Michael Lehmann: Adventures of a Young Director

The best thing about Joel Silver is that he is, in Lehmann's words, "a huge Dan fan." Waters and Lehmann, who are very close friends, were left completely alone while Silver went off to deal with Die Harder. If anything could have reassured Lehmann that he might avoid meal status in the lion's den, it was having Waters in there with him. What they ultimately cooked up for Hudson Hawk is "not an emotional movie," by any means, Lehmann admitted wryly. "There's clever wit, there's silly wit, there's lack of wit, and there's romance, but there's not a great deal of weighty emotional content. One of the things I connected with on Hudson Hawk was that when I was a kid I loved the Flint movies, In Like Flint, Our Man Flint, and The President's Analyst, and the early Bond movies, and The Pink Panther movies, and I grew up on 'The Man From U.N.C.L.E.' "

Bruce Willis loved what Lehmann and Waters made of de Souza's script. "Bruce is fully willing," according to Lehmann, "to take risks with something unconventional, where the humor is somewhat absurdist, and somewhat dark and dense and pop-culture self-referential. He likes that."

When Hudson Hawk comes out this summer we'll get to see just how much Bruce Willis ultimately likes that, and whether the studio likes it at all. And we'll see whether Joel Silver wants something new and fresh, or just likes to have new, fresh talent around him doing things he can later take the new-ness and freshness out of. It is, after all, Batman that's the proto-type here, and that's what Batman was about: for all Tim Burton's weirdness going in, what came out was a big, intense fantasy that saturates your retinas while it rolls right off your psyche.

A friend of mine who writes for TV once told me, when I asked him what idea he'd had that he thought was good but he knew the networks would never do, "You sound like a network executive. No network would openly acknowledge there's any idea too bizarre for them. They're the first to ask you for the ideas you've been holding back. I tell them I'd like to do a show where real celebrities and political figures commit sexual atrocities with their pets shot from the animals' P.O.V. by micro-videocams surgically implanted in their retinas, and we shoot the whole thing from holy cities around the world--Banares, Jerusalem, the Vatican--with rock music on the soundtrack. The executives don't flinch. Their evil is too insidious. They just look at each other and say, 'That could work. Is it possible to involve an eight-year-old so we can make it an 8 o'clock family show?' They don't have to tell you your idea is unsuitable. It's just a given that The Machine will grind it down to standard TV fare before it hits the airwaves."

My friend was talking about TV, sure. But today, movies are TV. And if Tri-Star, and/or Joel Silver and/or Bruce Willis want to grind down Michael Lehmann's take on Hudson Hawk, I'm sure it'll be possible to do it. Lehmann's sensibility soars precisely in the details it's so easy to snip out. Then again, maybe Lehmann is just the guy to sneak through the system, the way he did at USC (he was the younger Phil Joanou's TA in Phil's crit class, by the way) and with his first picture at New World. Lehmann does have some endearing credentials for collaboration with the Hollywood system. He has a certain taste for glorious nonsense. He's a lapsed intellectual, the son of a psychoanalyst father and a leftist liberal performance artist/ photographer mother, and he dabbled in the philosophy of aesthetics back in the days when the deconstructionists were hanging from the chandeliers ("they demythologized them-selves for me over a period of time").

"That's another reason I can go out and do something as crass as Hudson Hawk," Lehmann says, "It's a way to say 'fuck you' to my intellectual background. In the past my aspirations were as arty as they could get and I'm really embarrassed by it. I spent a good 10 years trying to flush that out of my system. Now I'm trying to get it back, but in the right way."

Lehmann has now made three films. He points out that nobody really saw Coppola's first three films. Coppola's generation got to rehearse on cheapo pictures and make mistakes that didn't reverberate in Tokyo. Today's young directors don't have that kind of freedom. Hollywood wants their blood. Now. Some of them, of course, are clawing their way toward the opportunity to embarrass themselves in the spotlight and die young. But the more perspicacious among them, Lehmann being a prime example, worry about burning out before they ever make their masterpiece. How many four-month, $60 million action pictures can a director do, and still expect to come up later with a Godfather? Then again, what if you have scruples against making crass action pictures and end up making nothing? Or, what if you're heralded young lions like the Coen brothers and, miraculously, you make your Godfather early on, i.e., Miller's Crossing, and a lot of critics, not just audiences, don't like your Godfather--will the studio keep funding your genius?

Kids in this country used to want to grow up to be President. Then it was an astronaut they wanted to be. Today it's a Movie Director. Michael Lehmann is living the life every kid envies. He's a really lucky guy and he knows it. Now he needs to be even luckier than that. And he knows that, too. Fortunately, he's got a strategy for letting luck play itself out. "I just can't operate with any direct awareness of the pressures I might be under," he told me. "I'd rather live in a state of denial and say no, I don't feel any pressure. I'm a fairly sensitive person. My skin breaks out. If you meet me on the street and my face is covered with pustulating sores, you'll know the pressure is getting to me."

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Virginia Campbell is co-editor of Movieline.

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