Refreshing and almost brutally blunt, director John Maybury comes across as one of the few people willing to speak absolutely honestly about the way his film's being marketed, about test screenings, and on bad movies (in his opinion) being passed off as award-worthy.
Speaking in front of a group of reporters in support of the release of "The Jacket," Maybury didn't hold anything back. Prepare for spoilers...
INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR JOHN MAYBURY:
What are your favorite time travel stories?
I don’t have any. No. This isn’t a time travel movie.
It has time travel in it.
No, you must have misunderstood it. He [spoiler deleted].
But if the media quotes you on that, it will give your whole movie away.
I don’t give a s**t. I don’t want anyone to make any money out of this. No, my favorite time travel movie I suppose is “A Matter of Life and Death” by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. But it’s not really time travel. It’s about someone dying – David Niven dies in a plane crash and then someone from the 18th century from heaven comes back and rescues him.
That’s also titled “Stairway to Heaven,” right?
Yeah, exactly. It’s “A Matter of Life and Death” in England. I think it was remade disastrously with Warren Beatty called “Heaven Can Wait.” It’s interesting because I don’t think this film is a time travel movie. I think what this film is is a kind of a symptom of the post-Charlie Kaufman cut and paste, because people on computers can shuffle their screenplays around. So…when there are big narrative failings in a piece of storytelling, writers can just shuffle it all up and dump it on someone like me, the director, to try and sort it out.
I think “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “Memento,” there’s been a whole raft of these kind of films. I think “The Jacket,” which was a screenplay that was done in Hollywood about four years ago when it was going to be an Antoine Fuqua movie with Colin Farrell, was just another one of that particular trend that was current at that time. I just, of course, the story of my life, came on last of all. At the tail end of really tired old formula.
It sounds like you have a bit of contempt for that genre.
Not at all. I love those kind of films. But I knew that if I got my hands on that kind of screenplay, it wouldn’t be that anyway. I made a romance that has kind of a subtext of being about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. I think if I’ve made a much more interesting, a much more demanding film than the general kind of… No, I don’t have contempt for Charlie Kaufman. He’s a brilliant screenwriter as was proved last night at that corporate event [referring to the Oscars].
Jennifer Jason Leigh described this film as a dark twisted, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
That’s actually how… Ironically, there was in the hour and 20 minutes we cut from the film, there is a whole subtext which actually has a scene from “It’s a Wonderful Life” on TV. It is very, very similar. Massy Tadjedin who rewrote the screenplay from the original Marc Rocco piece, she laced it with “It’s a Wonderful Life”-kind of references. Is “It’s a Wonderful Life” a time travel movie? I don’t think so.
An alternate reality…
I described it from the get-go as a subversive psychological thriller, which seems to be a kind of meaningless phrase. But I kind of know what I mean by that. It plays with conventions in that the film actually, I think, changes genre with each reel as the movie progresses. It starts out as one thing, morphs into something else. In a way it’s kind of the flux, the ambiguity of the film that I find interesting. It’s the challenge I hope I’m offering to audiences.
I want audiences to do the work and make the decisions about what this film is. As much as I love American cinema, this opportunity for me – this is my first – I’ve been making films for 25 years, arty, pretentious nonsense in Europe that no one has ever seen. But this is my first chance to make a Hollywood film. I was very excited about being allowed inside this system, and being given access to movie stars and stuff. But I could still play with some of the conventions of the sort of cinema that I like. And also play with the audiences. To ask audiences to kind of come along and do a bit of work, to invest some of their intellect, their own emotional responses, and try and construct some of the story for themselves.
I was very glib when I said he [spoiler deleted]. That could be true. That might be what this film is about. But there are other options open to you. In a way, it kind of denies the point of making films if I tell you, “This is how it begins. This is what it’s about. And this is what it’s meant to do,” because then why bother to go see it?
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