A Strange Idea of Entertainment: Conversations with Tom McLoughlin

by Tom McLoughlin

  Not Like Everyone Else seems to me like your first distinctly post-9/11 film. D.C. Sniper was obviously rooted in our collective fear of terrorism, but Not Like Everyone Else seems more political. It really says something about American culture during the Bush administration…

  For parents, Columbine was just as frightening as 9/11. It demonstrated how much the world had changed for our children. I remember in the sixties not getting served in restaurants and being spit on after the Manson murders, because my hair was long and hippies had become a scary thing. After Columbine, teenage loners became a scary thing.

  That paranoid attitude is the real monster in Not Like Everyone Else. That monster is the way people allow themselves to be controlled by fear, and the way other people use that fear to manipulate. That never stops. What we’re dealing with right now [2008] with the stock market is all about fear. Yesterday, the critics reluctantly said that the stock market was rebounding. Reluctantly. They don’t want people to get too comfortable. It was the same thing with the recent hurricane. The news said, “It’s coming, it’s coming, everybody get the hell out of New Orleans.” They were replaying these images of the levee rising, trying to make it look as horrific as they could. Then it didn’t happen and they moved on to the next crisis.

  In Not Like Everyone Else, it’s the metal detectors and the daily shakedown at the entrance of the school. Suddenly these kids are in a whole new world, run by a new fear. When we got to that scene, the producers said, “Do you really need more than one metal detector?” I insisted that it had to look like an airport. Everyone has to be inconvenienced, unsettled and tense. That’s what it was like in many schools. It’s such a weird image. These kids are just going to get an education, and they’re being shaken down like they are criminals. It was the best way to tell the story visually. I also had tons of cameras in the school, so Brandi was constantly looking up at them and knowing she was being watched. They actually did have cameras in the school we filmed at, and I really wanted that Big Brother aspect.

  There are a few other details I homed-in on. We were prepping and I saw all of the buses pull up to the school. The kids piled in and then there was this incredible parade of buses leaving all at once. It all happened within about a three minute time period. I said, “We’ve got to get this on film.” So we got there early one day and set up about seven cameras. We didn’t have enough crew members to run all of them, so we had to have unmanned cameras. I felt it was important to show this huge, almost robotic system at work.

  Not Like Everyone Else asks the timely question of how much invasion of privacy we’re willing to accept in order to feel protected.

  I usually avoid the speeches at the end of movies. If it’s needed, I really try to downplay them as much as I can. In this case, I didn’t want to say that the people who are persecuting her are bad people. Instead, I wanted to convey a sense that it’s the times we live in that makes people want to throw the baby out with the bath water. I wanted Brandi to simply express that basic truth about accepting people for who they are. Stop being afraid and condemning people just because they’re different. As you know, it’s what the classic monster movies were all about. The monsters were defined by the society that rejected them.

  Your next movie, The Staircase Murders, was also based on a true story — one that had already inspired a lengthy documentary. How did you get involved in a dramatization?

  The thing that fascinated me most about Staircase was the role of documentary or reality television. Michael Peterson was a suspected murderer who had the arrogance to allow an Oscar-winning documentary team to come in and make a film asserting his innocence [The Staircase]. I wanted The Staircase Murders to be a movie about making a documentary about this guy. People already knew the story, but I was interested in doing a film about our desire to craft the truth in the media. There’s a scene in the movie where Michael Peterson is unhappy with his response to one interview question and he says, “Can we do that again?” And the documentarian says, “Yeah, let’s shoot it again.” It was so carefully orchestrated. To me, things like that were the more unique aspects of the film.

  In the movie, Michael Peterson is very unsympathetic. Was the real guy that sleazy?

  I really studied the documentary. I was right up against the screen, watching his eyes and looking for little “tells” that would reveal he was lying. I was trying to figure out if he really, 100% believed what he was saying. He looked completely comfortable when he was telling his version of what happened. But the facts of the case told a different story.

  I didn’t want Treat [Williams, who plays Michael Peterson in The Staircase Murders] to mimic the real guy, but to convey his apparently genuine belief that he is the real victim. When the documentary crew took him out by the pool where the murder took place, he told his story in a tone that said: It hurts me to think that you could even think that I killed her. Every now and then, he’d launch into a bit of poetry or something that seemed completely disconnected from what an innocent man would be saying or thinking in that situation. That’s when he’s grasping. Trying to show how someone as intelligent and poetic as him could do something so horrible.

  Assuming he’s guilty, do you think he believes his own lies?

  I think if you tell yourself something long enough, it can become a truth in your mind. You can maybe even pass a lie detector test because you are so comfortable with it. I think Michael Peterson has that ability, as a lot of people do, to convince others of the lie, despite all the facts to the contrary.

  Occasionally I’ve seen this sort of thing with children. They drop and break something. I say, “Why did you drop that?” And they say, “Drop what?” They can look at it and, in a very convincing manner, say, “I didn’t drop that.” “I just saw you drop it.” Then they act confused, “You saw me drop something? What do you mean? I don’t understand. How could you have seen me do something I didn’t do?” At a certain point, you start to feel like you’re going crazy. “I just saw you drop that. Why won’t you admit that you dropped it?” “Because I didn’t. If I did drop it, I would say I dropped it. It’s not a big deal. I just didn’t do it.”

  This is an example I give actors all the time. Especially if we know their character is lying. You have to convince the other person to believe that they’re wrong, and you sometimes do that by being unemotional, rational and matter of fact. That’s what Michael Peterson did, and that’s what made him such a frightening villain. There were times when I was watching the actual documentary that I started to believe him, because what he was saying made sense. I’d think, “That’s true…Why would he want to kill her? What does he get out of it?” Then I’d have to remind myself of the facts. If she had fallen down those stairs, would the blood be spattered so high on the wall? Those questions he just shrugged off. He said, “I can’t explain it. All I know is that I didn’t kill my wife.”

  It’s too bad that the real story was public knowledge, or you could have played it as more of a mystery, and forced the audience to have that same internal debate.

  Believe it or not, many did. The documentary filmmaker, at least up until the time that the documentary aired in Britain, claimed that he didn’t believe Michael Peterson was guilty. He stuck by that, and the documentary presented this as a case of injustice. After I watched it a few times, I started to see the filmmaker at work — choosing particular shots, taking certain scenes out of context, and setting the whole thing to this wonderfully emotional and tragic musical score. The documentary really is a finely crafted example of cinematic art. I was very hesitant about doing The Staircase Murders because I knew critics and viewers would compare the two. What made me want to do the movie was examining the art of a documentary, and how it can manipulate “reality.”

  In the movie, it seems like the truth doesn’t even matter to Michael Peterson’s kids. With one exception, they were determined to take his side no matter how much evidence indicated that he had killed their mother.

  Th
ey were 100% willing to defend him, despite everything telling them not to. They just flat-out refused to accept the facts. Maybe because their father was the only parent they had left, they refused to give him up.

  After The Staircase Murders, you went back to high school for Fab Five: The Texas Cheerleader Scandal — another rippedfrom-the-headlines story. How did you get involved with this one?

  As I’ve said, I find myself drawn to projects where children are empowered in some way. Sometimes that’s a good thing, like in Fairy Tale, and sometimes it’s a bad thing, like in Turn of the Screw. My intention was to show how certain kids of that generation can behave when they are given too much power. They develop an unbelievable sense of entitlement, and become insanely demanding. They’re so used to getting what they want that they feel unstoppable and have no respect for authority. Their view of the world is so skewed that they have no qualms about doing anything that crosses the line.

  During editing, I started becoming concerned that there’s no central character that takes you through the whole movie. The lead actress, Jenna Dewan, plays the wide eyed coach who comes into a high school and has to — almost like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington — deal with the corruption. (In this case, a squad of cheerleaders.) As good as Jenna was in the part, her character wasn’t that interesting to me because she fell into the clichés of “Mrs. Smith Goes to High School.” She comes in very innocent and naïve, but you know that by the end she’s going to somehow turn the kids around. The only thing I could change was that she didn’t turn all of the kids around. The main reason I wanted to make Fab Five was because the Brooke character intrigued me. Maybe I should have been focusing on the coach or the mother, but I was most interested in Brooke.

  She was this gorgeous girl that seemed to have everything, but she was constantly fighting with her mother and she had issues with her father because he had wanted a son. I wanted to make people realize that this was a kid who was just crying out to be loved, but also to be properly disciplined. She’s a very strong personality, so somebody’s going to have to work incredibly hard to get through to her. In the end we don’t see her change, because she’s too set in her ways to change overnight. But every now and then, there are moments where you can see the vulnerable little girl.

  You say you were concerned about losing narrative focus, but I really like the choppy narrative of Fab Five — especially the way you transition from scene to scene using freeze frame. It looks like the Lifetime version of a grindhouse movie.

  I made a conscious choice that I was going to pay homage to that genre, and try not to let Lifetime catch me. There’s a scene where the girls are going to buy booze, and I purposely added surf music to give it that grindhouse quality. One of the network execs said, “What’s that old ’60s music doing in there?” I said, “It’s my way of saying that this sort of thing has been going on with teenagers for decades…you know?” Somehow I got away with that explanation.

  When I started doing the teen movies, I’ve tried with each film to find some kind of music that is representative of that particular world — because teenagers today have such diverse taste in music. On She’s Too Young and Odd Girl Out, my editors and I spent an enormous amount of time going through library tracks and cherry-picking the songs. By the time I got to Fab Five, I was searching for some kind of music I hadn’t used. I didn’t want to do Bring It On. I wanted the music to have a darker edge, because the girls were darker and tougher.

  I started exploring rave music, using my son as my guide. One weekend, I went to a rave in downtown L.A. I was overwhelmed, because there must have been ten thousand kids there, and I was at least thirty-five years older than everybody else in there. Interestingly, most of the kids didn’t pay attention to me at all. I was just some invisible entity walking around, observing. It was like I had died and gone back to my teen days. I was thinking:

  This is just like the Love-ins and outdoor music festivals of the mid-’60s. I remember that guy. I remember them. It seemed all these young faces sort of looked like people I had known. It was amazing.

  I stayed from eight o’clock until four in the morning, just walking around, mesmerized. Kids kept coming up to me, offering me ecstasy and saying, “Dude, how old are you?” I’d say, “Old enough to be your father.” And they’d say, “Man, I hope when I’m your age, I’m still doing this too.” Some asked what it’s like to see all of this, and I’d say, “I hate to tell you, but it’s pretty much the same thing we did at love-ins in the sixties.” The rave music created the atmosphere and, if you were there, they assumed you were cool.

  On Monday, I started putting rave music into the movie. Then I immediately realized that it wasn’t going to work because of all the emotional changes that happen in the story. The music needed more variety to match the storytelling, so then I started searching for additional types of music. The first cut that I showed to Lifetime had a very eclectic soundtrack. It was still a work in progress. I told them, “I’m still trying to get a handle on the music.” They came back and said, “Why are you putting disco music in some scenes. Disco?” That’s when I realized that rave music sounds like disco to the older generation. I knew this was never gonna fly with Lifetime.

  I worked intensely with a music editor to pick the songs. We ended up going back to more of an electric guitar sound because I wanted a slightly masculine edge to this movie. I thought it was a nice homage to the juvenile delinquent movies of the ’50s and ’60s. Later, the teens I spoke with who saw the movie didn’t even seem to notice the music. They accepted the eclectic variety. It seemed natural.

  What have people responded to most about Fab Five? I guess it’s not the music…

  I think it’s the performances. I think people don’t expect to like it, and they’re surprised when they do. I was really careful to not exploit the girls, even though this is a movie about girls who are purposely exploiting themselves. I was hoping that people would like them…or at least like watching them. I wanted people to walk away from it saying, “I just hated them, but I couldn’t stop watching.” The ladies’ performances are the thing that people bring up again and again.

  Do you tell actors not to come in to rehearsals with preconceived ideas about their characters? I think that was something that Capra did.

  I’ve learned over the years that every actor works a little differently. Some really do come in and they just want to be directed. It’s wonderful when actors have the freedom and trust in their own ability to do whatever it is that you ask. And if you cast the right people — and again, this is what Capra said: “Ninety-five percent of directing is casting” — they come in and they bring whatever you need with them.

  With Fab Five, I had all the girls create character journals, so that they really felt like their characters had a history. Some actors like to do a lot of work in advance, to feel comfortable enough to come onto the set and be told what to do. The hard thing is when they’ve learned their lines and gotten into a particular rhythm and cadence, and their performance starts to become mannered. I’m always saying to actors, “Please don’t restrict the character any more than you would restrict yourself in life.”

  I assume that, with so much focus on the hot young cheerleaders, Fab Five got an unusual amount of attention from male viewers.

  When we were editing, I wrote an impassioned letter to the president of Lifetime, saying, “Everybody thinks I’m crazy for bring this up, but have you ever actually tried to target a male demographic?” There wasn’t one guy in the post production department who didn’t wander into our edit bay and say, “You know, I’d sit and watch this movie because the girls are hot.” They could have advertised Fab Five on ESPN or Spike, and males would have taken note. Guys don’t give a crap that it’s on Lifetime if it’s something they want to watch. But Lifetime didn’t want to go beyond their tried and true demographic. I’m sure they were also concerned that women were going to get turned off if I went too far.

  The network asked me not t
o make the fights too violent…but I made them very violent. One reviewer said that Fab Five was like a western. All we were missing was a shootout at the end. We had to follow the facts of the real story, or I would have had a hell of a catfight at the end. I would have really loved to have staged something like that.

  I fought the happy ending, because at the end of the day the real cheerleaders pretty much just walked away from the situation. The coach got her story out and was vindicated, but it wasn’t any great victory for her. I wanted to end the movie after she saw the news report and said, “What difference did I really make?” Then we’d fade to black. As far as I’m concerned, you can turn the show off right there and that’s it. Of course the network didn’t want to end on that note, so there’s the scene where the coach goes back for a cheerleader competition at the school and a few of the younger girls on the squad say thank you. Begrudgingly, I admit it did add that Capra-esque quality — one person can make a difference.

  Now you’ve got me thinking of Fab Five as Western. The revisionist Western is pretty cynical, but the classic Western is about how the loner can save the community. At the end of the film, there’s always sense of community that wasn’t there at the beginning of the film.