...director of such films as The Matador, starring Pierce Brosnan and the upcoming The Hunting Party, starring Richard Gere and Terrence Howard. This is the unedited version so it may take you a while to read. I take credit for all errors, lol.
Make sure you come back Friday for the review of The Hunting Party, an entertaining yet informative look at three journalists who go after a Bosnian war criminal.
This was a round table sort of thing with me, another journalist named Jason Buchanan, staff writer for All Movie Guide (www.allmovieguide.com) and Richard Shephard to promot The Hunting Party, a film starring Richard Gere and Terence Howard. There really wasn't a “start” to the interview, we just started chatting and the first thing that came up was that me and Jason had crammed as many of Mr. Shepards movies as we could over the weekend. That led into a discussion about director's commentaries, so I shall start with Mr. Shepards take on commentaries.
RS: Yea, you look into my director commentary babble. I love that when on a DVD directors talk, but a lot of the time it's not that interesting because they are sort of repeating what you have already seen. They're like, this is the scene where they walk out of the house and down the street. William Friedkin is one of my favorite directors and his commentaries are awful because they are exactly that. You want stories and behind the scenes, you know? Coppalas commentaries are really great. Sometimes the story behind it is more interesting than the movie. At the end of the day I made this thriller, Mexico City in Mexico City and I had such a great time just making the movie and I'm like, this movie kind of paints Mexico as this horrifying place but i actually had a really good time, I actually want to make another movie set in Mexico City that actually shows the positive side which is why I set The Matador there.
Jason: I was wondering about that when I watched The Matador, it seemed like you really wanted to go back.
RS: I didn't choose to write this (The Hunting Party) to go to Bosnia though.
J: That was the next question, did you have a similar experience there?
RS, I did. Listen, Mexico is a particular culture. They are incredibly warm people. The sun, the tequila and everything, it's just a really nice place to make a movie. Bosnia, the people are very nice, but it's a war torn country and it's a different vibe so we had a really interesting time making the movie but it wasn't the same. It wasn't Margarita time, you know? And since we were shooting in places where the war had really happened and a lot of our crew had lived through the war. The Bosnians have a pretty dark sense of humor and a good sense of humor, but it's a different sort of experience.
Me: Did you have any trouble with any crew that lived through that having flashbacks or anything?
RS: A few people had to leave the set. There's a scene that actually got cut out where Richard Gere is in the bathtub and he has a flashback of them (Gere and Howard) running with a camera that was part of a sequence in Sniper Alley which was an area where people were constantly shot at from up in the hills. It was shot at Sniper's Alley in Sarajevo and several crew members had to leave because it was too much. The set was exactly what it was like, the burnt out cars, people getting shot. That was really grounding for us to know that people were having that reaction. It made me feel terrible for them but at the same time we must have been doing something right. One of the reasons I wanted to shoot it there was that I figured the crew would keep us honest. They see the comedy in the United Nations ridiculous effort to try and catch these war criminals and as soon as they realized that we weren't making fun of what happened in the war they were fine with what we were doing and I think they were happy that we chose to shoot it there. We could have shot the movie in Bulgaria and saved ourselves three million dollars and had another ten days to make the movie, but I am convinced it wouldn't have been as good.
J: I noticed in Mexico City, you used a lot of local talent, did you do the same for The Hunting Party?
RS: Yes, it's great. The guy who played The Fox in The Hunting Party is a Sit-Com actor in Croatia. That would be like taking Jason Alexander, George from Seinfeld, and making him a bad guy. No one knows this guy here (The Fox), so in a way, you have this wide range of talent and they are completely fresh faces here to America and I think it is so great when you see an actor you don't know. I also think it's fun to see actors you know doing something different than what we are used to seeing. I think that's part of what is great about casting Gere and Howard in those roles, it's not everyday you see them play roles like that, but to see an unknown guy doing something, yea, he's a great actor, he just happens to live in Croatia and not in LA and that's the reason you don't know him. I think that also the local faces, the extras are so great, they don't look like actors. You could shoot the woods of Bosnia in Vancouver, you really could, and half the time we were there we were like, why aren't we in Vancouver, but at the same time, you'd never get those extras, you'd never get that real feeling of being there.
JB: You used the term “mood-tage” on one of your commentaries.
RS: Without a doubt. It's a real shorthand, like when Gere, Howard, and Eisenberg walk into that bar with the animal heads on the wall and the people there all turn and look? Those people were real townspeople in that little town that we shot in. Just their faces said so much more than any dialogue, you just knew that that was how they lived. People who work outside have that sort of face and you can't fake it and I'm always wondering, how can you tell shorthand a bigger story? Like when they walk away from that “Enjoy Sarajevo” thing and you think they are sitting in front of a Coca-Cola sign. We recreated it but it was a real piece of art in Sarajevo at the time. To me, that just says an enormous amount, there's this mortar wound in this thing and it says enjoy Sarajevo and it's just wow, what the hell does that mean?
ME: That leads to another question. You said last night (at the Q&A after the screening) that you made this first and foremost to be entertainment. How hard was it to walk the line between showing too much war and not showing enough. How much did you feel you could put in there before it changed the tone of the film?
RS: Well, if it's the issue, if I was just making a movie about the hunt for some criminal set in Vegas, then it's just a caper or an invention movie, but this is A. a true story, and B. about a serious situation. There is nothing funny about war crimes, but, there is something humorous about what was going on then and what happened to these real journalists. When we were cutting the movie we tested it a lot. We screened it for a lot of audiences. You guys are some of the first to see the finished movie, but we test screened it a lot and if it was too silly, they don't take the drama seriously and if it's too dramatic they won't laugh for twenty minutes. So how do we balance that? I think we achieved it but it was tricky and not so easy and that's why I think ultimately you don't see a lot of movies that try to mix genres because they are hard in the sense that if the comedy works, it works, it's funny. Knocked Up is funny. If it's not funny, it doesn't work. If The Bourne Ultimatum isn't thrilling, it doesn't work. Here is a situation where it's not so simple, it has to be two things and two things are harder than one thing. I think that's why these actors wanted to do it in the first place, it seemed a little different.
ME: That's what interested me. I looked it up (The Hunting Party) on IMDB and I noticed all the genres it was listed under, action, adventure, drama, comedy and thriller. It's a very well rounded movie and you can't go wrong with that.
JB: You made the point last night that life has all of that. Life has laughs, life has horror, life has everything.
RS: Especially in this story, in this real thing. It was especially weird shooting that first battle scene where you meet Richard Gere and he's asking for a Quaalude. We filmed that where a real battle had taken place and that burnt out building was not art directed. We added the explosions, but the set was a real street.
JB: You said they did their own stunts, Gere and Howard?
RS: Yes, they did it all. Even that night where they are kidnapped and being shoved down the hill and Jesse slo-mo's, he really did that. The big thing was when they were hung up. That took three days to shoot, with tape on their mouths and let me tell you something, if those guys were assholes, we would never have gotten through it. Thankfully they were really nice. When you start tying people up, it really hurts, even though you aren't really tying them up, just being like this (demonstrates). We didn't have the money for real sets so it was really a barn in the middle of nowhere, really at night. It was cold and wet.
ME: It makes it more real.
JB: I can see where they would lose themselves in it a little more.
RS: It was fun, I like working that way.
ME: It's fun to tie up Richard Gere?
RS: (laughs)You know what, sometimes when the actors are pissing you off, I know we aren't shooting for another ten minutes but go ahead and tape their mouths and leave them up there anyways.
ME: You said we were some of the first people to see it, are you prepared to be answering those hard questions about leaving out thing like Russia's involvement in the war and other questions like that?
( This is in reference to a question brought up at the Q&A about why he left some facts out)
RS: At the end of the day, if you aren't in tune with someone politically, they are going to have trouble with whatever you are doing. There's a theory that this guy Radovan Karadicz, the real guy, is being hidden by Russians. Now that's a theory among many others. Could I have had a line in the movie about it? Probably, but to answer your question, I am prepared most of the time to talk about the political things. Listen, I was interviewed today by a conservative web person who was basically on me about the fact that I was siding with the Muslims. It's not fiction that genocide happened here, it's not like I'm making something up that makes the Muslims seem sympathetic. I say in the movie that atrocities happened on all sides and in real life there are war criminals from every side of the war but the fact is the Muslims got their ass kicked in that war and it's horrible. They got slaughtered and raped and I would be making a fake movie if I didn't show that and deal with that, so that's a political thing. If the movie gains any traction and people start to see it and like it, it will gain in some way but I'm up for it. I know the subject, it's not like they're asking me about some subject that I know too much about. I was killing time before an interview at Borders and I was looking at the Bosnian War books and I was like, “I'm done with this movie, what the fuck am I doing here?”, I've read every single one of these things.
JB: You said you read a lot of them. What would you recommend if people wanted to find out more about this war?
RS: There's this great book and I'm trying to remember the name of the author (Anthony Loyd) called My War Gone By, I Miss It So. Track it down at Amazon, I think you guys would love it. He was a junkie who basically shows up in Bosnia without any newspaper behind him who somehow gets a job as a stringer (freelance) reporter and it changes his life. Whenever he's not in Bosnia he's back on junk because he's an adrenaline junkie as well as a junkie junkie. He's such a great writer, he's so funny and so vivid. Reading that book, it was like, man, these guys have a great sense of humor and yet they look at things in a way that we can't. That's how they survive. He describes things in that book that just curdle you, just horrible stuff that if you and I were to see it, one day would just devastate us, but if you see it everyday, who do you deal with that? You have to find a sense of humor about it.
JB: Like in the scene where Richard Gere finds his girlfriend, that was just powerful.
ME: I like how you showed what happened and then why it happened.
RS: I did that on purpose. I think movies, a lot of the time, tell you everything you need to know in the first three minutes about a character. I love movies where you kind of peel back the onion, where it’s kind of like well, we think we know Richard Gere, but actually you don’t.
ME: You don’t realize it’s personal
RS: Right. And you think you get him, like Jesse Eisenburg just thinks he’s a jerk, and then he hears that and it’s like whoah, well maybe there’s more to this guy now, there’s more to him, and I think that that’s interesting. I did it in The Matador too in that you think you know what Pierce is but at the end of the day he’s totally different than you expect. And the baggage that Pierce brought as an actor to the thing that you know him as James Bond, you’ll be hooked with what you think you know about him, but by the time he’s pathetically crying and asking Greg to help him it’s like wow, that is not the guy I thought he was when he walked in the movie. And I think that’s fun. And the more you can keep an audience not knowing what’s going to happen both story and character wise then you actually can build tension in a way that doesn’t have to rely on special effects or anything like that. It causes a tension because you just don’t know. Like I hope that the scene where they’re hung up in the barn that it causes people to think someone might actually bite it.
ME: I have to ask you about Dylan Baker, because he’s in The Matador, Oxygen, and The Hunting Party. I’ve also seen him in the Spiderman movies, where he’s a lighter character. Are you friends with him?
RS: I’m friends with him in the sense that every two years we meet up for like a day and he does a cameo in a movie of mine. I do think he’s such a good actor and I wrote that part in The Hunting Party for him because I had him in Oxygen and he had this one big monologue and he was so great I’m like this guy’s amazing. That was not an easy monologue and he just like killed it in two takes. And so then in The Matador I’m like who could play this part, and then I thought let’s track Dylan Baker down, see if he’ll come down to Mexico. And then on this one it was easy because now we’ve worked together before. He’s a great character actor, and I think that’s one of the reasons Terrance Howard is so good, because he started out as a character actor, and when you start off as a character actor you have to hit a home run in every scene, cuz sometimes it’s only one scene. So if you want to make an impression on a filmgoer you have to really be good. It’s not about being OK. And Dylan Baker’s career is about coming in and being really good in whatever role, like in Spider man, which I think he’s really good in those movies, or Happiness it’s a completely different kind of role he played in that. And I think Terrance also comes from that school where he is a professional scene stealer, he always has been. And I think that’s why I wanted to mix him up with Gere because Gere had to stay on his toes or Howard was going to just steal the movie because he’s that type of actor.
JB: I like the character details. I got a lot of, sort of, what Pierce Brosnan had done in The Matador, Richard Gere was kind of doing here. Like you said, he kind of reinvented himself. I didn’t see a lot of this Richard Gere before.
RS: That’s right. I think that’s kind of like how it’s smart to cast a movie where you don’t have a lot of money. Because if you have a ton of money you can get almost any actor to do anything. If someone is going through a divorce and needs 15 million dollars then you can get them. But if you don’t have 15 million, if that’s the whole budget of your movie, you’ve got to figure out how am I going to get an actor to actually do this part. To me it’s like take an actor who is likely jonesing to do something different, that they’re not the sort of roles they’re always offered. Pierce is so likeable as an actor , you just like him, whatever the history is of him you kinda like him, and that’s where I thought he’d be great in The Matador. Why it worked in The Matador is because you like him so you can accept him being a scoundrel. And I think the same thing with Gere. You like him so much you can kind of accept him stealing money from a (can’t understand) doing things that with other characters you might be like what a dick. So with Gere you kind of give him a little bit cuz he smiles at you and you kinda gotta go with it. It’s a very subliminal thing. Terrance has done plenty of these sort of darker characters is Crash and Hustle and Flow. I mean he’s great in those movies but dark. I think he was like “Oh man, I get to smile, I get to play guitar, I get to fuck around.” That’s why he wanted to do it. So you kind of mix and match and you hope. The Matador first and then this is sort of more buddy movie that doesn’t feel like just a normal buddy movie. The idea that men can love each other in some deep heterosexual way, that they can hang out and talk with each other in a sort of sarcastic way, that’s kind of one of the elements I’ve been trying to deal with. When I hang out with my friends it’s a lot of insults, you make fun of each other, and I like that, and I think it’s not every day that you see that. When you see a buddy movie it tends to be like I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry or whatever, which is so very specifically like “He’s the blah blah and he’s the blah and together they’re…” I think that you can mix it up a little bit. When people starting looking at The Matador as a buddy movie I was like yeah, it is, and you should enjoy it as you do a good buddy movie like The Inlaws or something like that, but at the same time there’s hopefully more to it.
JB: I had a question about the scene in The Matador where you have Pierce Brosnan walking through the hotel lobby in the boots….you guys said you dreamt that up in a couple days. Was there anything like that in The Hunting Party?
RS: That’s funny you should ask that. Not really. Though I’ll tell you, there’s a bit of a long story that’s interesting about Terrance and Richard as actors. In the scene where they’re hung up there’s a guy with a tattoo on his head. In the scene itself The Fox never talks to Richard Gere, he just watches. But in the scene in the movie The Fox comes out from the shadows and has a confrontation with Gere. So we started rehearsing the scene the way it was originally written, with The Fox just watching, and the actor with the tattoo on his head was great when he was speaking in Serbian, but his English wasn’t so great, and he was kind of over acting. You couldn’t tell he was over acting when he was acting in Serbian, but when he was speaking English he wasn’t the greatest actor. Something about the scene’s not going right, we would rehearse it, da-da-da…Terrance Howard comes over to me and he’s like “We’re fucking up right now. That actor who’s playing The Fox is so god damned good, and he’s the one who has this thing with Richard Gere, and he’s the one who should be talking to Richard Gere, not this guy.” It’s OK in the beginning, but when it’s finally about confrontation with Gere talking it should be The Fox. And if you’re sitting there, you’ve already rehearsed for two hours, you’re already two hours behind, and you think about what it’s going to take to make that change, and all the ramifications of it…you gotta cut some lines out of that scene at the end where they confront him in the woods, cuz the scene begins and he’s talking in Bosnian because he doesn’t know that they’re American, because we had shot it first. Terrance detected something that was not in the script, that was a major change, and as a film maker if you don’t listen to that you’re just screwed. I could have just been like “This is the way we’re doing it.” I’d rather deal with the repercussions of going over schedule if it’s to make the scene so much better, which it did. That scene’s a great scene, it’s the best part of Richard Gere’s entire performance in my mind, when he’s sort of begging for his life, and all the lives, he's told people the whole movie he'd come back and pay him back in spades, the fact that he’s saying it to that guy, the guy who killed his girlfriend along with millions of other people, that made that scene really good. And it was basically Terrance, and if Terrance hadn’t voiced what he was thinking it wouldn’t have been as good, and I also think the whole movie wouldn’t have been as good. There should be a fluidity when you’re making a movie, that’s part of what the process is like. I mean on The Matador it was high comedy, I mean I like to think the movie’s realistic, and even that scene’s realistic, but it’s clearly a visual thing. That was like fuck it, this is gonna be funny, we had the freedom to try it, and believe me if it wasn’t funny it wouldn’t have ended up in the movie. But I’m a fan of, if someone brings up an idea that’s good you should at least think about it, I mean you’re stupid if you don’t. And also as the director you always get the credit even if it’s not your idea so you may as well listen to every idea.
ME: I noticed watching Oxygen that you have The Toxic Avenger in there. Was that on purpose in the background in the scene where he’s in the bathtub?
RS: Very interesting, nice work. Toxic Avenger, we got it from Troma, yes. I had an intern trip for a day at Troma. I met Mike Kaufman, he described to me what was expected of me as an intern, including cleaning his personal toilet, and I just quit after less than a day. I loved Troma movies growing up, and so I really wanted to work there. I probably would have learned something if I would have stayed, but I was just like, you know when on the first day the guy fucking has me cleaning his toilet I’m like, no fucking way. But they were nice enough to loan us the Toxic Avenger.
ME: Not even just The Toxic Avenger, you’ve got that one scene in there so you can hear it and you just know it.
RS: Like I put Missing In Action in there
ME: Yeah, that was obvious
RS: But that’s the music (I think that’s what he says), I don’t know, there’s certain movies that just…..Like, Missing In Action is the movie that this could have been if it was just shitty. Although Chuck Norris is very nice.
JB: I know you worked with the same crew for a lot of your earlier movies, the same DP and stuff, but you’ve got David Tattersall in The Matador and here (in The Hunting Party)…how’s that?
RS: It’s amazing. The woman who shot Mexico City and Oxygen is brilliant, and I want to work with her again as soon as possible, she’s a really good DP. On The Matador Pierce said to me “I don’t care who you hire as a DP as long as they’re as good as David Tattersall.” I ended up getting David, and David was so much more experienced than I was, on every level. He had just shot the Star Wars movies, and it was funny because was doing my first green screen ever on The Matador and it was the simplest thing, and David had to really explain it to me, while he meanwhile had just gone and shot a whole fucking movie in green screen. He’d worked with such experienced directors that he just expected me to be as good as I could be. I’ll say “Why don’t we do this” and just the look on his face is like “That’s not good enough” and you’re like “OK, then why don’t we do this.” He just a motivator, he’s worked with really good people and I think he enjoys doing my movies because they’re so different from these gigantic mega 300 million dollar movies, and my movies are so not that, they’re just such different things that I think he likes wearing both hats. He said to me “We should do The Hunting Party, we should do most of it hand held, let’s just go for it, let’s not be dealing with all the normal things that you do with a movie.” Most movies there’s a mark on the ground where the actor has to stand, so he walks across the room and has to land on this mark, and actors are great at actually looking down at their mark without looking. But they have to hit it because this light goes like this, and the other light like this….it’s just this fucking perfect thing. So David’s just like “Fuck it, we’re just not going to give them any marks, if they stand in the wrong place I’ll move.” That was great for them and fun for us because every day was just an adventure.
ME: Well then you can also open it up and not be stuck with “OK, well we’ve got to be set up to do this.”
RS: Exactly, and you can change things. Certain things were very planned, like the wide shot with the “Enjoy Sarajevo” was a very planned, like we have to get this wide shot at the end. So certain things were very planned, and then certain things were just like let’s give them the freedom and see what they do. To me one of the best parts about making a movie are the people you collaborate with. It just is awesome, because they just bring so much and they’re working full time at only one job to do the best that they can. A production designer will bring in hundreds of ideas that you never even thought of, and the costume designer, and the editor will be only focusing on that and really finding the little moments that work. That is pretty god damned cool. You’re writing the movie and then you’re directing it, but you have all these other people who are trying to get you to do the best work that you can. At the end of the day it’s always my decision and so I have to take credit for whatever works or doesn’t work in a movie, but that doesn’t mean that everyone else doesn’t contribute. It got through on The Matador when Pierce is there in his cheerleader outfit, that was something we came up with that morning. And I had such confidence in everyone on the crew I said to the first assistant director “Can you get a trampoline, can you get such-and-such” and he’s like “yes,” I went to the costume designer and I’m like “Can you make a cheerleader outfit for Pierce by two o’clock,” and she’s like “yes.” It was like BAM BAM BAM. So then all I had to do was sheepishly knock on the door of Pierce’s trailer and say “Hey, do you have any interest in dressing up like a cheerleader” and he just starts cracking up.
That's about all there was to it. I really need to get a better recorder for the next one.
Mitch E.
mitchemerson@hotmail.com
