My Mother Was Nuts (29 page)

I couldn’t get her insured, but I didn’t care. Neither did she. She wanted to do it. To me, that’s what the movie was about.

I also had an open call for people in wheelchairs. I needed them for background. Why not use real people? Everyone was shocked when they heard me audition them.
Okay, what happened to you?
One told me that he had been run over by a car while sleeping on the street. Others had similar tragedies. My directness shocked some people around me. But I had to ask.
Can you use a manual wheelchair? Because this takes place in 1969
.

If they said yes, they were in. We learned a lot about different afflictions from being around and watching these people. The patients in Dr. Sacks’s real story had survived an early-twentieth-century outbreak of encephalitis lethargica.

There was one survivor from the group of original patients. We visited her in a hospital. It had been twenty-some years since Dr. Sacks had treated her. She was very sweet. We would be talking with her, though, and then suddenly she’d freeze. It was like a light switch had been flipped. I put her in the movie, but unfortunately she was cut out of the final version.

I cast Julie Kavner as the nurse because Steve Zaillian writes beautifully and very tight, but everyone spoke like Dr. Sayer.
When you wake up the next morning it twill be the next morning
. No one really speaks like that. At least Julie has a different sound. One day she asked how she would change Leonard’s diaper. How would I know? I told her to go downstairs and ask actual nurses.

I tried as much as possible to utilize actual people dealing with diseases, including a couple of people with Tourette syndrome. It was nearly impossible for an actor to duplicate the reality and reactions of a mentally ill patient, especially when we saw what it was really like. Robin had a scene early in the picture where the simple act of pulling
a pen out of his jacket to write on a woman’s chart scared the shit out of her. I read numerous actresses, and they were all right. But then I tested five schizophrenics, including Waheeda Ahmed. I gave her the role. She screamed in a way that shook the walls like no actor could do because they didn’t know what it was like to scream from deep inside your brain.

On camera, she was perfect, remarkable in fact, and she enjoyed the hell out it. After we finished the scene, I went to thank her. I found her sitting upstairs in one of the dressing rooms. She was all smiles. “I’m almost a star,” she said.

Thursday was the night in the hospital when the patients on the floors below ours were taken off their meds so they could be checked by the doctors. And that was the night we shot the pivotal scenes where Leonard finally wakes up after Dr. Sayer has spent days giving him different amounts of L-dopa. It was late at night in the movie, too. Dr. Sayer wakes up and sees that Leonard has also woken up and gotten out of bed. He finds him in a nearby room.

“It’s quiet,” Leonard says.

“Yes, everyone is asleep,” Dr. Sayer says.

However, as we shot, the patients from downstairs were screaming through the whole scene. It happened several times. What was I going to do? Tell crazy people not to be crazy?

There was another issue. Until this point, Bobby, like Leonard, had slept through the first part of the movie, and Robin became nervous with him suddenly alive and playing opposite him, reacting, changing the game. Bob is different when the camera is on him. He waits for it to find him. Before I said action, Miroslav asked if I wanted moonlight. I said sure, why not? We shot the scene and I thought it was great. Then I saw the dailies. Robin was blue. The following day when he asked how it had looked, I said, “Your acting is fine. But I have to reshoot your side of the table because the moonlight turned your face blue.”

Indeed, I didn’t know that moonlight turns people blue. You don’t
see it with your eye, but you see it on film. I didn’t know until then. It was only my second full movie.

Robin and Bobby got along well, though they had different styles. Robin entertained the crew between takes, while Bobby disappeared into his dressing room. Everyone was afraid to get him. That job fell to me because I wasn’t afraid. “What’s going on? Are you ordering silverware patterns for the Tribeca Grill? Let’s go.”

Reports that he and Robin got into a fight on the set were false. In the scene where Dr. Sayer and Leonard argue, Bobby told Robin to actually hold his hands down and prevent him from moving. At the same time, Bobby was struggling to move. They were two opposing forces. And Bobby is strong. One time Robin’s hands flew up and hit Bobby in the nose. Robin dropped to the floor while Bobby continued on with the scene. Afterward I said cut, wondering why Robin had overacted. It turned out he had broken Bobby’s nose.

“Does it hurt?” I asked Bobby.

He shook his head. “It’s numb.”

“Well, do you want to go to the doctor?” I asked.

“No, let’s finish it,” he said.

After the scene, I asked how long it took him to heal. I wanted to know if he was going to be black and blue, would I have to shoot around him? He turned out to be a fast healer. It straightened his nose, actually. But the mishap was reported in the tabloids as a fight. Sometimes they said it was Bobby hitting Robin. Sometimes it was the other way around. It was all bullshit.

What went unreported was Bob’s squeamishness in the scene when a cockroach walks across the table as Leonard freezes while writing. In real life, Bob hates cockroaches. Robin turned the moment into a stand-up routine, saying, “On my last job I was up for a cockroach in a Raid commercial.” But Bobby was so scared that I ended up using one of the other patients to touch him on the shoulder and break Leonard’s trance.

Then there was a minor interruption when Sony bought the studio. I remembered the conversation I’d had with Dawn Steele when
I asked if she’d still be the president when I finished shooting. Well, now she was gone—and so was Columbia Pictures. But it turned out good for us. The new Japanese owners loved Robin, and they just gave us more money.

We continued to shoot with a lighter attitude. I remember this scene where Dr. Sayer takes Leonard for a drive. We had the car up on a flatbed, and Miroslav and I were on the camera truck, watching. Bob had one line: “What a wonderful place the Bronx has become.” He said it just as a bus rolled by so we couldn’t hear him clearly. In fact, all we heard was Robin turn into Harvey Fierstein and say, “Well, Leonard, if you like the Bronx, wait till I take you to this place downtown. You’re going to love it.”

Robin made him laugh throughout the whole car scene. Every time we hit a red light or another car slowed us down he cracked a joke. Bobby would laugh and turn red. I had to wait until he went back to his natural pale color.

Bob was an equally powerful presence. Jazz great Dexter Gordon played a patient named Rolondo. The tenor saxophonist was ill at the time, battling cancer that took his life before the movie opened. He was 6’6’’ and rail-thin. He moved slowly. I had him play the piano after his character woke up. Despite needing a throat box to speak, Dexter kept asking, “Where’s my scene with De Niro?”

I understood. When Bob walked out of Ward 5 following his speech there I instructed him to shake Dexter’s hand. Then Julie moved in and helped Dexter walk away. But he got his scene with Bobby D.

To me, Bob’s greatness as an actor was measured in the way he handled the parts that gave him the most trouble. There were three of them—speeches that weren’t written in his rhythm, including the scene in Ward 5 where he goes a little crazy. He wouldn’t let anyone in while he rehearsed, including Robin, who took me aside and said, “But I’m in this scene.”

“Remember you got nervous the night Leonard woke up, the night you turned blue?” I said. “This is Bob’s turn.”

I worked with Bob privately and after a while I said, “Okay, Robin is coming in.” The transition was smooth. Bob just had to go through his process. He acts within himself, and it’s his restraint that makes him a ticking time bomb. He can say, “Did you fuck my wife?” and you don’t know how he’s going to react. In the same way, he surprised me in the scene where Leonard is in the bathroom shaving for the first time with an electric razor. I could see him thinking about what he was going to do as he held the razor in his hand. I went over to him—because you talk to Bob privately, not where everyone can hear—and I said, “Does it tickle? Leonard was twelve. This is all new to him.”

He got it. His performance in that scene was layered with nuances that let you actually see this character’s entire life start to come together. I liked the scenes with Leonard and Paula, the complicated sweetness of him having feelings and discovering the “gift and wonderment of life.” Penelope Ann Miller was great as Paula. My favorite scene was when Leonard, his health rapidly deteriorating, tries to say good-bye to Paula, his love, in the cafeteria, and she gets up from the table, pulls him close, and they dance. You had Dexter playing the piano in the background. It was heartbreaking. I also liked the scene when Leonard’s mother sees him awake for the first time. I thought everything in that worked.

My whole thing with Bobby was that I didn’t want any
Raging Bull
in his performance. I wanted him to play against type, to play a sweet guy. As he said, it was the glitz.

We shot a whole back end of the movie that I knew I didn’t even need, including a scene where Dr. Sayer sneaks Leonard out of the hospital and finds Paula ice skating at Rockefeller Center. It was so cold out that day, the Steadicam froze. None of it was necessary. I had been sneaking in shots of the patients and orderlies the whole time to use during Robin’s final speech. I did make sure to get Dr. Sayer asking Eleanor out for a cup of coffee. That passed for a love story, which
the studio had always wanted. But if not for all the extra shooting, we could’ve finished two months earlier.

Our wrap party, held at the Tribeca Grill, included a slide show of behind-the-scenes still photographs from the production letting us see our struggle against the cold weather. That wasn’t the only challenge. The first assemblage of the movie ran five hours. My brother said, “I think you need to cater it.” But the editor had put everything in, which is what I like to see. An hour came out like butter.

I walked away from that conversation with two additional editors, who began to cut heavily. I also called in Steve Zaillian and asked what he wanted out, and he basically agreed with my suggestions. We took out the subplot of Leonard building a library out of balsa wood. The whole back end came out then, too. The producers complained that I was ruining their movie, but Steve supported me and so did the studio. I liked the way it ended with a positive message. I was pleased when I saw it.

The studio loved that I got it down to two hours. They didn’t believe I could do it. The movie premiered in New York at the end of 1990, shortly before its official opening in December—in time to qualify for awards. Barry Diller, bless him, was very proud of me. Although he had passed on the movie, he said, “You did a remarkable job.” As was my habit, I was going away to avoid opening-weekend nerves. I was on my way to Phuket. I think Sean Penn had gone there and said it was beautiful. But Barry stopped me. “You can’t go there,” he said. He reminded me there was a war in the Gulf. “Terrorists are meeting in Bangkok.”

Instead, he sent me and Tracy and my niece to Australia’s Hayman Island, a ridiculously luxurious and beautiful haven in the midst of the Great Barrier Reef. No one was there, we had a butler, we ate phenomenal seafood, as you’d expect, and, of course, we played in the ocean. Relaxed, I returned to learn that
Awakenings
had received three Oscar nominations, including Bobby for Best Actor, Steve for
Best Screenplay, and the movie itself for Best Picture. Robin, who had held the movie together, should have been up for an Oscar. But he was nominated for a Golden Globe, Bobby won a New York Film Critics Circle Award, and Randy Newman, who scored the picture, earned a Grammy nomination.

Again, I was left out of the celebrations. Privately and publicly, people complained it was sexism. I don’t know. I didn’t dwell on it. I knew that people didn’t expect me to make that kind of movie. It’s not what I was known for. I hosted a non-nominee Oscar party at my house. As the awards show went on, though, and I saw that only Joe Pesci won from the pack of
Goodfellas
nominees, I realized I was going to be entertaining a bunch of depressed Italians. They knew about the food—fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, and more—from Carrie’s and my annual birthday parties. It was exactly what you wanted to eat if you didn’t win or get nominated. Even Barbra Streisand showed up.

She’d presented an award, then left the awards show and headed up the hill to my place. I loved seeing her walk through the door, looking comfortable and ready to have fun. She had been screwed over by the Academy, yet everyone knew she was a brilliant talent and, as far as I was concerned, a great gal who knew real satisfaction in life came from doing work you loved, not winning awards.