Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir (33 page)

The next day was to be lunch. At the table were Jeunet, Caro, and their producer, Claudie Ossard, who doubled as a translator because neither Jeunet nor Caro spoke a word of English. And let’s face it, the C-minus I got in high school French was not fer nuthin’. No small talk, no foreplay, just right to the gusto: first question, “What do you think of our movie?” as if I were auditioning them! I’m thinking there must be a shoe that’s about to drop any second, because no one ever offered me a movie of this sort out of the blue. But then there never was this sort of a movie. And clearly Europeans go about things differently from Hollywoodians. (Hollywoodinistas?) But indeed, these two guys came there to offer me this film on the condition that I liked the script and was willing to go do it—that’s the only condition. So I kept saying, “What the fuck is wrong with this picture?” This can’t be right. Maybe I
don’t
wanna work on this picture ’cuz these guys are too naïve to know how shit’s supposta work. And besides, to channel Groucho Marx, why would I wanna join any club that would have me as a member?!

So I started playing it cool and said, “Well, I have to show it to my people, and we have to talk about dates, because, you know . . . I’m very busy . . .” But fuck, if I wasn’t dying to do this movie!

So we end up negotiating a deal, and I was off to the races. As soon as I got back to Los Angeles, I hired a trainer, joined Gold’s Gym, to which I’m still a member, and proceeded to lose fifty-five pounds and get in as good a shape as I possibly could. I then went over to France for the next seven months and worked on one of the strangest, most intense productions I’ve ever participated in. It was almost like being on an acid trip, you know; the experience itself was bizarre from the onset. Every exchange between me and the two directors had to take place through a translator because I was the only one on the movie who didn’t speak French, and they were the only ones who didn’t speak English.

Jeunet had a country house in Normandy on the northern coast of France that he was very proud of and comfortable enough there to almost be a different guy from who he was on set. We used to go up there on weekends while we were in preproduction and have these long discussions about who this character I was playing was going to be, what his background was, and what made him so unique within this strange world of the film—again, every word of it through a translator. Eventually we decided to make the character a Russian sailor, somebody from Belarus, something like that, so he had a very Eastern European, kind of Baltic accent. My task was to learn the role in French and then speak it with a Russian accent. The only people who really understood I was speaking French with a Russian accent were French people because they’re the only ones who know the difference between what French is supposed to sound like and what it sounds like when it is being butchered.

Eventually we commenced what was to be a six-month principal photography shoot. The location for the set was an abandoned airplane hangar about thirty kilometers south of Paris. Because everything Jeunet and Caro had ever done involved stylized environments with false perspectives, thus making their various worlds appear a few degrees off from center and slightly surreal, even though they might be shooting an exterior, it was always shot inside so as to manipulate the visuals as their minds imagined them to be. So the set for the
movie was the section of a made-up, slightly apocalyptic city, including a harbor complete with ships that moved, neighborhoods, restaurants, butcher shops, patisserie, you name it, all within the confines of this massive space. It was the most magnificent piece of whimsy/harsh reality I’d ever seen. It was like Epcot meets 2036 World’s Fair. To light the film they went back to Darius Khondji, who had just gotten finished setting the world on its ear with
Delicatessen
and was on the cusp of being the most sought-after cinematographer on the planet. Darius’s plan was to have all of the actors’ faces painted almost white so that when he color-corrected the film in postproduction back to natural skin tones, it skewed everything else in the frame, thus giving it a dreamlike-bordering-on-nightmarish quality. Genius, right?

Once we got under way the making of the movie felt like nothing I had ever experienced before—indeed, nor have I seen anything like it since. The tone of the set felt like church: it was the quietest set I’d ever been on, as if we were all involved in some secret experiment and were anxious about how it would come off. The directors’ style of shooting was unique: we never shot scenes, we only shot shots. Each shot was a designed and calculated piece of a mosaic they would eventually turn into a seamless painting. But to give you an idea of how this translates, dailies for the first day of filming took twenty minutes to watch, as opposed to the three to five hours it usually takes on a more conventional shoot. Clearly this was no conventional shoot, and these were no conventional filmmakers.

All in all I felt I had been placed in a highly privileged, totally unique dreamscape in which the results were set up to be groundbreaking. Story-wise alone the piece was magnificent: this sick, twisted Dickensian world where just the mere act of survival obliterated love and where children are left completely on their own, to make it or not, and in the center of which is this pristine, gothic romance between the shrewdest, most hardened, gorgeous ten-year-old girl who is awakened to the feeling of love for the first time by this foreign-born country bumpkin who has just lost his little brother and is desperate to find
something, anything in this world to care for. Shit, I’m crying while I’m writing this.

I’m pretty sure you’re getting tired of hearing this by now, but I believed this project had
game-changer
written all over it. I know, I know, we’ve been down this road before. But
City of Lost Children
? Come on! EASY STREET. YA DIG?!

This time I
know
it is the real deal, and I’m licking my chops, getting ready to take the muthafuckin’ world by storm, baby! By the way, did I mention Jean-Paul Gaultier was doing the costumes? I mean, come on, people! Then, while we’re shooting I’m becoming very close friends with Claudie Ossard, who is producing the film. She’s produced
Delicatessen
, along with a multitude of classic French films, and she’s high-society in France and a real classy dame. Coincidentally, while we’re shooting, the Cannes Film Festival was going on. This is Claudie’s turf, baby. She is to Cannes what Dorothy Parker was to the round table.

She invited me to go down there with her on a private plane as her personal guest. “I’m showing you Cannes as you’ve never seen it before. Next year you’re going to be here, and you’re going to be the opening-night selection, and I want you to be prepared for what you’re about to experience.” Sounded pretty good to me. She showed me fucking Cannes as an outsider, as a wannabe, because nobody knew who the fuck I was. But by the time she got done with me, I knew that joint like the back of my hand. Because I saw Claudie Ossard’s Cannes—champagne wishes and caviar dreams, baby, ’cuz she was French royalty, baby! Oh, and by the way, she turned out to be right: the next year
La cité des enfants perdu
was the opening-night selection at the Cannes Film Festival, or, as Sam Spade would call it, “The stuff that dreams are made of.”

The reception at Cannes was tepid, very much like my own reaction to the film. I felt it was nothing like it had played out in my head when I was first absorbing it. And I wasn’t all that enthralled by my own performance in it either—it’s certainly one of those I’d like to
have another crack at. And even though I personally disagree, there are many people, especially in the movie business, who hold that film in high regard. I don’t argue. I learned in the aftermath of that film that what I think of me is none of my business. Anyway, Sony Classics distributed the film worldwide, and if the grosses are any indication at all, I’m not the only one who felt that way.
La cité
was the last picture Jean-Pierre and Marc worked on together. I went on to do one more with Jean-Pierre in what turned out to be his foray into big-time Hollywood studio filmmaking. In 1997 we did
Alien: Resurrection
together for 20th Century Fox. He and I remain close friends and are still threatening to find still another project to do together.

Anyway, as game-changers go, that wasn’t it. But I am certainly overcome with a feeling of warmth every time I see that on my “shit I have done” list. So there’s that—
Enfants perdus
!

(CHAPTER 19)

Como Day Peliculas . . .

So around the mid-nineties word started circulating around and about the environs of Hollywood of a retelling of
The Island of Dr. Moreau
. There were a number of reasons why I would have been compelled to participate in a revival of this tale, not the least of which is the fact that it’s a classic title by one of the most brilliant iconoclast authors in the history of writing, H. G. Wells. In this case he wrote something so prescient, so cutting edge, and so, so ahead of its time. It concerned itself with futuristic experiments in vivisection, and he dreamed all this up in 1898, a full one hundred years prior to even a glimpse of a science that would embody these virtues. Wells must’ve been a frigging time traveler, because he identifies the concept of gene splicing, as the precursor to cloning and all the things that we were experimenting with in the 1990s. Plus, the cinematic versions also had a long history of distinguished people who were involved in it.

Charles Laughton had done a version of it, as did Burt Lancaster, and now there was gonna be a version of it done again nearly one hundred years after Wells wrote the book. New Line Cinema, which was at the time one of the majors, was going to be producing this new version. They were putting out amazing stuff: They were responsible for some of the best, most profitable pictures being churned out at the time, culminating with the
Lord of the Rings
trilogy. Having just
come off a little sleeper hit called
Don Juan Demarco
, the nineties was New Line Cinema’s strongest decade, and we were right in the midst of that, with the film company flexing its already formidable muscles.

But the number-one reason why one would deign to drop everything and put on four hours worth of makeup again, which, at this point, I was sure I’d sworn off doing, was that this newest retelling had the incomparable Marlon Brando playing Dr. Moreau, or at least that was the rumor. As I mentioned earlier, the chance to even be around this man would have had to be the single-most profound privilege any actor could imagine. From the moment he burst onto the screen he was the most important actor in the history of the medium—indeed, in a class all by himself. His performance in
The Godfather
was the last of three times in his career in which he deigned to turn on this gear that no one else has ever come close to having, and those of us like me, who are real students of the game, can’t even begin to analyze how he did what he did, which is another reason for the fascination. Even though generations of us tried to imitate him, tried to find moments, pockets of that kind of clarity, that kind of human behavioral verisimilitude, there was only one Brando. And even he didn’t let himself let it all hang out very often, so no one knew when it would come flying out again.

So it was doubtful that I was gonna get the Vito Corleone version of Brando on
Island of Dr. Moreau
, but even if I just got a shadow of the man, I was good to go. What they didn’t know was that they didn’t even have to pay me. I would have showed up for free just to fuckin’ observe the guy, analyze him, breathe the same air as him.

The man whose idea it was to do a new adaptation of
Island of Dr. Moreau
was a filmmaker named Richard Stanley who, according to the last rumor I heard, had gone feral and was living in a tree somewhere in the middle of London. And it all started with
The Island of Dr. Moreau
. The loss of his beloved version of the movie drove him over the edge. But Richard Stanley had a take on why it was a great idea to do another adaptation of this story that was so compelling that he was able to attract even Marlon Brando himself to the idea of being involved with the film.

Brando, as well as Johnny Depp, had just come off
Don Juan De Marco
, so they were responsible for one of the biggest hits the studio had ever enjoyed. It also signaled to the community that maybe the old man was back. So at that point Marlon Brando was green-lighting movies again. If he said he wanted to do a movie,
boom
. Whatever kind of budget they needed, they got. So Brando came on board, Richard Stanley went to New Line and said, “I’ve got Marlon Brando.” They said, “Let’s do it.” And
boom
, the train starts moving and the search is on to put this bad boy together. The first one on board to play the lead opposite Marlon was Rob Morrow. Next came Val Kilmer and then Fairuza Balk, both of whom were at the peak of their powers. And then there was the rest of the cast set to play the creatures, all handpicked by Richard Stanley, whose particular expertise lay in the horror genre. It turned out he was a bit of a fan boy of mine, which I didn’t know before, and he wanted me to play one of the more featured of the creature parts. It’s kind of like he had that same fascination with me that Guillermo had, because he was really into these kinds of transformational performances I was known for. It was clear that I was gonna be in the movie, playing one of the experiments, one of these half-man, half-whatever creatures Dr. Moreau made that lived on this island where he could work on his experiments unfettered, without the watchful eye of society telling him that he was insane and should be in an institution or maybe even a prison cell, which is the premise of the story.

Mine wasn’t a gigantic role, but I did have one huge scene and then a couple of little tiny pops. So they hired me for three weeks and paid a decent sum of money for me, which surprised me, as I didn’t have a lot of leverage at the time. Once the deal was set, I was due to fly in about ten days, which was already two weeks after filming had begun. The shooting was in the far north part of Queensland, Australia, in a city called Cairns—C-A-I-R-N-S. They pronounce it
Cannes
, but it was a far cry from the French Riviera. It’s Cairns, right on the Great Barrier Reef, in the middle of an absolutely pristine rainforest. It was a pretty magnificent location. Perfect for
The Island of Dr. Moreau
.