In two short years, Michael Lehmann went from directing the hip, low-budget satire Heathers to directing one of the most expensive movies ever made in Hollywood, the new Bruce Willis action comedy, Hudson Hawk. And he lived to tell about it.
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Whoever thought there'd be such a thing as a "Bruce Willis movie"? Sure, Willis was fun on "Moonlighting," where he had a bunch of gifted, wacked out writers to back up his smirk. But a big screen career so inflated that a movie he stars in is now thought of as a Bruce Willis picture as opposed to just a movie he's in?
You gotta love Hollywood. No, you gotta hate Hollywood. Because not only is the upcoming summer blockbuster-wannabe Hudson Hawk the latest Bruce Willis movie, it's also the first official Michael Lehmann film to come out of a major studio, and only in the Hollywood of the '90s could you find an offbeat, supersmart young director like Lehmann tied up with a megawatt/mini-range star like Willis--oh, and this is good too--all under the auspices of action picture czar Joel Silver (48 HRS., 1 and 2, Lethal Weapon, 1 and 2, Predator, 1 and 2, Die Hard, 1 and 2, Roadhouse, Ford Fairlane, etc., etc., etc.).
It's possible that the comedy spy caper Hudson Hawk will be a big, slick, fun summer picture, and even that it will have a genuine edge to it (God knows, Die Harder sure didn't). I really hope it turns out that way, and that everyone in those dark theaters has a swell time and everybody in Hollywood makes a bundle. But criminny, why did a guy like Michael Lehmann have to direct this picture? And why does a guy like Joel Silver want a guy like Michael Lehmann to direct this picture? Answer these questions and you've got a real bead on one of the things that's wrong with Hollywood right now. What you have is a story about how Hollywood, always cannibalistic to some extent, has taken to eating its young.
Michael Lehmann's gotten away with murder so far in this town. He started out by sneaking an outre little piece about a kid "who applies for a scholar-ship in order to pay back his drug debts" past the powers-that-be at USC film school, and with that product sample (titled The Beaver Gets a Boner) in hand, went on to convince New World Pictures to let him make a deeply subversive satire called Heathers. Then-unknown screenwriter Dan Waters's weird script about teenagers who are almost as mean as teenagers are in real life had been the talk of the town by the time Lehmann got a hold of it. Lots of people loved it, no one wanted to make it. It was the girl so sexy nobody had the guts to sleep with her. New World backed Lehmann's $3 million tryst, and the young director turned out a film with genuine, original teeth in it.
Some people thought Heathers, which featured the first interesting performances from current screen throbs Winona Ryder and Christian Slater, was politically incorrect (it skewered the maudlin sanctimony surrounding the subject of teenage suicide, for example) if not downright satanic (the teen heroine's homicidal fantasies spill over into real life and go completely unpunished). Others, myself included, saw it as a minor godsend in a major wasteland. Either way, Heathers caused a stir, and even without making money it made careers for its producer (Denise Di Novi, now head of Tim Burton's production company, and producer of Batman II), its screenwriter (Waters went on to write Ford Fairlane, and co-write both Hudson Hawk and Batman II), and its director, who switched from William Morris to CAA and found himself sought after as a hip young filmmaker with a cool eye for the new and the different.
The new and the different are just about the last things you'd think Joel Silver would be after. Silver is, when you get down to it, the Irwin Allen of the '80s, a guy whose devotion to big-time, glossy production values is matched by an uncompromising assembly-line mentality. A good, solid craftsman like Dick Donner or John McTiernan is perfectly capable of adding plenty of sheen to the big beautiful hog of an action picture Silver likes to make. But ever since Batman, every mogul-in-his-own-mind has been on the lookout for his very own Tim Burton, his own strange, young director with round dark glasses who can do for him what Batman did for Guber and Peters--that is, make him zillions of dollars, allow him to be mistaken for a genius for making zillions of dollars, and maybe even attract the attention of Japanese feudal lords with zillions more dollars.
So Joel Silver's looking for a Tim. Thus far he's gotten a Renny--Renny Harlin (Die Harder, Ford Fairlane), who--his own protestations notwithstanding--did indeed refer to himself, when he first came to Holly-wood five years ago, as "the Steven Spielberg of Finland," and to my mind has pretty much lived up to that self-description, with the emphasis on Finland. And Silver's also gotten himself a Michael, a Michael who, like the pre-Die Harder Renny, had never dealt with the night-marish logistics of a $40 million action picture before going to work for Joel, and who, unlike the pre-Die Harder Renny, had never even dealt with a big studio picture of any kind before going to work for Joel.
I talked to Michael Lehmann about all this. I asked him, for instance, why he thought producers and studios were giving young directors tens of millions of dollars to do something they'd shown little evidence they could actually do. "It's really stupid," he said flatly. "It's got to be a combination of factors. One is that the untested always offers the potential for more surprises and rewards than the tried and true. Joel also works with Dick Donner and I don't think he expects surprises from him. He can do movies with Donner and know Donner's going to deliver, and he can work with me or Renny or Stephen Hopkins and what we'll bring may be fresher." (We may note here, since Lehmann did not, that Silver didn't get anything fresh out of Harlin or Predator 2 director Hopkins.)
Lehmann went on to explain that he thinks guys like Silver think they've got their bets covered: "I don't think Joel thought he was taking a big risk with me. I think he was thinking if you want a different sensi-bility you take the risk with a younger director and he was also thinking, this kid's a little green and maybe I'll be able to control him more. When I was making the movie there were certainly days when I felt I was the victim of that kind of thinking. He felt that if I couldn't deliver, he could back me up, but also that even if I could deliver, he might be able to deliver a little more of what he wanted, by virtue of my inexperience. Joel, being the kind of person he is, power is part of his game."
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."
It may seem a stupid and fatuous question to ask why a gifted young director like Lehmann ever signed on to direct Hudson Hawk. It was, after all, an opportunity to make a major studio picture that by its very nature nearly ensured a big audience if it was done competently. It was also, as noted above, a situation in which he could tell himself he'd be covered by Joel Silver's expertise. And it was also a situation in which Lehmann could either laugh all the way to the bank or cry all the way to the bank. However it turned out, he was going to the bank.
"They gave me a lot of money to direct Hudson Hawk," said Lehmann. "But they gave it to me because my agents had already negotiated a very high fee for me on another project. This is the other side of filmmakers being given their shot too early and too big. I was in my own opinion being offered far too much money to direct a third picture, and I told my agents it was ludicrous. My agents [CAA's Jack Rapke and Richard Lovett] said, it's like the real estate market in L.A. Why are people spending a million dollars for a tear-down shack in Santa Monica? The money's there and people want to spend it. They said, you can't turn your back on that if you're going to make movies in this context. Take the money, but make the movies you want to make."
"I want the money," Lehmann continued. "I'm not giving it back." Why the hell should he? He was in a position to be paid a whole lot of money no matter what he directed, as long as it was a commercial studio picture. And though he had made his mark with the deliriously idiosyncratic non-studio Heathers, he was, at the time he agreed to do Hudson Hawk, dead set on moving to center court. The reason for that was not so much big money, as it was a little film called Meet the Applegates.
For all the hoopla over the courage and purity of independent filmmaking--and we do necessarily look in desperation to that arena for movies that have something, anything to do with recognizable human life--it's the same dog-eat-dog world as the studio environment, just smaller dogs. And with the financial crisis in independent film over the last few years, there are some mean and hungry small dogs. New World Pictures was in bad shape as Lehmann finished Heathers and, seeing they had talent on their hands, they were eager for him to go right to work shooting the other project of his they owned, a spaced out "Saturday Night Live"-style satire he and writing partner Redbeard Simmons had written called Meet the Applegates. It was about giant Amazonian insects who infiltrate America disguised as the perfect American family. The kind of thing that can look really stupid if it isn't done carefully. Lehmann knew the script wasn't close to ready. "They basically blackmailed me," he said. "They didn't want to change the script and they said they'd give it away and they had every right to do that and I went nuts.
"I willingly made the movie," Lehmann conceded. "We all decided to make it." But Lehmann wasn't happy with the film. More-over, as New World began to go down the tubes after the release of Heathers--the point at which Lehmann was suddenly flying high--they began screening a rough cut of Applegates to studio executives in an attempt to sell it. Lehmann was embarrassed.
So all the independent film boosters who think Lehmann sold out by going big time should listen up. I asked Lehmann if any of his peers did accuse him of selling out. "Yeah. But in the current generation, the concept of sellout isn't the same. What does sellout mean? I thought about it. I was coming off the Applegates situation and I didn't ever again want to be faced with the kind of choices I faced at the beginning of that movie. And I was humiliated by New World screening the unfinished film. I felt betrayed by my low-budget independent experience. I wanted to make a movie that would get released.
"I didn't have my sights on doing a Joel Silver/Bruce Willis picture. I didn't have my sights on a big commercial movie, or even on a comedy." What Lehmann did have his sights on was a certain stylish, noir suspense thriller that's since been made and he won't name. He'd been offered the project and was excited about doing it. Then the deal went sour. Two days later, the Hudson Hawk script arrived. Lehmann was obviously looking at this script in a particular light. New World was, it seemed, conspiring to end his career. A sure thing had just evaporated before his eyes. And he was pragmatic enough to know that Hollywood doesn't keep doling out the opportunities till you find one just right for your precious sensibilities.
Want to know what it'll be like if Joel Silver ever decides he wants you? Back when Heathers was first being screened in 1989, Lehmann got a call from the big man. "I was home and the phone rang, and a secretary's voice said, This is Joel Silver, can you take the call?' On comes the crackly sound of a car phone and this voice just says, 'Awesome.' I said, 'Pardon me?' And the voice says, 'Awesome.' And I said, 'Oh.' He says, 'I just saw Heathers. Incredible,' and he really played it up. Clearly he'd watched it closely and the things he pointed out were not the things I was embarrassed about. He singled out a shot that had been of some concern to me, so I was impressed. All it told me was that as a producer, he understood the conventions of filmmaking--but not all producers do."
Lehmann consulted his agents, who were bullish on Silver, and a lot of other people ("I heard lots of stories, and they weren't by any means all negative"). He turned down a number of scripts Silver sent to him. But when the Hudson Hawk script arrived, Lehmann saw it as something he could "do really odd-ball things with without violating what a piece of entertainment like this needs to be. I was not interested in making a movie that didn't work for the audiences for which it was intended. There's no point being destructive and saying, good, those fools gave me a big picture and I'm going to come in and turn it into some weirdo art film, ha ha ha. It's more like, how far can you go and maintain the integrity of the commercial action comedy."
Lehmann's agents reassured him that it was just this oddball stuff Silver had liked about Heathers. Silver does, in fact, like this oddball stuff, at least at the script stage, so he agreed to put Lehmann together with veteran Steven E. de Souza, who'd writ-ten the original screenplay for Hudson Hawk based on Willis's idea for the central character, and have the two of them work out a new odder-ball approach. Then suddenly, in a great case of oh-please-don't-throw-me-in-the-briar-patch, Lehmann was informed by Silver that de Souza, whom Lehmann describes as "a very funny guy...but not a hip guy," would have to be torn away from him to work on Die Harder. Too bad. Well, argued Lehmann, you'll have to bring in Heathers scripter Dan Waters.
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.