The Oscar-nominated screenwriting team of Raynold Gideon and Bruce A Evans reunite for Mr Brooks, a suspense thriller starring Kevin Costner as a successful businessman who's also a serial killer.
How did this story come about?
“You might say we wanted to write an adult film. We were getting a lot of work for PGs like Stand By Me and Starman. We thought, ‘Ah, let’s change our image,’ if you wish, ‘in Hollywood here and write something that is adult, R rated.’ Then of course, what do you write about? Then we thought, ‘Well, maybe we should write about addiction.’ Then we thought the ultimate addition would be murder.
Serial killers have always been fascinating to us because they live within their community. They go out and they kill, nobody knows about it. Then of course when we finished the script, a lot of people said, ‘Hey, no, no, no, he can’t be a successful normal guy. These are weirdos that live in attics and kill chickens in their spare time.’ We said, ‘No, no, no, no, no.’ Then the BTK Killer came out and here’s a guy who’s an elder in the church and teaches Sunday school. He had a couple of kids and he had murdered half a dozen people. So it seems because of the BTK Killer, the FBI has changed their profile on the serial killers. They now look for anybody, any normal guy, the guy who lives next door to you might be.
We just wanted to tell a good story, an entertaining story. We didn’t want to make any point of it, any specific point. Anybody that says, ‘Oh, this is an important movie,’ not about Mr. Brooks but others, you go, ‘Uh, you don’t write important movies. You write movies to entertain people. Then if there is some importance that falls from it as it moves through the world, then fine.’ Stand By Me, we thought it was a great adventure. Four kids on a railroad track on their way to find a dead body and they end up finding themselves, finding their future. We would get all kinds of letters about, ‘Oh my God, this changed my kid’s life, which is great.’ But it certainly wasn’t our intent. Our intent was just to entertain.”
Were you ever worried about glorifying killers?
“No, and I’ll tell you why - because we think he’s a very moral man. He definitely has a sickness. We gave him a sickness. It is a virus that he’s desperately, desperately trying to get rid of, trying to fight. We’re all addicted to something. You’re probably addicted to movies, as we are. Other people are addicted to chocolate, to wine, to sex, to drugs. Unless they say, ‘Oh, the heck with it, it doesn’t bother me, I don’t care. I’m just a chocoholic or an alcoholic or a drug addict,’ I think most people who are in that situation fight it and try to correct it. Mr. Brooks, to watch it, it’s a very moral movie. It is not encouraging. It is basically saying you need to fight your addiction."
Did you tinker with the ending?
“No, because we had always planned this as a trilogy. This is just the first part of a trilogy and this is what fascinated Kevin Costner into coming aboard, besides the fact that he loved the script. We said to him, ‘By the way, we have planned this as a trilogy.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’ve never done sequels on any of my films although I’ve been approached to do a sequel on The Bodyguard,’ or whatever other film, whether Bull Durham… He said, ‘No, never was intrigued by that but this I could be intrigued with to do a trilogy.’ One day on the set he said, ‘I have the ending for the third one,’ and he told us something which was quite good.
I mean, you start writing, as you know, and characters take off and they go, ‘Uh-uh, I don’t want to go there. This is where I want to go.’ You’ve got to follow them, otherwise it just doesn’t work. Here, once we started Mr. Brooks and then Marshall, the Mr. Smith character, they just took off. We wrote it very fast. We wrote it in about eight weeks, 8-10 weeks I think, which is fast for us. They just came out. Usually when somebody reads a script of ours, we have rewritten each scene five, six, seven eight times to get it right, to get it right, to get it right. So when you read it, you’re reading our fifth or sixth draft. But we don’t write the whole script and then come and rewrite it, rewrite it. We rewrite each scene and don’t go onto the next scene before we’ve done this scene. Here, there’s some scenes, for example, when she goes to her father’s office and she says, ‘I dropped out of school,’ that was written just one morning, boom, just came out and that’s exactly the way it was. It just flowed quite easily.
Bruce was explaining why he hadn’t directed since Kuffs and essentially we’d get these ideas, write them and then oops, it’s $100 million budget or $80 million. We wrote a great World War I love story about the fliers in World War I. People say, ‘Oh, you should write this into a novel.’ Nobody’s interested in doing anything about World War I in that way, the fliers. That one took us maybe four months to write and we were very proud of it, but it’ll never get on. But also, we had to get it out of our system. It was something that banged and banged and banged on us for a while. Bruce was a fan or fascinated with the fliers of World War I. I’m Canadian so from Canada, we had a big hero, Ace from Canada who shot down umpteen German pilots in World War I and then came back and lived the life of a farmer for the rest of his life.”
Do you have deals in place for the trilogy?
“No, what will happen is it will depend upon the success of the film. If we have a moderate success, it doesn’t have to be a blockbuster, you know these kind of movies don’t do Shrek or Spider-Man or Pirates business. If we achieve, knock wood, a moderate success with it, we would do the sequels. And obviously we’d do them with Element who financed the first one. And Kevin is into doing the sequel, William Hurt saw the movie, he’s shooting in Louisiana, he loved the movie and he said, ‘Hey, for the two sequels, I’m on board.’ So is Demi. They’re all very pleased with the film. We approached it from the beginning. We didn’t hide it from anybody and say, ‘Oh, hey, this one and if…’ No, we said, ‘By the way, this is a trilogy. It doesn’t end with the first one.’”
