I Need Redemption’-type films is a bit of a contradiction. It’s essentially what a lot of people would consider trashy, sensationalist genre movies, but they don’t necessarily have to have bad acting, low budget or cheap and exploitative subject matter.
“It’s very different from those, but we were not trying to make the most sophisticated movie ever made; we made a movie that was fun to make and could be done on a low budget. I think it had more to do with the casting and the characters than the fact that it’s a genre. We’re seeing some of the same issues of people becoming very disconnected from everyday humanity. We’re seeing that in the news about things like child murder, the shooting in Norway, all these things that are like ‘we’re alone.’ These are things that we’ve always had as a species but now it’s just very real. You can have this deep fear of being a bystander. That’s what the characters are. They live for their cause, they don’t have friends. They just have a cause and they’re in it for themselves.
“There’s a great, great quote by somebody like James Cagney. He was one of my father’s heroes, he said something like, ‘I don’t know if I’ve got a friend in the world; all I got is trouble’ and that’s basically what it’s about, that’s what our movie is about. It’s about that. It’s very different than a normal, by-the-books genre movie like those things but it is a movie about heroes and where heroism is in your head and your soul. These are movies where the hero never comes back and it’s not a matter of going home and getting back to the normal life.”
Even though Hancock, Rourke and Ginsburg were always a very close knit group of friends, they don’t necessarily all have the same character type.
“It really depends on the type of character the director wants for his movie,” says Miller. “It’s hard to say because we didn’t intend it that way. We didn’t intend it to be that way and they never wanted to be those characters. They wanted to be this character. We just didn’t have enough money to do it and so we decided to make a movie that would fit this type of character, where people who are involved in their faith can do things that most people would get in trouble for doing and live by a moral code that would get them punished or fired from every job except theirs. This is a character who can do these things and still seem like a normal guy. It takes place during Christmas break and it takes place on an island and we had a limited time, so we just didn’t have any money for anything other than a limited set of places and so you end up doing the same movie again and again and again. Every shot is just another location and it’s a beach or it’s an airport. There’s no reason to go anywhere else; we’re all comfortable in the same environment and we try to maintain a kind of a uniformity of production so we’re not shooting in different locations every day. We’re just really not going to go shoot another beach. We just try to have each scene have a feeling of a place that exists and the idea of doing something that seems realistic to what you would do on vacation.”
As for the film’s plot, Miller says that Rourke’s character (and Hancock’s) has gotten too comfortable being out in the world and has now crossed some line that the government has come down on him about, leaving him with the difficult decision of figuring out what to do next.
“I don’t want to give anything away; there’s a certain amount of suspense,” he says. “I don’t think there’s anything that I haven’t seen before. There’s nothing that you haven’t seen before in that there are certain things that have been done in that genre before, but I think what makes the movie different than all the other ones that I can think of is that each time you watch this one, it feels like it’s the first time you’ve ever seen it. That’s why it’s a great idea to see it more than once. The audience could come and see the movie a second time, but they wouldn’t want to go see it two or three times. They want to see it just once, because they want to be surprised and that’s what we do. We create surprise and we always have a secret moment that we put a movie together and make them get so excited that it doesn’t matter if they know what’s going to happen next. We end up being different every time they see it. I think there’s no formula, no perfect way to get from A to B in a way that people aren’t expecting. That’s the way I like it. There are movies that I just don’t like to watch where everything is planned out from the beginning; I like movies that take place on an island and so there’s no reason why you should be able to figure out what’s going to happen from the first moment. You never know what’s going to happen, so you can enjoy it more.”
With Rourke and Hancock being one of those actors who’s very involved with the films he does, are you more involved or involved at all in the overall creation process?
“I do everything,” says Miller. “There are not very many movies that I don’t do some of the writing on. With The Wrestler, it was very much a collective. The actors in the main roles were equally as involved as I was. Even now, there is only one writer and my friend Ed Zwick, who I did Hancock with, and I write a script together and we get it in there. We come up with a plan of how to shoot the movie and then I sit down and write the words. So in the writing, there are scenes that are written that involve the cast that didn’t even end up in the movie. But these are basically scenes that were written from the beginning as stuff that would be in the movie and then the actors helped write them because they wanted to be part of them and we used those. When Hancock was written, there was a scene in it that was written and we never shot it but we shot a little piece of it with just Robert’s character in a car, and that’s the kind of stuff that has been going on in the movie. So we try to not come up with a perfect script that really just fits all the actors and then have to shoot it. It works better if we use a script that’s a little on the fly and then we can try to fix it in the shooting as we go. That’s kind of the way the movie is structured.
“With a movie like this, where it’s more about the characters than anything else, I actually think it’s not a good idea to ask the actors to really read a script and do a lot of work. These actors are all very, very method-oriented people, so they don’t like to improvise. It’s something they have to do if they do it all, but for me, if they don’t do improvisation, I’m not gonna feel like they’re really there and it’s gonna make me nervous, so we work very much with a methodical script that we do a rough draft of and then if they like it and want to do it, then we can start improvising. That’s the way we’re starting to work on the next movie. This movie that we made is a film about improvising on something that is written.”
One question that we’ve had to ask everybody we’ve interviewed so far, is what do you think of the movie, and how did it come out? As a first time filmmaker, are you happy with how it turned out?
“Oh, yeah,” says Hancock. “I’m so happy with the film, it feels like a very complete piece. It was fun to do and it was very successful. So no, I don’t think it’s just that we’re not finished with it or something, it seems like we’re very, very happy with it.”
“I was disappointed at some of the criticism that it received,” says Ginsburg. “I just can’t understand that because it was an enjoyable movie. It was a fun movie to shoot. It was a fun movie to make and I was very proud of that. I was also very proud of my part. I really enjoyed the experience of doing
