Rebels on the Backlot (33 page)

Early in the shoot the pace and atmosphere was low-key; Kaufman came frequently to the set, as did Sofia Coppola, who was working on her first film, The
Virgin Suicides.
Jonze’s younger brother Sam was a production assistant who challenged crew and cast members to regular Ping-Pong tournaments. The table was carted from one location to another. But the pace of filming grew more and more frantic as the crew fell behind on its tight, forty-day schedule. Almost every day they kept trying to squeeze in time to shoot the scenes of people falling through the portal, a twelve-foot-long tunnel, six feet in diameter. The crew kept carting the tunnel from one location to another, dismantling it, and reassembling the thing, hoping there’d be time to get to it. They carted it to six different locations before the portal scenes were finally shot.

That was typical of the low-tech approach to production.
Other directors would probably have used computer graphics to achieve the effect of seeing out of Malkovich’s eyes, for example. At first they tried to achieve that with a high-definition camera mounted to a pair of glasses, worn on the cinematographer’s head. The plan was to stabilize the picture in postproduction. But this was too elaborate for Jonze, who kept insisting on keeping things simple. Instead Acord ended up strapping a camera to a life preserver and mounting it on his shoulder. This kept his hands free as he rolled film, so he could put them in view of the camera, giving the impression that they were Malkovich’s. To get the shape of Malkovich’s eye, they painted an oval-shaped filter over a wide lens.

One of the most difficult, and most dangerous, stunts involved using Jonze himself; it later got cut from the movie. Originally there was an elaborate chase scene in which Keener (Maxine) chases Diaz (Lotte) with a gun. They go through a portal and find themselves in Malkovich’s memory. At one point they are on a bus, struggling with one another, and their fall off the bus takes them out of the portal. This had to be done in front of a blue screen, and it involved a high fall off a platform, into a trench. They succeeded in pulling off the fall, but the next week as they continued to shoot the chase scene, Keener’s stunt double was running through Malkovich’s memory again, veering around a corner, down attic stairs, where she sees a little-boy-Malkovich crying, “Mommy!” The stunt woman fell and twisted her ankle. It was the end of the night, and Landay was about to call the whole stunt off when suddenly he saw Jonze putting on the stunt woman’s dress and wig. “We’ve got enough frames just to do this quick shot,” Jonze said over his shoulder as he ordered the cameras to roll. Landay was freaked that Jonze might injure himself and the whole movie might be in jeopardy. Jonze was fine, but the bus scene and the chase was almost entirely cut from the film during editing because it distracted from the main story line. The moment with Jonze in stunt-drag remains.

J
ONZE ASKED
D
IAZ TO SPEND SEVERAL DAYS WITH THE CHIMP
that would play Lotte’s pet in several scenes. She hung out with the monkey for about a week, and eventually walked around the set, holding its hand. The preparation paid off in a key scene when Lotte had been locked in the chimp’s cage by Craig, who wanted to go off and have a sexual tryst with Maxine while inside Malkovich’s body. Diaz as Lotte is in the cage, with tape over her mouth, when Craig rushes in, having just had sex with Maxine, and storms around the apartment, changing clothes before storming out the door. Jonze never shouted “Cut!” at the end of the scene. He frequently let the camera keep rolling to see what would happen.

“When we shot it on Cameron’s close-up, we just let the camera roll,” said Jonze. “She was freaking out, trying to make noise, trying to take the tape off. She’s locked in the cage with the chimp, and the chimp was so scared by her being scared that he sort of panicked and tried to comfort her.” With the camera still rolling—though the scene was over—the chimp gently came over and kissed Diaz on the tape over her mouth, a tender moment that a trainer never could have planned.

The film had long sequences of puppetry, an obscure art to say the least, using both marionettes and—in a “Dance of Despair”—Cusack himself. These were some of the hardest shots and the most important to Jonze to get right. He tried to get the country’s top puppeteer, Phillip Huber, to shoot the scenes with Craig performing, but he wasn’t available. (Jonze had no idea there was such a huge public for puppetry.) Finally Huber became available, and they shot with him for two weeks, but the scenes came out horribly. The dance of despair had to be redone completely, and was finally shot in Huber’s garage.

With the shoot complete, Jonze set out to carve out the movie from the hours and hours of odd, disjointed footage. Depression set in as he moved into the editing room. The first assembly of the footage was four hours long “and it was just this miserable thing to watch,” said Jonze. None of it seemed funny at all. It had no pacing. It just felt like a long, flat, bizarre experience. A terrifying thought occurred: Will this movie work at all? Jonze thought this
moviemaking business was real torture. “You feel like you’re on the brink of failure all the time. Some days it feels like it’s really working and other days you think it’s never going to work.” The editing process on
Being John Malkovich
ended up being much more grueling and fundamental than on most movies. Eric Zumbrunnen, who’d worked with Jonze for years on music videos, spent nine full months with Jonze trimming, assembling, finding the movie. But the director was mostly not even in Los Angeles. Instead he was in Arizona, working as an actor for the first time on the set of
Three Kings
, David O. Russell’s $60 million auteur movie for Warner Brothers.

For nearly two decades, Warner Brothers had been making movies founded on a solid partnership between two moguls, Robert A. Daly and Terry Semel. The two men had a unique collaboration that confounded the Hollywood norm of back-stabbing competitiveness. They lived near each other, drove to work together almost every day, lunched often, and shared the fruits of their successes. In an industry where the head honcho job changes about as often as you trade in the BMW for a Mercedes, these two were a monument to longevity. Daly, the elder, had been chairman since 1980, and Semel, having risen through the ranks of the studio from the mid-1970s, joined him as vice chairman, then president and finally as cochairman. By the turn of the decade, they gave no sign of slowing down.

The pair owed their success largely to having found the ideal formula for making movies in the age of corporate Hollywood. As agents grew more powerful and began to package entire movies—script, director, and star—Daly and Semel kept their clout by striking on-the-lot deals with producers like Joel Silver, David Geffen, and Rob Reiner, and by nurturing relationships with the movie stars who ruled the box office, like Clint Eastwood, Kevin Costner, Sylvester Stallone, and Bruce Willis. They gave them cushy development deals and lavish perks such as access to the company jet.
As a result they churned out an annual slate filled with effects-laden action movies featuring stars’ towering images that translated into huge box office sales all over the world. The machine that Daly and Semel had honed was expert at making high-budget, high-concept movies that required huge sets, hundreds of extras, explosions, and demolition derbys on water, land, or in the air. They helped perfect the franchise film, making blockbuster hits that could then spawn sequels and spin-offs and toy tie-ins and video games, including
Batman
and
Lethal Weapon.

In 1990 the historic Warner Brothers studio merged with the venerable publishing powerhouse Time Inc., a $14 billion deal that created one of the early monoliths of the era of media conglomeration, Time-Warner. The merger, orchestrated by the dynamic Steven J. Ross, seemed to make sense: a publishing giant combining forces with a moving pictures giant. But it didn’t greatly affect the decision making at the top of Warner Brothers because Ross gave his executives the freedom to make their own decisions. For the executives who worked under the pair of moguls, the message was clear. As one put it, “If you make money on the movies, you keep your job. If you don’t make money, you lose your job.”

But by the mid-1990s times were changing, and below the most senior executive ranks there were those who could see that Warner Brothers couldn’t forever continue to attract huge audiences with a stable of aging stars whose price tags seemed to rise exponentially. They missed the days of intelligent movies for adult audiences and were interested in making films that tested the tried-and-true limits of the star vehicle. They thought the big studios ought to be able to compete for an Oscar at the end of the year.

In 1996 Bill Gerber and Lorenzo di Bonaventura were the young rising talents at the studio; named as joint heads of production, they seemed to be on track to one day inherit the studio from Daly and Semel. Both were literate and intelligent—di Bonaventura’s father was a classical musician—and highly competitive men who believed a vehicle should have four wheels and headlights, not refer to a movie. While they both were well trained in the nuts and
bolts of Warner Brothers filmmaking, they also had their eye on young talent rising elsewhere, in the independent world.

In the early 1990s they came up with two big ones. Di Bonaventura got hold of a script written by two reclusive, comic book–geek kids from Chicago, Larry and Andy Wachowski. The script was called
Assassins
, an action thriller about an aging hit man on the run from a younger killer. Di Bonaventura thought it was one of the best scripts he’d ever read. He bought the rights from independent producer Dino De Laurentiis and tried to make it as a non–Warner Brothers project: small, cool, with a $15 million budget. But the bureaucratic culture of the studio proved overpowering. Sylvester Stallone got the script and wanted to make the film. Of course he ended up starring in it, with another Warner Brothers stalwart, director Dick Donner, at the helm. The combo of new blood (the writers) and old blood (the star and director) was not exactly a success. Donner and Stallone radically changed the script, fired the Wachowskis as writers, and brought in Brian Helgeland as a replacement. The 1995 movie
Assassins
, cost a whopping $50 million (not including marketing) and bombed at the box office, taking in just $30 million in the U.S.; and even abroad, where Stallone still had a following, it took in a feeble $47 million.

The flop was a test of the Wachowskis’ relationship with di Bonaventura, who had failed at this first attempt to nurture new talent within the Warner Brothers bureaucracy. He determined to be more protective in the future. After signing the brothers to a four-script deal, he got a look at a separate project they’d written on their own called
The Matrix
, a dizzyingly complicated sci-fi story about humans enslaved by machines who sucked their lifeblood while diverting the human mind into an alternate, virtual universe—the “matrix” of the title. It was a fantastically original plot, though hard for many to understand. The script arrived in early 1994, before the Internet and the notion of a virtual universe was common or even comprehensible to most people. Certainly it was not accessible to Daly and Semel. But di Bonaventura was fascinated. “It’s a mind-altering script,” he said. “I thought it was unique. Something you chase even if you don’t fully understand it.”

For the next three years di Bonaventura followed the evolving versions of the script and didn’t come up against any serious opposition within the studio until the Wachowskis said they wanted to direct the film—well,
films:
The movie had morphed into a trilogy.

To old-fashioned businessmen like Bob Daly and Terry Semel, unaccustomed even to e-mail,
The Matrix
was impenetrable to begin with. They were inclined to say no. But they wanted to support their head of production and were willing to believe in his passion. They told di Bonaventura that if the Wachowskis could prove that they could direct a traditional action picture, the moguls would consider green-lighting The
Matrix.
After the brothers quickly wrote and directed
Bound
, a lesbian crime thriller starring Gina Gershon that did well enough, Daly and Semel softened.

Semel particularly loved the noir, sexy thriller and gave a tentative go-ahead to start casting
The Matrix.
Di Bonaventura knew he needed stars. Brad Pitt showed interest, as did Will Smith and Leonardo DiCaprio. Val Kilmer was agitating for the role of Morpheus and came close to winning it. But the Wachowskis’ wanted Lawrence Fishburne and wouldn’t budge. Keanu Reeves chased them for the role of Neo, though at the time he was hardly a big enough star to carry what was supposed to be a $45 million, then a $63 million, and eventually a $72 million movie.

W
ARNER WENT DOWN ITS LIST OF MOVIE STARS.
A
RNOLD
Schwarzenegger as Morpheus? It was a possibility, briefly. “Desperation is not the word, but we were trying to get the movie made,” recalled di Bonaventura. Reeves was ultimately cast, despite the resistance.