|
Nobel Thrill Ride
By Randall Miller
Over the years, I have often found myself sitting in a darkened theater thinking, "I wish I could do a movie like that": dark, twisted, edgy, not always PC, with a hot girl, witty dialogue, in-your-face visuals, music pumping from end to end, bold and brash, unforgiving. But, the field I had been playing on was more soft grass than hard gravel. Even our '05 Sundance premiere, Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing & Charm School, which was met with standing ovations, was unabashedly sentimental. Then we started work on Nobel Son. We pulled out all the testosterone stops for this one and hit the pavement running to create an adrenalized, heart-pumping, smart thriller.
I didn't want someone to watch 20 minutes and turn to the person next to him in the theater and say, "I know what is going to happen next." Challenge the audience, work the medium, push the envelope. Jody Savin, my wife and creative partner, and I used every tool we had: STORYTELLING, CASTING, EDITING, ACTION and MUSIC.
STORYTELLING
Jody and I always try to populate our stories with complex, layered characters culled, in various ways and with many distortions, from our lives. My father, who never won a Nobel Prize, always thought he should have. We used a pumped-up, ego-the-size-of-a-truck version of him as the jumping off point for the story of a Nobel Prize-winner who refuses to pay the $2 million ransom for his kidnapped son. The beating heart of the film is the father/son story between Eli and Barkley Michaelson (Alan Rickman and Bryan Greenberg). The unexpected twist is the outsider - the "autodidact" - who questions whether the theory that won Eli the prize was in fact actually his.
CASTING
We had our heart set on Rickman for the role of Eli Michaelson. But we hit a wall when we were told he was not available. That didn't stop us. We tracked him down through his English agents and got him the script. I'll never forget coming home to a message on our phone machine from Alan. In his commanding, regal tone he said, "Thank you for being real writers." It was an amazing feeling to hear those words from such a magnificently talented actor.
We met a lot of actors for the younger roles. Bryan Greenberg, Shawn Hatosy and Eliza Dushku all blew us away in their auditions. Eliza learned every line from every scene and started flipping through the script asking which scene we wanted her to read. She really did her homework. We had worked with Academy Award®-winner Mary Steenburgen and Danny DeVito on our previous film, and designed the roles in Nobel for them. Mary Steenburgen, at one point, delivers one of the best lines in the film: Threatening a news reporter with a gun, she says, "If you don't get the f*** off my lawn right now, I'll use it."
EDITING
On those dark nights when I was editing until 3:00 or 4:00 a.m., I was consistently blown away by the performances these great actors had given me to work with. We had a vision of what this film could be, but with this great cast, they took it to places beyond our wildest dreams. All of Alan's choices were revelatory to me. Mary, Bill, Danny, Bryan, Shawn and Eliza each gave me a rich library of multi-faceted performances to craft the movie from. Exhausted as I was, it was hard to tear myself away to sleep at all.
ACTION
So, imagine a BMW Mini Cooper speeding through the inside of a mall that is open for business. Forty, fifty miles per hour, spinning out of control. Real people were shopping while we were filming a car smashing through a storefront in the atrium of the mall. It was awesome.
MUSIC
It was all working pretty well, but I wanted the music to further crank things up, take it to that next level. Grammy nominee Paul Oakenfold created a score that really rocks. To bring home the emotional undercurrents of the movie, we brought in Mark Adler, who has a classical background. So we ended up with this tightly woven web of adrenalized techno and orchestral elements that keeps people rocking on the edge of their seats.
So maybe I am known as a heartfelt softie who directed "Thirtysomething" and "Northern Exposure" and the sentimental Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing & Charm School. Sure, I directed an occasional episode of TV where something dark or tawdry happened before they cut to a commercial, but never a full 110 minutes of unadulterated wicked fun. Never anything like Nobel Son. |
|
|
