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Indies & Imports
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Darwin Finds Missing Link
A year and a half ago, The Darwin Awards was the toast of Sundance. Then it was simply toast. But a couple of theater owners are giving the film an unlikely new push.
Wednesday, September 5, 2007 at 12:55 PM
By Pam Grady
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Clayton Chase/WireImage.com
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Taylor at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival
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Poor judgment leads to premature and ridiculous death in The Darwin Awards, the stories collected from books and the Internet. Some are mere legend, others only too true, adding up to the blackest of inadvertent comedies.
"They stuck in my head and they're funny as hell," filmmaker Finn Taylor tells FilmStew during a recent chat at a San Francisco cafe. "They always struck me as cinematic. For me, I tend to have in my films, I like telling the stories of – for the lack of a better word, just a vernacular term – losers.”
“ I guess I use that term, because I think that is more like the reality of what we all are and what you see in films is a hyper-reality,” he continues. “They always say in films, we don't show man as he's intended to be, but what he hopes to be. And I think we're all clumsy and flawed."
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Bauer-Martinez Studios
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Co-stars Ryder, Fiennes
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In Taylor's affable world view, the characters are all that and more as one battles a soft drink machine in a duel to the death, another builds a rocket car without considering the ramifications, a couple misapprehends the purpose of their rented RV's cruise control, a couple of pals go ice-fishing – with dynamite, a pair of Metallica fans' concert-going experience does not quite go as planned, and more. Joseph Fiennes is the disgraced former police profiler who is obsessed with the Awards, Winona Ryder is an acerbic insurance claims investigator, and Wilmer Valderrama is the increasingly obnoxious filmmaker who trails the pair with his camera as they delve into the lives and sudden ends of these dubious prize winners.
The Darwin Awards was one of the hottest titles at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Taylor had been to the festival twice before with 1997's Dream with the Fishes and 2002's Cherish, but he had never had an experience quite like this one. Tragedy would ultimately mark his time at the festival when Darwin Awards co-star Chris Penn died that week at his home in Los Angeles, but the festival experience was positive and Taylor was ecstatic at the audience reaction. The film sold out the huge Eccles Theater with scalped tickets going for hundreds of dollars. Taylor himself had to go on Ebay to buy tickets for his brother and sister-in-law.
The stars seemed to be aligned for a healthy theatrical run. It was not to be. But now, a year and a half later, following a July 31st DVD release, The Darwin Awards is set to open an engagement on September 7th at San Francisco's Roxie Film Center. It also recently play at Hartford, Connecticut's Real Art Ways. Other than that, the movie lives now on DVD.
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Gregg DeGuire/WireImage.com
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The late Chris Penn
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Taylor cannot really talk about the theatrical distribution mess, bound by a confidentiality agreement. But turmoil accompanied the film's original distribution deal and a second deal fell through, leaving the home video option. At this point, he was not expecting any kind of theatrical exhibition, so he appreciates the faith that Bill Banning at the Roxie and John Morrison in Hartford have put in his work.
Not that it is such a leap on their part. The Darwin Awards lives up to its comic premise, which in addition Fiennes' delving into the Darwins, is also bookended by the serial murder case that he was investigating when he lost his job. Tim Blake Nelson plays a poet with a Beat obsession and a homicidal bent, which allowed Taylor, the one time literary director of San Francisco's Intersection for the Arts, to pay homage to a literary scene he holds dear.
"It's always been a fond part of San Francisco history to me," Taylor explains. "I feel like we're extremely lucky that we have this extremely important literary movement totally tied geographically to our city and there are all these great places like Trieste and Tosca and City Lights that all played a big role in it right there in that one little area.”
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Paul Natkin/WireImage.com
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Taylor's next film subject, Bill Monroe, circa 1990
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“Maybe you can call it self-indulgent or obscure to have that in the landscape of the movie,” he continues. “But since I was having fun with Joe as this investigative type, I didn't want some straight reality like of the murder he was solving. I wanted it to be playful and kind of larger than life, because that's the way the Darwin Awards are, and also about literature and the apocryphal nature of things."
Besides, he says, "Some of the lines of the Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem that Tim Blake Nelson recites when he's on the roof kind of relates to the Darwin Awards very specifically, I felt very lucky to be able to have that."
Taylor grew up in El Cerrito not far from San Francisco and he prefers to live and work in the Bay Area. His next film, a biopic of bluegrass great Bill Monroe that he hopes to shoot next spring will necessarily take him out of state, but when he can, he sticks close to home.
The Darwin Awards takes place all over the country, but except for desert scenes where David Arquette takes to the wheel of a rocket-propelled car, it was mostly shot locally. Small, sugar factory town Crockett substitutes for Tacoma, Washington. Joaquin Miller Park in Oakland, a city that might receive a dusting of snow every couple of decades, stands in for the winter wonderland of Minnesota and its frozen lake.
At a time when the region sees less and less film work, being an expensive place to shoot and offering no tax incentives, Taylor believes in supporting the local economy. It is also a place he knows intimately and he loves what it has to offer.
"The Bay Area is such a rich area, it's so varied, you go from a dense city, Oakland, which looks quite a bit different than San Francisco, to a total rural nature," he says. But his loyalty is not just to the area, but also to crew and cast and well. Certain actors – Arquette, Nelson, Brad Hunt, and Robin Tunney among them – are regular faces in Taylor's work.
"I like working actors over and over again – not all actors, but some actors strike me as brilliant and wonderful to work with," he asserts. "It's the same with crews. Without whining, making films is a pretty hard undertaking, so the more you can pass the small talk and the small obstacles by knowing the person you're working with and knowing what things they're capable of and what works for them and what doesn't, it makes it that much easier to get to that little moment of truth that you're going to get out of the scene, whatever that is."
| "Hopefully, I don't abuse it, but I just have affection for them, I like seeing them, they're like my family in a way," he adds. "I had Robin Tunney come in for a very short scene [in Darwin Awards], but she's really good at comedy and she's kind of like the kind of woman you can imagine Joe wanting to be with, so I feel lucky in that way."
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The Darwin Awards has such a big cast that it gave him the chance to work with a whole new group of actors, including Lukas Haas, Judah Friedlander, Ty Burrell, Tom Hollander, Julianna Margulies, and, of course, his stars Fiennes and Ryder. "I wanted somebody who didn't bring as much iconic baggage," he says of Ralph's baby brother. "We've seen Joe before, but mainly in sort of European dramas and costume dramas, historical period dramas. He's a great actor and everybody knows his name, but he's in a different context than we've seen him before."
"Both he and Winona have this thing where you get that kind of nerdy quirkiness of a geek that you get in character actors, but not often in leading actors," he continues. "It's a different thing. Character actor and lead actors are different things and Joe is a lead actor and Winona is a lead actress, but they still have that kind of intellectual nerdy factor."
| In addition to the literary angle and the Darwin Awards themselves, making the film allowed Taylor, through Valderrama's filmmaker character, to poke fun at himself as well as explore the increasing Big Brother nature of our society where everyone is increasingly on somebody's camera. He admits to another motivation that led him to The Darwin Awards and that was for the opportunity to put something on film that is rarely, if ever, explored.
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"I think the other thing that was really attractive for me was cinema's always been a medium of violence, like malevolent violence,” he relates. “You know, like we laugh at campy slasher flicks and secret agent movies or whatever, but what I liked about this was that it talked about our own mortality but without some malevolent killer coming in."
"It's more about people's own undoing, you know sometimes by acting decidedly or overthinking their safety and there's something to me that is much more human about that and exciting about that," he adds. "It's a lot less bloody than 90% of genre flicks, but sometimes people are shocked or scared by that. I think what scared people about it is that it points out our ability to undo ourselves, everybody's mortality."
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