Very Naughty Boys [EBK]

by Robert Sellers

  As cast and crew caught the hydrofoil back to Hong Kong, it emerged that Hill had been sacked and replaced by another actor — Paul Freeman. Griffiths says, ‘It was none of my business. The only reason my heart sank was that it was my door that was pounded at 3.00am with this howling Wookie, like Chewbacca, banging on my fucking door, out of his mind, saying, “They’ve sacked me. I’m fired.” And I’m sitting there thinking, Fucking brilliant, because if Bernard’s sacked, I can’t work any longer so they’ll have to sack me and I’ll get a cheque and I can go home, which I’ve never had before, which is heaven. You see, by then I’d already kind of lost it with the picture. You can imagine how bad a state Bernard Hill was in. Very few English actors have ever been sacked off a movie for acting reasons, which he was, patently, clearly, by the influence of Sean Penn.’

  Amazingly, Hill had been fired without even playing a scene opposite Sean Penn, or Madonna for that matter. Bernard Hill states, ‘Penn just saw the rushes. As one artist to another, you don’t do that kind of thing, unless there’s something seriously wrong with you. I haven’t met Sean Penn — and I’d really like to.’ Neither did Hill get to meet Denis O’Brien until much later, despite attempts to track him down, as he’d begun to suspect that studio politics might have had some part to play in his dismissal. ‘Eventually, though, I did get to have a long conversation with O’Brien and I said, “I’m not sure what the truth is. I suspect what it is, I’ve been told what it is, but I’d like to hear it officially from you.” And he wouldn’t come out with it because it was obviously too political, he couldn’t do it.’

  The whole tawdry experience left Hill disillusioned and angry: ‘It kind of set me back for a long time. My instinctive reaction was to pack the whole business in because I thought I just don’t want to come across this kind of crap again. I would have sued them in a breath. A couple of years afterwards I thought, Actually, that’s what I should have done. I should have nailed them to the wall. Given the reasons for the dismissal, which were just paltry. At the time I said, “If you let me get sacked, your film’s fucked, basically, because Penn and Madonna will just think they can do what they like — and they did.’

  Paul Freeman had, in fact, screen-tested for the part of the villain at the same time as Hill. The actor was at home when the call came through that he was urgently needed in Hong Kong. When Richard Griffiths was told that Freeman was flying in to replace Hill, he went cold, he says, ‘Because they’d sacked Bernard the night before and the day after his replacement was landing, which meant that the decision had had to have been taken the week before because Paul Freeman arrived with his wardrobe and make-up stuff. He’d had all that work done during the previous week in London. So we were doing all those night shoots which were all doomed because the guy in the middle of it, Bernard Hill, was already sacked and didn’t know it. And that was Sean Penn’s doing. So Bernard got the cheque and went off gnashing his teeth. Lucky bastard. And the rest of us had to carry on.’

  Tensions were rising, too, among the largely British crew while they watched, sometimes disbelievingly, as Sean Penn began flexing his muscles on the set and calling the shots. Griffiths remembers, ‘Sean had this ace of trumps. He’d play the ace of trumps, win the trick and then put it back up his sleeve and then when the next drama was played, he’d pull out the ace of trumps. And the ace of trumps was this — in Madonna’s contract, and Penn was very sore about this because he saw himself as the star of the movie, there was a clause and it said Madonna shall have the casting approval of her leading man. In other words, if you don’t do what I say, says Sean Penn, I quit and, if I quit, she won’t agree with any other guy playing my part because, hey, she’s my wife, and you don’t have a movie, so go and fuck yourselves. Do as I say or I’m out of here. Boy, did he know how to manipulate that situation with Madonna.’

  According to Bernard Hill, the crew codenamed the two stars Victor and Daisy. ‘It was interesting because they had two trailers and they used to put their initials on the door of each trailer and when you put the trailers side by side it said “VD”.’

  Not unnaturally, Penn’s brazen attitude brought him into direct conflict with Goddard and there was only ever going to be one winner. John Kohn’s perspective was that ‘Sean and Madonna were a little bit upset because they didn’t think the picture was going the right way, which it wasn’t, and they started giving the director a very hard time, they made his job very hard. And I think the director was a bit in awe of them. The two actors sensed that he could be pushed around. Penn made life difficult. The director was wounded and he kept sticking a knife in as much as he could and I tried to keep them apart, reminding Sean that he’s got to be professional in every respect. And sometimes I could and sometimes I couldn’t.’

  Penn knew this was Goddard’s début movie and exploited that heartlessly, thinking he could do a better job than the man who had actually been hired. Griffiths remarks, ‘And as you can see from The Indian Runner, Penn’s debut film as a director, he’s got no fucking taste and he’s an arsehole. At one point, John Kohn said, “I talked to Sean’s dad one time and you know he said to me, ‘The trouble with Sean is, he has never known adversity.’” And he just had this towering, mountainous confidence which was underpinned by not the greatest talent I’ve ever seen on the cinematic screen.’

  Back in London, George Harrison was monitoring the situation with growing disdain and was finally left with no option but to fly out to the set to pacify matters. It was something of an embarrassment for HandMade, having recently been honoured by the Evening Standard newspaper with a special Outstanding Contribution to British Films Award, to be seen legging it halfway across the world to save one of its own films from going down the pan. ‘First they’d brought Alan Ladd Jnr out from Hollywood,’ Griffiths recalls, ‘and Sean Penn told him to fuck off. And the only thing that kept it going was when George came up because the pair of them had the most infinite respect for George because he was a Beatle. And that was the only reason that the movie kept going ahead, because of their respect for George.’

  Harrison felt incredibly awkward about the position he’d been forced into. It went against his nature and was something he could well have lived without. Ray Cooper says, ‘George at that point had stopped smoking. And he started again, unfortunately, after that. Denis was using George not only as co-owner of HandMade Films, but also as clout with Madonna and Sean Penn. It’s not the way you do it, I don’t think. George didn’t want to be a threat, he just wanted to see the film done. And it was a mess. It wasn’t a particularly interesting film, unfortunately, but George was committed, because of the money, to getting this film finished.’ Cooper is convinced that Shanghai Surprise was the turning point in HandMade’s fortunes. It was never to be the same again.

  As filming continued in Hong Kong, other unforeseen external problems threatened to undo the film. Local mobsters began seeking huge pay-offs in exchange for access to film in certain areas of the city. Kohn recalls, ‘We’d been shooting all night with Sean and Madonna on this pier in a lagoon. At 5.30 in the morning we packed up and started to leave but there was this car blocking the exit and it wouldn’t move. Now, I had a lot of electricians and crew guys and they said, “We’ll just throw the car off the road.” And our guide said, “Don’t do that. Don’t touch the car. Don’t do anything like that, you’ll get in trouble.” So we finally bargained, I don’t know how much money it was, but it cost us to get that car out of the road. Now, things like that started to happen, and what we found out was there isn’t just one organised triad, each area of Hong Kong has their own triad. So if I knew I was gonna shoot in a certain area I’d find out who ran the triad in that area and try to make a deal with him, but that didn’t guarantee that if you shot in another part of Hong Kong you weren’t going to get some kind of harassment.’

  This kind of procedure was unorthodox to say the least and burdened the production with a headache they just didn’t need. At no time was anyone’s life threat
ened, it was more along the lines of “Your film may get exposed”, or at one point a generator was sabotaged forcing the set to close down. But this kind of thing carried on throughout the unit’s time in Hong Kong. Paul Freeman remembers, ‘One of the location manager’s jobs was to sort out this problem, but in a sense it was impossible. Quite heavy-duty men would arrive and demand more money when they’d already been paid off.’

  Some of the locals hired for the film also turned out to be less than helpful. One stunt, involving jumping into a river, badly backfired. ‘That was scary,’ Griffiths recalls. ‘One of the stuntmen nearly died. There were these bastard Chinese frogmen who were supposed to jump in if there was a problem and rescue our boys, but they wouldn’t go in so the stunt co-ordinator dived in and got this stuntman out. And when he got out he screamed, “Those bastard, fucking Chinese. I’m sacking the lot of them.” I said, “Why didn’t they go in?” He said, “They didn’t tell us but this stretch of river is infamous for water snakes.” And, of course, the water is the colour of mulligatawny soup; once you’re in it, you can’t see a fucking thing. And this stunt guy went down about 20 feet with weights on his body, he couldn’t get the weighted belt off and the current was dragging him down. The stunt co-ordinator was screaming at the divers to go in and get him and that was when they said no. They thought it would be OK just to collect the money and piss off. So he dived in, into the murky depths, he had no idea where he was, he just followed the safety line the stuntman had on, followed it down and grabbed him, helped him slide off the belt and they shot to the surface. The stuntman had taken a lung full of water. They got it out but, of course, it’s shit river water and he was never the same. I think he was hospitalised for months. It was desperate.’

  Just as desperate was the fact that a family of large black rats had made a home underneath Madonna’s trailer. Such adversities were sometimes too much to bear. ‘I kept saying, “I can’t wait ’til I can look back on all this,” Madonna said later. ‘It was a survival test.’ This coupled with her insecurities about any acting talent she might possess sparked rumours about whether the marriage would survive the experience. But, if anything, it brought them closer, each taking it in turns to be strong. According to Kohn, ‘As big a novice as Sean was to the music business, so Madonna was a big novice to the film business. This was Sean’s area of expertise and he taught her the ropes about movie-making. He was breaking her in, so to speak, in the various routines of filmmaking.’

  It was nice to see as a couple they were a mighty force and clearly very much in love. ‘Madonna worshipped the ground Sean Penn trod on,’ Griffiths adds. ‘There was much shagging in the marsh. I often wondered if that was part of her fitness programme.’

  When the picture moved to England in late February for interiors at Shepperton Studios, and also the disused sanatorium HandMade employed for Scrubbers, the problem with the press exploded into farce. It started the moment they touched down at Heathrow. Reporters who’d been waiting hours in the pouring rain swooped on the couple’s motorcade and in the crush a Sun photographer fell beneath the wheels of Madonna’s Mercedes limo, badly injuring his foot. Meanwhile, an untroubled Penn was keeping another aggressive photographer at bay in his own unique manner, by spitting at him.

  From day one until shooting finished, there was a tense stand-off between the Penns and members of the British press. Occasionally, it would flare up into violence. Reporters were shoved, beaten and at one point had fire hoses turned on them by the star’s minders when they encroached too near. The tabloids retaliated by dubbing the pair ‘the Poison Penns’. Griffiths admits, ‘I have to say the press were perfectly wicked in the usual paparazzic way of theirs. They treat you like shit and you react and boil over and there’s the story. Or you ignore them and then they come and treat you like shit until you react and there’s the story again. And they can keep doing that with someone who’s got virtually no fuse like Sean Penn.’

  The press knew this and exploited it, hounding the couple wherever they went. Freeman says, ‘We were shooting in midwinter with snow on the ground, but the press were there at six o’clock in the morning when we arrived to start work, and jeering at them trying to get some reaction. Very unpleasant, actually, the whole thing. I had a lot of sympathy for them because they were really hounded. The producer wasn’t very sensitive, I didn’t think, to their problems with the press. For instance, he would come in during shooting and show them what the front page of the Daily Mirror had said, which seemed bad timing to say the least. I had a sense that perhaps the producers thought that they were usefully employing publicity and, in fact, rather the reverse was true. I think they got so much adverse publicity by the time the film came out everyone was sick and tired of it.’

  At one location near London, some 80 press men with cameras crouched on a wall about 20 yards away from the action; it was as near as they could get. Griffiths observes, ‘Literally, the unit vehicles had been put into a circle and the press were like Indians on the war path. And they were crying out things like, “Hey, Madonna, I suppose a fuck would be out of the question?” Sean and Madonna were sitting having a coffee in my trailer and these calls were coming in and I said, “Now, please don’t react to them. These wicked things that they’re saying are designed entirely to get you mad, for you then to do something rash. And all it is, is they get a fucking photo or a story and they don’t care whether you live or die, so just ignore them.” But it was so tough.’

  One tabloid offered ridiculous money for anyone who could sneak a photograph from off the set. ‘So every now and then,’ Griffiths says, ‘a little selection of polaroids would appear nicked from the continuity book by some pieces of shit on the crew. I say “pieces of shit”, but it was a big temptation. But it was so evil.’

  When Penn and Madonna found out, the predictable fireworks ensued and they refused to go to work until the thief was identified. Denis O’Brien rushed to the location and pleaded with the pair for several hours before they finally relented to resume shooting.

  Harrison was by now losing patience with the expensive delays his film was incurring and all the negative press attention. Seizing the initiative, he announced a press conference at a West End hotel in the hope of smoothing things over. The trouble was, Madonna was an hour late and Penn didn’t show up at all. Inside, 75 journalists were crammed in from newspapers spanning the globe. All TV and radio reporters had been barred. Despite some hostile questions (and answers), Harrison’s gambit worked — the event made headlines around the world. People magazine even carried a picture of Harrison and Madonna on its cover. And for the remainder of the shoot, the Penns were more or less left in comparative peace. For a man who was known for his hermit-like stance to publicity and the press in general, this was a savvy piece of PR manipulation on Harrison’s part.

  Despite all this, it wasn’t the press who was the film’s greatest enemy. Penn continued to behave in a difficult way. From the very first day of shooting, he came on to the set with his own director’s viewfinder. He’d also ‘volunteer’ his own opinion of how scenes should be done, telling Goddard, who was making episodes of The Sweeney when Penn was still in shorts, where to position the camera. Penn also enjoyed great sway over Madonna. The two stars shared the same make-up artist but it was Penn who always insisted on getting his make-up done before hers, regardless of whose scenes were to be shot first, meaning that Madonna was invariably late on set. And whenever Goddard gave Madonna a note, she’d turn to her husband and ask, ‘What do you think?’ and more likely he’d rubbish it. Now, if Penn is telling the director what he has to do, then who on earth’s in a position to tell Penn what he’s doing wrong? It was a recipe for disaster. Freeman recalls, ‘I think Sean Penn wielded as much control on the set as he wanted to. I know he was talking about getting rid of Jim Goddard but was persuaded not to do it. But Goddard also didn’t behave very sensibly. He was sort of making rather stupid jokes while Madonna was around which I thought was bizarre. I think h
e didn’t know how to handle them at all, really.’

  Penn’s entire approach to Shanghai Surprise can be encapsulated in one incident. It was a scene where his character is confronted with a newspaper photograph that reveals one of the villains of the film. He was to look at the paper, then we see a close-up of the picture and then Penn’s reaction to it. Because no actor had yet been cast in the villain’s role, the art department didn’t have any photograph to use in the bit of newspaper. Griffiths reveals, ‘Sean took one look at this and said, “Where’s the picture?” and they said, “We haven’t got the picture yet because the guy hasn’t been cast.” Penn continued, “Well, if you haven’t got the picture, how can I do the scene?” We said, “We don’t see it. We see it’s a piece of newspaper, that’s all we see, and then we’re going to do a close-up of the picture from your point of view and then the audience will know who it is. So it doesn’t really matter what the picture is now because nobody can see it. I mean, sure, there’s a picture there but no one can see that it’s not the real one.” And Penn said, “If I can’t have the right props, how can I do the scene? I’m not doing the scene.” And he walked off the set and we lost an entire day’s shooting. So fuck Sean Penn.’

  Perhaps for the first time HandMade’s ‘policy’ of giving first-time directors a chance backfired. What was needed on so mammoth a production as Shanghai Surprise, that incorporated two equally sizeable egos, was a seasoned pro who wasn’t going to take any bullshit and who commanded everyone’s respect. Goddard, through no fault of his own, lacked both of those qualities and was put into an impossible position by HandMade. His career never fully recovered. Any thoughts he may have had of a career in feature films was more or less wiped out. To this day, even with close colleagues, he refuses to discuss the matter.