|
|
Features
|
|
A Very Mangy Matador
Thanks to writer-director Richard Shepard, Pierce Brosnan goes where neither Sean Connery or Roger Moore did with their post-Bond departures The Molly Maguires and Bullseye!.
Wednesday, July 5, 2006 at 10:30 AM
By Pam Grady
|
|
|
Steve Granitz/Wireimage.com
Photo
|
|
Winning the spec script lottery
|
|
When Richard Shepard's agent sent his script for The Matador to Pierce Brosnan's production company, Irish DreamTime, it was simply meant as a writing sample to show Brosnan and his partner Beau St. Clair what Shepard – who previously wrote and directed The Linguini Incident and Oxygen – was capable of. He already had the screenplay earmarked for a $250,000 digital video feature, an amount that probably wouldn't even cover the budget for cars on the James Bond movies that were then part of Brosnan's regular employment.
So Shepard was amazed when Brosnan got back to him to tell him that he not only loved the script, but wanted to star as Julian Noble, the dissolute hit man who befriends a down-on-his-luck American businessman in Mexico City. Chatting with FilmStew recently, Shepard admits that the prospect excited him. But he worried that the actor known for his elegance might want make certain changes to the character, so he emphasized to Brosnan that Julian was graying and going to seed, complete with pot belly.
Not only that, but if Brosnan took the part, Shepard insisted, "I want you to lewd and crude and rude." Brosnan’s reply: "Well, dude, that's why I want to be in the movie."
|
|
Steve Granitz/Wireimage.com
Photo
|
|
As good as an ex-E! staffer gets
|
|
|
The door on James Bond had not completely slammed shut when Brosnan came on board The Matador as producer and lead, but if he wanted to kiss that part of his life goodbye, he could not have picked a better project. It is rare to see a star's image so thoroughly deconstructed in one 96-minute movie, new this week on DVD. Where the martini-sipping Bond is sleek, glamorous, and unflappable, the tequila-guzzling Julian is ratty, panic-stricken, and such a mess that if he suddenly started coughing up hairballs, it would hardly be a surprise.
It was another movie, 2000's Sexy Beast, in which sadistic gangster Ben Kingsley coerces a retired former associate to take part in one last job, that inspired Shepard to write his film when he realized, "You could re-invent something. It was almost like a challenge to myself as a writer,” he recalls. “It was like if they could revitalize in Sexy Beast the one last heist genre, then it really is about the characters and the writing and I was just like, 'Listen, let me try.'"
He decided to write a hit man movie, because he found the genre tired. What could he do to freshen it up and make it something new? He started wondering what the psychic cost would be to someone who dealt death for a living. "I was interested in the idea that this killer, because of what he does, he's cut himself off from anything human in the world," Shepard says. "He doesn't have anyone. That was sort of like the basis of the beginning of this movie, a guy who suddenly [realizes], 'I'm going to die if I don't change what I'm gonna do.' He's too old for the job, he's worn down, and he's lonely."
|
|
Steve Granitz/Wireimage.com
Photo
|
|
Co-star Hope Davis
|
|
|
As he began writing, Shepard added other elements to the story. There was not one man, but two, the other being an average businessman living with the stress of a failing business and a family tragedy, but otherwise happy and deeply in love with his wife. "I had not seen a married couple who were in lust with each other in a movie in a really long time,” he explains. “I wanted to write that."
What Julian and his new buddy Danny, played by Greg Kinnear, have in common is that both are wrestling with a midlife crisis. Danny is terrified that the deal he has come to Mexico City to consummate will falter, ruining his business and maybe his marriage. Julian wakes up on his birthday to the realization that he is utterly alone in the world. When he strikes up a conversation with Danny in a hotel bar, it is out of desperation. Julian has the social graces of a rampaging rhino, but Danny quickly gets over that. "[These are] two guys who are lonely; they need a friend," Shepard observes.
From the start, Shepard planned The Matador as an ultra-low-budget feature, which he found liberating. He was not thinking about how a studio might eventually react to his screenplay or whether a star might eventually play Julian and demand the hit man's rough edges softened.
|
|
Steve Granitz/Wireimage.com
Photo
|
|
Shaken and definitely stirred
|
|
|
"It was like, 'I'm going to make this for no money and I'll find a hungry actor who'll want do it,'” he recalls. “I was not concerned about it, so the script kind of came out without worry about those things, and thus it was fresh, because it wasn't trying to fit a perceived thing.”
When he began writing, Shepard thought he was writing a thriller with some laughs. For one thing, he did not want to shy away from the brutality of what Julian does for a living or play his kills as comedy. "Even though there's not a lot of violence in the movie, when [Julian] does kill, it's vicious, because it is what it is and we have to buy it," he notes.
But as the script progressed and as he cast the movie with Brosnan, Kinnear, and Hope Davis as Danny's wife, Bean, he realized that he had written a different movie than he originally set out to. It was not a thriller with laughs that he had created, but a comedy with thrills, a facet that became even more pronounced once on set when he and the cast started inventing new bits of business. The startling shot of Brosnan walking across a lobby in his underwear and stack-heeled boots that features in the trailer and TV commercials came about just that way, dreamed up on location two days before Shepard shot the scene.
While Brosnan happily embraced the character of Julian just as Shepard wrote him, his involvement in The Matador nevertheless changed the production in a profound way. It was no longer going to be a quick-and-dirty DV affair shot for a quarter of a million dollars. With Brosnan and St. Clair putting their Irish DreamTime muscle behind the production to help raise funding, Shepard suddenly saw his budget rise to a respectable $10 million and, next Monday, consideration for various Golden Globes.
That meant he could afford a top-of-the-line cast that includes -- in addition to the three stars – Philip Baker Hall and Dylan Baker, and that he could also shoot on 35mm film instead of digital video. Suddenly, he had a full crew and that led to his biggest tradeoff. Danny and Bean live in Denver, Danny and Julian meet in Mexico City, and Julian is a globe-trotting hit man traveling to wherever his kills take him, an aspect that Shepard originally envisioned for his movie. As a low-budget affair, he would have a crew of only eight and they and the cast would shoot all over the world.
"When you have a crew of 100 people, moving to another country is a huge expense," Shepard says. Mexico City was the one location that was paramount. It is essentially another character in the movie, lending the film a certain flavor, not to mention providing the location of the bullfight, from which the title derives. The decision was made to shoot entirely in Mexico.
| "We shot Denver, Colorado in Mexico, we shot Budapest in Mexico – I don't think you can tell."
| |
Shepard relished the freedom of working in Mexico, away from Hollywood, away from everyone's agents, and far from the everyday world. "We were on our own," he marvels. "That freedom of being down there and going out at night and having a margarita and being able to shoot the sh*t and figure out what we were going to do was very helpful creatively."
As he prepped the film, Shepard remained a little nervous about how far Brosnan was willing to go in inhabiting Julian's reptilian skin. Though the actor assured him that he relished the challenge, Shepard knew he was asking a lot. "I wanted him to look like he's never looked in a movie before," he observes. "[Julian] is like a sexual animal, a sleazy, sexual animal and I wanted him to be like a snake almost."
| He need not have worried. Two weeks before the shoot began, he broke off his pre-production chores in Mexico City to return to Los Angeles for rehearsals. In walked Brosnan, already sporting Julian's trademark crew cut and salt-and-pepper mustache. "He was just accepting it and he was fully becoming this character," Shepard reports. "It was one of the happiest days to see him, basically say, 'I'm going to do it; I'm going to go for it. I'm going to do everything.' And he did. It was amazing."
|
The day Shepard and his cast and crew knew they were onto something special came on Day Four of the shoot. That was the day Julian showed off his underwear in the hotel lobby. "I knew that we were not making just a straight ahead movie and I think we all sort of were very excited at the end of that day,” he reveals. “I think we were all like, 'Wow! I can't believe it he did it. I can't believe we filmed it. I can't believe it happened.'"
|
|
|
|
|
 Email
|
 Print
|
|
|
|
|
|