The Co-Chairman and Co-CEO of New Line Cinema couldn't resist tackling another directing project when he was presented with The Last Mimzy. Although it wound up taking almost a decade to get done, Bob Shaye was determined to helm the film due to his love of the story. The Last Mimzy is based on the short story Mimsy Were the Borogoves about two children who stumble upon a mysterious box of toys.
Directing vs. Playing the Role of Studio Chief: Was there ever a conflict between his role as director and his position as Co-Chairman and Co-CEO of New Line? “No, but I will tell you we understand the challenges of selling this in an effective way. In the beginning, the film, I expected the film… For instance, there’s a whole subplot between Tim Hutton and Joely Richardson where they’re arguing all the time because she has a job, a business of her own, which has been cut out now,” explained Shaye. “He was really in the office a lot more, and was on the phone all day; and there was really this sub text about [how] the parents wanted to be what they do, and they’re blaming each other for the kids being goofy and not understanding it. But I realized this film was more of a family film. There was a little more – not salacious – but a little more sex between Rainn [Wilson] and Kathryn Hahn. We cut that stuff and it still would have gotten a PG rating.
But particularly in the friends and family screenings, because they’re a little more intimate, I kept getting these reactions from people saying, ‘You know, this is a film about a five year old and a ten year old. I had 12 year olds and 14, 16 year olds, and I want to bring my kids here, but I don’t like to see a family arguing all the time, and it’s not what the real story is.’ And with great reluctance, great integrity, ‘I’m not going to let audiences tell me what to do…’ Of course I’m going to let that audience tell me what to do if they’re the audience I want the film to embrace. And so I let this film, consciously, veer itself towards a film that I still think grown ups are going to like and find interesting. People who are science fiction fans are going to, I hope, embrace because [it] just for the visual effects aspect of it and the story line itself. But the core audience is going to be a more family-oriented film, and letting the film find its own natural audience ought to help the marketing tremendously. And I think I did a service to the company, as head of it, not to insist and stand on some kind of hubris.”
The Appeal of The Last Mimzy: “I’ve directed two feature films and in both cases, and even though I was running the company, they were both films that resonated so strongly with me that I really didn’t feel I was demonstrating any kind of arrogance be peremptorily deciding to direct them. The first one is about growing up in the ‘50s, by a guy who grew up in Scranton. I grew up in Detroit. It was funny, it was raunchy, I loved it, and it was just what happened to me. In fact, I re-wrote a lot of the stuff. So there wasn’t going to be anyone else who was going to direct or make this movie. I was a science fiction geek as a kid and one day I read the short story [Mimsy Were the Borogoves). [Producer] Michael Phillips came in [of] Close Encounters of the Third Kind and it’s a story that I love, a very famous short story.”
So I took on the task of trying to develop it. But the problem with developing this story was it didn’t have an ending. It’s a great story about children’s brains not being hard-wired, hardly, and being receptive to all kinds of teaching we could never engage in now because everything has sort of come together. …But the story ends where the kids become these super beings, step into a circle of these objects they find, and disappear. That’s the end of the story. And we started looking at this and I said, ‘What do you mean? We can’t have a movie where they just disappear.’”
Shaye continued, “We couldn’t figure out what to do with it so much, so over the years I just put it down, and followed the dictum that there are some stories that just don’t lend themselves to making movies. You just can’t make a movie out of everything. And in fact, as Hitchcock once said, which in this case is another axiom that I really subscribe to, most good films are made from bad novels or short stories. The Birds is a good example. Not a very fulfilling short story, but a great premise. So I kept gnawing at it, ‘This is a great premise, but I don’t know how to, what that ‘A’ story is.’ ‘What’s the red thread,’ as they say in Swedish. ‘What’s the beginning, middle and end?’
It took a real long, long time, about five writers, to get it finally nailed down. In fact, Toby Emmerich wrote two drafts over a period of two to three years and Bruce Rubin wrote two drafts, plus a lot of extra work over a period of three to four years. There were a bunch of years, over that 10-year period, where we just didn’t do anything because we were just following that rule of, ‘Just leave it alone. You’re never going to get it right.’ But I hope we broke that rule.”
