Rebels on the Backlot (37 page)

When di Bonaventura returned from vacation and discovered that Miller had tried to quash the film, he was livid. He told Russell he would quit if the movie didn’t go forward, telling him, “If I can’t make movies like this, I don’t want this job.” But Clooney’s letter helped defuse the standoff. Semel allowed di Bonaventura to pick up the threads of preproduction and continue as planned. Russell always referred to this incident as “a coup attempt.” He never shook Jim Miller’s hand again.

Russell also suspected that Warner had used this moment to place a wedge between him and his star. He dated Clooney’s hostility back to this point. “There was a distinct turn,” Russell recalled. “He started getting colder to me, even in preproduction. I never talked to him about it. But I think when Warner Brothers tried to pull the plug on the movie, they called him in and said, ‘You should bail on this movie because your life will be in danger,’ God knows what else they said to him. In other words, my own corporation undermined me. I bet what they said to him was, you know, ‘You know David went to Will Smith and he went to all these other people before you.’ And I have a funny feeling he didn’t
know how many people we’d gone to before him. I think he knew about Mel Gibson and that was all he knew.”

T
HE
O
CTOBER 1998 SHOOT OF
T
HREE
K
INGS
WAS SCHEDULED
for sixty-eight days in the Arizona desert, and it wasn’t much fun for anyone involved. For Russell it was one of the most tense, pressure-filled experiences of his life. Too many people were juggling too many things, and too many people had too much riding on one movie.

Russell felt the responsibility of making his first big-budget studio movie. He’d personally promised di Bonaventura to bring the film in on budget and on schedule. At the same time he and his wife, Janet Grillo, had just learned that their four-year-old son, Matthew, was autistic. Whenever possible he was jetting home to Los Angeles in midshoot for twenty-four hours to help her cope. Clooney was shooting
ER
three days a week, then jumping on a plane to work on
Three Kings
for four days, a seven-day-a-week schedule he maintained for weeks on end. Fridays were pickup day at ER—when unfinished scenes were completed—and he’d often finish in the early morning hours; he’d then fly to the set. At one point he came down with bronchitis and had to use an oxygen mask on the set for several weeks. “I once finished at 4:30 in the morning at
ER
after a seventeen-hour day, took a jet to the set near Casa Grande, was late for my 6:30
A.M.
call, and worked for another twelve hours. There were times that that got a little much,” Clooney recalled. Spike Jonze, another principal in the cast, was acting in Russell’s movie and flying home on the weekends to edit
Being John Malkovich.

The subject matter didn’t lighten the atmosphere much, either. For six days they shot scenes of people trying to grab food off a truck. Then for three days they shot a scene of a woman being shot in the head. Then they’d shoot a scene of a gas attack. Then a scene of treating Pfc. Conrad Vig’s injured eye. “None of it was fun,” recalled Goodman.

Many felt, and probably Russell would even admit, that he was
in over his head; he’d never made a movie remotely this ambitious. But things were made incalculably worse by a culture clash between his way of working from independent film, and the Warner Brothers tried-and-true studio machine. Russell wanted to work improvisationally, changing dialogue and devising new shots as he went along. The crew wanted more preparation and didn’t know what to expect with Russell. “David is a painter, not a technician,” observed Goodman. “They’re used to technicians.” Often Russell would give new instructions as the cameras were still rolling—“Okay, don’t say that line, say this instead …”—an unstructured method of getting his actors to keep pushing, keep honing. Eventually it led them to reveal the emotional truth of the scene, but it required focus and flexibility from everybody on the set.

And the director was nervous, to put it charitably. On the very first day of filming Clooney had a scene with a French actor. The French actor, who was trying to do what Russell wanted, called for the line and the script girl gave it to him. Russell turned to her and snapped, “You don’t talk to the actors.” She burst into tears. It was a sign of things to come.

More fundamentally there was a gulf between director and crew. For a big Hollywood studio, Warner Brothers can be a very provincial place. The hundreds of technical craftspeople who work on the lot are often second-or third-generation employees of the studio, tan, muscle-bound men who grew up in the San Fernando Valley and had the Big Studio culture ingrained in them. Goodman called it “a Calabasas cul-de-sac kind of world.” Their worldview was very different from Russell’s. He had taken to wearing hip-hop clothes—baggy pants, hooded sweatshirt, boots, and beret—courtesy of Mark Wahlberg and Ice Cube. Some thought he’d adopted a hip-hop attitude, too, a swagger. The crew was not willing to work past their union hours—that was never done at a major studio. If Russell was in the middle of the scene at lunch break, the crew would be looking at their watches, while Russell wanted another take. The crew was also impatient; they were mad he hadn’t given them a shot list in the morning, which annoyed Russell. At the same time, Russell was not easy to deal with. He was
pushy, scared. He insisted on working as an artist. To the crew, he was a strange bird, staring into space, racing out into the desert at lunch. As Nora Dunn, who played a war journalist, put it, “David’s always in the moment, but it’s not always going to be the moment you’re in.” Often no film was printed before lunch, then after lunch they’d have to run and shoot. Russell would be hysterical, shouting at the crew as the light faded, “Just shoot! Just shoot!”

The crew began to form into a kind of anti-Russellian bloc. They thought the movie was strange, with its shifting dialogue and ambiguous morality. It had good Arabs and bad Arabs. It was confusing. They would mutter under their breath “What kind of crap is this?” and “This is insane. What movie are we making?”—comments that would filter back to the director. It began to feel like sides were taken. Clooney would defend the crew, saying, “Hey, come on, don’t try to rush the crew like that, buddy.” He sidled over to Goodman one day and said, “I don’t know how a nice guy like you could be friends with a guy like that,” referring to Russell. Goodman was nonplussed. “Why can’t I just be loyal to my friend?” he responded. Relations deteriorated particularly with several crew members. Russell clashed with his cinematographer, Newton Thomas Sigel, whom the director felt had been foisted on him by Warner Brothers. Others felt he ought to be grateful, that Sigel was the reason the movie looked fantastic. Clooney was mortified that Russell didn’t seem to show any concern at all for other people on his set. One day an extra had an epileptic seizure, and Clooney—like a real movie hero—rushed to his aid (a moment which made the tabloids: “Clooney to the rescue in real-life ER Drama”). According to the actor, though, Russell blithely wandered back to the monitor and ordered that the shot continue. “You can’t do that,” Clooney later told Russell. “You’ve got a man down on your set.” Russell said he wasn’t aware that someone had passed out. “It’s five hundred yards from where I was, and I was still setting up a shot,” he protested. “And he’s like, ‘Look at this, a director who doesn’t even come over to look at the extra.’ I was thinking to myself, ‘Fuck you.’”

But Russell’s relationship with the crew was not nearly as
fraught as the one he had with Clooney. They had gotten off on the wrong foot, and it didn’t take long for them to clash on the set. Four or five days into the shoot the director and star were driving in a Humvee with a camera attached. According to Clooney, Russell shouted at the driver to go faster. “David started reaming this guy. I got off the Humvee and said, ‘Knock it off,’” said Clooney. “David was stunned. I’d humiliated him. But I said, ‘This is not the way to do this.’” Russell read the incident entirely differently. “The crane broke, we were losing the day and I was upset about that. So I jumped off the truck and I was like, ‘Fuck!’ I was just kicking the dirt and everything like that. And then George had this big thing about defending the driver of the truck, whom I hadn’t really said anything to. The drive was fine, but George seized on that like I was the bad abusive director and he was going to defend the guy. The guy turned out to be friendly with me throughout the shoot. I made a point of being friendly to him, because I thought George was casting me as this bad guy.”

It was not the last time the two clashed. Matters were exacerbated by Russell’s tension with the crew, guys Clooney knew and worked with on the Warner lot for years; he respected them. It made for a strange dichotomy. Clooney was a schmoozer, a guy’s guy and a basketball player who liked to shoot hoops with assorted crew members between setups. In the industry he was known as “Good-Down, Bad-Up”—shorthand for his ease with guys lower on the totem pole and his difficulty with those with more authority. He constantly stuck up for the crew when Russell pushed for one more take or curtly demanded that a gaffer hurry up. Clooney played pranks and made jokes, annoying Russell with fake sneezes in his direction or getting into a rock fight with Nora Dunn. One day Clooney took the antenna on his Humvee, put an apple on the end of it, whipped it back and smacked Dunn on the forehead. “Whap!” Clooney recalled, delighted. “I go around getting high fives.”

Russell thought Clooney ought to be working on his performance instead of horsing around. There was tension, too, between Clooney and some of his fellow actors. While he was beloved with
the crew, Clooney sometimes came to work unprepared—understandable given the demands of his schedule. Other actors complained that he wouldn’t look them in the eye during dialogue. Russell kept pushing Clooney to look directly at other actors, and would grumble when Clooney slowed down principal photography because he didn’t know his lines. Clooney also didn’t respond well to Russell’s improvisational style. Russell would give a direction in the middle of a take, and “it would be tense,” said Goodman. “George didn’t come prepared to do improv every day.”

Clooney had reportedly had trouble with his lines on other movies. After
Three Kings
he made
The Perfect Storm
, a big-budget action movie about the capsizing of a New England fishing boat, Clooney taped his lines of dialogue to the steering panel of the boat. In a scene in which Clooney and John C. Reilly, playing a fellow sailor, were buffeted back and forth by waves, Reilly—as a prank—dove across the steering panel and ripped off the lines of dialogue Clooney had taped there. For the rest of the takes, Clooney ad-libbed things along the lines of “Aaaaaagh!”

Clooney acknowledged that he didn’t do well with Russell’s loose style. But he says that if he didn’t know his lines on
Three Kings
, it’s because the dialogue kept changing. “I had long, long monologues written, and he would rewrite all of it in the morning,” he said. “That happens on every job, but the hard part was that he was so specific about everything—down to the movement of a finger. David’s feeling was, ‘What am I supposed to do? Shoot it the way I don’t like it written?’ And my feeling was, ‘What am I supposed to do? I don’t know my lines.’”

Other cast members found the method challenging, too. “We would complain about doing a scene thirteen or fourteen times,” said Ice Cube, “but if we didn’t get what the director wanted, you’ve got to do it again. I would hate for George to just say, ‘Fuck it! What’s my line? All right I’ll do it,’ and then go back to his trailer.” Jonze said he learned a lot from watching Russell’s method of working. “He’ll throw everything out if there’s a new idea that’s better,” said Jonze. “He’s not precious about his words because he can always make something better, or more real, or finding a way
that’s real but funny.” But, he noted, “it’s a certain sense of chaos, and obviously that’s stressful to everyone else because it’s like—you’re planning to do something like this and suddenly it’s, ‘This is a better idea, let’s do this.’ But at the same time, it always did make it better.”

Goodman and studio veteran Charles Roven had their own culture clash. Once the shoot began the line producer found out that the studio hadn’t built 10 percent extra into the budget for contingencies, as was common in the indie world, so he was behind on the finances from the start. And while Goodman was accustomed to shaving corners to save money, a habit from the indie world, Warner Brothers didn’t like to skimp in making its movies. Instead, they wanted a precise budget detailing what the movie cost and a forecast of likely budget overruns. If Goodman suggested using a location they’d rented, a twenty-five-square-mile copper mine in the desert, for more than one scene, Roven would chafe. “That’s too ‘little-movie,’ Greg,” he’d admonish. Meanwhile Goodman (and Russell, too) wondered whether the story really needed a scene in which Ice Cube threw a football-bomb at a helicopter, detonating it. It added an additional $1.5 million to a movie that was already starting to slide over budget.

As they watched the shoot progress, Warner Brothers executives began to panic about certain riskier elements. On the one hand, they were worried their action war movie didn’t have enough action in it. On the other, they were disturbed by several graphic scenes that Russell wanted to shoot, not just for their visual impact but to dramatize the human cost of war. The studio thought a stunt blowing up a cow was too expensive and absurd. (Clooney helped convince the studio to go ahead with it.) They didn’t like showing birds drenched in oil from the oil fields (though they didn’t seem to mind human casualties). They resisted a key graphic scene in the film, in which an Iraqi woman is shot in the head; it is the turning point in the story, where the would-be gold diggers are shocked into aiding the fleeing Shiites. Also the studio was very disturbed by a shot that showed a bullet tearing its way into the human body, showing the infected organs in nauseating detail. Russell wanted
to use a corpse, and did, over studio opposition. It only stayed in the movie after passing muster with the test audience.