Nicholas Kazan: Laughter in the Dark

SR: Even though I've seen every movie made from one of your scripts, Reversal of Fortune was the first time I'd ever really seen what I perceive to be your real humanity-and malice-onscreen.

NK: It's the first time I've seen one of my scripts. Finally I got a director and actors with a sense of humor who believed it was okay to be funny. What a relief. Ed Pressman, who had sent the book to Brian DePalma, told me, laughing, that DePalma would only do it if Sunny von Bulow were the hero. I [later] remembered Ed's remark and I realized that the one perspective we didn't have was Sunny's. So, I said, "Let's give it a whirl" and I immediately wrote the last lines of the film. It became a script about how you never know for fucking sure. That's the situation we are in life. We don't know for sure if this person loves us. We don't know for sure if our parents loved each other. The only thing we know for sure is about ourselves. By cutting back to Sunny in a coma, I was giving the film a kind of emotional solidity that most legal, murder dramas don't have. They forget the victim. It sort of reminded the audience, without mentioning it, of the emotional stakes of what we're dealing with.

SR: You and Schroeder worked closely.

NK: The first director on Reversal [Hugh Hudson] wanted me to keep working on the script. I believed I would be fired. But Ed Pressman said, "No, I want to make this script." With Barbet, I literally wore a beeper in Los Angeles. He wouldn't change a line without asking me. If the actors wanted to change a line, he would call me up and ask me. We spent three days going through the script scene by scene, line by line, character by character.

SR: I'd heard that Jeremy Irons had reservations about playing von Bulow.

NK: Glenn, Jeremy, and Ron Silver were all in London at the same time, so Barbet and I flew there. Jeremy walks into the reading and says, "It's a lovely script, but I'm sorry to have put you through all this trouble. You see, I can't possibly play a man who's bald. I'm not going bald and if I'm not, I'd be self-conscious about changing my appearance." After we read it, there was this long pause and he said, "Perhaps there's something I could do with my hair." He had to acknowledge that his hair was going to thin and then that it might thin more rather than less, then that his hairline might someday recede somewhat and it went on from there.

SR: Was Alan Dershowitz as interesting to you as Claus and Sunny?

NK: He owned control over how he was portrayed as a lawyer. I liked him. I didn't want him to look bad. My first meeting I said, "You are not going to like how you're portrayed." If I gave the character Alan's flaws, which are always more interesting to me as a writer, he wouldn't like it. If I gave him flaws he didn't have, he wouldn't like it even more. Also, the real Dershowitz is a lot like Woody Allen, which I couldn't write-there's a way in which he's mysterious that I never completely understood.

SR: My favorite quality about Reversal of Fortune--besides its wit-is its mystery, its respect for things that are, finally, unknowable.

NK: Mystery is the essence of art. There's an unfortunate tendency in commercial films to give audiences something that's a package, completely predigested. I always want to leave something left to digest.

SR: What do you see as your strengths as a writer?

NK: Passion. I'm a mediocre writer unless I'm really excited, then I'm pretty good. Hopefully, when I'm excited I can liberate my unconscious and then, I'm expressing, in a Jungian sense, fears, hopes, desires that we all have.

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