A few hours later I got a call from the producers saying, “We need you to get on a plane tomorrow.” It happened that fast. I didn’t have to go through the months of agony, wondering whether it was going to happen or not. I was used to the faster paced world of TV movies. I’d get a script on a Thursday and if I loved it, the deal was made on Friday and I was on a plane by Saturday.
Did you and Andy finally discuss your vision for the film?
Absolutely. What Andy and the producers didn’t want was a horror movie, or anything supernatural. That was fine with me because I had shifted my own storytelling preferences from traditional horror to real-life psychological monsters that are far more frightening. These are the monsters that you can’t always get away from…like the doctor in The Unsaid who molested [Andy Garcia’s character’s] son. I wanted the movie to convey the perspective of the actors, and to visualize the horrors that come from their subconscious. When Andy’s character, who is a psychiatrist, is looking at [his patient] Tommy, he starts to see [his dead son] Kyle in him. He knows that Kyle is not really there, but subconsciously he is. It illustrates transference — the very thing psychiatrists to avoid. He can’t stop working with Tommy, trying to help him, because Tommy reminds him of his son. It’s like this case gives him this way to access his son’s suicide. Then there are love stories, between Andy and the Teri Polo character, and between Tommy and Andy’s daughter, played by Linda Cardellini. And the dark love story at the center of the film is between Tommy as a boy and his mother.
The title sums it up. It’s a movie about relationships that are too complicated or too illicit for words. And it requires a strong commitment from the viewer — a willingness to endure the pain that all these characters are going through. It starts right away, with the scene where Andy Garcia discovers his son’s body. He just loses it…and you hold on that for a long time, unlike a slick horror movie that moves on very quickly. It made me genuinely uncomfortable as a viewer…
That had a lot to do with Andy’s commitment. He felt very, very strongly that those moments had to really be painful. He called it the monk’s wail, when he got into that scene — just totally letting go. We did run the risk of going too far, or pushing people away because they just don’t want to watch anyone in that much tragic pain. But it was an honest moment for Andy’s character. He had sensed a problem with his son and thought he had dealt with it. But it had only made things worse for his son. He had so much regret, pain and sorrow that he just caved in on himself. His marriage and his relationship with his daughter fell apart, and then he became a recluse for the next few years. As far as he was concerned, his life was over.
I wanted to do something interesting for the flashbacks where Andy is remembering his son. The normal way you would do that is to get a kid who looks like the actor and then shoot the flashbacks. I wanted to the flashbacks to look like home movies. I talked to the mother of Trevor Blumas, the actor who played Kyle, and she said she had a lot of footage of him as a little boy, and she was willing to let us use it. So my editor Charles Bornstein and I went through and handpicked those moments: the first haircut, the kid in the little stroller, looking up at the lens. All those in-your-face moments. We certainly could have gone out and shot something where we see little Trevor growing up on VHS home movies, but this was the real thing. Nothing surpasses that.
His mother must have had a hard time watching that part of the movie.
She might have. I certainly appreciated her allowing us to use those clips.
I can imagine that this is what would happen if I were in Andy’s situation: You think about all you’ve lost. I can see myself doing that — watching old home movies — to try and somehow cathartically deal with such a loss. I don’t think those images would stop running through my mind. I cannot fathom getting up every day and trying to get on with my life. I can’t even imagine taking comfort in the notion that it was God’s will. I can accept it in theory, but when I think about the extreme emotional impact…I don’t know how I could. Especially if you’re a parent who cuts a child out of your life for some reason and then something horrible happened to the child. You’d have to struggle with that regret for the rest of your life. That is deeply horrible to think about.
How do you get through a film like this without getting mired in that dark headspace the whole time?
I remember twice getting very emotional while I was making this movie. One time was after my family came up to visit. When they left, I had this overwhelming sense of loss and grief beyond anything I’d ever experienced before. I didn’t share that with anybody on set or even with my family, but I suddenly felt completely overwhelmed. I was weeping in sorrow. I’d never had that occur before.
Maybe it’s because, as director, I try to throw myself into the minds of the characters in order to understand them and to relate to the actors. I certainly wanted a deep kinship with Andy. I also really connected with Linda Cardellini’s character, who feels alone and separated from her family.
Vincent’s character Tommy was a different challenge altogether. He was basically a little boy who was corrupted and confused. He witnessed something so intense that he literally had blocked it out. He had no memory of what he had seen. At the end when Andy is pushing him to remember what happened, it’s pretty melodramatic, but it had to be that extreme in order to ring true…because [Tommy] has pushed the truth so far down into his subconscious that he really had no idea what fucked him up. Then comes the pseudo-Catholic moment when he tries to kill himself. He opens his arms in front of a train, in symbolic fashion. Those scenes really did require an emotional commitment, from the actors and from myself.
I was shocked by the ending. I didn’t expect a mainstream film to go there, because it’s such a taboo subject.
Some people figure it out early, but most people don’t realize how tragic it’s going to get. In the flashbacks, you see the husband attacking his wife like a madman, and you have to think that, if he’s just caught her with another guy, he’s overreacting. Then once you know what the circumstances are, you’re likely to have different feelings about it…But did she deserve to be beaten to death? No.
I had a long discussions with the actress playing young Tommy’s mother, about how this situation with her son might have evolved. It started with having her child in bed with her. The boy was needy. She was comforting him and one thing lead to another…The starved-for-affection mother justified it to herself as love. It’s hard for me to believe that any parent could ever justify that, but some do. These things have and do happen. In this case, it wasn’t just about sex so much as it was about an unfulfilled need for physical love that she wasn’t getting from her husband.
To me, it’s a movie of extreme horrific magnitude. This type of horror is beyond what you want to think a person could rationally do. And her punishment for that is so severe. As a result, this little boy grows up sexually damaged, and he’s just as violent to women as his father was with his mother. He snaps, and suddenly he’s acting out the things he’s been trying to suppress for all those years. Maybe it’s as close as I’m ever going to get to The Exorcist-caliber horror, at least in terms of the real human emotions at their peak. In The Unsaid, that one event in the past opened the psychological door for a demon to come in. It created the battleground for these characters. All that was missing was a supernatural element.
A supernatural element would have made it easier to deal with, in some ways. “The devil made them do it.” This is too real, even for horror movie audiences.
When the movie was over, I had a sense of a huge emotional weight being lifted off of me. At the same time, I didn’t want to let it go. I was afraid it might not be successful. We were telling a complex, multi-layered story, forcing the viewer to participate in something very uncomfortable, and it evoked strong reactions.
I think Universal decided that movie was just too dark tonally to make money. Maybe there wasn’t a way to properly promote it. They didn’t believe there was
an American audience for this kind of thriller. On the other hand, the Europeans and press overseas totally embraced it. We received a standing ovation at the Deauville Film Festival. Reviewers in France understood what we were trying to do, and they loved it. Partly because they thought it was a very European film.
The French were like, “Well, of course a boy could want to sleep with his mother. It’s psychologically very natural.” Here, we say, “Oh God! Are you fucking kidding me?!” It doesn’t mean that those thoughts have not gone through certain people’s heads. It’s that they’re never going to admit that out loud, or even to themselves.
You can say it in a horror film, because it’s less realistic — like in your episode of Freddy’s Nightmares. That audience will accept it under those conditions.
When we shot that scene [where the teenage boy dreams he is being French kissed by his mother], people said, “Oh God, the kid’s kissing his mother!” In reality, it’s just an actor kissing another actor, but people had such extreme reactions. But in Freddy’s Nightmares, the whole scenario is so fantastic and so over the top…it wasn’t presented in a realistic way. I do wonder what would happen if The Unsaid was being released today. It seems like people now more open to disturbing movies that are grounded in a deep sense of humanity.
I have one more random question about The Unsaid: What’s the significance of 333? In the film, there’s a scene where Andy wakes up and the clock reads 3:33, and you said on the DVD commentary track there’s some significance to that number in your life?
This falls into the category of “strange but true”…For years, I always found myself arbitrarily looking at my watch at 3:33. And it always gave me a feeling of déjà vu. So in a number of my movies, whenever I had to arbitrarily pick what time a clock was going to be set at, I always chose that number. It’s in “The Prophecies” and a few films. I’ve never really talked about it until I recorded the DVD commentary on The Unsaid, which I recorded in Auckland, New Zealand, while I was making Murder in Greenwich.
About two weeks after I did the commentary, I got a phone call in the middle of the night from my younger brother Jim. He said, “I’ve got bad news. Mom’s dead.” I rolled over in bed and my eye went right to the digital clock and it was 3:33. That was it. That was the time that I heard that my mother was dead. What was so strange was that I had just brought up this anecdote on the DVD commentary two weeks earlier, and had said, “One day, maybe, I’ll figure this out.”
I experienced a complex emotional release when I heard my mother died. I truly regretted not being there, but the good thing was that she went peacefully and quickly. She didn’t suffer for a long time like my father did. The hard part was that I was on the other side of the world, in the middle of a shoot. The funeral couldn’t wait until I was done shooting, so I had to help make arrangements while I was in New Zealand. The really sad thing was that my wife and kids were on location with me, and we couldn’t afford to fly the whole family back to L.A. for the funeral. Thankfully, Nancy was very understanding, as were the kids.
On the last day of the third shooting week, I got a car to take me directly from the set to the airport, got on a plane, flew to L.A., gained back that day and a half [because of the time zone change], came home for a few hours, then went to the mortuary to see my mother, spent some time with my brothers and sister, came back home, slept for a few hours, got up and went to the funeral, gave the eulogy, said everything I could think of to say about my mother, then went from the funeral into a car, back to the airport for another fifteen-hour flight. On the morning I got back to New Zealand, I literally went directly from the airport to the set and continued to shoot the movie. It was just like when my father died. Once again, had no time to grieve. People would ask me, “Are you okay?” And I’d say, “Yeah, I’m fine. Let’s shoot.”
Wow…I guess it’s a good thing that you thrive on chaos. I remember you once told me that you enjoy being in the eye of the hurricane.
I miss being on set every day I’m not. I miss the excitement of creating. Of course I’m conscious that any number of things can and do go wrong, but I’m still happiest when I’m working. I remember one time somebody asked Steven Spielberg what the hardest thing is about directing and he said, “Getting out of the car when I arrive on set.” On some shoots I have so much anxiety about getting everything done. On other shoots, I go in thinking: I know what I want to do, but if it doesn’t all happen that way, I know something else great will happen — because I have a great crew of talented people and everybody is watching everybody else’s back.
When I first met John Frankenheimer, I asked if he still loved directing. He said, “What I really love to do is fish or hunt, and that’s when I feel like myself. Once I’m refreshed [by doing what I really love], then I can go and be a director.” I thought to myself, Boy, I’m not I’m not cut from that cloth at all. I am the most myself when I’m watching movies. When I’m making a movie, I’m watching. I’m looking at the script, trying to find something really interesting to focus on…or I’m watching the actors, looking for those great moments and remembering them for the edit. That’s the only way I know to direct. That’s how I got into this. It’s an obsessive passion.
If I’m not making movies, I’m going to the movies. Watching movies makes my love for what I do that much stronger — because I’m constantly learning new things, looking at things in new ways, and thinking about things that I’ve never thought about before. Fellini said that he didn’t like watching other people’s movies because he didn’t want to be influenced by them. I can understand not wanting to watch somebody else’s movies when you’re making your movie — because you don’t want to confuse your vision. At the same time, I love it when I recognize the influence of an earlier film on somebody else’s film. Artists copied Rembrandt and Monet because Rembrandt and Monet were brilliant. I can’t think of any piece of art or music that hasn’t been influenced by someone else’s work.
Murder in Greenwich seems to be influenced a bit by Sunset Boulevard. In both films, the main character addresses the audience from beyond the grave. Was that part of the original script?
The history of that movie is that Fox made a deal for Mark Fuhrman’s book [Murder in Greenwich]. Somehow that deal fell apart. Then USA picked it up. What they were hoping to do was make it part of a series of films introduced by Dominick Dunne. I think [Dunne] was either going to host the series, or do book ends where he introduced and wrapped up each movie, like “Masterpiece Theater.” Then that fell through. After all of that, the producer Bernie Sofronski was left with very little money to make his project, but he still was determined to do it.
Dominick Dunne wasn’t going to be involved anymore, but his name stayed on it because money had been spent. And contrary to what a lot of reviewers said, Mark Fuhrman wasn’t involved at all. I never met him, I never spoke with him, and he never came to the set. I don’t know if he even read the script. Fuhrman is still a character in the movie, but I put more focus on Martha. Also her mother, who was so devoted to solving the murder.
It’s interesting that you chose to focus on the victim instead of building the film around the investigation of her murderer, Michael Skakel.
Jon Foster completely threw himself into the role of Michael. He became a recluse for days and put himself into that very dark frame of mind. In the fight scene between him and his brother, those guys really went at it. I kept saying, “Guys, don’t kill yourselves.” And they’d say, “No, no, we really want to go for it.” Almost all the actors in Greenwich pushed themselves to make everything as real as possible.
What I wanted to convey was the sense that Martha was telling the story, calling out from the grave. We had a wonderful script by David Erickson, and he had that voiceover in the script, but I wanted to see her talking to us. I wanted to make her presence part of the fabric of the whole movie, so I shot her monologues with a moving camera, to create a sense that her spirit was weaving in and out of the movie. Shooting
the monologues with Maggie Grace [the actress who plays Martha] was the challenge, because they had not been scheduled. I had to pull her off to the side whenever I could. I’d get her into a room with a camera man and the sound guy and just let them shoot while I was setting up the next scene outside.
A lot of what we did on that movie was very instinctive. We were in the cemetery shooting the funeral sequence, and we finished up by shooting Martha’s grave marker in the grass. We had all these leaves blowing across it, because I was trying to make it look like autumn in New England, even though we were shooting in the middle of summer in New Zealand. We had a warehouse full of spray-painted leaves, which the art department carried around in huge bags. When we were done, everybody was starting to pack up and bag the leaves, and I said, “No, wait, I want to do a slow move in on the marker.” The producer was looking at his watch and saying, “We have to make a move. What is this for?” I said, “I don’t know. I just want to shoot this thing while we’ve got the camera here. It’ll take me five minutes. Give me five minutes and if I can’t do it in that time you can pull the plug.” He said, “Okay, you’ve got five minutes.” So we shot this slow push in on the grave marker, and had a leaf blower slowly uncover it. I really didn’t know what I was going to do with it. It wasn’t until I got into post-production that I even remembered I had that shot. It seemed like the perfect way to start — clearing away the leaves to reveal the girl and her story. I think some of the leaves even had blood on them, because we had used them in the scene where Martha gets killed. That became the opening title sequence.
A Strange Idea of Entertainment: Conversations with Tom McLoughlin Page 21