fter winning an Oscar in 2002 for his performance in Roman Polanski's The Pianist, Adrien Brody has become an actor in high demand. First came last summer's critically derided but commercially successful M. Night Shyamalan picture The Village, in which he played a mentally challenged resident of a rural Pennsylvanian town; next up for the adventuresome performer is The Jacket, a thriller that, like his previous film, combines elements of reality and fantasy to weave a hypnotic tale of lost pasts and redeemed futures.
In the film, Brody plays Jack Starks, a Gulf War veteran who returns from a tour of duty only to find himself convicted of a murder he does not remember committing. Sentenced to rehabilitation in a mental-health facility, Starks is treated to all sorts of cruel and unusual experiments, including being shackled and shoved into a morgue locker. Brody, along with director John Maybury (Love Is the Devil), recently sat down with Science Fiction Weekly to discuss the movie, which is released this week nationwide.
As the pair reveal, working on a genre picture like The Jacket often proves to be just as challenging as a typical drama, and requires some careful planning to create a world that's entirely unique but utterly believable.
Adrien Brody, what kind of preparation did you do to play this role?
Brody: I grew up living in New York, in an apartment there, and it was pretty small [laughs]. No, I did. I actually found a sensory deprivation chamber where we were shooting in Glasgow. It was really an interesting experience; I would do quadruple sessions that they were pretty amazed that I could endure, and then you become very aware of how your mind works and how cyclical thoughts are and how you can guide them. It's an interesting way to meditate, in a way, but also to separate yourself from your physical being.
How would you describe this film to someone who hasn't seen it?
Brody: Well, I think it's the kind of ... it's pretty amazing to go to a movie and not be spoon-fed, as you know, because you see films all the time. You don't want to be fed everything. I like the ambiguity of it, because, like in life, things are ambiguous, and people are ambiguous, and people's interpretations of people are ambiguous. That's part of what attracted me to this role, the fact that the character is not really defined by any of this. His ethnicity, his religious beliefs, where he's from, on any level that's not described. Nor does he have any allegiance to his own past, which defines us, how we are raised and how we are told who we are and what we are. And I think it's a remarkable place to be as an actor or at any point in life. It's liberating, but at the same time, who are you? That's a very exciting concept to explore in depth, because it's all a way for us to understand or assume we understand each other, by how we perceive one another. But now we're perceiving each other on a very physical level, or a level of beliefs, but that's not tapping into who we are within that or the soul, not even the mind or the beliefs, who we are within that.
Especially in Hollywood, that's hard to obtain, with everyone telling you, "What are you wearing?", "How do you look?" You look this way, you look that way. That's what was interesting being in that drawer in the deprivation chamber. You start feeling in that utter blackness of space. It's a chance to let go of your own physical being, so it was a pretty fascinating process, but I liked the ambiguity of it all, because it's cool. I have my own ideas of what it's about, but I also have to suspend that, too, when I'm doing it, not even in explaining it to you, but my process is that I have to kind of believe everything my character is believing while he's believing it, or while he's enduring it or experiencing it. My character is going mad whether I'm dead or I'm dreaming or whatever, I'm going mad in that moment, and I have to experience that as part of my reality.
What kind of shooting conditions did you face during the scenes in the morgue drawer?
Brody: Well, we shot in a mental institution, in the basement. They built this in the basement of a mental institution, and it had that vibe. It had the kind of energy of that. We were using real gurneys, and they were all kinds professional instruments around that were frightening. The crew was nice, but the state of mind I was in was not, I don't even try to communicate with anyone when I'm working. You know, I was restrained in the jacket, and I would often ask to be left alone on the gurney and wait while they set up the next shot, instead of them getting me out of it and sitting around and having a conversation. I think that's not conducive to staying in that state of mind. Plus, I think it's just important to stay centered, so therefore it doesn't matter where it is, what it is. I would be in the same place as we were shooting. If we were shooting it anywhere, I would be in my own space, so I am oblivious to what's going on, for the most part, while I'm filming.
I think Peter Deming is a phenomenal D.P. He's really phenomenal, and the production designer is great. On all levels, it was a very creative environment, including the process that they edited the film and did the effects. It was very organic, and very much like crafting something. They were crushing moth wings and blood on negatives and blood on my outfit, and coffee stains and hopefully not urine, but things that were very reminiscent of urine, and it had a real artist's feel to everything, which is wonderful. So it was cool. It was pretty inspirational.
How many hours would you spend in that jacket?
Brody: It depends. I mean, I'm sure we did lots of days with lots of overtime. Nothing will be more difficult than The Pianist, because The Pianist had a six-week slot with no other actors, and it was a tremendous amount of pressure, and it was all day with Roman and myself and a crew, and it's a whole movie in that time period, basically, you can shoot. And it's relentless, and Roman never even liked using the stand-in, so I was there from morning to night on set doing everything. I learned probably more than I could learn in any filmmaking class from that experience, but it's made everything else kind of easier in a way, you know, easier than it would be. But I'm not saying it was not difficult. It was difficult. There were long days of being restrained on a metal gurney in a cold, damp Scottish prison.
John Maybury, what are your favorite time-travel stories?
Maybury: My favorite time-travel movie, I suppose, is A Matter of Life and Death by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. But it's not really time travel. It's about someone dying—David Niven dies in a plane crash, and then someone from the 18th century from heaven comes back and rescues him. It's interesting, because I don't think this film is a time-travel movie. I think what this film is a kind of a symptom of the post-Charlie Kaufman cut and paste. Because people on computers can shuffle their screenplays around. So there are, when there are big narrative failings in a piece of storytelling, writers can just shuffle it all up and dump it on someone like me, the director, to try and sort it out. I think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Memento, there's been a whole raft of these kind of films. I think The Jacket, which was a screenplay that was done in Hollywood about four years ago, when it was going to be an Antoine Fuqua movie with Colin Farrell, was just another one of that particular trend that was current at that time. I just, of course—the story of my life—came on last of all. At the tail end of a really tired old formula.
Jennifer Jason Leigh has described the film as a dark, twisted version of It's a Wonderful Life.
Maybury: Ironically, in the hour and 20 minutes we cut from the film, there is a whole subtext that actually has a scene from It's a Wonderful Life on TV. It is very, very similar. Massy Tadjedin, who rewrote the screenplay from the original Marc Rocco piece, she laced it with It's a Wonderful Life kind of references. Is It's a Wonderful Life a time-travel movie? I don't think so.
It could be described as an alternate reality.
Maybury: I described it from the get-go as a subversive psychological thriller, which seems to be a kind of meaningless phrase. But I kind of know what I mean by that. It plays with conventions in that the film actually, I think, changes genre with each reel, as the movie progresses. It starts out as one thing, morphs into something else. In a way it's kind of the flux, the ambiguity of the film that I find interesting. It's the challenge I hope I'm offering to audiences. I want audiences to do the work and make the decisions about what this film is. As much as I love American cinema, this opportunity for me—this is my first—I've been making films for 25 years. Arty, pretentious nonsense in Europe that no one has ever seen. But this is my first chance to make a Hollywood film. I was very excited about being allowed inside this system, and being given access to movie stars and stuff, but I could still play with some of the conventions of the sort of cinema that I like, and also play with the audiences. To ask audiences to come along and do a bit of work, to invest some of their intellect, their own emotional responses and try and construct some of the story for themselves. It kind of denies the point of making films if I tell you, "This is how it begins. This is what it's about. And this is what it's meant to do," because then why bother to go see it?
Were there any specific thematic or aesthetic references you used to create the cerebral world and the inner mind of the characters?
Maybury: There's a very particular agenda. All the very expensive CGI sequences I actually had shot on film, and I gave them to an art student and got her to just copy Stan Brakhage, actually. We painted blood and bleach and stuff onto the electronic sequences to make them more trippy, more organic, more psychedelic, simply because Stan Brakhage is my favorite American film artist. He's kind of like the Willem de Kooning of American cinema, really. If I had money I'd be buying prints, because in about 10 years' time at Sotheby's you'll become a millionaire by owning a print by Stan Brakhage. Even the end credits are bad pastiche of Mothlight, which is one of his films. This is me being really pretentious, which probably isn't really useful for this particular conversation, because I'm meant to be selling this movie so that there's bums on seats and people with big buckets of popcorn and Coca-Cola.
How would you market this movie? You don't seem happy about the way Warner Independent Pictures is selling the picture to prospective audiences.
Maybury: I don't know. That's not my job, unfortunately, and I have to defer to the people here in particular, because it's their dollar that they've spent on this film. But I don't know. What do you do? It really is a difficult question, because you can't say, "Oh, it's a really interesting film," because I don't think that's going to come over as a very strong tagline.
Are you interested in putting together a DVD with some of the extra footage?
Maybury: All the DVD extras ... I'm sure that's probably how I'll actually make some money at the end of the day.
Will you do a director's cut?
Maybury: No, this is my cut. I said to them, "If you can't tell a story in 90 minutes, don't tell it at all." And it was always my intention to try and cut it to the bone. I knew the story was there. The bond company makes you shoot the screenplay. You have to do that, and it was a long screenplay. I cut about 20 pages myself before we started shooting, and I still knew it was overly long. No, but also it's interesting, because there is another film. There's a whole relationship between Mackenzie Phillips' character—the two guards. There's actually a scene where they make out in the nurse's waiting room, where It's a Wonderful Life is playing on the TV. And it dissolves from that to Adrien in the drawer, and you just hear Zuzu saying, "Every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings." There are kind of romantic/poetic kind of bits. In the end they didn't have any value or meaning to the story I was trying to tell. And I'm really interested in how much you can cut it to the finest kind of bone and still have a story. That's where it brings me back to that thing about audiences have enormous intelligence. I'm a member of the audience. I remember. I know what it's like. Audiences will bring value to films that invest meaning to situations and subjects. I don't buy into this thing of five-hour, four-hour, three-hour [versions], ... but within this kind of American/Hollywood me trying to be all proper, I think there is a kind of framework you can work within that is very vital to this day. Very full of energy—and I want to be a part of that. I hope The Jacket is. Even though it's being sold as The Ring.
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Ian R. MacLeod
