|
|
Features
|
|
Normally His Kind of Town
In between the critical success Upside of Anger and this month’s Adam Sandler release Reign Over Me, writer-director Mike Binder made a film you’ve never heard of.
Monday, March 5, 2007 at 6:40 PM
By Daniel Robert Epstein
|
|
|
Gregg DeGuire/WireImage.com
Photo
|
|
Affleck at last fall's Hollywoodland premiere
|
|
Ben Affleck generated a lot of heat last year with his tragicomic portrayal of George Reeves in Hollywoodland. But fans are going to have to search on DVD for another one of his resurgent individual performances, despite the fact that it was directed by Mike Binder on the heels of the impactful Joan Allen drama The Upside of Anger.
“I don’t think Man About Town came out as good as it could have,” admits Binder during a recent interview with FilmStew when asked why his 2006 flick went straight to DVD. “But I think Ben [Affleck] is really good in it.”
“I think that Lionsgate just figured that it’s a show business movie," he continues, referring to a narrative in which Affleck plays a Hollywood talent agent undone by the theft of a personal diary. “I think it could have done some business. Ben got good reviews for Hollywoodland. I think they made a mistake, but I’ve never met anyone at Lionsgate so I can’t really talk to them about it.”
During the making of Man About Town, which was filmed in Vancouver before Hollywoodland, Binder and Affleck constantly joked with each other that their movie was going to go straight to video. They never actually believed it would, but now - staring at a February 13th straight-to-DVD release date - Binder says perhaps they should have been more careful about what they joked about.
|
|
Chris Weeks/WireImage.com
Photo
|
|
Binder, promoting Man About Town last month at the Santa Barbara Film Festival
|
|
|
A line that is getting a lot of attention in the film is when Affleck’s character – after having had some work done on his teeth – muses that he looks like "Tom Cruise’s retarded cousin.” Funnily enough, Cruise does have a cousin in real life (William Mapother) that he not only works with a lot, but with whom Binder once shared the screen as an actor in Minority Report. “He [Mapother] was the manager of the hotel where my character, Leo Crow, lives,” Binder recalls.
When Binder first came to Hollywood in the late 1970’s, the prospect of working with someone like Minority Report director Steven Spielberg might have felt intimidating. But today, at age 48, Binder counts the most important filmmaker in town as one of his personal friends. "He comes to my editing room and looks at the rough cut,” Binder reveals. “I’ve become friendly with him over the years.”
In fact, it was Spielberg who first hired Binder to write the script for Man About Town after hatching the story together. Spielberg was a big fan of Binder's TV series Mind of the Married Man when it aired on HBO, watching every episode and calling Binder regularly to discuss. Intriguingly, Spielberg initially also planned to direct Man About Town, but, says Binder, decided in the end that a show business tale hit too close to home.
|
|
Jim Spellman/WireImage.com
Photo
|
|
Binder's latest leading man
|
|
|
“He saw me on Larry David’s show [Curb Your Enthusiasm] and he said, ‘Hey, we should do a show about a cross between your show, Larry David’s show and the life we all live’ (Binder lives in the same neighborhood as Spielberg),” Binder explains. “Even though his life is much different than mine. We started banging around ideas in his office and he liked the final story idea and he said, ‘Go write it.’”
After teaming with Cruise as well in Minority Report and doing things like having the A-lister wave a gun in his face, Binder was determined to work with the actor again. But when Cruise declined the chance to do Reign Over Me, even though Binder had specifically written the script for him, it opened the door for Sandler.
“I’m excited about it, I really am,” Binder exclaims of the movie, which opens March 23rd. “Adam [Sandler] and Don [Cheadle] are really good in the movie and it feels like the studio is behind it. I’m confident about this one just in the sense that I know they’re not going to send it right to video. I think they’re going to go for it because of Adam and because it’s good. It’s tested very well with audiences.”
Reign Over Me is all about the impact of 9/11 on the human psyche. On that morning in real life, Binder was being interviewed by Good Morning America’s Diane Sawyer about his aforementioned HBO series, which was scheduled to debut that night. “And it was downhill from there,” Binder jokes.
|
|
Mike Terry/WireImage.com
Photo
|
|
Friend and professional colleague Spielberg
|
|
|
Although Reign Over Me is not autobiographical, it has great resonance for Binder nonetheless. On that fateful day, he was stuck in New York City with thousands of others and remembers walking the streets at night, meeting people covered from head to toe in dust.
“I went back a couple of years later with my wife and kids,” Binder recalls. “We were walking down the street and I just started thinking that there are some people still wandering the streets after that night ended. The world has gone on, but these people are still wandering those same streets that I wandered that night in the same pain. I thought, I’d like to write about one of those people and just try to illuminate where that comes from.”
Unlike Man About Town, which was made independently by Binder with a company called Media 8, and for that matter pretty much every other movie the filmmaker has been involved with as a director, Reign Over Me was bankrolled by a studio (Sony). But because it starred Adam Sandler and Binder kept it below a certain budget threshold, he says they pretty much left him alone.
|
|
Barry King/WireImage.com
Photo
|
|
Man About Town co-star Howard Hesseman
|
|
|
While Sandler made major changes to the script prior to filming, Cheadle – following in the footsteps of such previous Binder collaborators as Kevin Costner (The Upside of Anger) and Janeane Garofolo (The Search for John Gissing) - improvised much of his dialogue. This is something Binder has grown comfortable with over the years.
“When I first started writing and then directing my own scripts, I had to hear it exactly the way that it was in my head,” he admits. “Then I would cover the hell out of it and figured I would just cut it the way I wanted it. I was just stifling the actors.”
“With the first few films, there’s a rigidity to protecting the jokes you think are so funny and the moments you think are so important,” says Binder. “Then you realize that you’ve got good actors and you better let them do their thing.”
Binder says he definitely gets a kick out of watching the phenomenal success of Patrick Dempsey on the ABC series Grey’s Anatomy. Once upon a time, when Dempsey was just McHopeful, Binder saw him enact his first produced screenplay, Coupe de Ville.
“He was a funny, wild kid,” Binder says. “No one gives a sh*t about the writer on a set, especially that one. So I would just hang around with Patrick. We would drive around Florida, get into trouble and have laughs.”
“My dad lived near there, so we would go over to my dad’s and go boating,” he continues. “He was a fun, goofy kid. He was always a good wiry little comic. I was just reading this Billy Wilder book and he’s talking about how many leading men there were in his day that could do comedy. There really aren’t that many guys that can really carry a [feature film] comedy anymore.”
Guys like Will Ferrell, who Binder thought along with John C. Reilly was genius in the musical comedy sketch performed at this year's Oscars. “It reminded me of something from the Golden Age of Hollywood,” the former stand-up comic suggests. “I don’t know why. Other people don’t seem to agree with me, but that blew me away.”
“I could see like [Bob] Hope and Groucho or somebody doing that thing. I just felt like it really was a throwback piece.”
|
|
|
|
|
 Email
|
 Print
|
|
|
|
|
|