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| Interview: Gavin O'Connor On "Pride And Glory" |
by Peter Sobczynski
The director of "Tumbleweeds" and "Miracle" talks about his latest film, the Edward Norton-Colin Farrell cop drama "Pride and Glory."
In 1999, writer-director Gavin O’Connor burst upon the scene with “Tumbleweeds,” the Oscar-nominated story of a woman who careens from town to town with her increasingly frustrated 12-year-old daughter in tow to escape one failed relationship after another. Despite the attention and critical acclaim that he received for the film, it would be five years until the release of his follow-up film, “Miracle,” a chronicle of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team from their formation to their stunning victory against the fearsome Russian team that paved the way for them to win an unexpected gold medal. Now, nearly five years after that film (a gap that isn’t entirely his fault, as you will see below), O’Connor has returned with “Pride and Glory,” a cop drama starring Edward Norton as a police detective who is asked by his father, the Chief of Police (Jon Voight), to investigate the violent deaths of four cops and discovers that a.) the four were all connected to his brother (Noah Emmerich) and brother-in-law (Colin Farrell) and b.) that they were all involved in illicit activities that force him to choose between keeping everything as is or exposing the truth about the corruption that has infested both the force and his family.
A couple of days before the release of “Pride and Glory,” O’Connor sat down to discuss the origins of both the film and his filmmaking career and also shed some light on why the release almost never happened.
When did you first become interested in filmmaking?
My father introduced me to film. This was back in New York before cable, DVD, VCR’s or Beta--you just had networks like CBS, NBC and ABC and local affiliate stations like WOR and WPIX. Those stations would show old movies and my father would sit me down and we would watch the films of Howard Hawks, John Ford, John Huston, Errol Flynn, Jimmy Cagney, Spencer Tracy, Paul Muni. I was very young and I didn’t realize that there were people writing scripts or hat there was a director who was realizing this document and who had a vision and idea of what he wanted to say. They were just stories and there was something about the medium that got into my DNA.
Then I started going to movies. I remember being seven and I told my father that I really wanted to see “The French Connection,” which was an R-rated movie. Why would a kid who was six or seven want to go see ‘The French Connection”? I don’t know but I just knew that I wanted to see it. I knew I had an angle with my dad because my dad was a cop and it was a movie about cops. Also, my parents were divorced, so there was a little less discipline going on and a little less accountability and so my dad did take me to see ‘The French Connection.” I remember watching the film and leaving the theater--once again, I wasn’t quite sure intellectually of what I was watching--and thinking to myself, “I want to do that!” I didn’t know why he kept asking about picking your nose in Poughkeepsie but when I have Tookie in my film with the Santa hat, that is sort of my little tribute to “The French Connection.”
It just started from there and then we got a Betamax and it went from there. When I got to college, I asked my advisor what the easiest major was at the school. He said sociology and I said that I wanted to be a sociology major because I wanted to write and go to movies--I knew this great art-house theater and I got a VCR and that is what I did. It just spoke to me in some way.
Where did the initial inspiration for “Pride and Glory” come from? You mentioned that your father was a cop, for example.
I probably started it in late 1997, I think. My brother and this guy who was a retired cop began kicking it around the story but the genesis really began with. . .where you grew up, did you hear sayings like “cops bleed blue” or “the blue line of silence”? I grew up hearing that all my life ever since I was a little boy. The notion of an institution of cops that bled blue and a family of cops that bleed red and having them collide, I thought that would be interesting and it evolved from there. There were also a series of newspaper articles because there were a lot of police scandals in New York with dirty precincts like The Dirty Thirty going on at that time. Time went on and I began writing it with Joe until it fell apart in 2001. We sort of geared up and began rewriting a lot of stuff after 2001 because corruption really became more a part of the conversation because you had a lot of corporate corruption that was going on that everyone was reading about like Enron. Then there was Abu Ghraib and the sort of institutional corruption that was going on and that filtered into the movie as well because it became relevant to me at that time because I wanted to express myself through these ideas that I was reading about and I wanted to use my movie to touch on them.
Where did the connection with Joe Carnahan, your co-screenwriter and a filmmaker in his own right, come about?
I had seen “Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane”--someone had given me a DVD of the movie, like a rough cut to look at, and I was like “Fuck, this is good. Who the fuck is this guy?” Whoever gave me the movie knew Joe and he came over to my house and instantaneously, I liked this guy. He is crazy, beautifully crazy. He has this very big personality, he is very smart and very funny and very talented. He owns a room very quickly. We just liked each other and so I told him the story. Then I read “Narc”--I wanted to read something he had written and he was trying to make that movie and it took him many years--and I knew he got the Irish thing of that world that I understand and he understood cops in the way that I did. I think our sensibilities are very different --if you look at Joe’s films and my films, they are done in very different styles--but Joe was great because as we were mapping out the movie, I would very often say to him “I want to make a left turn here, Joe, because I don’t know how to do that. That would be your version of the movie.” There is no right or wrong, just different sensibilities.
After I put a rough cut together, the two people that I screened it for were Joe and David O. Russell, who has also been a close friend for years. I put those two guys in the room and after the film was finished, and it was about 2 ˝ hours at that point and a rough, rough cut, David was very complimentary and really got it and loved it. Joe, I could tell, didn’t and what I realized--and one of these days, I will talk to him about it--is that Joe is a filmmaker and he clearly had a very different movie in his head and the movie that he had in his head didn’t coincide with the one that was on the screen. If he took the same script, we would have made two entirely different movies. It was an interesting lesson but he was still great because as a director, he was very respectful because he knew that I was directing and he knew what that meant.
You mentioned earlier that your father was a cop. What was his reaction when he learned that this was going to be your next project?
He didn’t like the script at all, but when he saw the movie, he actually wept and loved it. Then he said to me, “Am I the Voight character?” I said, “A little bit,” because he was.
Of the films that you have directed to date, “Tumbleweeds,” “Miracle” and “Pride and Glory,” each one appears on the surface to be completely different from each other. However, do you yourself see anything that connects them together? It could be argued, for example, that each one deals in a way with family ties and how they bind (and occasionally) choke people.
I don’t know. “Tumbleweeds” was, for me, about this mother and daughter that lived this sort of nomadic lifestyle and this woman who was chasing love when the love of her life was sitting next to her the entire time. I understood that because I grew up in a divorced home and I lived with my father in motels and all of that stuff while feeling rootless. I didn’t cover the miles that Angela did based on her life but I knew what it felt like to be looking for home and feeling rootless while chasing something. That was personal and “Miracle” was personal. I understood what it was like to put your family on a shelf in order to chase a dream. To me, the movie was about a mad scientist and the team was his lab experiment and I felt like a mad scientist making the movie and all these kids who had never been in a movie before were my experiment. I had twenty kids and eighteen of them had never acted before. That was my doorway into it because it had to be personal. This one, for obvious reasons, was also personal. Beyond that, I have no idea--it has to be inside me and it has to come out like when you have to pee really bad. That is when I know it is time to make the movie.
“Pride and Glory” was made a couple of years ago for New Line Pictures and they seemed reluctant to release it at all. Then, after the studio was folded into Warner Brothers, the new people in charge also seemed unwilling to distribute it theatrically for a while. Now that the ordeal of getting it into theaters has finally ended, can you talk a little bit about that experience and what was going on behind the scenes?
I think it is pretty obvious what that was. It was painful and a great lesson in patience. It started out as the worst possible thing that could happen and ended up as maybe the best because we got the best of both worlds. We got to make the film at New Line, which was like making an independent film, and they let me make the movie that I wanted to make. It became very apparent to me when I was finished that they didn’t have a clue as to how to market the movie and the studio was starting to splinter and fracture and you could feel it. Then Bob Shaye didn’t believe in the film and that was very frustrating--we had our issues, he and I--and then it seemed like the worst possible thing happened when the studio got folded into Warner Brothers, a studio that never in a million years would have made this film. They just inherited it and when a studio inherits a movie that they never would have made. . .I thought we were fucked. We were in purgatory for a long time and I didn’t know if we were ever going to come out or if we were going straight to DVD--I had no idea. Fortunately, the head of marketing at the studio loved the movie and believed that she knew how to market it, which is what it is all about in the studio world, and that is the only reason that we are sitting here now.
link directly to this feature at http://hollywoodbitchslap.com/feature.php?feature=2606
originally posted: 10/29/08 14:47:53
last updated: 10/29/08 14:57:49
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