Adrian Lyne became one of the hottest directors of the past decade by pursuing his compulsive enthusiasm for slick surfaces in movies such as Flashdance, 9 1/2 Weeks, and Fatal Attraction. Will the new Jacob's Ladder be Lyne's artistic breakthrough, or just another one of his skin deep pretty pictures?
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Yo, Adrian! What's with you and water? You got soggy subway stations, you got buckets of water falling on strippers, you got ice cubes dripping down breasts, you got people screwing in puddles and sinks, you got more rainstorms than Costa Rica. Even your roads are wet. "Water looks good on skin. It's evocative. And wet roads look better than dry roads." Oh, c'mon, I say, it's gotta be more than that. Isn't there some subliminal message you're sending? Adrian Lyne smiles and shrugs. "It must be some obscure thing from childhood."
You can argue with success, but in Hollywood no one ever does. That's why, despite the drought, no one has told Adrian Lyne to cut back on water usage. In fact, since Flashdance, no one has told Adrian Lyne anything except, "Sign here. You shoot in six weeks."
Lyne's new film is Jacob's Ladder, from a 10-year-old script by Bruce Joel [Ghost_] Rubin. It stars Tim Robbins and Elizabeth Pena. As ever with Lyne, the director of Flashdance, 9 1/2 Weeks, and Fatal Attraction, it's a chancy property from a screenplay that's been knocking around Hollywood for a long time, and Lyne has-as usual-cast the project with low-wattage stars. Lyne says, "There's no full length movie to compare it to. It's like nothing I've ever read. I turned down The Bonfire of the Vanities to do it. I told [Bonfire producer] Peter Guber that I felt stronger emotionally about Jacob's Ladder."
The film is about a Vietnam veteran who was used by the U.S. Army in an LSD experiment. When the soldier returns to New York, he suffers nightmarish visions, and he tries to figure out what has happened to him. Lyne was cutting the film in the Carolco offices on Sunset Boulevard when we met for lunch.
"I think it's working," Lyne says of the film. "We looked at the first few reels today. Everyone's reasonably pleased." Still, Lyne is edgy. He can't seem to get comfortable. He fiddles with the matches. He asks for a glass of wine. Lyne is a young-looking 49, and he's still got most of his blonde hair, which he wears shoulder length. This day he's dressed in a white T-shirt, black sport coat, and black slacks. When I praise Lyne for turning down The Bonfire of the Vanities and taking on the riskier Jacob's Ladder, he says, "It's easy to take risks when you're not in a breadline."
Lyne may be, as some detractors have dubbed him, the poor man's Ridley Scott, but his three hit films have grossed over $200 million. [9 1/2 Weeks was not a success in America, but it was a phenomenon in Europe, and, according to Lyne, it's still playing in Brussels, Amsterdam, and Paris.] When you consider that Lyne has succeeded despite two terrible scripts, third-, or, at best, second-tier players like Michael Nouri, Jennifer Beals, Mickey Rourke, and Glenn Close, and-in the cases of Flashdance and 9 1/2 Weeks--little studio support, you have to admit that the man is doing something right. The question is, what is it exactly?
"Flashdance," says Lyne, "was a little fairy tale that was reviewed as though I were Ingmar Bergman. I knew it was an awful script, and I had turned it down. But the second time it was offered to me, it was a go project with an $8 million budget." At the time, in 1982, Lyne was marooned in development hell. His first film, Foxes, about San Fernando Valley teenagers, had bombed. "So I took Flashdance and tried to do something different with it." I ask Lyne, "If the script was so bad, why didn't you have it rewritten?"
"At the time, my bargaining power was nil."
Both Simpson-Bruckheimer and Guber-Peters have since claimed credit for Flashdance, so I ask, "Who was the driving force behind the movie?"
"Wasn't me, darling," Lyne answers. "I was only the director."
The film supposedly takes place in Pittsburgh, but it wasn't the Pittsburgh at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers. It was the Pittsburgh of the soundstages--a Pittsburgh where mill foremen drive Porsches and welders aspire to be ballerinas.
Lyne says, "I made a choice. I could have done a nuts and bolts story, but I didn't. Instead I made it a kind of fantasy." I ask if the producers understood what kind of movie they were getting. Lyne shakes his head and smiles. "It was tough," he says. "For instance, I knew I wanted to do a number in which the dancer was wet. I'd never seen anything like it before, and I had to convince everyone it would work. So we had a rehearsal, and the producers and the studio executive showed up, and they sat on a dais above the set. And we were hosing down the dancer, and of course it looked awful. I could sense that there wasn't a lot of confidence anywhere. Everyone thought the movie was going down the toilet, including Paramount, which sold off a 25 percent stake in the film a week before it opened."
But Flashdance opened big in the spring of 1983. At the time, MTV was really starting to clog the airwaves, and Giorgio Moroder was everywhere. The movie not only mined both those veins but spoke in a language that remedial English students could understand. "If your dream dies, you die," says the Beals character. "span class="pullquote right">It also had more gloss than a Revlon commercial, plenty of bouncing butts, and it created a fashion craze-the torn, oversized sweatshirt worn off the shoulder. Lyne, who says he adores fashion photography, takes credit for that one.
Lyne likes to stand in the back of theaters listening to, and sometimes tape recording, audience reaction. "They came out of Flashdance glowing," he says. "It was a fabulous feeling. After that, I was offered A Chorus Line, but that would have been the obvious choice, and I didn't want to be pigeon-holed as a director of musicals."
Instead, he took on 9 1/2 Weeks, a story about a kinky, sadomasochistic affair. It starred Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger, and it proved too hot for the ratings board. Certain scenes were cut for the American version, and the film did badly. Lyne says, "In America, and in England, people have a problem with sexuality in public. Men don't want to go to the theater and have a hard-on while they're sitting next to their wives. At one screening, people were so enraged that I didn't want to be around when the lights came on, so I went up and hid in the projection booth. It was as if they were threatened by it personally. They will rent the tape, though. Which they did in droves."
I say to Lyne that while 9 1/2 Weeks had the best looking jello I'd ever seen on the screen, I didn't feel much heat between Rourke and Basinger.
"If I had it to do over again," he says, "I'd recut it. I think I may have been influenced too much by Flashdance."
"How would you recut it?"
"I'd take out some of the music. There are too many tunes." I wait for Lyne to go further, to suggest some other changes he might make, but he doesn't. The problems with the movie aren't limited to the surfeit of tunes. I'm thinking, for instance, of the scene in which Basinger does a beautifully choreographed striptease for Rourke. As she shimmies through the sleek apartment-and as Joe Cocker throbs on the soundtrack-it's a feast for the eyes and ears. But by making it a visual, and aural, tour de force, Lyne empties the scene of content. Basinger, in a sense, goes past Rourke and performs directly for us, the film audience. When Lyne cuts to Rourke for reaction shots, Rourke looks like he's wishing he was in his trailer. And no wonder. He has nothing to play. His presence is a mere formality, an excuse for Basinger to strut her stuff.
Before Lyne began directing features, he directed television commercials. In commercials, there are often two characters who pretend to interact. But their relationship is a pretense. They aren't there to reveal private truths. They are there to sell a product. Likewise, in Lyne's films, the characters who happen to be on the screen together don't so much interact as they facilitate. They're in completely different orbits. They share nothing but floorspace. Instead of selling us a product, Lyne is selling us Basinger, Beals, and company. When I charge Lyne with this misdemeanor, his retort is, "If you do a stylized picture, you sacrifice a certain intimacy. But what you lose in intimacy, you gain in ... "Lyne pauses, thinks." ... I don't know what you gain. I do know that when you play music like that Joe Cocker song, you've abandoned reality. If I were to recut that scene, I'd eliminate the big Joe Cocker song, and just have a little tinny noise off the record player."
Again I wait for more. Again, there is no more. I conclude that Lyne is either not quite sure how to create intimacy in a scene or else it's not important to him. Surprisingly, however, it is important to him when he watches other people's movies. He didn't like Dick Tracy, because he "didn't care about the characters." In Blade Runner, he thinks Ridley Scott "missed the opportunity" to make the relationship more poignant. "It was his choice to direct Harrison Ford as a stylized Bogart type. I would have made him more real."
I ask Lyne about directors he admires. "Almodovar," he says. "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is the sweetest of love stories. Kubrick's Paths of Glory is one of my ten best. Truffaut I admire enormously-he liked to make movies about people with shortcomings. I do, too. I think it should be possible to make movies about people who are not necessarily perfect. I think vulnerable characters are more interesting than heroic characters. I had to convince Michael Douglas of this, because in Fatal Attraction his character essentially gets beat up for two hours."
Fatal Attraction, like 9 1/2 Weeks, was a script that had been all over town, and nobody would touch it. Lyne says, "There was no reason to think it would do better than Jagged Edge, which was not very successful." What attracted Lyne? "It was a page turner."
If Lyne was spooked by the success of Flashdance and, as a result, larded 9 1/2 Weeks with music, he was burned badly enough by the criticism of the latter that he made sure to rid Fatal Attraction of all music: "I didn't even want a song over the opening credits." You can see in these reactions the mind of a marketing major. If it worked before, do it again. If it failed, take it out.
Fatal Attraction is a landlocked version of Jaws. Glenn Close, the predator, her teeth bared, her locks madly frizzed, keeps closing and nosing and nibbling until finally Douglas and his wife do what any good shark hunters have to do. One can't quibble with the suspense Lyne creates. He manages to turn the ringing phone into a weapon by zooming in on it and then cutting to a close-up of the jangled Douglas. In the scene with the boiling bunny, Lyne took three concurrent actions and edited them so deftly that every possible ounce of tension is squeezed from them. On the other hand, his characters are not flesh and blood creations. They are stand-ins for cliches. Close is the fragile, single career woman. Anne Archer is the simple, soulful, supportive wife. Douglas is the distracted, bored yuppie. Now, it's okay to start with types like these so long as the writer and director then lead them through some sort of character arcs. But neither James Dearden, the writer, nor Lyne did this. What they did instead was push the characters to extremes, mistaking sex and violence and retribution for character development. Few clues are dropped as to why these people behave as they do. Lyne's just not interested in back story or in the little touches that reveal character. We have no idea, for instance, how Douglas feels about his wife, and aside from a fiery confessional scene, the affair seems to have no consequences for the marriage. In fact there's not one significant discussion between them.
Lyne doesn't trust himself with these revelatory scenes. The reason might be that such scenes require talk. The dialogue in Lyne's films is never good. He doesn't put much stock in words.
What interests Lyne, what he's adept at serving up, is lust and its consequences. He's at his best when shooting a feverish sexual encounter between a worldly stranger and an innocent. He's obviously drawn to the idea of a routine life being turned topsy-turvy.
Lyne began his career in the mailroom of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in London. "I went to a public school, and took my A levels in French and German, and I passed them, which surprised my father who hadn't booked a place for me at the University. But I don't regret it. I learned how to direct by watching Clive Donner and John Schlesinger shoot cigarette commercials.
"David Puttnam [who plucked many a young director from the ad biz] gave me my first feature, and I'm very grateful to him for that. I just wish he hadn't shot off his mouth so much when he came over here to run Columbia. How can you castigate Beatty and Hoffman for making too much money when you're earning the same amount yourself? If you're going to criticize, you must be beyond criticism. If Puttnam had given his salary to charity, that would have been impressive. Otherwise, it's just ranting and raving."
Lyne thinks the notion of "high concept" is ludicrous. "The moment you go out and look for something that you think will do well-that's when you fail." Lyne is attracted to offbeat projects that have been turned down by less daring directors. Yet, if you look at what Lyne does with these risky properties, you realize that he's hedging his bets. The material may not be standard studio fare, but Lyne makes sure he dazzles us with tried and true advertising gimmicks-quick cutting, lots of zooms and closeups, unusual camera angles-all of which contribute to a kind of heightened reality. Into that mix, Lyne ladles public groping, pelvic grinding, and dewy beauties in black stiletto heels. Little wonder that, despite the script, his audience is treated to a titillating series of images. If little in Lyne's films seems improvised or spontaneous, it's because everything has been thought out in advance. Like all advertisers, Lyne does everything he can to elicit a desired response. If, in pre-release screenings, he doesn't get the response he wants, he makes changes. He admits that his role-as director-is one of manipulator. "A film audience is there to be manipulated for two hours," he says.
Certainly Lyne's hoping such is the case with Jacob's Ladder, the top-secret storyline of which is intended to tease an audience into guessing at what's really happening to hallucinating protagonist Tim Robbins, before arriving at what Lyne is hoping will be the surprising denouement. From the footage I've seen, this could be a giant leap forward for Lyne: for once, his characters are speaking to one another, and Robbins seems an inspired choice for the role of Jacob. His lumbering goofiness and dimply smile help to off-set this dark story. But it's all too soon to tell; the finished film isn't available to see.
"Tell me about the film," I say. "Any major problems?"
"Bruce [the writer] saw the demons and the devils in a strictly Biblical sense," says Lyne. "I argued that people are familiar with Biblical demons. They've seen the 'devil' before, and I felt that if they're familiar with the demons, there's a lack of terror. Ridley Scott did an extraordinary devil in Legend, but it wasn't terrifying, because you looked at it and said, 'Oh, that's the devil.' I tried to root [my demons] in flesh so people wouldn't be able to reject them." Here again we see Lyne's magnificent obsession with the look of his films; he's fretting over whether his demons will sell.
"There's a scene of a nurse with horns. Now you can't put a nurse with horns on the screen. The audience will howl with laughter, and your movie will stop dead. I got rid of the horns and put two red sores on her head. We spent months discussing that and trying to get the right kind of sores."
How telling, I thought, that Lyne, when given an opportunity to discuss the project, said nary a word about the U.S. Army shooting drugs into our own servicemen (in effect, trying to kill them twice). I conclude that Lyne is not a political animal. Nefarious governmental policy doesn't goad him to anger. What does make him bilious is repressed and repressive Anglo society. "In England, or in America, they have no problem putting a guy who's about to blow his brains out on the six o'clock news, but they won't let you show a woman's breast. I can't stand the English. They moan too much."
When not working in Hollywood, Lyne lives in France where, he says, "You see nude women on the box all the time. And nude men, for that matter."
I mention to Lyne that, in his films, there seems to be an abundance of close-ups on feet. "Are you a foot fetishist?" I ask. He lets out with a high-pitched whinny and shakes his head. "You need something to cut to," he says.
Lyne himself is an awfully engaging dining partner. There's an impish quality about him. He does a dead-on imitation of a snooty English actress who turned down a role in one or his films. One reason he cast Glenn Close, he says, is she liked to have fun. "She was not the stay-at-home intellectual that she usually plays." All the actors who've worked with Lyne speak of his willingness to listen.
Lyne is still wide-eyed about his success.
"Of course I've been lucky," he says. "But a lot of directors get a break and then they're told they're geniuses, and they start to believe it. This town is filled with directors who think they know what they're doing because people tell them as much. The moment you arrive at that position, and think you don't need advice, you're in trouble."
"How would you rate yourself as a director?"
"I'm stumbling around in the dark. Maybe one day I'll do a good movie."
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Jeffrey Lantos has written for American Film and Cosmopolitan, and is a frequent contributor to these pages.