Interview with Director & Star of “The Jacket”

The star of The Jacket, Adrien Brody, and its director, John Maybury, talk about their upcoming film and how they feel about the genres of time travel and horror.

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How would you describe this film?

Adrien Brody: That’s up to you. Well, I think it’s pretty amazing to go to a movie and not be spoon-fed. You don’t want to be fed everything. I like the ambiguity of it because like in life, things are ambiguous, and people are ambiguous, and people’s interpretations of people are ambiguous. That’s part of what attracted me to this role was the fact that the character is not really defined by any of this. His ethnicity, his religious beliefs, where he’s from — on any level that’s not described, nor does he have any allegiance to his own past, which defines us. How we are raised and how we are told who we are and what we are.

I think it’s a remarkable place to be as an actor or at any point in life. It’s liberating but at the same time, ‘who are you?’ That’s a very kind of exciting concept to explore in-depth, because it’s all a way for us to kind of understand or assume we understand each other, by how we perceive one another. Now we’re perceiving each other on a very kind of physical level, or a level of beliefs or whatever, but that’s not tapping into who we are within that or the soul, not even the mind or the beliefs who we are within that.

I liked the ambiguity of it all because it’s cool. I have my own ideas of what it’s about, but I also have to suspend that when I’m doing it, not even in explaining it to you. My process is that I have to kind of believe everything my character is believing while he’s believing it or while he’s enduring it or experiencing it. My character is going mad whether I’m dead or I’m dreaming or whatever, I’m going mad in that moment. And I have to experience that as part of my reality.

What kind of preparation did you do for the movie?

Brody: I actually found a sensory deprivation chamber where we were shooting in Glasgow. It was really an interesting experience. I would do quadruple sessions that they were pretty amazed that I could endure. And then you become very aware of how your mind works and how cyclical thoughts are, and how you can guide them. It’s an interesting way to meditate in a way, but also to separate yourself from your physical being. I did it a number of times, but it was hours on end.

We shot in a mental institution in the basement. They built this in the basement of a mental institution and it had that vibe. It had the kind of energy somehow of that. We were using real gurneys and they were all kind of instruments of medicinal - I don’t know, professional instruments around that were frightening. And the crew was nice but the state of mind I was in was not. I don’t even try to communicate with anyone when I’m working.

I was restrained in the jacket and I would ask to be left alone on the gurney and wait while they set up the next shot instead of them getting me out of it and sitting around and having a conversation. I think that’s not conducive to staying in that state of mind. Plus I think it’s just important to stay centered. So therefore it doesn’t matter where it is, what it is, I would be in the same place as we were shooting. If we were shooting it anywhere, I would be in the same kind of my own space. So I kind of am oblivious to what’s going on, for the most part, while I’m filming. When I’m done, it’s cool.

What was your working environment like?

Brody: On all levels, it was a very creative environment, including the process that they edited the film and did the effects. It was very organic and very much like crafting something. They were crushing moth wings and blood on negatives and blood on my outfit and coffee stains — and hopefully not urine, but things that were very reminiscent of urine. And it had a real artist’s feel to everything, which is wonderful. So it was cool. It was pretty inspirational.

How many hours would you spend in The Jacket?

Brody: It depends. I mean, we did lots of days with lots of overtime and there are sequences… Nothing will be more difficult than The Pianist because The Pianist had like a six week slot with no other actors.

It was a tremendous amount of pressure and it was all day with Roman [Polanski] and myself and a crew, and it’s a whole movie in that time period basically you can shoot. And it’s relentless. Roman never even liked using the stand-in so I was there from morning to night on set doing everything. I learned probably more than I could learn in any filmmaking class from that experience. But it’s made everything else kind of easier in a way, you know? Easier than it would be. But not saying it was not difficult. It was difficult. There were long days of being restrained on a metal gurney in a cold, damp Scottish prison.

What are your favorite time travel stories?

John Maybury: My favorite time travel movie I suppose, is A Matter of Life and Death. 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. 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 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.

One of your actors, Jennifer Jason Leigh, has described this film as a dark twisted version of It’s a Wonderful Life. Do you agree?

Maybury: 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, 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!

How would you describe The Jacket?

Maybury: I described it from the git-go as a subversive psychological thriller, which seems to be a kind of meaningless phrase. 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. 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.

The posters and ads make it look like a full-on horror movie — How would you market it?

Maybury: I don’t know. That’s not my job, unfortunately, and I have to defer to the people here because it’s their dollar that they’ve spent on this film. But I don’t know. What do you do? It really is a difficult question because you can’t say, ‘Oh, it’s a really interesting film,’ because I don’t think that’s going to come over as a very strong tagline.

Why was Adrien Brody right for the role of Jack?

Maybury: Because he looks like an Arab. I mean, although he’s a nice Jewish boy from Queens, he actually looks strangely Arabic to me and it sort of had a nice resonance for my Guantanamo Bay [references]. Actually, to be really honest, he reminds me of Pierre Clémenti who is one of my favorite European actors. It’s like a big bowl of pretentiousness, which I really shouldn’t be talking about because I want to sell this movie to the general target in America and I want it to be really commercial… and Keira Knightley gets her tits out and it’s just great! [laughs]

[In this film] Adrien gets to show a phenomenal range of who he is. It’s not just the angst and beating himself up. There’s a levity. The scenes with Daniel Craig’s character, Mackenzie, you get to see a lightness in Adrien, a humor. And again in the scenes with Keira where it looks like sort of Rudolph Valentino and Lillian Gish or something. There’s a kind of beauty in the pair of them that’s astonishing.

What happened when you first previewed The Jacket for screening audiences?

Maybury: When we did one of the kind of inextricable kind of previews that Warners seems to think is really important on crap like this, they asked 20 random people why this should have an R [rating]. Do you know why they thought it should an R? Because you can see Keira’s nipple. Not because people are being smacked on the heads, their heads are being blown off... It’s really extraordinary to me the kind of cultural climate. It was interesting you asking about why did she have the bath. For me it was a very important part of telling you how dissolute and vulnerable this character is. How kind of off-kilter her character is, which is reflected in her mother’s character, Kelly Lynch’s character.

So, you’re not a fan of test screenings?

Maybury: I loathe the whole process. I don’t see the point. I’ve walked through towns and I’ve walked through cities and I’ve never seen statues built by committee. And that, to me, it just seems like the most absurd… I’ve only made no-budget films before this.

The first screening we did, and the film was like an hour and 20 minutes longer than it is now because I wanted to see it. I didn’t even think about the process. I just wanted to see what I’d shot, what I wanted to lose, what could go, what mattered, what didn’t. And suddenly I had the 19 producers like angels of death all around me telling me the music was wrong. I’m like, ‘Hey, that’s the temp music.’ ‘No, that’s not the finished sound design.’ But obviously it’s a process that’s very important to the corporate people who work in this country, which is why you get so much crap cinema.

In the end [the extra hour and 20 minutes] didn’t have any value or meaning to the story I was trying to tell. And I’m really interested in how much you can cut to the finest kind of bone and still have a story. That’s where it brings me back to that thing about audiences having an enormous intelligence. I’m a member of the audience. I remember. I know what it’s like.

Audiences will bring value to films that invest meaning to situations and subjects. I don’t buy into this thing of 5 hour, 4 hour, 3 hour… Imagine if The Aviator had been 40 minutes shorter. It would have won every fucking Oscar [this year]. It was ironic that Thelma Schoonmaker got the Best Editor. She’s a brilliant editor, don’t get me wrong. But if she’d cut about 35 minutes from that film, it would be a masterpiece. But it lingered so long in certain scenes you were like, ‘Get over it. Leave me alone.’

If it’s City of God, I will watch for 7 hours because that’s a different kind of energy, a different kind of cinema. But within this kind of American/Hollywood me trying to be all proper, I think there is a kind of framework you can work within that is very vital to this day. Very full of energy — and I want to be a part of that.

I hope The Jacket is a part of that. Even though it’s being sold as The Ring.

Would you ever make another Hollywood movie?

Maybury: [laughs] I bloody hope so. It remains to be seen if I’m allowed back.

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By Staci Layne Wilson