Folks, Harry here with another of Quint's FANTASTIC interviews that he's doing for us here at AICN... The following is over 8000 words all about who and what Christopher McQuarrie is... what he's up to.... where he's headed.... nuances of WAY OF THE GUN (a movie you have to see!) and so on. So before I ramble too much... let me just hand you over to the hands of a man that hasn't been counting money all his life.... QUINT...
Ahoy, there all you little sea squirts. 'Tis I, Quint, the forever crusty seaman here once more, this time with another interview for ya' to gobble up. Now, I'm gonna try to make this a bi-monthly thing, Straight from the Shark's Mouth or some shit like that. I've got a few more interviews lined up, all pretty cool, some definite, some not so definite... we'll see how they play out.
So, I am now officially putting the call out. Are you an accomplished filmmaker? Star? Screenwriter? Special effects guy? Cinematographer? Wanna have a fun chat with this crusty ol' seaman and have your words read by a rather large percentage of the geek community? Then just drop me a line (literally) via email, quint@aintitcoolmail.com, or you can contact me through Harry.
Now, the only catch is you have to be known, either from past work or by something big upcoming. I don't mean to be a prig, but I do have to consider what the readers of this site will want to spend their time on. I have a wish list of possible interviewee's, but I'll spare you. Suffice it to say, it ranges from Dick Miller to Tim Curry to Steven Spielberg, so just about anybody is fair game.
That's enough pimping from me, on with the interview of right now! I did this interview with Mr. Christopher McQuarrie, Academy Award winning screenwriter of The Usual Suspects and the writer/director of the upcoming The Way of the Gun. I met him after I saw the movie at an Austin Film Society sponsored local premiere. I just sorta bumped into him at the after party and we struck up a conversation. He relented to an interview near the end of my 5th retelling of my USS Indianapolis story. Hahaha. Works every time!
>Unfortunately, the only time we could fit it in was very, very, very, VERY early the next morning. Needless to say, we were the first people in the Cafe at the Four Seasons and were both working off of less than 3 and a half hours sleep. So, you might wanna take that under consideration... Also, an important note! There's a question in the interview that ends up being a huge spoiler if you haven't see Way of the Gun. I have marked the question with big spoiler warnings. All the rest of the interview is pretty safe. Keep an eye out for his great James Caan stories and what Chris let loose about the upcoming Green Hornet film.
So, without any further adieu, here's the wacked out conversation that happened between two sleep-deprived individuals:
SO, I READ SOMEWHERE THAT JAWS WAS THE IMPETUS OF YOUR SCREENWRITING CAREER.
I don't know if that was the impetus of my screenwriting career, but it was definitely the impetus of my understanding of screenwriting. I had asked Bryan (Singer), I guess this was about 1991, I was still in New Jersey. Bryan and I were talking about movies, you know Bryan was just, in his classic way, going on about films and what films suck and what films are great. I said, "What makes a great film? What is a great movie to you?" And he said, "Jaws." Immediately, I was like, "What? It's the fuckin' shark movie. How's that a great film?" I didn't think that was what you considered a great movie. Bryan began to describe to me why Jaws was a great film, what in it was a great story to him and the dynamic between the three characters. Bryan had done a thesis in college about how the opening scene in Jaws was completely symbolic of date rape. In describing that to me, all of a sudden, I started looking at movies in a completely different way. It just sort of unlocked this whole sort of perspective for me.
The other big movie, the other big eye opener for me was Deliverance. Watching Deliverance and seeing a film in which there was so little dialogue and every single line of that film means 65 different things and that everytime you watch it, you can relate it. Those two movies more than any other really opened me up to the notion of subtext. That you can make a movie that was both subtextual and entertaining.
LONG LIVE BAD HAT HARRY PRODUCTIONS!
Yes, indeed.
NOW A LOT OF PEOPLE DON'T KNOW THIS, BUT YOU STARTED OFF AS A SECURITY GUARD AND SPENT SOME TIME GUARDING A MOVIE THEATER.
Yeah. First of all, it was in this pretty lousy part of New Jersey and a lot of your clientele at that point... well we were getting a lot shootings up at this theater in Long Island... or Staten Island... one of the islands. So, we had a lot of New York clientele that didn't want to get shot that were starting to come down to New Jersey to see movies. As a result, all the sort of low level gangbangers who couldn't cut it in New York were coming down to New Jersey and all of a sudden it was like the fat of the lamb.
So, you had Newark, Jersey City, New York, Edison, these kind of rough places, Elizabeth all converging on this one place, which was kind of on the edge of the suburbs. It was in Sayerville, where Bon Jovi grew up. Naturally, when you have that sort of a rowdy crowd, people are very vocal in the movies. For the four years I worked in this detective agency, my bread and butter, when I was waiting to do more interesting work, my bread and butter was working security at this movie theater. We all wore body armor and carried guns, we were running money to the bank. The place was making money hand over fist, so we were running thirty grand at a time to this bank at night.
Basically, my job for that four years was to watch the audience because they were constantly getting into fights and they were dealing drugs and doing all kinds of shit. Here, I'm not aware at that time, I became aware later, here I am, watching the ultimate focus group, because these people are not aware they're being monitored. They're being very vocal and very honest about their opinions on movies as they're happening.
The other great thing was I was getting paid to watch a lot of movies and watch them in a way that for four years, except for very rare occasions, I didn't get to see movies from beginning to end. I was seeing them out of context. I'd walk in and I'd see five minutes of a movie, then I'd be breaking up a fight during another five minutes of the movie. So, I was seeing everything out of order.
The other thing was we would go into the lobby at the end of the night, myself and bunch of other guys and we would look at all the posters for the coming attractions and try to anticipate what the opening weekend was going to be to know how many guys to put on. We got to be kind of marketing wizards. We could look at a poster and go, "That's going to open like this and that'll be comparable to this," and you could pick it nine times out of ten.
I always say while Bryan was at USC studying film, I was at the Amblin multiplex studying the audience. I think that really had a lot to do with how Usual Suspects came to be.
PERFECT LEAD IN TO MY NEXT QUESTION! USUAL SUSPECTS WAS YOUR FIRST REALLY BIG EXPOSURE TO SOMEWHAT BIG MOVIE BUSINESS. WHAT EXPERIENCES FROM THAT TIME DID YOU LEARN THE MOST FROM, THAT YOU WALKED AWAY WITH?
The shortrun experience I had... when we premiered the film at the Sundance Film Festival in '95, we had sort of come back feeling triumphant because we had left in '93 with Public Access, which had split the Grand Jury prize there, but is an absolutely inferior film. We came back with this movie that we knew was really solid, we felt really good about it.
I'll never forget, Gramercy, otherwise known as the fucking douchebags from Hell, Gramercy would not fly Benicio (del Toro) anywhere, or me, they just ignored both of us. They wouldn't send us to Sundance, we had to pay our own way. As a side note: The night I arrived at Sundance... this was like the difference between being a writer and a director, was that Bryan was flown into Salt Lake City, a limo picked him up, took him to this unbelievably palatial room at Deer Valley, where he could have had like 17 of his friends sleeping. Meanwhile, I drive in from San Francisco where I picked up Dylan Cussman. Dylan and I drive into Salt Lake City, I'm staying at a little place Mine Camp, which we called Mein Kampf, and I get into town after dark, I pull up to the real estate office where I'm supposed to get my key and it's closed. I'm driving around until midnight that night waiting for the caretaker at Mein Kampf to come home. Driving around with all my luggage in my car and I can't get into my place.
Anyway, the night we premiered the movie, Benicio and I walked into the theater and we came in just behind Bryan and Stephen Baldwin and most of the cast was there... Benicio and I walked in and nobody knew who we were. We were just standing in the back of the room and we were watching everybody else get lavished with attention because Bryan had been the director who had won the festival two years before. Everybody knew who he was. So, we walked into the theater and we watched the movie and at the end of the movie, we came outside and everything had changed.
All of a sudden, people wanted to know everybody that was on the film. For the first time in my experience as a writer, people were suddenly asking me questions about the movie. I was surrounded by this mob of people who all had these questions about, "What happened? What was really..." All of a sudden, everybody's all, "Ahhhh (Crowd noise)..." in this weird frenzied attitude in the lobby. You're just like, "Holy shit!" I hear this voice say in my ear, "All glory is fleeting." I turn around and it's Benicio and he's walking the other way, he's running for the door, just being chased by people. He had walked into the theater and nobody knew who he was and now he was running out of the theater trying to get away.
"All glory is fleeting" obviously is in reference to Patton, the last line of Patton. After the Academy Awards, where Suspects did as well as it did, I remember going home. The first thing I did when I got home was clean up the dog shit that was on the carpet. No one had let my dog out the whole night. So, here I am, in my tuxedo cleaning up soupy dog shit on the floor. My dog's looking at me like, "You know what, man? You still have to clean up my shit."
As I'm cleaning up this dog shit, I remembered what Benicio had said. I got Patton, I put it on and I dialed my answering service and I recorded the last speech from Patton on my answering machine, hung up the phone and got the fuck out of town. I just ran out of town. AND, by the way, all glory was indeed fleeting. After the Academy Awards, I thought, "I can make whatever I want now. I'm gonna go and I'm going to armwrestle these guys and get whatever I want." Unfortunately, I literally tried to get everything I wanted right out of the gate and ended up getting absolutely nothing.
What happens to you, is they're not really interested in you making your film, they're interested in you making their film and they're just willing pay you more money for it. They didn't want to make Way of the Gun anymore then then they would have before. They didn't want to make Usual Suspects, either and they wouldn't want to try that again.
The long term that I realized was: I really hated Suspects... I can't say I hated it... I was very frustrated that when we were making the movie, I was constantly griping that, while I was very proud of the work on the script, it wasn't about anything. It wasn't a movie that had the substance that I wanted to have in my work. When I wrote The Way of the Gun, I thought, "I've finally written a movie that had the substance that I wanted" and it was only when I had gotten to the end of Way of the Gun and was cutting the movie and putting it all together that I realized Suspects is a good story. Having gone through five years since then and having people still responding the way they do, I just thought that's what I wanted to do. I had sort of come full circle. I had resisted for a long time the idea of telling an entertaining story. You can infuse your work with all the weird observations you make on a daily basis, if you're not entertaining people while you're doing it, you're just a criminal. So, I look at Suspects as one end of the storytelling structure and I look at Way of the Gun as the other end and I'm really looking forward to writing the next movie to apply what I've learned from both, to see what comes out.
ALL RIGHT, TIME FOR A FUN QUESTION THAT HAS ABSOLUTELY NO REAL SIGNIFICANCE AT ALL! HOW MANY TIMES, IN YOUR ESTIMATION, HAVE YOU HEARD THE NAME KEYSER SOZE NOW?
(Sighs) Oh... (pause)... in the millions. (laughs) It's interesting. I was never sorry about it until I finished The Way of the Gun. You know, you'd meet somebody after the screening of the movie or as I'm doing press, people come up and go, "I saw Way of the Gun. Really liked it. By the way, Usual Suspects is one of my favorite films." I'm like, "Oh-oh-kay. So, I'm operating at 80%." But no, you can never complain about something like that in your life. It's too good, it's too much to be grateful for.
WELL, THE FILM HAS BECOME SUCH... JUST TO HAVE A LINE, WHICH IS THE LINE FROM THE FILM, AND I ASSUME YOU WROTE THAT LINE... THE GREATEST TRICK LINE.
Well, actually, we found out after the movie that is was Bonolaire. Where I had heard it was, I was living in this little apartment at the time with this friend of mine and there were a couple of girls over at the apartment one night and we were all trading favorite quotes. This one girl threw that quote out. It was right as I was gearing up to write Suspects, I was, of course, "Okay, I'm using this!"
So, I stole it from this girl, not knowing where she had gotten it, she couldn't remember where she had heard it and it was only as Bryan and I were finishing the film... Bryan was actually in France with the movie and somebody said, "Oh! Bonalaire!" We were like, "Oh, okay."
YOU CAN AT LEAST TAKE CREDIT FOR ITS PLACEMENT IN THE FILM. I MEAN, BY ITSELF, IT'S A COOL LINE, BUT IN THE CONTEXT OF THE FILM, AT THAT POINT THAT MAKES IT MEMORABLE. YOU SAY THAT LINE AND JUST ABOUT EVERYBODY KNOWS WHAT MOVIE IT'S FROM. THAT MUST BE...
That must great for Bonalaire. (laughs). And props to John Ottman. In the script, the line doesn't come back at the end of the movie. That whole voice montage that John and Bryan put together at the end of the movie is really... While it works on the page, I think you need that stuff at the end of the movie to come back. The way it's written in the script, there are "visual cues" that I write into the script, phrases that I used in the beginning, that I use again in the end in the narrative, but stuff that the audience is not seeing. Bryan took that same notion and applied it to film.
YOU KNOW, SHYAMALAN (SHAW-AH-LA-MON)... I THINK THAT'S HOW YOU PRONOUNCE HIS NAME YOU KNOW, M. NIGHT...
Shyamalan (Sham-A-Lan) That's how they pronounce it. Barry Mendel, I asked him. I was like, "How the fuck do you pronounce that?"
WELL, REGARDLESS, WITH SIXTH SENSE, THEY DID BASICALLY THE SAME THING, WHERE THEY TOOK THE DIALOGUE FROM THROUGHOUT THE MOVIE...
Yeah, and Mission: Impossible. Literally, Mission: Impossible owes so much to John Ottmon's editing.
ON TO WAY OF THE GUN, WHAT SCENE STANDS OUT FOR YOU? ***BIG SPOILER WARNING***
I would say, from the moment Juliette Lewis comes out of the hotel room to the end of the movie. To me, the film starts and it just sorta rocks out, then it turns into this sort of soap opera that's going on, because you're uncovering all this family's dirty little secrets, like Long Days Journey. You're uncovering all this stuff and the film takes on this methodical pace, then all of a sudden, that shotgun goes off through that door and the movie takes off again. It's just the "out of the frying pan, into the fire," the thing getting worse and worse and worse and worse. The scene I am most proud of in that film, not for what I did, but for the actors did, is the scene in the birthing room.
It's scripted completely different than what you see on the camera. What I did was, there was a lot of technical stuff in that scene that we had conflicting information on. No two OBGYNs will tell you the same thing. Juliette had done all this research, had talked extensively with her sister who had had four children and had gone through every kind of birthing crisis you could imagine. Dylan Cussman is absolutely phenomenal in his detail.
I didn't know how I was going to shoot it. It was one of the few things I hadn't storyboarded because I didn't know what the room was going to look like until a few days before we were shooting it. Dick Pope had told me early on, "Don't storyboard anything that takes place in these rooms because you'll just be wasting your time. It's never going to be what you think."
So, literally, I took everything that was in that scene, that took place in that room and threw it out. I brought Juliette and Dylan into a trailer at 10 o'clock at night, after we had been shooting all day and we were going to shoot the birthing room the next day. I had the prosthetic belly coming and all this other stuff, but I didn't know what I was going to do. I just said to Juliette and to Dylan, I said, "I want to know, based on everything you guys have gathered about your characters, I want to know about this scene from your perspective. Nevermind what I'm thinking." I said to Dylan, "What I need is I need this to become a C-section. Now, why are you giving her a C-section?" We went through the various reasons why you would have to do it and we agreed that an abruption was the best because it required no equipment to tell that there was an abrution. It all started because Dylan was saying, "Well, you're having me give her a spinal before anything is really wrong. I wouldn't give her a spinal unless I knew I was giving her a C-Section." So, that changed the order in which certain events unfolded.
Then I turned to Juliette and said, "OK, what's your reaction?" She said, "All I want to do is see my baby. I just want to see my baby. And this is what I'm feeling and this is how I'm reacting, this is the pain I'm going through." So, I'm taking notes from the perspective of these two people and Dylan is telling me everything that his character is going through emotionally and everything that is his character's concern and the order in which the doctor has to go through with this. He had done enough research, you know, you were talking to this guy that had this medical knowledge... well, had SOME medical knowledge, which is perfect for his character.
So, I took all these notes, went home, went to bed, got up the next morning at 5 o'clock, went to the stage and I sat down and I wrote everything that took place in the birthing room in about half an hour. Basically. Printed it out, gave sides to Dylan, gave sides to Juliette, gave sides to Teddy and we went in a couple hours later, I never even reread it, we went in a couple hours later, we rehearsed it, then shot it. Everything you see in that room... and I watch it now and there are shots in that room... There's this one particular shot where we're looking at Benicio reacting, he's just seen Juliette cut open and he's having that long reaction shot and then suddenly the camera dollies over and Painter comes into frame and it turns into an over of Painter looking at Longbaugh. I look at that shot and say, "I never would have storyboarded that shot. That's not a shot I ever would have seen in my mind and said this is how I want to do it." It was only because Dick Pope said, "Don't board it and you'll figure it out when you get there." I look at certain shots in there, I don't know where they came from. When I look at what is going on in that room, so much of it was coming from somewhere else and I really believe that the best writing I do is not me, I'm channeling from some other place. You get in the zone and you're completely unconscious about what you're doing and that's where your best writing comes from. We were moving so fast and so desperately trying to get through this scene that we didn't know how to shoot. We just never gave ourselves the room to stop and think about what we were doing.
That was what I had hoped directing would be. That kind of collaboration with the actors, that kind of freedom with the cinematographer and that end result. Juliette's performance in that scene... for me to have to go to Juliette and say, "OK, we've got enough screaming. We can move on." And she's saying, "No, I can do it better, I can do it better." So, to me, that's the stuff I'm proudest of.
YEAH... SHE SOUNDED LIKE SHE WAS BLOWING A LUNG THERE...
She was unbelievable. There was one, I swear to God, that she said, "Did that sound OK?" And I said, "Juliette, you literally sound like somebody's sawing a seal in half. We got it." ******END OF BIG WAY OF THE GUN SPOILERS**********
WHAT MADE YOU DECIDE TO DIRECT THIS ONE AS OPPOSED TO SOME OF THE OTHER SCRIPTS YOU'VE WRITTEN?
I had tried to direct other ones and for one reason or another couldn't get them made. I wasn't willing to make the compromises I needed to get them made. I knew, based on Suspects, if I wrote a crime film, they would pretty much leave me alone and I have to start somewhere. So, as resistant as I was to do back to back crime films, it was kinda getting late, you know. About five years... it was time to... something was better than nothing.
WHAT'S REALLY INTERESTING IS THAT IT'S A CRIME FILM, BUT ONLY A CRIME FILM TO DISGUISE THE FACT THAT IT'S REALLY A SPAGHETTI WESTERN.
Yeah, yeah. Talking about when your best work comes from the unconscious, right after I wrote Usual Suspects, I went to go see Romeo Is Bleeding, I walked out of the theater and turned to the person I went to see the movie with, I turned to my friend and said, "You know, I'd really like write a film noir someday." And my friend looked at me and said, "You realize you did." I didn't know. I really didn't know. When Ken and I were in preproduction on this movie, I kept telling him, "The next film we do should be a western." At a certain point, somebody turned to me and said, "You realize this is really it." I guess in my want not to make a crime film I can do it.
I HAVE TO GET ANOTHER GEEKY QUESTION OUT OF THE WAY. I ADMIT, IT'S TOTALLY GEEKY, BUT HOW WAS IT TO DIRECT MR. ROLLERBALL?
Mr. Rollerball... Let me tell you something about Mr. Rollerball... he is the fuckin' man. When Jimmy Caan first called, and he called us, he had read the script and we got this call one day saying "Jimmy Caan wants to meet with you." My immediate reaction was: everything I've heard about Jimmy Caan was he was out of his fuckin' mind, or at least that was the impression I was under and I was really intimidated at the notion. Ken Kokin, the producer, said, "You've got to meet with him. You don't know until you meet with him. Just go and take the meeting. Go and sit with him for half an hour."
So, we went to the Four Seasons in LA and Jimmy shows up and he comes walking in and the first thing out of his mouth when he walked in was, "You're a sick fuck!" Then I thought... here I've been judging Jimmy and then I sorta realized how I must look to him, looking at what was going on in the script. He sat down for this half hour meeting and we didn't leave for three and a half hours. We kept getting up to go and then something else would come up and we'd sit back down. It was great and by the end of the meeting I was like, "I've gotta have Jimmy Caan!" But I thought, "This is too good to be true. Too good to be true." So, I called James Gray, James Gray had just finished The Yards and I said, "James, I just met with Jimmy Caan and I was just calling to ask you what you think. Should I work with him?" He said, "It's not about whether or not you should work with Jimmy Caan. You HAVE to work with Jimmy Caan." I said, "But what is he like to work with?" He said, "You're going to fucking love him! He's great, he's a lot of fun, he's a professional and he'll make you work."
We got to the set and Jimmy showed up a day early, which was great of Jimmy, and he came walking onto the set when we were shooting this other scene and Bill Clark, the AD (assistant director) turns around and goes, "Everybody, James Caan is here." As everybody turns around and goes, "Holy shit! It's Jimmy Caan standing there!" He goes, "That's right, Jimmy the Dream." And I said, "Jimmy the Dream?" He said, "Yeah, it's a new thing I'm working on. I want people to call me The Dream. I want to be a dream to work with." I was like, "OK..." We started calling him The Dream right from then and for the rest of the movie it was, "Send The Dream up... It's time for The Dream..."
There were only two times on the set that Jimmy Caan got angry. The last time Jimmy Caan got angry was during the shootout at the brothel. One of the shutters was rigged with primer cord and it's when Ryan shoots at him with a shotgun and blows the shutter to pieces. Due to a miscommunication, and that's my polite way of saying it, Jimmy was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not his fault. The shutter blew and Jimmy took shrapnel in the back of his head, his forearm and his ass. He came down and I thought, "Now we're going to see..." and as angry as he was, he had a very good reason to be a lot angrier. A testament to Jimmy, he came down, had it looked at and in one of the shots, in the dailies, you can see, when we're over Jimmy's shoulder, a hole in the back of Jimmy's head. He got a chunk of the shutter in his head. He came down, had it looked at, went right back up and got behind the shutter again.
The other time Jimmy got angry was... this has to do with the difficulty with making the transition from writer to director. There are two kinds of people in the film business, I believe. There are those who say "Please" and there are those who say "No." Which of those you are more comfortable saying determines what job it is you do in the film business. As a writer, you're accustomed to say "Please" and it is your job to be reasonable, accommodating. It is your job to try to conform everyone's wants into your vision. As a director, it is your job to conform your vision out of everyone's wants.
So, as the movie is going on, I'm wrestling with "Please" and "No" and I'm having a very difficult time making the transition from someone who is accomodator. I'm working very hard to give the actors every bit of free reign they want and every bit of input they want and at a certain point in the movie, I was really frustrated with this one scene because I wasn't getting what I wanted out of it and didn't know how to get what I wanted out of it. We broke for lunch and I was walking in between the trailers and Jimmy came out of his trailer and said, "Come here." He grabbed me and he pulled me aside and I thought, "Oh, shit! Jimmy's going to fucking have me now." Jimmy got really close to me and he grabbed my arm and goes, "I'm going to tell you something. Actors, and I mean all actors, including myself, need to be told what to do. No matter how much they might resist it, they want to be told what to do. This is your movie and nobody else's. Now quit fucking around. Get back in there and tell people what to do." That was the first day I started saying "No" instead of "Please." That was really the day I started directing the movie. The Dream... The Dream...
IF I EVER MEET THE MAN, I'LL CALL HIM "THE DREAM" INSTEAD OF MR. ROLLERBALL... I DON'T WANT HIM TO HURT ME....
Jimmy the Dream... Another great little story about Jimmy is after the movie wrapped, I told him I was going to New York. He goes, "OK! You're going to New York. OK... I'm gonna get you a reservation at this restaurant," and it was up in Harlem! It was way up in the upper east side of New York or wherever... way up in the 130s. He says, "Go to this restaurant, but you gotta go. If you say you're going to go, you have to go. If I get you this reservation, you have to go." I was like, "I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go!" So he makes this reservation and he says, "You go there and just ask for Frankie. Frankie No will take care of you." I said, "Frankie No?" And he goes, "Yeah, this guy, I call him Frankie No 'cause he always says "No", he's always telling me he can't get a reservation."
So, we're at this hotel in New York and my wife comes down to the concierge and says she wants to get us a car to take us to this restaurant. He says, "Oh, where are you going?" She says, "Oh, we're going to this restaurant called Rayo's." He says, "You're going to Rayo's?" She goes, "Yes, why?" He says, "Madam, I've worked at this hotel for 20 years and I've never been able to get anyone a reservation at Rayo's." She said, "Really?" He said, "I've had Bruce Springsteen standing right where you're standing, begging for me to get a reservation at Rayo's and I couldn't do it." I thought, "Oh, my God! What is this Rayo's?"
So we go to Rayo's. You pull up in front of Rayo's, cars are double parked at the curb, two, three cars deep all the way around. You're in Harlem, but it's as quiet as any gated community you've ever been in in your life. Rayo's seats about 40 people and it is like... This is where the Mob eats! This is where the full on Mob eats their dinner. We went in and sat down and met Frankie's son, who was running the restaurant that night. By virtue of the fact we were guests of Jimmy Caan it was suddenly as though you were eating with the King of Jordan. The treatment we got at Rayo's was unbelievable! The best Italian meal we've ever had and everything was so completely great. No one else in the world could have gotten you into that restaurant, except for The Dream.
I GOTTA GET INTO THE GREEN HORNET STUFF, NOW. YOU ARE CURRENTLY WRITING THE SCREENPLAY FOR GREEN HORNET. SPILL WHATEVER YOU CAN.
I won't give away too much of the basic plot outline only because I'm really proud of it, I'm really digging it. The great thing about the Green Hornet is the studio, and this is my first experience with Universal and my experience with Universal thus far, I'm also doing The Prisoner with them, my experience has been so refreshing because you're dealing with people who legitimately get it.
I had actually been offered Green Hornet years ago and turned it down because of the direction it was going. I got offered this one again for a rewrite. In reading the script, I realized it was a superhero movie. There was way too much in the way of superpowers and superabilities and superskills. There was a lot of Super in it. I think the thing that has been killing superhero movie is the Super has become more and more ridiculous. My take to the studio was to take out any suspension of disbelief, that everything had to be based in complete reality. That no supergadget could be something that didn't already exist. Obviously, you have to have a supervillain, but the supervillain's rationale has to be a lot more... frankly, a lot more rational, a lot more thought out.
With the different plots that came along in the movie, there were doomsday cults and there was all this other stuff. The script I was given to rewrite was very good, but I think the whole doomsday cult thing... I didn't really und
