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Training

Changing Lanes

NIGEL FLOYD
Let’s talk a little bit about the script: it had been written and developed by a guy called Chap Taylor who I gather was sort of an intern who kept throwing all these ideas at his boss and then one of them stuck and he went away and wrote the script. Michael Tolkin, who wrote The Player, added to it subsequently. At what stage did you come in to that process?
 
ROGER MICHELL
I came in after Michael had had at least one go at the script. Chap Taylor was actually a production runner on a lot of movies in New York. He was like the lowest of the low and he did the classic thing, one day at lunch time, everyone else went off to have a huge slap up lunch and his job was - as somebody’s job always is - to sit by the camera, just in case anybody wanted to steal it. So he sat there for an hour and a producer, the man who did this film, came up to him and said, ‘How are you?’ and he said ‘I’m very well and I’ve got an idea for a movie’ and the producer said ‘Great, write it down and send it to me’. He did send it and he did get permission to write a script, I eventually read Chap’s script which is very considerable but it’s very different from the script of the film I ended up making because it was much more of a kind of action movie, it was much simpler in its moral construction than the one we ended up making. When I got the script my mission was actually to try and remove as much action as possible to make it as much about people battering away at each other emotionally, because that’s the sort of action that interests me…more than car chases.
 
AUDIENCE MEMBER
At what point do you get the script and how much work do you usually do on it?
 

RM
I think you have to urinate on it all from the outset, in a way. You have to make it yours, and all directors do this in different ways; by speaking very closely and at length with the writers in draft after draft after draft after draft, and they are only blueprints. Scripts are blueprints to the film because as you find the locations, you have to change the script, or as you find an actor or as you start rehearsing, the blueprint for your film is changing and you have to react to everything that is making the story feel different or feel better. Then the final rewrite is in the cutting room where your film starts to really show itself to you and become rather wonderfully alive and tell you what it is. Every film I’ve made, I’ve gone into it thinking, firstly, every scene is crucial to the film: ‘I couldn’t possibly imagine not shooting any of this material’. Secondly, each scene has to be presented in this order, it’s totally sequential; there is no question of moving things around, and this is true of every film I’ve ever made. Yet, in the cutting room I’ve found that the reverse has been true; things that I’ve fought tooth and nail to shoot; scenes that I’ve shot for two or three days are irrelevant. Not only are they irrelevant - they are often bad, because they’re slow and they’re boring. They tell audiences things that they will pick up along the way. I’ve also found that scenes - sometimes bizarrely - are in the wrong order, as if the script has been badly put together. You know, because it becomes obvious to you that that scene can’t be there: it’s got to be back there, or this other scene has to be back in its place. It can’t possibly be where it was in the script…but that can only happen in the cutting room where a strange and wonderful alchemy takes place.
 
AUDIENCE MEMBER
How did you go about upping sticks to America for this production?
 
RM
I was pretty nervous about going to America to make a film to be honest. I read the script at the time and then put it down again. Then when I went back to it later, I felt that I could do it well and got my wife to read it and got my friends to read it. Then I wrote just a page to Scott Rudin – who had sent me the script - saying what I would do if I made the film, how I would approach it: mostly hand-held or the impression of hand-held camera, very saturated colours, very rough in its style. There were various action sequences in it that I wanted to pull out. I just wanted a document that enshrined my approach, so there wouldn’t be some ghastly moments on the first day of shooting where somebody said, ‘Why are you doing it in this way?’. So once that was accepted, that kind of manifesto, then Michael Tolkin came here and we started working on it. We cast it very quickly, we cast it in about a month, so it all happened quite fast after that.
 
AUDIENCE MEMBER
What you were saying - before you came in, wasn’t it more like Falling Down with two guys?
 
RM
It was more like Falling Downbut it wasn’t as simple as Falling Down because Michael Tolkin had already got his claws into it, but I guess it was a bit more like Falling Down. It’s certainly been compared to that film.
 
AUDIENCE MEMBER
What sort of movie do you think Scott Rudin intended you to make when he sent the script?
 
RM
I think he expected it to be more a Lord of the Flies sort of thing; when you strip back the wallpaper, people turn into savages. I think he’s pretty happy with how it’s turned out.
 
AUDIENCE MEMBER
In the one page manifesto you described, why did you think that this was the appropriate way to tell the story?
 
RM
I don’t know. I’m not sure. I don’t quite know how to rationalise it. I feel that with any kind of high concept idea, which this film is - i.e. it’s a ridiculous idea, it’s full of too many coincidences and implausibilities - it has to be based in a sense of reality. It has to feel like this could really happen. What interested me about the script was making the two very different worlds of the two protagonists not only as separate as possible, but also as detailed and as plausible as possible. In the end I wanted it to have this phoney feeling of being a documentary or to trick the beholder into thinking that they were eavesdropping on the action as opposed to the action being presented to the camera.
 
AUDIENCE MEMBER
Was that an intended decision rather than an instinctive decision?
 
RM
No, it was a totally instinctive decision, which I subsequently intellectualised for your behalf.
 
(HUGE LAUGHTER)
 
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