed up with William Morris. There was one particular agent at William Morris, Steve Glick, who was very excited that I was now there. He was their television movie guy and he said, “If you ever want to come back to TV…” I said, “Not right now.” And for a year, I didn’t work. I took meetings, made a lot of phone calls, and wrote a script called If You Knew Me with my friend Tony Reitano. It was based on a book that I had personally optioned. I thought it was a good enough character piece that I could make it as a little independent film for a few million dollars. At one point, I had Mary Steenburgen involved. A lot of people were interested, but never enough to generate the money to get it made.

  Eventually, after I’d turned down a number of TV movies, I got a call from Steve Glick. He said, “Would you do a TV movie if it had Marlon Brando in it?” I said, “Are you serious?” He said, “He’s going to do a movie for CBS and they’re interested in hiring you to direct.” I thought about it for a day, then called back and said, “What’s required?” He said, “Read the script and then you’ll meet with Brando.” I figured: This isn’t an offer you get every day.

  The script was based on a true story that actually happened in Culver City, my home turf. The main character was a doctor named Robert Shushan who ran a business that employed handicapped people. One day Shushan had a heart attack and one of his janitors there, a guy named James Jones, found him in his car and pulled him out. After that Shushan became like a surrogate father for him. It was basically a male love story, which I thought was really fascinating.

  I started wondering, “Could Brando really play Dr. Shushan?” I started talking to every living director who had ever worked with him, and they all said t
he same thing: “Run — do not walk — from this situation! You’ll have great war stories, but he will kill you! He doesn’t like directors. He is his own boss. He gets paid a million dollars a week, and he will push you over schedule so that he can get prorated for those extra days…” I decided it would be worthwhile to take the meeting regardless. At the very least I could say I met Brando.

  So I headed to Brando’s house. He lived off Coldwater Canyon, on this private road that leads to three different gates. One went to Warren Beatty’s house, one went to Jack Nicholson’s house, and the other went to Brando’s place. Brando’s home was really very simple — white walls, modern, 1960s-style house. When I got there, [producer] Stan Brooks was already there, along with the writer/co-producer Barry Morrow, Brando and his housekeeper…and his large dogs. When I walked through the door, Brando got up and warmly greeted me. He was dressed in black, which reminded me of Orson Welles. He had this huge coffee table filled with sushi and a ton of other Japanese appetizers.

  I became instantly overwhelmed, standing before The Godfather and Captain Kurtz. It wasn’t until I sat down with him that I really got a sense of the power he had. He had so much charisma. The meeting lasted almost three hours. Basically, he held court the entire time. I would ask a question, he would start to answer it and then he would veer off onto all these other subjects. I was thinking, Maybe he’s really lost it. At the same time, the things he was saying were brilliant. He was like a genius who would lose his story point, and then suddenly he would be totally back on track, answering precisely. Then he kept repeating, “Eat eat eat. I got all this fuckin’ food here.”

  He brought up so many stories about his past. “Fuckin’ Robert Evans, that’s why I’m so fuckin’ fat today is that fuckin’ asshole.” And then suddenly he’d shift into the details of all the sexual encounters he’d had over the years. This meeting was taking place right after the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal, so he said, “What man in this room wouldn’t take a blowjob from Monica Lewinsky?” And everybody sort of laughed nervously. He pointed at me and he said, “You would.” And I said, “No, I don’t think I would.” He glared at me. “You wouldn’t take a blowjob from Monica Lewinsky?” I said, “I don’t think it’d be worth it.” He turned to the others and said, “What’s with this guy?” I kept trying to make my case, “Well, I’m happily married…” He said, “You’re an asshole. Marriage has nothing to do with it.” I was actually worried that I had alienated him because I didn’t want a blowjob from Monica Lewinsky.

  At one point I said, “Marlon, I’ve got to ask you a question. I am a huge Chaplin fan and you worked with him on A Countess from Hong Kong. There are stories that you guys didn’t like each other…” He said, “No, no, Chaplin’s a genius. Fuckin’ genius.” Then he said, “Did you ever see the movie City Lights?” I said, “Yeah, about fifty times.” Then he proceeded to dissect, shot by shot, the last scene in City Lights — the whole encounter between the tramp and the blind girl. He recited the title cards as if he had just seen the movie yesterday. That movie must have made a major impact on him, for him to be able to pull up all those details…and to act it out the way he did. At that moment I thought, There’s no place I’d rather be right now than sitting here watching Marlon Brando do Chaplin.

  I kept trying to steer the conversation back to the film [about Shushan and Jones], but he wasn’t interested. He didn’t really want to discuss it. I only remember him saying one thing about it. He said, “I see this guy Shushan having fingernail clippers…He’s always cutting his fingernails, what do you think?” I said, [confused] “Yeah…okay…” Later, after talking with more people who had worked with Brando, I learned that he had gone from being an actor who pulled from his own experiences and his own understanding of life, to being an actor who didn’t want to learn his lines and always needed a prop, a wig, a piece of wardrobe…something to help him find his way into the character.

  From everything I was told about working with him, I knew I was going to be jumping into a hornet’s nest if I agreed to do the movie. But I figured: What the hell, let’s see. So I signed up and went up to Toronto to start scouting locations. We got the production offices all set up, and then we got a phone call from CBS that Brando had pulled out. Why? He decided that he didn’t want to play Shushan. He wanted to play Shushan’s son and he wanted to ride around on a motorcycle as this character, throwing toilet paper to the poor. The head of TV movies at CBS said no to his idea, and that was that. I think he just wanted out, as he has on so many other films. I think he was deeply insecure about playing someone who was just a regular guy. Anyway, we closed down the offices, came back from Toronto, and I figured that was the end of it.

  When Brando was attached, Vincent D’Onofrio was going to play James Jones. Sean Penn was interested in doing it if D’Onofrio fell out. Chris Penn came to the office and met with us about another role. I also got a call from Pam Grier, who was willing to work for scale, just to have a chance to work with Brando. People were coming out of the woodwork to be in a movie with Brando. Nobody considered the fact that it would be very difficult working with him.

  Donald Sutherland, who worked with him [in A Dry White Season], told me that Brando wore an earpiece so that his assistant could read his lines to him. In the old days he had cue cards all over the place, but now he felt it was better to have somebody read him the line. He would hear it for the first time just before he said it. Donald said that was incredibly difficult to deal with — because, while the other actors were delivering their lines, Brando was having his lines fed to him. He wasn’t even listening to the other actor. And his hearing was going, so he had to turn up the volume on his earpiece so that it was loud. The other actors were having trouble delivering their own lines, because they were now overhearing his incoming lines. Despite all of that, everybody in town wanted to work with him.

  Anyway, once Brando pulled out, all the other actors jumped ship. We were back to square one. We had to find actors to play both Shushan and Jones. Eventually the script made its way to Donald Sutherland. I thought he was a great choice for Shushan. I’ve always been a fan of Donald’s work and I thought he would be really wonderful. But he’d been playing darker roles during that time period, so the folks at CBS were worried about whether he’d be likable. Stan Brooks and I basically assured them that he would be. We said, “Think about his role in Ordinary People…He can do anything. He’s an incredible actor.” We eventually convinced them.

  Somehow the word must have reached Donald, because during the first few days of filming, he went out of his way to say, “I know they questioned my likability, but I know I can make this guy likable.” He requested that we not schedule any of the scenes at the beginning of the movie on the first few days of the shoot. He said, “Schedule those toward the middle, because I need time to find the character and I don’t want to be struggling to find him right at the beginning of the shoot. Once the audience knows who he is from those initial scenes, the other scenes will just fly by.” And he’s absolutely right. It’s so crucial that you really establish the character right away, because that’s the viewer’s gateway into that world. I’ve used his advice on every movie I’ve done since then. Some people think the best thing to do is to shoot the scenes in order, to keep track of the character arc, but I now believe it’s more important for the actors to spend some time in the shoes of their character before shooting those introductory scenes.

  Once Donald was on board, we still had to find an actor to play Jones. That was not an easy part to cast. The real James Jones was very off-putting in several ways. He was loud and aggressive and funny-looking…but in the movie he had to be sympathetic. Eventually, we got hold of Gary Sinise, who was interested in the role. I was pretty much begging him to do it, because I knew he would do a great job. After a few days of talking, he said, “Look, Tom, I would love to do a part like this, but you guys start shooting in two weeks. That doesn’t give me enough time to prepare.” That was the bott
om line. He just couldn’t take on a role like that without having more time to define the character for himself. I had to respect that.

  Les Moonves [president and CEO] at CBS decided that the role should go to Matthew Fox. I thought that was the most insane idea I’d ever heard, because at that point Matthew hadn’t done much other than “Party of Five.” He was a model before that. And this was a part that Gary Sinise and several other very accomplished actors didn’t even want to attempt because it was so difficult. To make matters worse, Matthew would still be shooting “Party of Five” while we were shooting this movie. He’d have to take flights back and forth to Vancouver to do this role. Also, Matthew Fox is a very handsome guy and he was going to be unrecognizable as Matthew Fox in this role — hidden behind the stringy hair and missing teeth. But, like it or not, we needed a James Jones and now we had him.

  I met with Matthew in advance, because I wanted to have some degree of confidence that I could get this performance out of him. He couldn’t have been nicer. He said, “I don’t know if I can do something like this but I really want to try.” He said he really wanted to be an actor’s actor, and I admired that. I asked him to meet with Shawn Nelson, an acting coach that I knew really well who has worked with a lot of great actors. He coaches the same way I like to direct, so I knew we’d be on the same page. Matthew was willing to do that.

  Then we had to cobble his [character’s] look together, without having much money for special makeup. I called in a big favor to Rick Baker, to get him to make the teeth. Adding the extra weight and the beard was more difficult — especially because we were working with somebody that people recognize. We got nailed in a few reviews over Matthew wearing a wig and beard.

  Once I had my leads, I started casting for all the other roles. When we started shooting, I still didn’t have a wife for Donald. It was a Tuesday and we had to start shooting the wife scenes on Thursday. Finally, just before lunch, I got a call that we were going to get Mary McDonnell. I thought she would be great. I told Donald, and he gave me kind of a strange reaction. As I was heading to lunch, someone said, “Mr. Sutherland wants to see you in his trailer.” So I went in and he was sitting there, still wearing his hat and his overcoat and holding his umbrella from the scene we’d just completed. He should have been out of wardrobe and going to lunch, but instead he was just sitting there. He said to me, “Do you think this actress is the right choice? This is not who I imagined…” I said, “Really? You don’t think she’s a good actress?” He said, “No, no, no, it’s not that. She’s just too young. I’m going to look like her grandfather.” I did my best to reassure him: “I don’t want you to be uncomfortable. Whatever we need to do, we’ll make sure she doesn’t look too young.”