After a 15 year hiatus Bruce A Evans returns to the director's chair with the dramatic movie, Mr Brooks, starring Kevin Costner. In a break from the heroic roles Costner's best known for, the Academy Award-winner plays a successful wife and father who also happens to be a serial killer.
Why has the serial killer genre allowed so many artists to break through with creative ideas?
“You’re doing something that’s forbidden and you’re in territory that you can be dramatic without people questioning you.”
You can be dramatic without being questioned?
“Because there’s nobody that can say to you, ‘No, no, they don’t do that.’ Unless you got a call or one of the reviewers was a serial killer and said, ‘No, no, no, I would never do that.’ It’s a very dramatic. It lends itself to wonderful drama.”
Is it something you’d been thinking about for a while?
“Yeah, when we sat down to write it, we had the idea of doing something that was dark and we hit on the serial killer idea. But what we wanted to do was something that you had never seen before. We wanted to do something that was 180 degrees from Silence of the Lambs where he is kind of gleefully a serial killer, or Kevin Spacey in Se7en. He’s obviously troubled. We wanted to do something that they weren’t obviously troubled.”
Why do we identify with killers?
I don't know you that well to answer that (laughing). There’s something fascinating about the snake. It’s beautiful in that you know that it is so dangerous and I think it gives us, with a film it gives us that [feeling] of excitement without having to put ourselves in the actual situation. But I think the bad guy is very, very attractive to all of us. We’re attracted to it.”
You worked on the screenwriting-only side for so long, was there a point you had to step back and develop something for yourself?
“Well, I directed Kuffs 15 years ago. What happened was we had jobs and the things that we wrote were too big for financiers to trust me with. And with this one, we just said, ‘Let’s go out on a limb with this.’”
Was this 10 years ago? Did it take that long?
“Oh, no, no, no. This one is only about three years old, three and a half years old.”
And your last screen credit was 1997…
“Yeah, probably, Jungle 2 Jungle. But we’ve done screenplays and rewrites and all of that kind of stuff in between.”
The movie assumes we should already know who Mr. Brooks is. Can you talk about taking that approach?
“It seemed kind of redundant to try and tell everybody who he was. We thought that the Man of the Year celebration would tell us all we needed to know about him. And I think the less exposition that you do up front, if you can get all of what you need to do up front, it allows time for the story to develop. In the story you discover more about them.”
How difficult was it to incorporate fantasy sequences without breaking the scene?
“Well, it’s what Mr. Brooks is hearing in his head and we all hear voices in our heads telling us throughout the day our thoughts. We have contradictory thoughts about things. Should I? Shouldn’t I? Should I? Shouldn’t I? What we were trying to do is visualize or dramatize that process. We all have dark sides, I think.”
It seems as though Demi Moore’s character is kind of in an action movie.
“She is as troubled as the hero, which was our conceit.”
But it’s a tonal shift that works. She’s the action-packed world we may be more familiar with.
“Truthfully, never thought of it that her side was more action-packed. We fell in love with her character and put her in, and it was just a natural evolution of the world that she was in. She hunts for these guys and then things could happen.”
It makes us believe she’s capable of finding Mr. Brooks.
“Our conceit was that if you were in a room with 1,000 people, Mr. Brooks was the smartest person in the room. He has an intuition as to people’s desires and fears. And if Detective Atwood was in the room with him, it would be almost equal in her ability to perceive desires and fears in people. These are two people who read people brilliantly without any conscious effort.”
Is directing after a 15 year break like riding a bicycle?
“It was kind of like riding a bicycle. The only thing is this time I knew more how to prepare and I had a great team around me. Jim Wilson, Kevin Costner, Ray Gideon as producers. That’s a great, great team. Christian Slater was very good and Milla was very good, but if you get a chance to work with Kevin and William [Hurt] and Dane [Cook] and Demi and Marg [Helgenberger], those are people that can make you look really good.”
And you also were one of the writers of Cutthroat Island?
“Well, Cutthroat was written for Michael Douglas and he was supposed to do the Geena Davis part. It was basically Pirates of the Caribbean. Geena Davis was to play the girl and Michael the guy, and basically what they did is they made Matthew Modine the girl and Geena that guy.”
So you worked on a completely different version?
“We were called in to rewrite it and ended up getting story credit, so you know how much we did.”
