Michael Lehmann: Adventures of a Young Director

You have to figure that the guy who made Heathers is a pretty smart smart aleck, and Lehmann probably is--in real life. In interview life, where his career and other people's money are at stake, he's just smart. He's a study in gracious tact when he's in this mode. You may think that his remarks about Joel Silver are rather pointed, at least by comparison with what generally gets said about producers, but when you consider what usually gets said about Joel Silver, Lehmann looks like a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.

On the subject of Bruce Willis, he's similarly calm, if direct. He told me out front he liked Willis, then proceeded to explain what it was like working with this major movie star: "Not only does Bruce have the power," Lehmann said, "but it's legitimate. The character was his idea and it was his job to carry the film. It's not like they're patting him on the back saying, oh you're a movie star, we'll indulge you."

Did he and his star see eye-to-eye for the most part? "There've definitely been times when we didn't see things the same way and in other circumstances I, as the director, would have at a certain point just said, well, this is my choice. On this movie, I've had to be more collaborative on a certain level than previous pictures. It may be that way whenever you work with a movie star. It's a trend in the industry now. Costner, whatever. The seven or eight major stars now have a great deal of input into the final shaping. As a director, that's by definition an irritating thing. But it's not necessarily a bad thing if you come in knowing that's what you have to deal with. When I started Hudson Hawk, I realized I was dealing with a strong-willed producer, a strong-willed actor and at times a strong-willed studio, and I was the junior partner in all of this, the guy who hadn't proven anything in terms of box-office success. And Bruce Willis is Bruce Willis and it was a Bruce Willis movie--he conceived the original character and he felt in many ways that, regardless of who was directing it and who was producing it and who else was acting in it, it was his movie. If I'd walked into a situation like that with the idea that whatever I said would be taken as the way to go, that would have been naive."

Lehmann may not have been naive, but, you're probably thinking, he sure was suicidal. Why didn't he realize that even if he managed to get Hudson Hawk made with all this, ahem, help, he'd be in the looney bin missing the party when the box-office receipts started pouring in? But this perspective overlooks the shiny side of the Joel Silver coin. Silver's made a lot of action pictures. A smart young director with confidence, a good eye and two pictures of any kind under his belt should be able to make a big action picture without going nuts when he's backed by Silver's level of experience, right? It was fair for Lehmann to think that, be-cause Die Harder, Silver's infamous logistical catastrophe, hadn't happened yet.

As it turned out, Silver was going through a phase of greater-than-usual over-confidence. Lehmann went through a good deal of hell during a difficult four-month shoot in New York, Italy, and Budapest, during which reports filtered back to Hollywood that costs were escalating and logistics were screwing up. The female lead, European actress Maruschka Detmers, arrived on the set with a medical condition that had her fainting with pain, according to Lehmann, and the insurance company had her out of the picture within two days. (Other, more colorful versions of this story circulated in Hollywood at the time Maruschka departed.) "If there was a moment of desperation on this movie, it was that moment," said Lehmann.

That moment passed when Andie MacDowell was quickly brought in. But the logistical problems that would send costs through the roof did not pass so easily. Silver had just assumed he'd be allowed to film inside and outside the Vatican, but he just wasn't allowed, either inside or outside ("In Joel's defense," said Lehmann, "he usually makes movies in L.A."). Lehmann went ahead and stole the exterior shots. "We got what we needed. I think Godfather III did the same thing. It's all guerrilla filmmaking on some level."

There were other things that even a man as powerful as Joel Silver couldn't control, like history. The very day the decision was made to shoot exteriors in Prague, demonstrators marched into Wenceslas Square and started a revolution. In the end, shooting was done in a studio in Budapest on sets that had been built in England and transported across Europe. ("It was never clear to me that we would save money going to Budapest," says Lehmann, "but the money guys said we would, so we did.") Hudson Hawk co-producer Michael Dryhurst was quoted late last fall when the picture was still shooting, "If we'd known a year ago what we know now, we'd have built sets in Los Angeles."

So, did all this send Lehmann right over the edge?

"I'm not a macho guy," Lehmann told me. "I'm very soft-spoken on the set. But I'm not really intimidated by the process of making movies. And so on a big picture like this, the things I thought I might be neurotic about weren't the things that bothered me. Yes, there absolutely were very dark days when I thought why did I do this, why did I choose this as something to do with my life? [What bothered me was] that it shot for so long that at a certain point I could no longer remember the beginning and I could no longer picture the end." It should be added here that Lehmann was not completely a babe in the woods as far as big-budget filmmaking went. Before he ever went to USC film school, he worked for Zoetrope, Francis Ford Coppola's free-form experiment in director-moguldom. He ran Coppola's video operation on the bloated One From the Heart, and so he knew that the scariest thing is not how easy it is for production schedules to go to hell in a handbasket, but how easy it is for incredibly talented people to work really hard and totally lose their way.

One thing Lehmann simply won't discuss is the Hudson Hawk budget, which went right through the roof when the best-laid plans went haywire. Estimates last fall had it at $60 million, $20 million over budget, but hardly unusual escalation for present-day action pictures. More recent estimates have it close to $75 million, and that's astronomical, surpassed only by the latest predictions on Terminator II ($80 million). "Luckily for me," says Lehmann, "I can't tell you the bill on anything. If I'd tried to keep track of how much individual things, or even big things, were costing, I would have gone nuts."

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