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Features
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"Not a Retard Movie"
Both Sam Mendes and David Fincher almost spoiled Scott Frank’s coming out party. But it is the way the latter pitched The Lookout that the screenwriter remembers most fondly.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007 at 3:50 PM
By Brett Buckalew
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Alexandra Wyman/WireImage.com
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Frank, at L.A. premiere with co-star Isla Fisher
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Scott Frank is one of the last people in Hollywood who should feel the need to direct. He’s established himself as one of the greatest screenwriters currently covering the crime thriller beat, having successfully adapted novels by celebrated genre masters James Lee Burke (Heaven’s Prisoners) and Elmore Leonard (Get Shorty, his Oscar-nominated script for Out of Sight).
And with that reputation intact, all he has to do is alternate his hours spent at the word processor with valued family time, while directors like Steven Spielberg (Minority Report), Jodie Foster (Little Man Tate) and Sydney Pollack (The Interpreter) take his work through the non-stop hell of production, and - voilà! - there you have the makings of a pressure-free career in the film industry.
But Frank had to go muck up his laid-back life by venturing into directing anyway, with his script for The Lookout, another crafty crime thriller (no surprise there, at least). During a recent interview with Film Stew, the writer-turned-director acknowledges the luxuries he sacrificed for spending chilly late nights shooting in Winnipeg, Canada (substituting for the American Midwest).
“That’s why I waited so long to direct; because I was a successful screenwriter, because I had a great life,” Frank reveals. “I was really happy. I had a decent personal life. I was really comfortable. And I thought, what a great way to f*ck that all up: go off and direct a movie.”
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Mark Sullivan/WireImage.com
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Co-star Matthew Goode
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Frank’s decision seems a little less insane when he describes the project’s genesis. The Lookout took around a decade to get to the screen, and it didn’t start out as Frank’s maiden voyage in the director’s chair. “It began in the mid-‘90s, right after Get Shorty,” he recalls. “I was about to write it, and I had three kids all [sharing] one room, and we needed another house.”
“And then the gods handed me Out of Sight, and I did that job because I thought, ‘Oh, that’ll be easy. I can do it fast!’ I took that job for the most mercenary of reasons, and it turned out to be my most satisfying movie…and it took the longest to write.”
Once Frank finally finished writing The Lookout, a heist movie centering on a brain-damaged janitor (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the finished film) who agrees to help an old high-school acquaintance (Matthew Goode) and an alluring stripper named Luvlee Lemons (Isla Fisher) rob the bank he works in, theatre wizard Sam Mendes expressed interest in making it his own film directorial debut. Then, American Beauty happened.
Shortly after Mendes left to helm that Alan Ball script instead, Fight Club director David Fincher stepped in. The filmmaker tried to secure an $80 million budget and the participation of Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead, but it was Fincher’s pitch to worried studio executives that Frank remembers most fondly.
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Mark Sullivan/WireImage.com
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Considered twice, hired once
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“[Fincher] used to always say when he was working on it, ‘It’s not a retard movie,’” the writer recalls, “as only David Fincher could say. And I knew what he meant, in his own inimitable way. You know, it’s not gonna be My Left Foot. It’s not gonna be a guy acting all fucked up.”
Indeed, the character of Chris Pratt, as written by Frank and played by Gordon-Levitt, is someone who appears to be in normal mental health a good portion of the time. But the brain injury suffered by a car crash that took place right when Chris was the big man on his high-school campus still manifests itself in his frequent short-term memory loss, his sudden lack of inhibition when blurting something inappropriate out, and his inability to perform mechanical functions like opening a can of pasta sauce.
“The key thing of what [Chris] wants is to be who he was,” Frank analyzes. “And the impossibility of that, and how that gets him into trouble. I think that’s a very different thing than overplaying the woe-is-me and the pathology of his injury all the time.”
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Jeff Vespa/WireImage.com
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Co-star Jeff Daniels
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So, set in the idea of how his disabled protagonist should be portrayed, and possessing a desire to shake things up after becoming ‘borderline bored with [his] work,’ Frank decided to direct The Lookout himself after Fincher departed the project to take on Zodiac. Soon enough, in pre-production, Frank committed his first major error as director: failing to cast the obvious choice for the lead when the right actor was all but staring him in the face.
“I think someone probably…at some point showed me a picture, and said, ‘This is the guy from 3rd Rock From the Sun,’” Frank explains. “I probably went, ‘No! No, no, no. I want a real actor in this movie,’ and didn’t know anything about him.”
“And then, online, I saw a trailer for Mysterious Skin,” he continues. “There was this guy sticking his head out the window of a car, screaming, in the trailer, and I called my casting director [Marcia S. Ross], and I said, ‘Who’s that guy?’ And she said, ‘That’s the guy [who] you said you don’t want him in it.’ I said, ‘No, that’s not him!’ And she said, ‘Yeah, that’s the same guy. You should really see the movie.’”
Needless to say, once Frank saw Gordon-Levitt’s turn as a tormented gay hustler in that film, he was convinced that the actor could play much more challenging roles than the alien spawn of John Lithgow for a sitcom. The wet-behind-the-ears director was similarly proven wrong when meeting with former Wedding Crashers ditz Fisher and Match Point charmer Goode for their respective against-type roles (“my instincts are unerring in these matters,” he self-deprecatingly jokes), but that was still nothing compared to the horrors that production in Winnipeg brought about. Panicked, he would turn to his brother-in-law, filmmaker Phil Joanou (who had previously teamed up professionally with Frank on Heaven’s Prisoners), for advice, only to discover that he was experiencing the same frustrations that any director does while shooting a film.
“I would call [Joanou] up, and I’d say, ‘Okay, I’m maybe getting 1% of what I want,’” Frank elaborates. “ ‘I feel like all day long, I die these little deaths as you just don’t get what you want,’ because it’s impossible. It’s the nature of filmmaking. You’re trying to [guide] this living, breathing beast that is your crew to get what you want, and it’s like picking a lock with a wet noodle.”
“And then Phil said, ‘You know what? Disappointment is…part of the process. You just have to accept that, and you have to keep going.’ And he said, ‘If you were telling me that you love everything you got, I would guarantee you that you’re making crap.’”
| Now that The Lookout has wowed audiences at Austin’s South by Southwest film festival and elicited a rave from Ebert & Roeper co-host Richard Roeper before its release, its non-crap status has been validated. Which begs the question: will Frank step out of his career comfort zone to direct again anytime soon?
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While he currently has no plans to do so, might we suggest a climate warmer than Winnipeg’s and a reunion with the clearly astute Ross as the casting director next time out?
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