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An Interview With Richard Shephard - The
Hunting Party
by Mitch Emerson
This was a round table sort of thing with me, another journalist
named Jason Buchanan, staff writer for All Movie Guide (www.allmovieguide.com)
and Richard Shephard to promote The Hunting Party, a film starring Richard Gere
and Terence Howard. There really wasn't a “start” to the interview, we just
started chatting and the first thing that came up was that me and Jason had
crammed as many of Mr. Shepards movies as we could over the weekend. That led
into a discussion about director's commentaries, so I shall start with Mr.
Shepards take on commentaries.
RS: Yea, you look into my director commentary babble. I love that when on a DVD
directors talk, but a lot of the time it's not that interesting because they are
sort of repeating what you have already seen. They're like, this is the scene
where they walk out of the house and down the street. William Friedkin is one of
my favorite directors and his commentaries are awful because they are exactly
that. You want stories and behind the scenes, you know? Coppalas commentaries
are really great. Sometimes the story behind it is more interesting than the
movie. At the end of the day I made this
thriller, Mexico City in Mexico City and I had such a great time just making the
movie and I'm like, this movie kind of paints Mexico as this horrifying
place but i actually had a really good time, I actually want to make another
movie set in Mexico City that actually shows the positive side which is why
I set The Matador there.
Jason: I was wondering about that when I watched The Matador, it seemed like you
really wanted to go back.
RS: I didn't choose to write this (The Hunting Party) to go to Bosnia though.
J: That was the next question, did you have a similar experience there?
RS, I did. Listen, Mexico is a particular culture. They are incredibly warm
people. The sun, the tequila and everything, it's just a really nice place
to make a movie. Bosnia, the people are very nice, but it's a war torn country
and it's a different vibe so we had a really interesting time making
the movie but it wasn't the same. It wasn't Margarita time, you know? And since
we were shooting in places where the war had really happened and a lot of our
crew had lived through the war. The Bosnians have a pretty dark sense of humor
and a good sense of humor, but it's a different sort of experience.
Me: Did you have any trouble with any crew that lived through that having
flashbacks or anything?
RS: A few people had to leave the set. There's a scene that actually got cut out
where Richard Gere is in the bathtub and he has a flashback of them
(Gere and Howard) running with a camera that was part of a sequence in Sniper
Alley which was an area where people were constantly shot at from up in the
hills. It was shot at Sniper's Alley in Sarajevo and several crew members had to
leave because it was too much. The set was exactly what it
was like, the burnt out cars, people getting shot. That was really grounding for
us to know that people were having that reaction. It made me feel
terrible for them but at the same time we must have been doing something right.
One of the reasons I wanted to shoot it there was that I figured the
crew would keep us honest. They see the comedy in the United Nations ridiculous
effort to try and catch these war criminals and as soon as they
realized that we weren't making fun of what happened in the war they were fine
with what we were doing and I think they were happy that we chose to
shoot it there. We could have shot the movie in Bulgaria and saved ourselves
three million dollars and had another ten days to make the movie, but I am
convinced it wouldn't have been as good.
J: I noticed in Mexico City, you used a lot of local talent, did you do the same
for The Hunting Party?
RS: Yes, it's great. The guy who played The Fox in The Hunting Party is a
Sit-Com actor in Croatia. That would be like taking Jason Alexander, George from
Seinfeld, and making him a bad guy. No one knows this guy here (The Fox), so in
a way, you have this wide range of talent and they are completely fresh faces
here to America and I think it is so great when you see an actor you don't know.
I also think it's fun to see actors you know
doing something different than what we are used to seeing. I think that's part
of what is great about casting Gere and Howard in those roles, it's not
everyday you see them play roles like that, but to see an unknown guy doing
something, yea, he's a great actor, he just happens to live in Croatia and not
in LA and that's the reason you don't know him. I think that also the local
faces, the extras are so great, they don't look like actors. You could
shoot the woods of Bosnia in Vancouver, you really could, and half the time we
were there we were like, why aren't we in Vancouver, but at the same
time, you'd never get those extras, you'd never get that real feeling of being
there.
JB: You used the term “mood-tage” on one of your commentaries.
RS: Without a doubt. It's a real shorthand, like when Gere, Howard, and
Eisenberg walk into that bar with the animal heads on the wall and the people
there all turn and look? Those people were real townspeople in that little town
that we shot in. Just their faces said so much more than any dialogue, you just
knew that that was how they lived. People who work outside have that sort of
face and you can't fake it and I'm always wondering, how can you tell shorthand
a bigger story? Like when they walk away from that “Enjoy Sarajevo” thing and
you think they are sitting in front of a Coca-Cola sign. We recreated it but it
was a real piece of art in Sarajevo at the time. To me, that just says an
enormous amount, there's this
mortar wound in this thing and it says enjoy Sarajevo and it's just wow, what
the hell does that mean?
ME: That leads to another question. You said last night (at the Q&A after the
screening) that you made this first and foremost to be entertainment. How hard
was it to walk the line between showing too much war and not showing enough. How
much did you feel you could put in there before it changed the tone of the film?
RS: Well, if it's the issue, if I was just making a movie about the hunt for
some criminal set in Vegas, then it's just a caper or an invention movie, but
this is A. a true story, and B. about a serious situation. There is nothing
funny about war crimes, but, there is something humorous about what was going on
then and what happened to these real journalists. When we were cutting the movie
we tested it a lot. We screened it for a lot of audiences. You guys are some of
the first to see the finished movie, but we test screened it a lot and if it was
too silly, they don't take the drama seriously and if it's too dramatic they
won't laugh for twenty minutes. So how do we balance that? I think we achieved
it but it was tricky and not so easy and that's why I think ultimately you don't
see a lot of movies that try to mix genres because they are hard in the sense
that if the comedy works, it works, it's funny. Knocked Up is funny. If it's not
funny, it doesn't work. If The Bourne Ultimatum isn't thrilling, it doesn't
work. Here is a situation where it's not so simple, it has to be two things and
two things are harder than one thing. I think that's why these actors wanted to
do it in the first place, it seemed a little different.
ME: That's what interested me. I looked it up (The Hunting Party) on IMDB and I
noticed all the genres it was listed under, action, adventure, drama, comedy and
thriller. It's a very well rounded movie and you can't go wrong with that.
JB: You made the point last night that life has all of that. Life has laughs,
life has horror, life has everything.
RS: Especially in this story, in this real thing. It was especially weird
shooting that first battle scene where you meet Richard Gere and he's asking for
a Quaalude. We filmed that where a real battle had taken place and that burnt
out building was not art directed. We added the explosions, but the set was a
real street.
JB: You said they did their own stunts, Gere and Howard?
RS: Yes, they did it all. Even that night where they are kidnapped and being
shoved down the hill and Jesse slo-mo's, he really did that. The big thing
was when they were hung up. That took three days to shoot, with tape on their
mouths and let me tell you something, if those guys were assholes, we
would never have gotten through it. Thankfully they were really nice. When you
start tying people up, it really hurts, even though you aren't really tying them
up, just being like this (demonstrates). We didn't have the money for real sets
so it was really a barn in the middle of nowhere, really at night. It was cold
and wet.
ME: It makes it more real.
JB: I can see where they would lose themselves in it a little more.
RS: It was fun, I like working that way.
ME: It's fun to tie up Richard Gere?
RS: (laughs)You know what, sometimes when the actors are pissing you off, I know
we aren't shooting for another ten minutes but go ahead and tape their mouths
and leave them up there anyways.
ME: You said we were some of the first people to see it, are you prepared to
be answering those hard questions about leaving out thing like Russia's
involvement in the war and other questions like that?
( This is in reference to a question brought up at the Q&A about why he left
some facts out)
RS: At the end of the day, if you aren't in tune with someone politically,
they are going to have trouble with whatever you are doing. There's a theory
that this guy Radovan Karadicz, the real guy, is being hidden by Russians.
Now that's a theory among many others. Could I have had a line in the movie
about it? Probably, but to answer your question, I am prepared most of the
time to talk about the political things. Listen, I was interviewed today by
a conservative web person who was basically on me about the fact that I was
siding with the Muslims. It's not fiction that genocide happened here, it's
not like I'm making something up that makes the Muslims seem sympathetic. I
say in the movie that atrocities happened on all sides and in real life
there are war criminals from every side of the war but the fact is the
Muslims got their ass kicked in that war and it's horrible. They got
slaughtered and raped and I would be making a fake movie if I didn't show
that and deal with that, so that's a political thing. If the movie gains any
traction and people start to see it and like it, it will gain in some way
but I'm up for it. I know the subject, it's not like they're asking me about
some subject that I know too much about. I was killing time before an
interview at Borders and I was looking at the Bosnian War books and I was
like, “I'm done with this movie, what the f*** am I doing here?”, I've read
every single one of these things.
JB: You said you read a lot of them. What would you recommend if people
wanted to find out more about this war?
RS: There's this great book and I'm trying to remember the name of the
author (Anthony Loyd) called My War Gone By, I Miss It So. Track it down at
Amazon, I think you guys would love it. He was a junkie who basically shows
up in Bosnia without any newspaper behind him who somehow gets a job as a
stringer (freelance) reporter and it changes his life. Whenever he's not in
Bosnia he's back on junk because he's an adrenaline junkie as well as a
junkie junkie. He's such a great writer, he's so funny and so vivid.
Reading that book, it was like, man, these guys have a great sense of humor
and yet they look at things in a way that we can't. That's how they survive.
He describes things in that book that just curdle you, just horrible stuff
that if you and I were to see it, one day would just devastate us, but if
you see it everyday, who do you deal with that? You have to find a sense of
humor about it.
JB: Like in the scene where Richard Gere finds his girlfriend, that was just
powerful.
ME: I like how you showed what happened and then why it happened.
RS: I did that on purpose. I think movies, a lot of the time, tell you
everything you need to know in the first three minutes about a character. I
love movies where you kind of peel back the onion, where it’s kind of like
well, we think we know Richard Gere, but actually you don’t.
ME: You don’t realize it’s personal
RS: Right. And you think you get him, like Jesse Eisenburg just thinks he’s
a jerk, and then he hears that and it’s like whoah, well maybe there’s more
to this guy now, there’s more to him, and I think that that’s interesting.
I did it in The Matador too in that you think you know what Pierce is but at
the end of the day he’s totally different than you expect. And the baggage
that Pierce brought as an actor to the thing that you know him as James
Bond, you’ll be hooked with what you think you know about him, but by the
time he’s pathetically crying and asking Greg to help him it’s like wow,
that is not the guy I thought he was when he walked in the movie. And I
think that’s fun. And the more you can keep an audience not knowing what’s
going to happen both story and character wise then you actually can build
tension in a way that doesn’t have to rely on special effects or anything
like that. It causes a tension because you just don’t know. Like I hope
that the scene where they’re hung up in the barn that it causes people to
think someone might actually bite it.
ME: I have to ask you about Dylan Baker, because he’s in The Matador,
Oxygen, and The Hunting Party. I’ve also seen him in the Spiderman movies,
where he’s a lighter character. Are you friends with him?
RS: I’m friends with him in the sense that every two years we meet up for
like a day and he does a cameo in a movie of mine. I do think he’s such a
good actor and I wrote that part in The Hunting Party for him because I had
him in Oxygen and he had this one big monologue and he was so great I’m like
this guy’s amazing. That was not an easy monologue and he just like killed
it in two takes. And so then in The Matador I’m like who could play this
part, and then I thought let’s track Dylan Baker down, see if he’ll come
down to Mexico. And then on this one it was easy because now we’ve worked
together before. He’s a great character actor, and I think that’s one of
the reasons Terrance Howard is so good, because he started out as a
character actor, and when you start off as a character actor you have to hit
a home run in every scene, cuz sometimes it’s only one scene. So if you
want to make an impression on a filmgoer you have to really be good. It’s
not about being OK. And Dylan Baker’s career is about coming in and being
really good in whatever role, like in Spider man, which I think he’s really
good in those movies, or Happiness it’s a completely different kind of role
he played in that. And I think Terrance also comes from that school where
he is a professional scene stealer, he always has been. And I think that’s
why I wanted to mix him up with Gere because Gere had to stay on his toes or
Howard was going to just steal the movie because he’s that type of actor.
JB: I like the character details. I got a lot of, sort of, what Pierce
Brosnan had done in The Matador, Richard Gere was kind of doing here. Like
you said, he kind of reinvented himself. I didn’t see a lot of this
Richard Gere before.
RS: That’s right. I think that’s kind of like how it’s smart to cast a
movie where you don’t have a lot of money. Because if you have a ton of
money you can get almost any actor to do anything. If someone is going
through a divorce and needs 15 million dollars then you can get them. But
if you don’t have 15 million, if that’s the whole budget of your movie,
you’ve got to figure out how am I going to get an actor to actually do this
part. To me it’s like take an actor who is likely jonesing to do something
different, that they’re not the sort of roles they’re always offered.
Pierce is so likeable as an actor , you just like him, whatever the history
is of him you kinda like him, and that’s where I thought he’d be great in
The Matador. Why it worked in The Matador is because you like him so you
can accept him being a scoundrel. And I think the same thing with Gere.
You like him so much you can kind of accept him stealing money from a (can’t
understand) doing things that with other characters you might be like what a
dick. So with Gere you kind of give him a little bit cuz he smiles at you
and you kinda gotta go with it. It’s a very subliminal thing. Terrance has
done plenty of these sort of darker characters is Crash and Hustle and Flow.
I mean he’s great in those movies but dark. I think he was like “Oh man,
I get to smile, I get to play guitar, I get to f*** around.” That’s why he
wanted to do it. So you kind of mix and match and you hope. The Matador
first and then this is sort of more buddy movie that doesn’t feel like just a normal buddy movie. The idea that men can love each other in some deep
heterosexual way, that they can hang out and talk with each other in a sort
of sarcastic way, that’s kind of one of the elements I’ve been trying to
deal with. When I hang out with my friends it’s a lot of insults, you make
fun of each other, and I like that, and I think it’s not every day that you
see that. When you see a buddy movie it tends to be like I Now Pronounce You
Chuck and Larry or whatever, which is so very specifically like “He’s the
blah blah and he’s the blah and together they’re…” I think that you can mix
it up a little bit. When people starting looking at The Matador as a buddy
movie I was like yeah, it is, and you should enjoy it as you do a good buddy
movie like The Inlaws or something like that, but at the same time there’s
hopefully more to it.
JB: I had a question about the scene in The Matador where you have Pierce
Brosnan walking through the hotel lobby in the boots….you guys said you dreamt
that up in a couple days. Was there anything like that in The Hunting Party?
RS: That’s funny you should ask that. Not really. Though I’ll tell you,
there’s a bit of a long story that’s interesting about Terrance and Richard as
actors. In the scene where they’re hung up there’s a guy with a tattoo on his
head. In the scene itself The Fox never talks to Richard Gere, he just
watches. But in the scene in the movie The Fox comes out from the shadows and
has a confrontation with Gere. So we started rehearsing the scene the way it
was originally written, with The Fox just watching, and the actor with the
tattoo on his head was great when he was speaking in Serbian, but his English
wasn’t so great, and he was kind of over acting. You couldn’t tell he was over
acting when he was acting in Serbian, but when he was speaking English he wasn’t
the greatest actor. Something about the scene’s not going right, we would
rehearse it, da-da-da…Terrance Howard comes over to me and he’s like “We’re
f***ing up right now. That actor who’s playing The Fox is so god damned good,
and he’s the one who has this thing with Richard Gere, and he’s the one who
should be talking to Richard Gere, not this guy.” It’s OK in the beginning, but
when it’s finally about confrontation with Gere talking it should be The Fox.
And if you’re sitting there, you’ve already rehearsed for two hours, you’re
already two hours behind, and you think about what it’s going to take to make
that change, and all the ramifications of it…you gotta cut some lines out of
that scene at the end where they confront him in the woods, cuz the scene begins
and he’s talking in Bosnian because he doesn’t know that they’re American,
because we had shot it first. Terrance detected something that was not in the
script, that was a major change, and as a film maker if you don’t listen to that
you’re just screwed. I could have just been like “This is the way we’re doing
it.” I’d rather deal with the repercussions of going over schedule if it’s to
make the scene so much better, which it did. That scene’s a great scene, it’s
the best part of Richard Gere’s entire performance in my mind, when he’s sort of
begging for his life, and all the lives, he's told people the whole movie he'd
come back and pay him back in spades, the fact that he’s saying it to that guy,
the guy who killed his girlfriend along with millions of other people, that made
that scene really good. And it was basically Terrance, and if Terrance hadn’t
voiced what he was thinking it wouldn’t have been as good, and I also think the
whole movie wouldn’t have been as good. There should be a fluidity when you’re
making a movie, that’s part of what the process is like. I mean on The Matador
it was high comedy, I mean I like to think the movie’s realistic, and even that
scene’s realistic, but it’s clearly a visual thing. That was like f*** it, this
is gonna be funny, we had the freedom to try it, and believe me if it wasn’t
funny it wouldn’t have ended up in the movie. But I’m a fan of, if someone
brings up an idea that’s good you should at least think about it, I mean you’re
stupid if you don’t. And also as the director you always get the credit even if
it’s not your idea so you may as well listen to every idea.
ME: I noticed watching Oxygen that you have The Toxic Avenger in there. Was
that on purpose in the background in the scene where he’s in the bathtub?
RS: Very interesting, nice work. Toxic Avenger, we got it from Troma, yes. I
had an intern trip for a day at Troma. I met Mike Kaufman, he described to me
what was expected of me as an intern, including cleaning his personal toilet,
and I just quit after less than a day. I loved Troma movies growing up, and so
I really wanted to work there. I probably would have learned something if I
would have stayed, but I was just like, you know when on the first day the guy
f***ing has me cleaning his toilet I’m like, no f***ing way. But they were nice
enough to loan us the Toxic Avenger.
ME: Not even just The Toxic Avenger, you’ve got that one scene in there so you
can hear it and you just know it.
RS: Like I put Missing In Action in there
ME: Yeah, that was obvious
RS: But that’s the music (I think that’s what he says), I don’t know, there’s
certain movies that just…..Like, Missing In Action is the movie that this could
have been if it was just sh**ty. Although Chuck Norris is very nice.
JB: I know you worked with the same crew for a lot of your earlier movies, the
same DP and stuff, but you’ve got David Tattersall in The Matador and here (in
The Hunting Party)…how’s that?
RS: It’s amazing. The woman who shot Mexico City and Oxygen is brilliant, and
I want to work with her again as soon as possible, she’s a really good DP. On
The Matador Pierce said to me “I don’t care who you hire as a DP as long as
they’re as good as David Tattersall.” I ended up getting David, and David was
so much more experienced than I was, on every level. He had just shot the
Star Wars movies, and it was funny because
was doing my first green screen ever on The Matador and it was the simplest
thing, and David had to really explain it to me, while he meanwhile had just
gone and shot a whole f***ing movie in green screen. He’d worked with such
experienced directors that he just expected me to be as good as I could be.
I’ll say “Why don’t we do this” and just the look on his face is like “That’s
not good enough” and you’re like “OK, then why don’t we do this.” He just a
motivator, he’s worked with really good people and I think he enjoys doing my
movies because they’re so different from these gigantic mega 300 million dollar
movies, and my movies are so not that, they’re just such different things that I
think he likes wearing both hats. He said to me “We should do The Hunting
Party, we should do most of it hand held, let’s just go for it, let’s not be
dealing with all the normal things that you do with a movie.” Most movies
there’s a mark on the ground where the actor has to stand, so he walks across
the room and has to land on this mark, and actors are great at actually looking
down at their mark without looking. But they have to hit it because this light
goes like this, and the other light like this….it’s just this f***ing perfect
thing. So David’s just like “F*** it, we’re just not going to give them any
marks, if they stand in the wrong place I’ll move.” That was great for them and
fun for us because every day was just an adventure.
ME: Well then you can also open it up and not be stuck with “OK, well we’ve got
to be set up to do this.”
RS: Exactly, and you can change things. Certain things were very planned, like
the wide shot with the “Enjoy Sarajevo” was a very planned, like we have to get
this wide shot at the end. So certain things were very planned, and then
certain things were just like let’s give them the freedom and see what they do.
To me one of the best parts about making a movie are the people you collaborate
with. It just is awesome, because they just bring so much and they’re working
full time at only one job to do the best that they can. A production designer
will bring in hundreds of ideas that you never even thought of, and the costume
designer, and the editor will be only focusing on that and really finding the
little moments that work. That is pretty god damned cool. You’re writing the
movie and then you’re directing it, but you have all these other people who are
trying to get you to do the best work that you can. At the end of the day it’s
always my decision and so I have to take credit for whatever works or doesn’t
work in a movie, but that doesn’t mean that everyone else doesn’t contribute.
It got through on The Matador when Pierce is there in his cheerleader outfit,
that was something we came up with that morning. And I had such confidence in
everyone on the crew I said to the first assistant director “Can you get a
trampoline, can you get such-and-such” and he’s like “yes,” I went to the
costume designer and I’m like “Can you make a cheerleader outfit for Pierce by
two o’clock,” and she’s like “yes.” It was like BAM BAM BAM. So then all I had
to do was sheepishly knock on the door of Pierce’s trailer and say “Hey, do you
have any interest in dressing up like a cheerleader” and he just starts cracking
up.
That's about all there was to it. I really need to get a better recorder for the
next one.
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