By
Edward Douglas
Australian
filmmaker Andrew Dominik has only made three films in the past twelve years,
but they've all been fairly unforgettable from his early crime film Chopper,
(which introduced Eric Bana to the world), to The Assassination of Jesse
James by the Coward Robert Ford, a Western starring Brad Pitt and Casey
Affleck.
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| Photo courtesy of The Weinstein Company |
Now
Dominik is back with The Weinstein Company's Killing Them Softly,
based on George Higgins' 1974 novel Cogan's Trade, and he once again got Brad
Pitt on board to play Jackie Cogan, a hitman called in by the mob to clean up
loose ends after the robbery of a high stakes poker game by two junkie punks.
It's a gritty, dialogue-driven crime film in the vein of films by Guy Ritchie
or Quentin Tarantino but set in rural America, specifically in 2008 in the
aftermath of the financial crisis.
Question:
The novel Cogan's Trade was set in the '70s and Killing Them Softly is
set in 2008. Was that one of your early ideas to move it closer to present day?
Andrew
Dominik: Yes, it's the
story of an economic crisis. I was reading it at the time, and it was fixed in
the fallout from the global financial crisis. It had parallels. You had an
economy that was supported by gambling. You had it collapsing because of
inflated regulations, and you had people dealing with not only the problems
themselves, but people's perception to the problem, so it's certainly a
political story. Then it's the basic idea that the mob is just a government for
criminals, and that crime itself is maybe just the most native form of
capitalism. It's the most unvarnished form of it and it seemed like an
opportunity to point out all those parallels, to make almost, if you like, a
sub-conscious crime film or maybe a pretentious crime film, but all that stuff
just seemed too good to ignore.
Q:
Is it harder to get financing for a movie like that when you're dealing with
subjects to the fore that affect people who finance movies?
Dominik: Look, I came up with the obvious,
it's a $15 million Brad Pitt movie. I mean, people actually liked the story.
When you told them, it was entertaining and kind of goofy and Brad made it
easier.
Q:
Were you able to find the right actors to play the colorful characters?
Dominik:
Well, I wasn't sure whether the
movie would reflect film noir or screwball and it doesn't really matter - both
those genres are very similar. My idea was to cast it like an old '40s picture
and to go with types, so they're cartoonish. You've got the fat guy, you've got
the goofy-looking skinny guy, you've got the sweaty junky Australian guy.
They're all instantly recognizable types as of course is James Gandolfini and
Ray Liotta and also Richard Jenkins as a mob lawyer, whose got the most mob
lawyer-ish face you've ever seen. Brad is the kind of fixer, it's all very
typecast. We might use some of those audience perceptions against them, as the
situations play out, but pretty much we're starting from, it's cast like an old
studio picture, where Walter Brennan always plays the grizzled alcoholic or
Burgess Meredith is the boxing coach, you know?
Q:
James Gandolfini had already done "The Sopranos" – was he hesitant
about playing another gangster?
Dominik:
Yes. I think Jim was, but from the
sound of things, Jim is hesitant about any part he takes, but I don't know. I
guess he kind of looked at his charactar here, Mickey, as almost an upside down
version of Tony Soprano. I feel like Mickey's a different character, but that
part's hard for Jim because it's only a two-scene part, but you really have to
put an awful lot of work into creating that character for two scenes because
they're such elaborate scenes. I mean, really what he's doing is he's playing a
middle-aged guy who's heartbroken and confused, and I think that's probably the
way he looked at the part rather than seeing him as a gangster.
Q:
My favorite scenes are the ones where James Gandolfini and Richard Jenkins interact
with Brad which are very dialogue-driven and it's all about storytelling. Was a
lot of that the tone taken from the book?
Dominik: Yeah, that was the thing I was
trying to preserve from the book. Alfred Hitchcock's famous quote is that he
doesn't want to make movies that are photographs of people talking, but Higgins
is just essentially creating these people that are singing these kind of arias
about their lives and their attitudes. He's got little pieces of plot sort of
cut intermittently away inside these monologues. But that was very much the
thing that I was trying to preserve, was almost a little movie that was all
completely through dialogue. A lot of the action, like it happens off-screen.
What we're really doing is we're looking at these people. We're spending time
with people, and we're seeing who they are, I guess.
Q:
Has the movie changed a lot since Cannes or is it pretty much the same movie
once you finished it and that was it?
Dominik: Well, it was difficult to sort of
feel like it was balanced because you do have a lot of character stuff. A lot
of the character stuff is about people we don't see. There's a lot of men
talking about women, very confused or heartbroken or their masculinity is
disturbed in some way. There's all that stuff going on and there's the plot. If
you cut it down to what moves the plot forward, you end up with a very thin
movie. If you allow too much of the talk about stuff that's not directly
relevant to the plot to go on, it spins into a kind of soup so it was difficult
to get all that stuff balanced. I mean, a script is always just like a prayer
of the film that you want to make. You know that you're going to then deal with
the reality of it all once you've shot, so a lot of stuff was cut out, but it
was always known that a lot of stuff was going to be cut out.
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