Director Jeremiah Chechik explains why making The Avengers was ever so much more fun than his last movie, Diabolique, and promised that Ralph Fiennes will be "light as a feather" as Mr. Steed.
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You know the old axiom that advises, "Never trust the artist, trust the tale"? The wisdom of that saying almost invariably goes triple when moviemakers get around to appraising their own work. Consider the pronouncements director Jeremiah Chechik has made about his oeuvre. Of his debut effort he said: "I liked the idea of trying to re-create an old-fashioned comedy of manners in the tradition of Sturges, Hawks or Lubitsch." Of what latter-day paean to the works of those stylishly irreverent directors is he speaking? National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. And here's his in-progress description as he was remaking the classic Diabolique: "Our script is a thousand times more relevant, interesting and complex than the original movie."
Driving toward the director's home in the twisty, sylvan streets of Santa Monica Canyon during an El Nino downpour, I can't help but reflect on the various forms of self-delusion moviemaking sometimes promotes. Or rather, requires. It's not that I haven't really liked some of Chechik's movies. I have great fondness for the idiosyncratic love story Benny & Joon and for the little-seen kid's Americana epic Tall Tale. Sometimes, though, directors don't walk it like they talk it.
Still, I'm thinking as I stand rapping on Chechik's door in relentless rain, this director is intriguing, and not only because he's just made The Avengers, the big-budget, big-screen version of the cult British '60s TV spy series. Here's someone who attracts powerful stars to his projects, people like Johnny Depp and Sharon Stone, not to mention The Avengers' cast members, Ralph Fiennes, Uma Thurman and Sean Connery. Obviously actors see more in Chechik's work than audiences and critics so far have.
The director opens the door, greets me casually, gives my sopping clothes and hair a cursory look, and leads me through his handsome home, which features a Buddhist shrine, bold contemporary art pieces, and a wall of windows opening out on a view of spectacular foliage. Explaining that he's under the gun timewise because he's flying back to England after today to attend to details on The Avengers, he directs me to a long slate slab dining-room table, then proceeds to his kitchen to fix himself breakfast. When he returns, he sets his egg whites in front of himself, then gives me a flicker of a nod and grin that are, I suspect, as close as I'm going to get to an invitation to begin asking questions.
Alrighty, then. "Was doing The Avengers something of a lark," I ask, "especially after Diabolique, which was anything but, and Tall Tale, which most people don't know even exists?"
"I don't tend to have fun working," Chechik responds, between hearty chomps. "You just go in hoping for the best. Benny & Joon was fun. The Avengers was the most fun I could ever imagine having on so big a movie. Diabolique was a nightmare. Again, you just never know going in. Did I know what Sharon Stone was like? But let bygones be bygones."
With this, Chechik goes off the record to unload just a small dose of the bile he's got stored up over making the shocker about two women who conspire to murder a guy they're both having sex with. Whether or not he thinks his Diabolique improved on director Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1955 original, the newer version proved not only a critical and financial bloodbath, but also a profoundly unpleasant moviemaking experience.
"I brought that on myself," he says, back on the record, "by putting together two highly charged female movie stars like Isabelle Adjani and Sharon, and then adding to that mix Kathy Bates. Sharon and I began very friendly. We were friends before we did it. When the project ended, we weren't speaking. I tried to help her go through whatever she had to go through to do it. She had her issues with the producer and the studio and used me in her game with them. And used the movie against me. I was trying to make the movie--I wasn't trying to deal with the politics outside of the movie, of which there were a huge amount. Some of what was reported in the press was true, but everyone used it to their own ends and really forgot about the movie. That's what made it so difficult. To this day I love the performances of Kathy Bates and Isabelle, with whom I became very close. Actually, I love Sharon's performance. I think it's good."
So, given all this good work, did he indeed make a film better than the original Diabolique? "I feel that my movie and the first are flip sides of the same coin," he answers. "I wanted to see how far I could take a movie perceived as a classic--a movie that was misogynistic--by reinterpreting it, as a man, as a feminist movie. That's pretty bold, in retrospect. Maybe I shouldn't have done it. I wanted to do a movie that was not light. What I ended up with was a movie that was so dark it had no light at all." He lets out a staccato laugh, adding, "Which may explain why it was kind of trounced critically--unfairly, I believe. A lot of the critical hostility came from just my attempt to redo it. I think it will be reevaluated, I really do. When there are no issues, no baggage, the movie will be seen in the light that I made it. Probably after I'm dead."
The movie more likely to be recognized after Chechik's death, if not before, is the neglected Tall Tale, a fantastical slice of American folklore featuring Nick Stahl as a boy encountering Pecos Bill and Paul Bunyan. "I'm very proud of that movie, which has a wonderful sense of the American culture and draws from the richness of American folklore," he asserts. "It got great reviews, and in test screenings, it scored as high as any movie possibly could. It was a failure of marketing. We never found a way to sell it."
Chechik shrugs. "At the end of the day," he says, "these movies are going to be part of the legacy I leave. They're not going anywhere. I try to make movies for my own life, for what is important to me. But the audience's collective consciousness may demand other experiences at the movies. Compare films like Jackie Brown and Pulp Fiction. Pulp Fiction was fun, but it didn't have near the depth, complexity, irony or skill of acting that Jackie Brown had. Jackie Brown knocked my socks off. Hats off to you, Quentin. Who knows why, but people weren't interested."
We'll soon see whether people are interested in Chechik's newest film, The Avengers. It certainly has appeal going in: a bold, grand-scale visual style, a cast that includes Sean Connery as a wacky mastermind named Sir August deWynter, Uma Thurman as both slinky Emma Peel and Peel's robot doppelganger, and the very English Ralph Fiennes as the very English secret agent Mr. Steed. It also boasts a considerable history. This is a project that's been around for years, with various stars and directors involved over a long course of collapsing initiatives.
Did Chechik have any doubts about tackling a film that's taken so long to get off the ground? "Trying to find a Hollywood project that doesn't have other people's fingerprints on it is like trying to find a virgin in Hollywood," he declares. "That doesn't bother me a bit. I got the job." Did he feel trepidation about making a project from a British TV series with a cult following? "I had no trepidation," he says. "Most people, certainly in this country, have never even heard of The Avengers. The cultists will all go see it the first weekend anyway. Then the movie stands on its own."
So, what exactly was it about The Avengers that attracted Chechik? "I read the script and thought, 'Unlike Diabolique, this isn't a psychological story. It's as fun a movie as I could imagine. I like stories that are not predictable, characters that are odd. That's the material I feel most comfortable with. I don't care about the genre. The commonality in my movies is the quirkiness of the characters within the world of the movie. The Avengers is a very simple story, basically about a mad scientist who has figured out a way to create weather and is holding the world up for ransom. Steed, who works for the British Ministry, and Peel, who knows a lot about science and weather, must stop him. And they do. Oh, no, now I've given away the ending!" He cracks up laughing.
Chechik's take on The Avengers sounds vastly different from those of moviemakers who considered the project earlier. According to London's Sunday Times, years ago, Mel Gibson nearly took a flier at playing John Steed in an action-comedy version, but opted instead to do the Lethal Weapon flicks. Before David Fincher made his name with Se7en, he did an Avengers script which he envisioned as "very cruel, very violent, with Charles Dance as Steed." Three years ago, director/writer Nicholas Meyer signed a deal to direct the movie based on a script by Don MacPherson, the writer of credit on Chechik's version.
"What I wanted to do was try and make a very smart action movie," Chechik says. "I think that once we moved into the '70s with disaster movies like The Towering Inferno, the visual kinetics began to overwhelm the characters and stories. Not that there haven't been wonderful, smart action movies since, but we seem to have drifted into a world where movie stars are people who run in front of fireballs. What I liked about The Avengers is that, at the heart of the movie, there's this wonderful playfulness, this wonderful Gable-Lombard banter between two fabulous characters."
The short supply of contemporary Gables and Lombards forced Chechik and producer Jerry Weintraub to come up with what they saw as contemporary analogs. "I saw Ralph Fiennes as Steed, pure and simple," Chechik observes. "It was never a question for me and there was no Plan B. He exemplified that classic sensibility--modern, yet traditional, kind of handsome. Cary Grant, Fred Astaire. I'd known him for several years and, while he was in Tunisia making The English Patient, I phoned him and said, 'I've got your next movie."'
To the observation that Fiennes, unlike Cary Grant or Fred Astaire, isn't renowned for his light touch, Chechik counters, "He has a light touch. He's fabulous at it. He's as light as a feather in this, and that's what people have never seen him do."
If Chechik was certain from the get-go about who his Mr. Steed was going to be, his perfect Emma Peel was more elusive. He dismisses as "not relevant" the circumstances as to why it wasn't Ralph and Nicole, or Ralph and Gwyneth, among other pairings. He also dismisses statements made in the press about Kidman by The Avengers TV series creator Brian Clemens, who observed that Kidman looked "too hard" and didn't have "the vulnerability that made the leather catsuits and high kicks that much more surprising and exciting."
"I don't remember [him] saying that," says Chechik, "but if [anyone] did, I'd say, 'Sure, if you're going to direct the movie, great, otherwise ...' The woman had to work well with Ralph and look good in the catsuit. She had to be able to do a good, strong, female personification and had to have energy equal to Ralph's and an intelligent sexuality. It's exciting when five people come in for the same part, and I often want to give them all the same part. The choice is often just a shading, a color interpretation, a quality of voice, a look in the eye. It's true that Nicole Kidman was one choice, Gwyneth, too. Uma got the part. She's extraordinarily hardworking, a very nose-to-the-grindstone person who's like, 'Let's just do it.' She worked very hard on her accent, the physical stuff. I don't know that any director can take responsibility for the sexual chemistry between two actors, other than putting them in the same room, but with Ralph and Uma, it was an 11 out of a possible 10."
What was it like watching Patrick Macnee, who lends his voice to an invisible character in the movie, watching Fiennes take over the role Macnee virtually defined, let alone watching Sean Connery watching Fiennes play a James Bond-like character? "Sometimes I did feel a little as if I were making a kind of Bond movie," Chechik recalls, "and working with Sean just reinforced it. With both Patrick and Sean, the mantle was definitely passed, both consciously and with great aplomb. We got on like a house on fire and it never let up. Sean got into the spirit of the movie before day one. We never thought, quite honestly, that we'd get him for the movie, but we didn't want to jinx it by even thinking of anyone else for the role. Like Ralph, there was no Plan B if Sean passed on it."
How does Chechik account for his ability to attract such interesting actors as Connery, not to mention Depp, Adjani and Fiennes to work with him? "Beats me," he grins. "I count actors among my very closest friends. I adore Johnny, for instance, who is one of the finest actors of his generation. I respect the actor's process. It's something I empathize with. I try to create an atmosphere that allows that process to flourish, where the actors can explore, feel safe. I respect that each actor has their own way of getting there and it's my job to make a challenging, fulfilling experience. On a smaller movie like Benny & Joon, you can devote yourself almost exclusively to the actors. Bigger movies like The Avengers require a certain amount of 'managing' as well as directing. However, when you're on the set of a big movie or small, within the scene, for me, it's all about the actors."
The importance of acting notwithstanding, the success of The Avengers will depend importantly on the evocation of a fantastic, stylized universe in which the cloak and dagger derring-do gets done. The movie boasts such A-list talents as award-winning production designer Stuart Craig and costume designer Anthony Powell (_101 Dalmatians, Hook_). "It's very surrealistic, a world completely unto itself," the director explains. "The posters for the movie say it well: 'Saving the world with style.' As in the show, there are almost no people on the streets, except maybe a woman pushing a pram, a bobby on a bicycle. It feels like an intimate movie on a grand scale. Stuart Craig created an absolutely magical, dream kind of London, both modern and Edwardian, we never question as we move our story through, never explain it, and never wink at the camera.
"I drew consciously from the world of fashion," Chechik continues, "on my background as a fashion photographer for Vogue in the late '70s. It all had to be of a piece, because the visual style is bold and unique, and the characters are totally unique, and even the action sequences are offbeat--interpretations of action sequences within the context of this wonderful, playful universe. It would be great if the movie paved the way toward a smarter kind of action movie."
Pave the way toward a smarter action picture? How about finding a way back to a smarter action picture, like North by Northwest, say, where Hitchcock shot big action set pieces in which characters spouted Ernest Lehman's witty, trenchant dialogue? "But you're talking about one of the greatest movies ever made," Chechik declares. "We can look at paintings and go, 'Tsk, would that they could all be Guernica.' I hope that, in our own way, we all aspire to the level of North by Northwest, but a lot of it is the age we live in. Why movies exist has changed. When that movie came out, television was not what it is today. Going to the movies now is a major investment in time and emotion. There's an audience that wants escapism pure and simple and doesn't want to be challenged. We look to shows like ER to get characterizations and relationships, and we look to movies for big, explosive entertainment.
"There's a certain cynicism now," Chechik continues. "The mass audience is uncomfortable with literary experiences on film. Maybe movies that are full of action but smart and personal, too, will come back in a new form. Sometimes movies with mass appeal can be brilliant and amazing like Titanic, or they can be mundane like movies I don't have to mention. All I hope is that audiences leave The Avengers--which is a nutty, light, weird, fun, offbeat movie--wearing huge grins on their faces, going, 'I've got to see that again.'"
Should mass audiences take to The Avengers, would Chechik direct another installment? "I don't know what I'm going to do next," he cautions, "because I don't know what I'm going to be, what person is going to emerge from this particular experience. I don't even think of my 'career' as a career. I'm here to direct movies, and I pour myself into directing them with as much passion as I have for life. All I think is, 'What a great gift it is to be alive in this world and to do the things I do every day with the kind of people I do them with.' I'm glad, honored, respectful, and fortunate."
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Stephen Rebello interviewed Christina Ricci for the April '98 issue of Movieline.