Fincher replied, “Well, I think you’d be really good in it, you know, for the movie’s sake it should have somebody good in this part.”
Bonham Carter said, “Yeah, but it’s so misogynist. It’s just awful. I was just wondering what work of mine that you’d seen that made you think that I was right.”
“Well, I liked Wings of the Dove, and both Brad Pitt and I were sold on you then.”
“Really?”
The actress was so flattered at the leap of imagination from Wings of the Dove to Marla that she agreed to consider it. She gave the script to her mother, a psychotherapist, who hated it. But she let her mother meet Fincher the next time she was in town. She still disliked the misogyny in the script, but Bonham Carter’s mother thought Fincher was funny—he was notoriously so—and she gave her daughter the thumbs-up. When the movie premiered at the Venice Film Festival, Bonham Carter’s mother “was the only person laughing,” Fincher recalled. “Her mother was just howling, she was rolling in the aisles.”
Happy to have found the Marla he wanted, Fincher went back to the studio to tell them. Great news, he said, Helena Bonham Carter wants to do the film. The Fox executives were far less enthusiastic. They had wanted a name actress, someone they’d worked with before. They pushed for Winona Ryder, who they’d worked with on Alien: Resurrection (the fourth installment) and The Crucible. Fincher wasn’t interested; he was tired of Ryder doing “the Goth chick thing.” Then Fox wanted Reese Witherspoon. Fincher thought she was too young. “It had to be a woman who was there going, ‘Look I want to fuck you, but I don’t want to fuck you,’” he said. A woman, not a girl. (Witherspoon instead took the role of an overambitious high school student in Election, Alexander Payne’s debut effort at Paramount, another rebel working contentiously within the studio system. For Witherspoon, the part launched her to Legally Blonde and stardom.) That left Fox with Bonham Carter, and their fear that she pushed the production still further in the direction of the dreaded Art Film. But eventually they deferred to Fincher.
After a year of work on the script and after five drafts, Fincher was ready. He went to dinner at Chianti, a restaurant on Melrose, with Ziskin and McCormick. In a private room in the back he laid it out: Here’s the script, here are storyboards, here’s a visual effects breakdown. Brad Pitt and Edward Norton want to play the leads. The budget would be $60 million. He told them: This is the package. I want to shoot this entire script. I want final cut. Then he gave them three days to respond.
BILL MECHANIC HAD GIVEN LAURA ZISKIN THE GO-AHEAD with Fincher attached, but watched with dismay as the budget rose from the forties to the fifties to the sixties. Ziskin was getting nervous, too. “At $50 million it was a good bet,” she thought. But the budget wasn’t finished going up. Before giving the green light, Mechanic had met with Fincher at the director’s house and seen the whole package. Fincher had shown him the title sequence, where the camera begins inside a man’s brain, then courses through the veins and nerve synapses through his eyes and then flies down the handle of the gun into Jack’s mouth to begin with the narrator’s voice-over. It was an amazing visual image, requiring many layered, cutting-edge digital effects, which Fincher had devised with the special effects house Digital Domain even before he created the shoot. The movie was full of special effects—with a budget totaling $5 million—but this one scene, which really had no bearing on the story line itself, was going to cost $800,000. Fincher didn’t blink at asking for it. Another difficult scene had Jack and Tyler on an airplane, when—in a fantasy sequence—the side of the plane suddenly explodes open with the passengers sucked out into the void. It was a costly scene that would also mean that the movie was unlikely to be sold to airline companies for inflight viewing—a small revenue stream sacrificed.
Mechanic was willing to bite on all of it, but he wanted to know why the shoot had to be eighty to hundred days, extremely long in Hollywood terms. Mechanic warned Fincher that he could have the pricey title sequence only if he stayed on schedule. That would have to wait until the end, once Fincher proved he’d kept his nose to the grindstone. Also, Fincher would have to cut his fee. The director agreed, relinquishing a fourth of his $4 million salary: a million dollars.
But in taking the leap to make Fight Club, Mechanic had some built-in cushioning, because the studio had scored a massive hit at the box office with Titanic and had recently rereleased the first three Star Wars movies with tremendous fanfare and great financial success. They needed to put new things in the pipeline; they couldn’t rerelease Star Wars forever. Maybe Fight Club would hit big, Mechanic thought.
Fincher could hardly believe that Fox was going to make the movie he wanted. He didn’t ask twice.
Malkovich
For a full year, Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze worked intensely on the script for John Malkovich, going through the screenplay page by page to develop each character and scene. Most people interpreted the script as a comment on the emptiness of society’s fascination with celebrity, with the genius twist of using the actual celebrity to mock himself. But for Kaufman and Jonze, it quickly became about the characters the writer had created, not some absurdist farce.
“The more I talked to Charlie the more I saw the complexities in the relationships, in the characters,” Jonze remembered. “I guess when I first read it, I was hit by how absurd it was, but then very quickly I just became focused on the characters in the story and making it real, at least real enough to where it made sense to me and the characters’ motivations made sense to me. And Charlie, as a writer, as big as his ideas are, he’s also very focused on making things real, in terms of the moments between the characters and why characters are doing what they’re doing. That’s the most exciting thing, feeling like it’s coming from something you understand, as opposed to just being arbitrary or random.” The script kept evolving, sometimes dramatically, and the ending was always a problem. In the early version Craig the puppeteer found himself competing against the reigning puppeteer king, with the puppet show featuring a sixty-foot puppet of the devil. The ending plagued them all the way through the shoot, and it was finally shot a second time but by the end of 1997 Kaufman and Jonze had a draft they liked well enough to go on to the next step.
It was time to approach John Malkovich. Without him, the movie could not move forward. Everyone involved began to panic: What if Malkovich said no? Neither Jonze nor Kaufman could think of anyone else who would be right in the title role if the actor turned them down: Being John Lithgow. Being Harvey Fierstein. Being Anthony Hopkins. “It was a scary thing when you put all of your hopes into one person. It’s like you’re really giving the control over to somebody else,” said Jonze. “We had a list of fifty people—all the iconic actors, everybody, but there was no even close second.” Malkovich, they agreed, had something particular, not just a sense of uncontrolled menace, which the actor used in a lot of roles, but an air of secrecy. The actor lived in an obscure village in the French countryside, far from Hollywood and the insanity of celebrity culture. There seemed something unknowable about him. “There’s a lot you can project onto him. Not necessarily him as a person, but his persona—you don’t really know who he is,” said Jonze. “There’s something so enigmatic about him.”
Finally they sent him the script through his agent. And then they waited.
Endlessly, it seemed, they waited for Malkovich. Two months went by. Jonze finally pulled some strings. His girlfriend (and soon-to-be wife) Sofia Coppola was the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola. They’d met on the set of a Sonic Youth music video in 1992 and seemed a perfect misfit couple despite her Hollywood pedigree. They were both shy and kind of awkward—Coppola is skinny and plain, Olive Oyl to Jonze’s Popeye, minus the muscles—but both had an almost unconscious ability to be trendsetters, to live inside their artistic sensibilities. (Jonze, ever unpredictable, wooed Coppola in the oddest of ways; he once picked her up at the L.A. airport with cotton balls stuck in his jowls, wearing a fatty suit and with Vaseline smeare
d all over his face.) Coppola got her father to call Malkovich and ask him to meet with Jonze. “Francis said, ‘In 10 years we’ll all be working for him,’” Malkovich recalled. “So I said, of course I would.”
In late 1997, on a gray day in Paris, a slight, mousy-haired American in rumpled trousers and sneakers walked into the Hotel Raphael, the elegant, rococo-style hotel situated just a few steps from the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, near the Champs-Élysées. Spike Jonze was there to meet the mythical John Malkovich, and he was about twenty minutes early. He decided not to call up to Malkovich’s room just yet and strolled into the hotel’s formal tea salon, the Blue Room, with its ornate gold-and-turquoise flourishes. Nervous, he found a table and pulled out his notes to go through them one last time: What do I say? How do I sell myself? An introvert, Jonze hated these meetings. Suddenly he heard a familiar voice. Over his shoulder at the next table, he saw John Malkovich, wearing his customary ascot. Beside him was his producing partner Russ Smith and a couple of other people. They didn’t notice Jonze—not surprising, since none of them knew what the director looked like. (Jonze is not the sort of person who attracts attention anyway.) Jonze sat there for several long minutes, wondering what to say. The longer he waited the more nervous he became. Should he say something? What if they think he’s eavesdropping? Maybe he should quietly slink from the room? It felt like a scene worthy of a Charlie Kaufman script, perhaps a sequel to the script at hand. Finally, after several more minutes, Jonze worked up his nerve to make eye contact. He introduced himself. Malkovich, smiling, was friendly.
And curious. Why me? He wanted to know. Jonze tried to explain why Malkovich was the right person for this role, both as an actor and a cultural icon.
Malkovich was still curious. What’s the movie going to be? What tone will you take? he asked.
Jonze explained that it would be a serious take on the script, as rooted in the real world as possible.
Malkovich then said something encouraging. “I love the writing. If I were being sent this script to play any of the supporting roles, or to play Craig, or any other thing, I would say yes without even thinking about it.”
But in truth the actor was in a bit of a quandary. Although he found the whole idea original and intriguing, there was plenty of risk involved. If he did the film and it became a huge success, it could become an indelible parody of him. It could even overshadow his ability to convincingly play other characters. If it was a flop, well, it would definitely be the worst possible embarrassment for an actor: a lousy movie about him, starring him, with his name in the title.
Still, he’d seen and liked Spike Jonze’s videos, especially the one with Bjork. He needed to think about it.
A few weeks later Malkovich met Jonze with Charlie Kaufman in New York, before deciding to take the plunge. By now, he’d become a full convert. He told them to turn it up, make the satire sharper. He figured why hold back? Who better to make fun of yourself—your impotence, your vanity, your ridiculousness—and say it’s okay? he thought. He later told the New York Times, “I am ridiculous. I am a celebrity. It’s sort of like a human sacrifice. To offer yourself up as a subject of ridicule and scorn to make a point about the society we live in, which has this celebrity obsession.”
That public remark was a way of explaining Malkovich’s deep misgivings about doing the film. He later said privately, “I kind of felt like it was a lose-lose situation…. So naturally I said yes.”
DISCUSSIONS OVER MONEY BEGAN BETWEEN STEVE GOLIN and Malkovich’s agent, Tracey Jacobs. Golin knew Malkovich since he had just produced the Jane Campion movie Portrait of a Lady, based on the Henry James novel, in which the actor played the evil and remote (naturally) Gilbert Osmond to Nicole Kidman’s Isabel Archer. While Jonze and Kaufman continued to polish the script, Golin had been working on a budget, and had come up with a price tag of $12 million. He called Jacobs; she said her client was going to want a million dollars to do the movie. Golin said that didn’t sound unreasonable, and “in Hollywood that means yes,” Golin acknowledged.
But over at PolyGram, Golin was not making a lot of headway on getting a green light for the movie. The monthly meetings continued, and Michael Kuhn kept finding one reason after another to pass on the project. “I was trying to figure out how to get out of it,” Kuhn later admitted. First he said, the budget was too high. Get it under $10 million, and then maybe we can make the movie. Landay and Golin squeezed and cut; within two months they submitted a new budget. Kuhn said fine, now get Malkovich. The actor had more or less given his approval. Now the problem was his fee; with the funding pared back to $9.1 million, Malkovich would have to accept a pay cut, a big one. When Golin told Tracey Jacobs that, she was furious; she’d already told Malkovich his fee would be a million dollars. The deal was off.
Golin and Jonze scrambled to save the situation. He and Jonze and Sofia Coppola were down in Calima, Mexico, on a fancy retreat for PolyGram, supposedly to meet and bond with other artistic talents at the studio and talk, over margaritas, about creative synergies. They ended up spending most of the time in Jonze’s hotel room, talking on the telephone with Malkovich, trying to convince him to stay with the film. A month later Malkovich finally signed on at a salary of $350,000, about a third of the initial offer. The other good thing that came out of the retreat was that Kuhn got to know Spike Jonze a little bit and liked him. It was becoming harder and harder for the executive to refuse the project.
Even so he had more conditions: Get another movie star before we green-light, he said. There again Jonze had a stroke of good fortune. He and Landay were in London making a commercial (with Jonze skidding around town on a skateboard) when they ran into John Cusack at a restaurant. Cusack, who they’d never met, went berserk. He’d read Being John Malkovich. He loved it, he had to be in the movie. Having read the script months before, Cusack warned his agent that if the movie got made and Cusack wasn’t up for a role, there would be consequences. “I said, if I found out I wasn’t up for this, you’re not going to be my agent anymore,” the actor remembered. “It was a famous script. As a piece of writing it’s the wildest, craziest thing ever.” Second movie star: check. Then Kuhn said we need to know who the female leads are. Catherine Keener, an indie veteran and Jonze’s first choice for the role of Maxine, the nasty vamp who thinks up the scheme to sell visits inside Malkovich, agreed to do the role. Finding a second lead, the role of Lotte, the dowdy innocent married to puppeteer Craig, was more difficult.
The clock was ticking. It was early 1998, a few weeks before filming was set to commence. Jonze had already interviewed scores of actresses, both known and unknown, and still hadn’t found the person he envisioned for the frumpy Lotte. Keener was good friends with Cameron Diaz and suggested her for the role. The sexy star of There’s Something About Mary hardly seemed the kind of actress Jonze envisioned for the character. “When I first met her I was really skeptical,” said Jonze. “She’s so comfortable in her body and so confident and so extroverted. That’s not how I saw the character. Cameron’s very comfortable with her physicality, her sexuality—that wasn’t right.” He agreed to meet her for lunch, and found she was funny, engaging. But still, “she was not Lotte.” The next day Diaz called to ask if she could read for the part. Jonze said fine—a couple dozen actresses already had—and the next day Diaz came in with Keener to Jonze’s office at Propaganda. They sat there reading through the script, with Keener playing all the different roles opposite Diaz. Jonze finally asked Diaz not to be Diaz. He kept asking her to subtract elements of her personality; not to pucker her lips, not to perch on her hips—things she leaned on to emphasize her sexuality.
“We started pushing the character,” said Jonze. And Diaz was willing. Jonze found that he could see a common thread between Lotte and Diaz. “What Cameron is that Lotte is is this very caring person that’s very open with herself emotionally. She’s not driven by her neuroses as much as she’s driven by wanting to make sure everyone’s happy.” Lotte’s physical plainnes
s wasn’t the point to him. Later when everyone remarked on how Diaz uglified herself for the role, Jonze was disappointed. “I loved how Lotte looked,” he said. “I thought there was something really endearing about her as a character.” When you’d see Jonze—small, sincere, endearing, and physically plain—you could see why he found Lotte so appealing. She was a reflection of him.
THE SECOND FEMALE ROLE WAS CAST BUT STILL POLYGRAM wouldn’t approve the movie. Kuhn was not convinced it would ever make a profit. It was crunch time. “This movie will never get made,” he kept telling Golin. And Golin wouldn’t go away. “I was so stubborn,” Golin recalled. Desperate, Jonze got his future father-in-law, Francis Coppola, on the job again. The director called up Kuhn to lobby on behalf of Jonze.
Finally Kuhn relented, reluctantly. “I couldn’t think of any more excuses, so I said okay,” he later said. On April 22, 1998, he sent Golin an official memo confirming his green light of the movie—“good, bad, or indifferent”—making it clear that the decision came under duress. He gave him the following four conditions:
1. It doesn’t cost one penny more than is on the control sheet.
2. It does not distract Golin from delivering one big movie for us for 1999.
3. Golin delivers at least one big movie for us in 1999.
4. Golin’s penis is on the line in a big way.
Essentially this meant that if the movie failed, Golin would be out of a job. “Fire him? Who cares about that. I was going to castrate him,” said Kuhn later. “I don’t think anybody felt confident,” remembered Tom Pollock, who was in the meetings about upcoming projects. What Kuhn had wanted from Golin was a big movie, more like a blockbuster, to bulk up his slate. But maybe, Kuhn decided, there was room for something offbeat. Pollock recalled, “When they were making the movie they were taking a chance on something weird, weird and unusual. Its unusualness is what’s appealing. It is different. If you’re PolyGram you’re looking for a big slate. If we’re doing a teen comedy, Ted Field doing an action movie, it might be nice to balance that with a more unusual movie.”
Rebels on the Backlot Page 22
