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I HEART HUCKABEES' DAVID O. RUSSELL TALKS UNCONVENTIONALLY ABOUT HIS UNCONVENTIONAL CAREER
By
Tom McCurrie
Unconventional writer-director David O. Russell gave an unconventional talk at the latest edition of the Writers on Writing series, sponsored by the Writers Guild Foundation. This talk was wide-ranging, jumping from Henry Ford to chiropractor's offices, from Zen to Claritin.
Yes, I said Claritin. Russell broke the "fourth wall" of his interview with critic F.X. Feeney to directly address the audience, begging for some Claritin to soothe his aching eye. When someone from the audience volunteered to help, someone else shouted "kiss-ass" to the Good Samaritan. Russell hilariously replied to the peanut gallery: "Yeah, don't give me the Claritin! Somebody might think you're a kiss-ass! Lead your life like that!" In person, Russell is like many of his movies, turning the most mundane of events into something both uproarious and thought-provoking.
As Russell explains, "The single advantage I have as a writer is that I did so many different things. I thought I'd be a fiction writer or a journalist, and I sort of was. I wrote about Jazz for Jazz Times and I wrote about Nicaragua for some lefty magazines. And then I tried to write fiction and it was very hard for me to write fiction -- it wasn't happening." So Russell turned to writing and directing movies. "I had always loved movies, but, again, never in like a cineaste way."
A 1981 graduate of Amherst College, Russell began his filmmaking career with two shorts, BINGO INFERNO (1987), shown at the Sundance Film Festival, and HAIRWAY TO THE STARS (1990). Nevertheless, by 1990 Russell was still a struggling filmmaker living in NYC. To pay the bills, he worked in an office during the day and as a bartender/waiter during the night.
Russell figured he needed to make another movie to kick-start his career: "I wrote a short film about a guy at a Chinese restaurant who has microphones concealed on every table and eavesdrops on them and writes insanely personal fortunes [, getting] involved in several of their lives. Kind of like an existential detective [later used in his current film, the existential comedy I HEART HUCKABEES]." He raised 40 grand, partly from the NEA [National Endowment for the Arts], and was "so happy." Russell: "But then I thought, I can't make another short film. You know, you just kill yourself to make a short film. You call in every favor, you borrow money from people that I still owed money to. I was like, it's time for a feature. I'm gonna be thirty years old...and I could be like Uncle Dave, the eccentric uncle who's in his seventies who tinkers around with Claymation...[and] still lives in that studio apartment on 23rd Street like William Burroughs or something."
Russell tried to expand the short script to feature-length, but after 18 months it wasn't coming together. Russell: "But the good news is at the same time I had this mistress project on the side, which is an interesting writer's trick...where you do a secondary project like you're cheating on the main project and it doesn't count. It's kind of like sex, just like a sex relationship. And it's really liberating and free because there's no baggage or relationship, you just have crazy sex. And you curse the world -- why is the world like this, why must it be this way. Something like LAST TANGO IN PARIS...it's got that fire to it." This "mistress" project was Russell's break-through picture, the provocative incest comedy SPANKING THE MONKEY (1994), "...which just popped right out." Russell: "There was no anguish, there was no, Must make this my first feature. It was just for me. I don't care, I don't care if this never sees the light of day." Russell used the 40 grand he already had, plus an additional 40 he begged, borrowed and begged some more to make his feature debut. Of course, the NEA wanted its 20 grand back since he was supposed to use it for the short. Luckily, he sold the movie at the Sundance Film Festival so he was able to pay Jane Alexander (NEA head at the time) right back.
Not wanting to be pigeonholed as a filmmaker, Russell next made the light comedy FLIRTING WITH DISASTER (1996). Russell: "And I cranked [the script] out real fast, because I was afraid of what happened to some filmmakers I know. We all graduated from that graduating class from Sundance that year -- there were filmmakers who didn't kind of seize that moment who have since told me that they regretted that. The iron's only hot for so long." So Russell wrote FLIRTING in the six months between Sundance (in January) and June of 1994.
Russell then took a stab at directing a big-budget studio flick with the $47 million THREE KINGS (1999), the first film to take a critical look at the Gulf War. Why so long between FLIRTING in early '96 and THREE KINGS in late '99? Russell: "It takes a while to figure out what you really want to say...it did for me. It doesn't for all filmmakers, some of them, right out of the womb they know what they want to say." Russell took another five years before releasing his next film, I HEART HUCKABEES.
Russell did a lot of research when he rewrote John Ridley's script for THREE KINGS, something he didn't do with his previous scripts. Russell: "It was a weird way to write...it was research-oriented and I could see this when Scorsese made GANGS OF NEW YORK. I think you gotta be careful about research. Research is a very seductive thing. All of a sudden you're just fascinated by all of it, it's endlessly fascinating and oh my god how am I going to fit all this in the movie. And, you know, none of it could be a movie, including how you're fascinated with it."
Whatever research Russell did worked, since THREE KINGS became a box-office hit. Russell: "After I made THREE KINGS, I knew I had a free pass in a way, because it was a big movie and it made money. And I decided to use it for a risk, to spend four years or so doing something that was extremely personal and important to me [I HEART HUCKABEES], and that's kind of mostly what I learned from THREE KINGS anyway, that's the kind of film I want to make mostly."
The creation of I HEART HUCKABEES was anything but research-oriented. After two false starts, HUCKABEES came together while Russell was, of all things, sleeping. "I had a dream...that resulted in this movie, which was that I was being followed by a woman detective, a sexy woman detective, but not for criminal reasons -- it was for metaphysical reasons. I read that two weeks later and I said that's pretty funny and that's a better structure than [anything] I had [before]."
When Russell writes, "fear is a good motivator." He wrote FLIRTING so quickly because, "At the time I was scared that I wasn't going to get another chance." Russell: "Ultimately, I settled on a method where I force myself to write a certain number of pages everyday -- after outlining...You're allowed to go sit in pizzerias and write and make the outline. Then, okay, now it's time to stop outlining, even though you're not sure it's right yet, and make myself write the pages, like four to eight pages a day, because otherwise, I'm gonna keep procrastinating, and rethinking it, and never think it's good enough."
On HUCKABEES, Russell wrote with a partner for the first time "...because I wanted to work with somebody." (Russell re-wrote John Ridley's script, but didn't work with the writer on THREE KINGS). This was a "comfortable" experience for Russell, maybe because the co-writer, Jeff Baena was already his assistant. Russell: "It was really fun for me. We got into a rhythm because I was kind of lonely from writing by myself so much...We would write at night a lot. It didn't start out that way but we would end up staying up really late at night." (I do this, too, because there are no phone calls to disturb you!) When they did write during daylight hours, Russell and Baena would use odd locales for inspiration, like a chiropractor's office, which was in a "...building that could be right out of DOUBLE INDEMNITY." Russell: "Anyway, we would just hang out in that office all day, and that was really fun, because it was a very peaceful office. We'd order lunch in and they'd let us stay there, they didn't mind. They were really cool about it. And people would come in...and it was interesting, they would all come in looking really f***ed up, they were like really not happy, and they'd go in and they'd get adjusted and they would come out and they would look completely different. They were so really relaxed and open."
Sometimes inspiration comes by moving from Point A to Point B. Russell: "Then once it gets going there's nothing better than being trapped on an airplane, too..." Russell: "I make my living more by doing rewrites for different scripts," so when Russell flew from LA to NY to promote HUCKABEES on CHARLIE ROSE, he used that travel time to do his rewrite work. Russell: "...I was trapped on the airplane, going both ways, so I could do this writing job I'm doing for Universal right now...and I like that, being trapped somewhere. Jury duty is good for that because you have a reason and you're told you have to stay in this room...But I'm not doing anything, you're just sitting around reading newspapers and not doing anything. This is when you're in the pool waiting to be chosen. If you're on a trial sometimes you have to pay attention. But that's the best because you think I'm actually being forced to sit in this room, which is filled with interesting-looking people." In fact, Russell wrote SPANKING THE MONKEY while on Jury Duty.
How does Russell know when a script is finished? "That's a tough thing. It's usually because you're forced to [hand it in]...[or] there's a feeling of, you know what, I'm so sick of working on this I don't think I can do anything else right now...Sometimes it just feels right, or sometimes it's because, you know what, it's time, let's go ahead...I show it to a lot of people, I talk to a lot of people about it, I get a lot of opinions...I can either listen to that or not listen to that. It kind of reaches a critical mass. Like when Raymond Carver said that he knew when a story was done, because he had erased and put back a comma three or four times. You get to the point with your notes, or with things you're hearing from people, and you realize OK, I've been over all the options now."
With I HEART HUCKABEES, Russell explains, "We made the decision when we wrote this to be like CHINATOWN, the audience is always a little behind the curve. Rather than making everything clear, right in the moment, and that's the kind of movie it is. It's the kind of movie where you always feel a little destabilized..." Russell prefers his characters to be a little destabilized, too: "They're all my favorite kinds of characters, people who will go beyond convention for a passion or an idea, whether it's political or philosophical."
Russell continues: "And you know what, as far as the title [I HEART HUCKABEES] goes, I think I like that some people hate the title. I don't hate the title, I like the title. Because it has a heart in it. But I like that it bugs people, and it makes people have to think, How do you say that? What is that? Is that I LOVE HUCKABEES? I'm getting annoyed!"
Whatever happens with HUCKABEES, Russell plans to stick with that type of low-budget, personal filmmaking from now on: "I have no intention of doing [studio work] unless it's an idea that I'm in love with."
Responses, comments and general two-cents worth can be E-mailed to gillis662000@yahoo.com.
(Note: For all those who missed my past reviews, they're archived on Hollywoodlitsales.com. Just click the link on the main page and it'll take you to the Inner Sanctum. Love them or Hate them at your leisure!)
A graduate of USC's School of Cinema-Television, Tom McCurrie has worked as a development executive and a story analyst. He is a screenwriter living in Los Angeles and is currently writing a novel about Spaghetti Westerns.
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