Joining them is Spanish actor Sergio Peris-Mencheta in a striking English-language debut as the boxer who comes between them, while Gina Gershon, Taryn Manning, Scout Taylor-Compton and Bai LIng chip in as part of the chorus of Love Ranch whores making history in the Nevada desert. Movieline caught up with Hackford in New York, where the Oscar-winner talked about coaxing Pesci out of retirement, the lucky stroke of finding Peris-Mencheta, and the challenges of directing the "best actress in the world" -- particularly when you're married to her.
So this one's been a while in coming, no?
It has been. It should have finished a year ago.
Finished a year ago, or released a year ago?
Released a year ago. It was kind of a circuitous route. The fact that it is finished and I'm pleased with it... It's great to get it out.
How is that as filmmaker? This long...
This long gestation? It was weird! I've never had that experience before. We shot the film on schedule, we shot the film on budget. I cut it together, and the company made it for had money problems. And it literally sat unfinished for a year. On the process, for a lot of it, we expected it to get started again. Finally you come to the realization, "Oh my God." There were other offers to go out and make other films. This is the problem: You've seduced a group of collaborators -- both actors and crew -- to go along with you. You're the driving force to make this film. You just can't abandon it. If you do, it'll never get finished. Luckily we were able to get the finishing money, and I had a lot of people help me. We didn't have all the money we needed. From back when I started, I have a lot of collaborators in post; they all got together, and I didn't have to make any horrible compromises. I'm very pleased with how it turned out. You have to just look at it as a kind of adventure.
But it's different. Ray took me 13 years to get the script done and make the film. And two years to make it, so 15 years in all. This came quickly, we made the movie and then had this wait. So there's no cookie-cutter process for these things.
That's Hollywood. How did this story come to you?
I have a friend named Mark Jacobson who writes for New York Magazine. We're old boxing fans. Mark and a fellow named Lou DiBella -- Lou's a boxing promoter -- called me up and said, "You know this story?" I said, "Of course I know this story." Anyone who grew up at a certain time knows the story of the Mustang Ranch -- the first legal brothel in the United States. They mentioned it to me, and I thought, "This could be interesting."
Because I was looking for something to do with my wife. We hadn't worked together for 25 years, and that's not for lack of trying. But when you make something, you have a passion for making it. You think, "Maybe I can find something for Helen to do." Well, that's not the right approach. It's going to be a subsidiary role. In Ray, what am I going to have for her to do? In Dolores Claiborne, it's Kathy Bates's movie. In Devil's Advocate, there was no real role for her to play that was of any substance. And frankly, she didn't want to do cameo appearances in my movie. That wasn't of interest to her. So when I heard about this, I thought, "Wait a minute, this is interesting. There's a triangular love story. There's a woman in the middle. She's playing a woman of rather substantial character." In a brothel, it's always the madam that runs everything, and she's a character you rarely see or understand.
What did Helen say?
When I presented it to her, she didn't dismiss it it out of hand. And as I got to work with Mark on the script, and as I gave it to her, she got more and more warm. Now, this wasn't just a Helen Mirren vehicle. I went to Joe Pesci first; he's the only one I ever really considered. He hadn't acted for 10 years -- self-imposed. He's a very unique iconoclast. I really had to seduce him into it.
When you're making period films -- this, Ray, Everybody's All American -- what is the impulse to fight and/or embrace nostalgia?
I want to do realistic nostalgia. I mean, the '70s are so aberrant. Big hair, big sideburns, big shoes, big clothes. Materials you look at today and kind of go, "Whoa." It's garish style personified -- the disco era, right? You can't just make the whole movie about that. [Costume designer] Melissa Bruning was fantastic. She found all that. We didn't have the money to [make costumes]. That was all vintage. She bought, she found, and she did build a few. But those cars and all of those things that really add the feeling of the period are not to wallow in. I want you to feel like you're in 1976, and people in 1976 believed they were contemporary! You're not looking back through a veil of age. These people re alive, they believe they're living in the moment. That's what I wanted to portray -- to keep it real. The style's inevitable. It helps the picture look real.
I actually shot the film in a '70s style. It's not like we're trying to do something today that looks like it's cinema verite. I wanted to keep it vibrant, alive and energetic -- but also do something of its time.
Back to Pesci: When I was watching him, I wondered if maybe he wasn't part of keeping the reality of that era. He's vintage; it's as if he still had something to say about it. Is that even close to accurate?
Well, I didn't think of that per se, but the truth of the matter is that Joe is a mature artist. He knows that era; it was an era he was vibrantly alive in. But his choices are really interesting. The antecedent -- Joe Conforte, who started the Mustang Ranch -- was from the Northeast. I think he was from Boston; I think he might have been a taxi driver. He had this impossible dream -- the Great American Dream like every other Great American Dream: "How do I strike it rich?" i mean, come on! This is impossible. This is 200 years of puritan ethic and mores. And he had had the charm, the drive, the ethic, the ingenuity to convince these people to legalize prostitution.
It's a life force that is Joe Pesci. And that's energy. You feel like he's a man. Whatever his size, he's going to make up for it. And I thought that was very important. He was the only actor I wanted, and I went to seduce him into doing it. And I'm pleased -- he's a consummate professional. He might have been hesitant to come out of retirement, but once he was out, he was a force to be reckoned with. And I do believe he knew what he was playing. Here's a guy -- we're playing him from Jersey, where Joe's from -- who absolutely embraces that Western ethos. He's a brothel owner in northern Nevada. There's a style. He doesn't dress like he's from New Jersey, though there is that garish style. But he's a cowboy! He loved that stuff. He kept his New Jersey accent but put on the accoutrements of the West. This is pretty much what Joe Conforte did. He made it his own, but he also understood what the '70s were all about. It wasn't someone mimicking it.
You're working with two masters in front of the camera -- one of whom you're pretty intimate with -- and you're hardly a slouch yourself as a filmmaker. I'm interested in that triangulation -- how things function at that level of performance. How did the three of you collaborate?
For me, I just trust them. Number one, I say to my wife, "I want a really good American accent. I want that flat, Western accent. I don't want a Mid-Atlantic accent; this is a working-class woman. I want a flat accent." And she worked at it intensely. With Joe, I had specific things I wanted from him. But at the same time, when you have horse who are thoroughbreds -- that you trust -- once you get them on board, they are themselves. They're professional egos are such that they're going to be serious. They're going to do their research.
For instance: Whorehouses are societies of women. It's not like a pimp with one or two whores. That's a very difficult situation; that's a very exploitative situation. A whorehouse is not exploitative. Those girls are independent contractors. They make their own money, and they can make as much money as they are good at making. But it has to be run, and the person who runs it is a woman. So I took Helen to Nevada and I introduced her to a madam -- a woman who had been at the Mustang Ranch and is now running her own places. I'd met her and thought she was really fantastic. Helen didn't want to go. I said, "Why should you approach this role any differently than anything else you've ever done? When you did _Prime Suspect, did you go to Scotland Yard? Did you meet the female P.I.? Absolutely. You've got to do the same thing here." And when she got there, she loved it. But I let her do her own work once she figured out what it was. She wasn't hanging out with me at the monitor; she was bonding with those actors and developing a relationship that works for the movie.
And then, on the other side, there's Sergio Peris-Mencheta in a kind of breakthrough role.
Yeah, the boxer character is a major character here. He's the catalyst that creates the triangle, and he has to stand toe-to-toe with some consummate veterans. So finding Sergio was a big deal for me. He's fantastic. He gained 35 pounds for the role. He's a physical guy -- he was captain of the Spanish rugby team -- but he'd never boxed. So I put him in Gleason's Gym, here in New York. Jimmy Glenn, who's one of the great legends of the fight game, trained him -- but not the sweet sport of movement. He's not in there looking like Sugar Ray Robinson. [Oscar] Bonavena was a muscle guy. He didn't have style; he just had an incredible punch. For Sergio to learn that -- to mimic that style? If you look at Bonavena and look at this film, Sergio is playing him really authentically.
To put in that person -- who's doing his first film in America and coming into it much younger -- was the interesting quotient to me. You're throwing into the equation new talent who has to be great to stand on the screen with those two. But at the same time, actors never act alone. Him counterbalancing those two veterans was allowing me to say, "I don't know what's going to happen." And those are always interesting moments.
To what extent is it an advantage -- or a disadvantage -- to work with your wife?
Listen. I say this with all sincerity, and you can check the source, but: My wife is the best actress in the world. I believe. There are a couple of others who are pretty damn good. But you're blessed when you work with her. Is there any disadvantage? No... The only sense is that we know each other so well that... Well, even with that, she gave me ultimate respect as a director. I mean, occasionally, when a woman lives with a man for a long time, we all have our eccentricities or sameyness that are in our styles of speech. So therefore they have a way of tuning us out. That's a dangerous situation for an actor and a director. She's already going, "Oh, I've heard his lines before." Well, don't tune me out! A couple of times I found that she'd kind of not listened to what I'd said.
Oh no.
But that was very rare -- very rare. I'd give her a note, and on the next take I'd come back and say, "Hey, here's this note." And I'd say it forcefully. And she'd say, "You don't have to be so forceful! Just tell me!" I said, "I did tell you -- on the last take." So there was that. But very rarely. And on the other hand, the drawback is that the person you're with on a regular basis who you can be candid with, you can also sometimes lose patience with. And she can lose patience with me. She never lost patience with me as a director. I did, occasionally, let my frustration come out in a way that I never would have done with another actor. But I did it with her, because she's my wife, and it was wrong. So there are things you find in that context. When we first worked with each other in '84-'85, we were just discovering each other. It's a different world now.
I don't think there are any real drawbacks, though, to Helen Mirren. She's a leader on the set. She's brilliant. Any actor does this -- like when I was blessed with Jamie Foxx. When you have a vision and you try to get that vision to an actor, if they're great, they'll take your vision far beyond what yours is, and they show you another side. They collaborate with you.
I've directed a lot of love scenes. I've had a lot of love scenes in my films, but they're acting scenes. They're important for the story. This isn't about showing flesh or anything else. Do you need to know, in An Officer and a Gentleman, that Richard Gere and Debra Winger are having sex before they fall in love? It's about lust. It's about screwing the local girls and then discovering over a certain period of time that you've actually discovered feelings for somebody. The sex is an important key. In Against All Odds, it's instantaneous passion. In Devil's Advocate, it's about being with one wife and dreaming about another. You know? They're scenes that are about character, about story. The fact that they're about a mechanical act is not what it's really about.
So in this instance, I know what I need. At the beginning of this film, Helen was courageous enough to let me make her look tired -- to make it look like she was shut off emotionally and romantically. She's dried up. And over the course of this movie she blossoms. Part of that is hair and makeup and costume, but a lot of it comes from the actress allowing this thing to evolve. You start to see her become younger. You start to see her become more feminine. That's great. But when you come to a moment where you have to see her and Sergio get it on, it's really important that it works. They understand as actors.
To me, it wasn't my wife I had to worry about; Helen will go for whatever. It was Sergio. Think about that: He's acting with an actress who's married to the guy behind the camera. He's got to put his hands on her breasts. He's got to the things that make it real. I was just saying to him, "Listen, this is an acting scene like any other acting scene. If you don't do it correctly, then we're going to be doing it over and over again, and it's going to be ugly. Make it work. Don't worry about me, because I understand what you're doing. And you have to go for it." Otherwise, if you're bringing your own personal life into it, you're going to fail.