Rebels on the Backlot (29 page)

From the final script:

In the process, Pitt became far more committed to playing Tyler Durden. From February through to the shoot, Pitt, Norton, Fincher, and Andy Walker spent almost every day in a room on Hollywood Boulevard going through the script over and over, rehearsing, and playing nerf basketball. Pitt and Norton also learned how to make soap.

Somewhere in those weeks in March, Pitt told Fincher he knew of an actress he should consider for the role of Marla, a woman who Jack meets while they are both sitting in on survivor groups, sucking emotion from the experience. They have an affair; Fincher and Palahniuk both saw
Fight Club
as a love story (they also considered it a comedy), with Marla as the love interest. Pitt popped into his VCR a videotape of the lyrical, period romance
The Wings of the Dove
, which starred British actress Helena Bonham Carter, who never looked more delicate and lovely. Fincher was confused. “Helena Bonham Carter? For Marla?” The character is meant to be scrawny and hollow-eyed, vacantly searching for sexual and emotional connection. Pitt said, “Just watch the movie.” Fincher did and strangely, he agreed; he thought she could internalize the self-torture of Marla.

Bonham Carter was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in
The Wings of the Dove
, and happened to be in town. Fincher met her at the Four Seasons for a drink. “She was this tiny little pale thing, and there were circles under her eyes. She had this beautiful, exquisite face and she just chain-smoked constantly and she said, “Why do you want me to do this movie?’” the director recalled.

Fincher replied, “Well, I think you’d be really good in it, you know, for the movie’s sake it should have somebody good in this part.”

Bonham Carter said, “Yeah, but it’s so misogynist. It’s just awful.
I was just wondering what work of mine that you’d seen that made you think that I was right.”

“Well, I liked
Wings of the Dove
, and both Brad Pitt and I were sold on you then.”

“Really?”

The actress was so flattered at the leap of imagination from
Wings of the Dove
to Marla that she agreed to consider it. She gave the script to her mother, a psychotherapist, who hated it. But she let her mother meet Fincher the next time she was in town. She still disliked the misogyny in the script, but Bonham Carter’s mother thought Fincher was funny—he was notoriously so—and she gave her daughter the thumbs-up. When the movie premiered at the Venice Film Festival, Bonham Carter’s mother “was the only person laughing,” Fincher recalled. “Her mother was just howling, she was rolling in the aisles.”

Happy to have found the Marla he wanted, Fincher went back to the studio to tell them. Great news, he said, Helena Bonham Carter wants to do the film. The Fox executives were far less enthusiastic. They had wanted a name actress, someone they’d worked with before. They pushed for Winona Ryder, who they’d worked with on
Alien: Resurrection
(the fourth installment) and
The Crucible.
Fincher wasn’t interested; he was tired of Ryder doing “the Goth chick thing.” Then Fox wanted Reese Witherspoon. Fincher thought she was too young. “It had to be a woman who was there going, ‘Look I want to fuck you, but I don’t want to fuck you,’” he said. A woman, not a girl. (Witherspoon instead took the role of an overambitious high school student in
Election
, Alexander Payne’s debut effort at Paramount, another rebel working contentiously within the studio system. For Witherspoon, the part launched her to
Legally Blonde
and stardom.) That left Fox with Bonham Carter, and their fear that she pushed the production still further in the direction of the dreaded Art Film. But eventually they deferred to Fincher.

After a year of work on the script and after five drafts, Fincher was ready. He went to dinner at Chianti, a restaurant on Melrose, with Ziskin and McCormick. In a private room in the back he laid it out: Here’s the script, here are storyboards, here’s a visual effects
breakdown. Brad Pitt and Edward Norton want to play the leads. The budget would be $60 million. He told them: This is the package. I want to shoot this entire script. I want final cut. Then he gave them three days to respond.

B
ILL
M
ECHANIC HAD GIVEN
L
AURA
Z
ISKIN THE GO-AHEAD
with Fincher attached, but watched with dismay as the budget rose from the forties to the fifties to the sixties. Ziskin was getting nervous, too. “At $50 million it was a good bet,” she thought. But the budget wasn’t finished going up. Before giving the green light, Mechanic had met with Fincher at the director’s house and seen the whole package. Fincher had shown him the title sequence, where the camera begins inside a man’s brain, then courses through the veins and nerve synapses through his eyes and then flies down the handle of the gun into Jack’s mouth to begin with the narrator’s voice-over. It was an amazing visual image, requiring many layered, cutting-edge digital effects, which Fincher had devised with the special effects house Digital Domain even before he created the shoot. The movie was full of special effects—with a budget totaling $5 million—but this one scene, which really had no bearing on the story line itself, was going to cost $800,000. Fincher didn’t blink at asking for it. Another difficult scene had Jack and Tyler on an airplane, when—in a fantasy sequence—the side of the plane suddenly explodes open with the passengers sucked out into the void. It was a costly scene that would also mean that the movie was unlikely to be sold to airline companies for inflight viewing—a small revenue stream sacrificed.

Mechanic was willing to bite on all of it, but he wanted to know why the shoot had to be eighty to hundred days, extremely long in Hollywood terms. Mechanic warned Fincher that he could have the pricey title sequence only if he stayed on schedule. That would have to wait until the end, once Fincher proved he’d kept his nose to the grindstone. Also, Fincher would have to cut his fee. The director agreed, relinquishing a fourth of his $4 million salary: a million dollars.

But in taking the leap to make
Fight Club
, Mechanic had some built-in cushioning, because the studio had scored a massive hit at the box office with
Titanic
and had recently rereleased the first three
Star Wars
movies with tremendous fanfare and great financial success. They needed to put new things in the pipeline; they couldn’t rerelease
Star Wars
forever. Maybe
Fight Club
would hit big, Mechanic thought.

Fincher could hardly believe that Fox was going to make the movie he wanted. He didn’t ask twice.

For a full year, Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze worked intensely on the script for
John Malkovich
, going through the screenplay page by page to develop each character and scene. Most people interpreted the script as a comment on the emptiness of society’s fascination with celebrity, with the genius twist of using the actual celebrity to mock himself. But for Kaufman and Jonze, it quickly became about the characters the writer had created, not some absurdist farce.

“The more I talked to Charlie the more I saw the complexities in the relationships, in the characters,” Jonze remembered. “I guess when I first read it, I was hit by how absurd it was, but then very quickly I just became focused on the characters in the story and making it real, at least real enough to where it made sense to me and the characters’ motivations made sense to me. And Charlie, as a writer, as big as his ideas are, he’s also very focused on making things real, in terms of the moments between the characters and why characters are doing what they’re doing. That’s the most exciting thing, feeling like it’s coming from something you understand, as opposed to just being arbitrary or random.” The script kept evolving, sometimes dramatically, and the ending was always a problem. In the early version Craig the puppeteer found himself competing against the reigning puppeteer king, with the puppet show featuring a sixty-foot puppet of the devil. The ending plagued them all the way through the shoot, and it was finally shot a second
time but by the end of 1997 Kaufman and Jonze had a draft they liked well enough to go on to the next step.

It was time to approach John Malkovich. Without him, the movie could not move forward. Everyone involved began to panic: What if Malkovich said no? Neither Jonze nor Kaufman could think of anyone else who would be right in the title role if the actor turned them down: Being John Lithgow. Being Harvey Fierstein. Being Anthony Hopkins. “It was a scary thing when you put all of your hopes into one person. It’s like you’re really giving the control over to somebody else,” said Jonze. “We had a list of fifty people—all the iconic actors, everybody, but there was no even close second.” Malkovich, they agreed, had something particular, not just a sense of uncontrolled menace, which the actor used in a lot of roles, but an air of secrecy. The actor lived in an obscure village in the French countryside, far from Hollywood and the insanity of celebrity culture. There seemed something unknowable about him. “There’s a lot you can project onto him. Not necessarily him as a person, but his persona—you don’t really know who he is,” said Jonze. “There’s something so enigmatic about him.”

Finally they sent him the script through his agent. And then they waited.

Endlessly, it seemed, they waited for Malkovich. Two months went by. Jonze finally pulled some strings. His girlfriend (and soon-to-be wife) Sofia Coppola was the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola. They’d met on the set of a Sonic Youth music video in 1992 and seemed a perfect misfit couple despite her Hollywood pedigree. They were both shy and kind of awkward—Coppola is skinny and plain, Olive Oyl to Jonze’s Popeye, minus the muscles—but both had an almost unconscious ability to be trendsetters, to live inside their artistic sensibilities. (Jonze, ever unpredictable, wooed Coppola in the oddest of ways; he once picked her up at the L.A. airport with cotton balls stuck in his jowls, wearing a fatty suit and with Vaseline smeared all over his face.) Coppola got her father to call Malkovich and ask him to meet with Jonze. “Francis said, ‘In 10 years we’ll all be working for him,’” Malkovich recalled. “So I said, of course I would.”

In late 1997, on a gray day in Paris, a slight, mousy-haired American in rumpled trousers and sneakers walked into the Hotel Raphael, the elegant, rococo-style hotel situated just a few steps from the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, near the Champs-Élysées. Spike Jonze was there to meet the mythical John Malkovich, and he was about twenty minutes early. He decided not to call up to Malkovich’s room just yet and strolled into the hotel’s formal tea salon, the Blue Room, with its ornate gold-and-turquoise flourishes. Nervous, he found a table and pulled out his notes to go through them one last time: What do I say? How do I sell myself? An introvert, Jonze hated these meetings. Suddenly he heard a familiar voice. Over his shoulder at the next table, he saw John Malkovich, wearing his customary ascot. Beside him was his producing partner Russ Smith and a couple of other people. They didn’t notice Jonze—not surprising, since none of them knew what the director looked like. (Jonze is not the sort of person who attracts attention anyway.) Jonze sat there for several long minutes, wondering what to say. The longer he waited the more nervous he became. Should he say something? What if they think he’s eavesdropping? Maybe he should quietly slink from the room? It felt like a scene worthy of a Charlie Kaufman script, perhaps a sequel to the script at hand. Finally, after several more minutes, Jonze worked up his nerve to make eye contact. He introduced himself. Malkovich, smiling, was friendly.

And curious. Why me? He wanted to know. Jonze tried to explain why Malkovich was the right person for this role, both as an actor and a cultural icon.

Malkovich was still curious. What’s the movie going to be? What tone will you take? he asked.

Jonze explained that it would be a serious take on the script, as rooted in the real world as possible.

Malkovich then said something encouraging. “I love the writing. If I were being sent this script to play any of the supporting roles, or to play Craig, or any other thing, I would say yes without even thinking about it.”

But in truth the actor was in a bit of a quandary. Although he
found the whole idea original and intriguing, there was plenty of risk involved. If he did the film and it became a huge success, it could become an indelible parody of him. It could even overshadow his ability to convincingly play other characters. If it was a flop, well, it would definitely be the worst possible embarrassment for an actor: a lousy movie about him, starring him, with his name in the title.

Still, he’d seen and liked Spike Jonze’s videos, especially the one with Bjork. He needed to think about it.

A few weeks later Malkovich met Jonze with Charlie Kaufman in New York, before deciding to take the plunge. By now, he’d become a full convert. He told them to turn it up, make the satire sharper. He figured why hold back? Who better to make fun of yourself—your impotence, your vanity, your ridiculousness—and say it’s okay? he thought. He later told the
New York Times
, “I am ridiculous. I am a celebrity. It’s sort of like a human sacrifice. To offer yourself up as a subject of ridicule and scorn to make a point about the society we live in, which has this celebrity obsession.”