My Happy Days in Hollywood (27 page)

The studio arranged for Julia to meet me at my office. All I really knew about her was this: She was actor Eric Roberts’s little sister. She had impressed audiences in
Mystic Pizza
, holding her own against Annabeth Gish and Lili Taylor. And she was dating the actor Liam Neeson. In walked a gangly girl, with schlumpy posture and hair all over the place. When she smiled, however, you just thought “wow!” The first thing she said was, “I won’t be naked.” She had read the script, knew it was about a hooker, and from the get-go she wanted me to know she was not comfortable doing nude scenes. I said fine. “You’re only twenty years old. I’m going to do everything I can to make you feel comfortable on this movie, but I also want you to have fun.” Once I had Julia locked in, I went after her costar.

We brought in a number of hot actors and put some on film with Julia to see how they looked beside her. Australian Sam Neil was a fine actor but wasn’t right with Julia. Chemistry was key to this picture. Comedian Charles Grodin came in to read, too, and while very funny he wasn’t quite right either. Richard Gere at the time had a shaky career and reputation. He had been hot after
American Gigolo
and
An Officer and a Gentleman
, but then after
Breathless
and
The Cotton Club
people weren’t rushing to hire him. I knew Richard best from my daughter Lori’s bathroom. She had every inch of her bathroom walls covered with framed photos of Richard taken from magazines or shot with her camera off the television screen. While I knew we didn’t have any nude scenes, Richard Gere was an actor who could play sexy, and I needed that in the role of Edward. The first week of shooting there was a rumor that Richard was indeed
going to do a nude scene. It wasn’t true, but just to shock everyone one day he took off his clothing and did a quick walk around the set. He had energy and attitude, and I liked that about him immediately.

The first time Richard and Julia spent an evening out together was at my daughter’s wedding that August at my house. They danced together and got the opportunity to know each other away from the set and the cameras. What made their chemistry eventually so powerful on the big screen mirrored some of their chemistry off-screen. Shortly after we started Julia broke up with Liam, and neither she nor Richard was dating anyone else. So they could hang out—unencumbered by outside relationships or paparazzi. We had a very quiet set. He taught her to play the guitar, for example. She bought a new dog. We played pranks on each other. Julia came to work tired one day, and Richard and I decided to keep her awake by having him snap a velvet jewelry box jokingly on her hand. It remains one of the hallmark moments in the film because Julia registers such true surprise with her smile and her laughter.

What people don’t know about the movie is that some of it never made it to the big screen. We felt we would get such mileage out of showing Julia in Richard’s fancy arena that we might get the same mileage from showing Richard in her dark and seedy world. So we shot a number of scenes in a club called the Blue Banana. I made up the name of the club because I love bananas and eat them often on a set. In our movie the Blue Banana was a place where Julia’s character, Vivian, and her friend Kit, played by Laura San Giacomo, hung out. In one scene Edward almost gets beaten up in a back alley by a gang. My son, Scott, plays a knife-wielding, skateboard-riding drug dealer (which to be honest caused a slight rift between my wife and me, because she was against our son playing a drug dealer. But I needed a boy who could ride a good skateboard). Showing the characters in each other’s worlds made sense mathematically but ultimately not emotionally. So most of that footage from Vivian’s world got left on the cutting room floor.

One of the funny behind-the-scenes aspects of
Pretty Woman
was the merchandising that appeared in the movie. One of the ways a director gets extra money for his budget is by placing various products
in the film. For example, I got a five-figure deal to mention a condom company. The fact that Julia was able to integrate the gold condom into the scene was funny and also talked about. In another sequence, involving a polo match, a car company gave me a big truck to use with money to match. I thought, rich people at polo matches don’t drive this kind of truck. So instead of driving it I just had some attractive wealthy people lean against it, and I was still able to get the merchandising money.

Julia came to the set every day knowing her lines, but sometimes the tedious pace of the production would bore her. I think she started to do needlework on the set of
Pretty Woman
, a pastime she would continue on other movies. She had visitors to the set. Her mother came one day to watch when we were filming on Wilshire Boulevard. I always feel a certain responsibility when I am shooting other people’s children, especially someone as young as Julia. I remember telling her mother that she was doing a wonderful job, and that I would do my best to watch over her. I think my experience as a camp counselor when I was in high school came in handy when I started directing young actresses. Often I got the best tips because I told the parents in detail how well their kids were doing at camp.

So you can imagine how worried I felt when Julia fainted in the middle of a night scene. On a movie shoot days are long, and nights can feel even longer. Emotions run high all the time, and people occasionally get sick and even faint. While the on-set nurse was tending to Julia, I went over to try to figure out what was wrong.

“What did you eat today?” I said.

“Half an avocado,” she said.

“Maybe you should have gone for the
whole
avocado and then you wouldn’t have fainted,” I said. She said she would try to remember that. Then I shared my can of tuna fish with her. I always carry tuna fish with me on the sets of my movies in case I need a shot of protein. So Julia and I shared a little protein and conversation and then got back to work.

Working with an actress trying to stay thin is nothing new to me, but it’s still worrisome. I made a point of seeing that Julia ate healthy food every day. Eating for me is one of the joys of filming a
movie. At what other time in your life do you have complete access to a private chef and whatever food you want twenty-four hours a day? But for young actresses trying to stay thin, a movie set can present too much temptation and trouble.

While Julia was new to life on a movie set, Richard was a veteran by the time we shot
Pretty Woman
. I spent a lot of time with him talking about life and his career. He is a complicated person. He enjoys getting to know people, but at the same time he works hard to preserve his time alone. Comedy for him, as for Matt Dillon, does not come naturally. Matt and Richard love to play brooding, sexy characters, but sometimes they lack the confidence to reach for the big jokes. So as with Matt on
The Flamingo Kid
, I gave Richard comedy roads to venture down. He bravely took them, and did a wonderful job.

One of my favorite scenes in the movie takes place in an opera house. We were originally supposed to film inside the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, but the Loma Prieta Earthquake hit in October and the location was damaged. Instead, our brilliant production designer Albert Brenner built an opera set for us in Los Angeles. In this particular scene Richard delivers a beautiful speech about his love of opera. As a counterweight to his passionate words, I gave Julia some opera glasses to play around with. Richard knew that Julia was going to get the big laughs from flipping and flopping about with the opera glasses, and he wanted to exit the scene early. It was not always easy for him to be her straight man. To put a twist on the scene and make him happy, I gave him a new ending to the scene. When Julia turned to another patron and said she liked the evening so much she almost peed in her pants, I had Richard jump in to cover for her and say, “She said she liked it more than
The Pirates of Penzance
.” When Richard saw the final cut of the movie, he beamed with pleasure at his delivery of the joke because he got such a big laugh.

Some stars introduce you to their agents, but Richard introduced me to the Dalai Lama. I went to an event where His Holiness was speaking, and Richard and I stood in a receiving line to meet him. When we finally got to where the Dalai Lama was standing, Richard
introduced me by saying, “Your Holiness, this is one of the funniest men you will ever meet.” I was embarrassed, because that is an uncomfortable way to be introduced to the most famous living Buddhist. However, I quickly covered and said, “Your Holiness, I read that we are the same age.” Showing his sense of humor, the Dalai Lama said, “And we both have done well.” It was not like the Dalai Lama had met so many funny people in his life either. I couldn’t imagine he had spent much time at the Improv in Mumbai or the Comedy Club in Delhi.

My love of playing pranks continued on
Pretty Woman
, and most of them involved trying to get Julia to laugh, because nobody laughs better than Julia. There is a scene when she takes a bubble bath in Richard’s hotel room. She is listening to music on headphones, but at one point she takes off the headphones and goes under the water. During one take the minute she went under the bubbles, I had the whole cast and crew run off the set. When she came out of the bubbles, she was surprised to see that she was sitting on an empty set and broke into a full round of giggles and a couple of choice swearwords, too.

The reality is that young people get bored easily, even young people who are movie stars. So I like to keep my actors entertained and on their toes. When actors least expect it, I will pull a prank. I knew if I could keep Julia laughing, I could keep her interested in her job. That is important to me. I don’t just want to make movies. I want to make actors enjoy the process. I don’t want people to go away saying, “I just finished a Garry Marshall picture and it was hell.” I want them to leave saying, “I had a lot of laughs with Garry on the set.”

I always knew that a prostitute with a heart of gold falling in love with a wealthy businessman was a predictable story line; it was magical because of these two actors. But there was a glitch: Some of the other executives thought the manipulative business side of the movie was a stronger angle. So there is a scene in the Rex restaurant in which Richard discusses a big takeover deal with several other businessmen. I filled the scene with humor. Julia flips an escargot into the air and a waiter catches it. The line “slippery little suckers”
was her own ad-lib. However, despite the fact that I thought the scene was working, I received some notes from the studio that the business deal was unclear and I should reshoot the scene. I knew that to rent the fancy Rex restaurant for another day would be ten thousand dollars, which would put my picture way over budget. I was not willing to do that.

My saving grace on nearly every movie I have directed is that I can pick up the phone and call the person in charge of it. I called Jeffrey Katzenberg to discuss the restaurant scene and we watched the footage together. I told him that in my opinion the scene was not about the hostile business takeover but instead about a young girl being in a fancy restaurant for the first time in her life. The business deal was merely background buzz for her humor. In fact, life was imitating the film, because Julia admitted that she had never been inside a restaurant as fancy as the Rex. Her honest and wide-eyed looks brought even more charm to the scene. Katzenberg agreed with me, and we left the scene alone and let Julia shine. When Julia saw the film for the first time, she laughed because she had no idea the waiter was going to catch her snail. She thought it just flew into the air off-camera.

Some directors have their entire plots mapped out, but on
Pretty Woman
I shot nearly the whole picture without knowing my real ending. My obligation was to have the lovers get back together somehow, but I wasn’t sure how. I came up with a possible solution during an earlier scene in which Julia is eating a croissant in Richard’s hotel room. She finally stands up and says to Richard’s character in essence, “I want to be your girl, not just your beck and call girl.” That’s when it dawned on me that I was directing a fairy tale and I needed a fairy-tale ending. I had to find some kind of metaphorical way for Richard to ride up on a white horse and rescue her—in the most modern and feminist sense of the word.

In the film Edward is afraid of heights. This was in my opinion a brilliant character trait, and the credit for it goes to Barbara Benedict, the sole female writer on our rewrite team. How perfect to have a big corporate guy who does hostile takeovers without fear be afraid of tall buildings. To add to the character we had him book the
penthouse in every hotel because that is usually the most expensive room. He pays for the high things in life but never allows himself to enjoy them. Despite the fact that he is in the penthouse, he never steps outside on the balcony because of his phobia.

So when I was thinking about the ending, I got the idea that it should somehow involve Edward overcoming his fear of heights in order to get the girl. We came up with the concept of his climbing up the fire escape of her building. A writer or director can spend all day trying to craft the perfect ending, but sometimes you show up at a location and things are not perfect. When we went to shoot the scene, we discovered, of course, you have to pull down the lowest set of stairs on a fire escape to make it work. At first glance it didn’t seem like the most romantic ending to a movie ever shot. But then it struck me that one variable you can always change is weather. So I decided to make it rain, and then have Richard elegantly pull down the fire escape using the handle on his umbrella. Finally, the ending to
Pretty Woman
came together. Richard drove up not on a white horse but in a white limousine. He pulled down the fire escape with his umbrella handle, then climbed up with his umbrella in hand to rescue the girl. To make the story modern, our producer Laura Ziskin came up with the memorable line “She rescued him right back.” Romantics rejoiced, and feminists weren’t too pissed off either.