What Just Happened? Read Free

little bit like Chauncey Gardiner, you have to listen for the right note. If you aren’t listening it makes no sense a lot of times but if you are listening it actually does. Part of it is a humility of not wanting to criticize. I’ve known him for a long, long time now, and he’s not somebody who you see criticizing other people’s scripts or other people’s movies. He makes stuff, so he doesn’t think about it that way.
    So every couple of months, I’d send Bob some pages and ask, ‘What do you think?’ He never told me exactly what he thought. It was ‘I’m sort of—I’m looking at the thing.’ I probably went through three or four drafts, and when I was finally done, he read it and he went, ‘It’s great, we should give this to Barry.’ I went, ‘Terrific.’ Barry read it and said, ‘Yes,’ and we were on our way.
    PB : Why Barry Levinson?
    AL : Bob worked with Barry on
Wag the Dog
. I’d never worked with Barry but I’d known him for a long time, and I just thought that this movie had a comedic sensibility and a reality sensibility that fit his thing, and moreover Barry doesn’t do shtick comedy, it’s more real. I know he knows the business like I know the business, so I knew he would understand it as true. The guy, the producer, the me-character is not a comedian. He’s just a guy who perseveres.
    PB : You had a table reading? Were you worried?
    AL : I’m always scared by table readings with Bob. After what I’ve been through with him I thought, ‘Oh my god we’re going to have one reading and he won’t want to do this after all this fucking work,’ so to say that wasn’t always on my mind—of course it was always on my mind. I kept saying to him, ‘Look, under normal circumstances, I don’t mind having a reading, but with you every time I have a reading, it’s your excuse to get out of the movie.’ As great as Anthony Hopkins was in
The Edge
, initially I wanted Bob to do it. But Bob wanted to read, and when he says, ‘Let’s do a reading,’ it means something’s wrong. So this time he said, ‘No, no, no, don’t be defensive, let’s hear what it sounds like.’ We had some wonderful actors there like Steve Buscemi who didn’t end up in the movie, but I learned a lot from it, including that it was funny, you could feel that.
    PB : What was De Niro’s reaction?
    AL : It’s always the same, ‘It’s good, it’s good.’
    PB : How did you know it was a go for him?
    AL : He never said it wasn’t.
    PB : The movie is packed with stars and great actors, not only De Niro, Penn, and Willis, but Catherine Keener, Robin Wright, Stanley Tucci, Michael Wincott, and John Turturro. How much did it cost?
    AL : The budget was just under twenty million. The actors frankly didn’t work for long periods of time. I think we shot Sean in a day and a half, we shot Robin in three days, we shot Bruce in one day. It was done in the spirit of an independent film. It comes off being a bit more glamorous than that, but that wasn’t my intention.
    PB : Was De Niro the magnet who attracted the other actors?
    AL : No, I think it was a combination of De Niro, Barry Levinson, and the script. With Barry, at least we weren’t going to embarrass ourselves, the script made me laugh, and then De Niro’s in every single scene, how bad can it be? If the movie works, it’s because of what Bob brought to it as much as the writing. For him to play a guy hanging on for dear life, and just being the mayonnaise in the sandwich, is just a hard role to play for a guy who doesn’t play that kind of stuff. In 95 percent of his movies, he plays guys who say, ‘I don’t take shit from you, I’ll kill you first.’ He feels comfortable doing that. He rarely plays a guy where things are being done to him. He strikes back.