A Strange Idea of Entertainment: Conversations with Tom McLoughlin

by Tom McLoughlin

  Why did you shoot the movie in New Zealand?

  When they started looking for a place to shoot it, the obvious choice was Toronto. It’s close to the east coast and it would have been much easier to do a period setting there and make it look like Greenwich. But there was not enough money, even with the tax breaks in Canada. It turned out that at that point, New Zealand was fifty cents to the American dollar — so without any tax breaks at all it was going to be cheaper than Toronto. Sony had a relationship with an independent production entity down there, run by Jake Rose. He convinced Sony to make the movie in New Zealand.

  Bernie and I thought this was crazy. We went kicking and screaming. But Jake was right. Once we got down there, we were both completely in love with that wonderful country. Everything about it — the weather, the people — gave us this feeling that, no matter what happened, making this movie was going to be an enjoyable experience because New Zealand is such an enjoyable place to be.

  When we did our first casting session down there, the actors who came in were totally prepared. They had read the scripts and worked with American voice coaches so that they could do the accents. They were extremely professional, and it was just a question of who was right for each part. I had a crew that would party on the weekends, get out all their pent up energy, then come to the set on Monday mornings, ready to work and happy to be there. Nobody complained. The crew responded to my every request with such enthusiasm — and often they’d come up with something even better than what I asked for.

  I had a wonderful production designer, Michael Ralph, who loved the challenge of turning Auckland into Greenwich. Basically, we had a choice of two houses that looked right, and we used both of them — one for the Skakel house and one for Martha’s house. We shot almost the entire movie in those two houses and those two yards. On the weekends, me and Michael and the Australian D.P. Mark Wareham worked out the production board. The film was incredibly overambitious for the schedule, but we were hell-bent to make it extremely cinematic. We shot some scenes with three cameras, and me and Mark were running back and forth the whole time. We tried to keep the camera moving and to make the locations as interesting as possible throughout the whole process, working within whatever restraints we had. It all came together incredibly well. The only sad thing about the New Zealand shoot was the death of my mother. It was shocking and heartbreaking to lose her, but I can’t imagine a better cocoon that I could have been in at that time than making this film, with that cast and crew, in that country.

  Years later, when I wrapped The Staircase Murders in New Orleans, I was depressed because that shoot hadn’t gone well. I knew I’d shot everything I could think of to shoot, but I felt like I didn’t get the movie I wanted. I shot a lot of pieces, but I didn’t know how the pieces were going to come together, and I didn’t have that feeling of closure that I usually get when production wraps. I was pacing in my hotel room on the wrap night, feeling like I should tear up my DGA card. Around 2 in the morning, I flipped on the TV and it so happened that Murder in Greenwich was on. I sat on the edge of the bed and starting watching it. It was such a blessing. It broke me out of the doom and gloom mood I was in. After that, I could go to sleep without feeling like I was the worst director in the world.

  Those two movies have very different aesthetics. Even though it’s nominally a movie about murder, Murder in Greenwich is very warm and comforting in a way. It has a lot of color and a lot of light. It’s like a reassuring dream of a deceased loved one. On the other hand, The Staircase Murders is very cold and dark. And so is D.C. Sniper.

  That definitely was the objective. When you watch a movie with “murder” in the title, you’re expecting something dark, but I wanted to make it about life and the loss of a life that was special. Like I said, I wanted the movie to have an emotional connection to Martha. Hopefully the audience wants to see Mark Fuhrman solve the murder, because we care about Martha. Maggie was the center of the film. The heart. She was able to project that warmth and innocence and that very pure sexuality of the all-American girl. She’s not just a pretty face — she’s very grounded and really connected to the work. You can look into her eyes and see that she is listening and processing everything. She really has the gift.

  But some of what you’re talking about is really a credit to the director of photography — Mark Wareham, who did both Greenwich and D.C. Sniper, and Lloyd Ahern, who did Staircase (and so many other films of mine). Everything is always thoroughly planned out. I decided, before we started shooting Murder in Greenwich, to look at all the stock footage I could find in Hollywood of Greenwich and the east coast. Then, when I was picking locations in New Zealand, I planned around the best stock footage instead of doing it the other way around. I’d see a piece of stock footage that had fog in it, and then we would add fog to our corresponding scene. That way I could start with a huge flying vista and dissolve into a ground-level scene with our painted leaves. The scope was really important to me. It opens up the movie and makes it feel like a bigger story.

  Where did you shoot D.C. Sniper?

  That was Vancouver.

  I wonder what Murder in Greenwich would have been like if you’d shot it there. Would it have been comparably drab?

  It wouldn’t have been, because we chose our color palettes. For Murder in Greenwich, we wanted those light colors and that feeling of the 1970s — including the drug parties and all. I was trying to create what I remember that world looking like when I was younger. Not that I’m an expert on ’70s drug parties or anything…[laughs]

  It reminds me of The Virgin Suicides — that same look.

  Yes. She [director Sofia Coppola] did a wonderful job with that film. I love her vision.

  The aesthetics of D.C. Sniper are the complete opposite.

  I wanted D.C. Sniper to have this cold, blue palette. Part of it’s in the shooting, but it’s also related to the color timing in post-production.

  That blue-gray palette conveys a strong sense of despair.

  Every time I scouted a location in prep, I would figure out which direction we were going to be shooting. Then we would paint the walls. Nine out of ten people don’t notice the use of those colors throughout the film, at least not consciously, but I believe it affects their impression of that world. I try to keep those things somewhat subliminal, so it doesn’t pull the viewer out of the story.

  What made you want to direct D.C. Sniper?

  USA network wanted to make a movie about [Police Chief Charles] Moose and all the pressure he was under to find out who was the killer. When we began making the movie, the police of course had John Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo in custody, but they had not been convicted yet. The FBI had not released much background information about them. I managed to get information from people who weren’t supposed to speak about the case. The more information I got, the more obsessed I became with the father/son relationship between the murderers. So I started splitting the focus of the movie because, while I thought Moose was a fascinating character and Charles Dutton turned in a hell of a performance, I became more interested in the snipers. I wanted to show what I had learned. How they could have done what they did.

  John Muhammad was a very twisted father figure. This was his way of feeling in control. He praised this teenage boy [Malvo] for doing evil, horrific things. The kid needed love and this was his way of getting love. To me, that was the scariest thing about the whole story…Muhammad was desperately trying to be a surrogate father to this boy, because his wife had taken away his real kids. Malvo never had a father, so this fulfilled a need for him. The thing that was most revealing to me was seeing the sketches that Malvo had drawn in prison. They were artistically really good. Also some of the things he had written made me realize that this was a child who had potential, but who was used in an incredibly horrific way by his father-figure to get attention.

  Muhammad definitely had his own agenda. As I started to hook into his story, I realized that these are the villains that are really ha
rd to stop, because they truly believe that they’re on an important mission — whether they’re shooting down someone in a parking lot or crashing a plane into the Twin Towers. They believe that they’re doing it for a higher purpose. They rationalize: “This is a good thing I’m doing. It’s going to change people’s lives. It will make a lasting impression on the American way of life.” How can you fight a villain that believes they are totally right and justified?

  I wanted the actors, Bobby Hosea [who plays Muhammad] and Trent Cameron [who plays Malvo], to work deeply with these characters on an emotional level, so that it wasn’t just a story about two guys shooting people. I wanted to explore how they got to that point, why they were doing what they were doing, and how it escalated until they got cocky and sloppy and then were caught. I thought there was a really compelling story to be told from the standpoint of those two characters.

  In the process of working this story out, I kept questioning whether there was any chance that these two guys might be found innocent. This had just happened six months ago. Should we make sure these guys really are the real killers, before we start pointing fingers? But truthfully, after all the research I did, I had absolutely no doubt that they were the Beltway Killers. I figured out what they were doing with the walkie-talkies that were found in the car before that became public knowledge. David Erickson did an amazing job with the script [D.C. Sniper]. I tried to make it as much of a psychological thriller as I could, without losing track of Chief Moose’s story.

  Charles [Dutton] is one of the greatest actors and greatest people that I’ve ever worked with. He doesn’t talk about the role. He doesn’t intellectualize. He takes a couple of simple notes, then goes in and does his job with flawless consistency. Most of the time, he remained very private. There were hours and hours of tape [of Chief Moose], but he didn’t want to try to imitate the man note-for-note. He just immersed himself in the situations and became an even stronger version of Chief Moose.

  Was that the first movie you did where you had to be conscious of the fact that the audience was going to compare the movie to real life? The murder of Martha Moxley had happened decades before the Murder in Greenwich movie came along…

  True. With Michael Skakel, all you saw in the media was an overweight Irish guy being led off to prison. And all that most people knew about Martha Moxley was that she was a pretty, blonde fifteen-year-old girl. With D.C. Sniper, all the details were fresh in everyone’s mind. The whole country had been watching, because everybody was looking over their shoulders at gas pumps and afraid to go to Home Depot. Nobody knew how or why the killers were choosing their targets. And nobody believed that it was just one person doing the shooting. People thought it was a diabolically well-orchestrated terrorist attack.

  There was a lot of freedom to create Muhammad and Malvo as characters, because all we’d seen at that point were their mug shots. The two actors worked extremely well together. Both are incredible actors. They played frightfully well the premise that they weren’t doing anything wrong.

  I wanted to end the movie with Muhammad and his anger — knowing that the kid had squealed and now he’s completely fucked. I did not win that battle. I was required to end the movie with the sequence of Moose and his wife going to a football game. The network wanted a scene that suggested that everything is okay. I do understand their thinking…but to me, seeing the villain realize that he is finished is a more satisfactory conclusion. Overall, I’m incredibly proud of the film. It won two NAACP awards for Best Television Movie and Best Actor (Charles Dutton).

  Your next movie was quite a change of pace. If I’m not mistaken, A Very Married Christmas is your only straight-ahead comedy?

  Unfortunately, I think that movie was perceived as an interesting failure.

  You perceived it as an interesting failure?

  No, I didn’t. Seems like everyone else did — the critics and the network. The film was based on a book called Say When, which really was not about Christmas at all. It was about a husband and wife breaking up, and how their daughter gets caught in the middle. Joe Mantegna was doing Joan of Arcadia at CBS and he was looking for a movie project, and the network decided that he would be perfect for this. I’ve known Joe for years because he’s a close friend of Jean Smart’s. Then we got Jean to play his wife. I was very excited to work with these two incredibly gifted actors, as well as Charles Durning [who plays the character Ozzy Larson]. I could go on and on about Charles Durning. He’s such a remarkable individual.

  While I was shooting, I found myself going back into some of my early influences, especially Buster Keaton. I brought all of my Keaton DVDs up to Toronto and watched them at night in my hotel room. I wanted Joe’s character to be like Keaton. I said to Joe, “I want to approach this character as somebody who is really out of step with the rest of the world. He doesn’t know anything about dating, so there’s this awkwardness about him.” And I wanted him to play out the awkwardness physically.

  Normally, Christmas movies are light and fluffy. But Joe, Jean and I said, “Let’s make this real.” When the husband and wife went at each other, it got nasty. It was a real knock-down between a couple of people who know each other so well that they’re able to go right for the throat. The producer had me tone it down quite a bit in editing. Still, we horrified the network. They said, “Oh my God! This is not a fun Christmas movie. We’ve got to play up more comedy. At least make the music funnier.” We wanted something more in the style of About Schmidt. The network wanted a much more sugary-sweet holiday movie.

  We shot the movie under the title Say When, but they changed it to A Very Married Christmas, which we hated. We must have gone through 400 different titles trying to find something else, but CBS wanted that one. Then they sent out the press release hyping it as a heartfelt Christmas movie. Of course the critics were really taken aback when they saw it. “How dare you make a Christmas movie about divorce, and put this poor child at the center of the story?” I thought: Wait a minute — It’s a Wonderful Life is a movie that starts with an attempted suicide. And Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is basically a story about thinking you’re dead and seeing the worst side of your humanity. I’m not trying to say that A Very Married Christmas is equal to It’s a Wonderful Life or Dickens, but my point is that some of the ugliest events in people’s lives can happen during what’s supposed to be the happiest time of the year.

  Unfortunately, our characters are going through a divorce at Christmas. The husband is trying to escape his pain and trying to be a man. The wife is trying to redefine herself. And then there’s this guy who might be Santa Claus. If he’s not, then maybe he should be. There’s a little touch of fantasy at the end of the movie, where Joe Mantegna wants to believe that maybe the guy really is Santa Claus. The movie isn’t saying that is true, but he wants to believe it’s true. As do we.

  That’s an upbeat message. Maybe people who thought it was too harrowing missed the point.

  I enjoyed the movie immensely while I was making it, especially all the physical comedy stuff. I was shell-shocked when the network said it wasn’t working for them. Then I learned that the exec who pitched the idea to them never read the script. They never knew anything about the complexity of the relationship between the husband and the wife.

  On the set, we did occasionally ask ourselves: “Should this confrontation really be this strong? Should they be insulting each other this much?” But we always came back to the truth that if both characters aren’t fully engaged in this emotional battle, then we’re not committing to the reality of life. When people feel hurt, they do get protective and selfish and they lash out at the other person. There’s extreme pain in that kind of breakup and that pain has to come out. I wanted that in the movie. And I don’t believe we made the wrong decision. I think what we did wrong was trying, in post, to make the movie into something it wasn’t. I wish the network had embraced it for what it actually was. Had the film been released as a feature, perhaps those critics would not hav
e reacted so harshly to the darkness of the story.

  You moved into a new phase of your career after that and did a series of Lifetime movies focused on teenage characters. I like to think of it as your “high school phase” — She’s Too Young, Odd Girl Out, Cyber Seduction, Not Like Everyone Else and Fab Five. This was during the same period that your own kids were in high school, right?

  Yes. The most recent movie I did where my family went on location and was part of the moviemaking process was She’s Too Young. We shot that in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and my kids have incredibly fond memories of Halifax. My son Shane shot some second unit stuff on the set and Hannah did some acting. They were really part of the experience. As was Nancy. There were also family influences that affected the script. I remember two specific instances at our apartment when Hannah and Nancy got into some kind of argument. I literally took their dialogue and put it into the movie. The great thing was that when the movie aired, a number of teenagers posted on the Lifetime website: “Yeah, that’s exactly how that argument would go with my mom.”