Take your best shot- John Dahl Q&A

John Dahl serves up a dry comedy about drying out.

Director and sometime screenwriter John Dahl scored a breakout hit with his 1994 crime comedy 'The Last Seduction', in which Linda Fiorentino played a heartless manipulator of men (notably Bill Pullman and Peter Berg). Dahl’s latest picture, 'You Kill Me', marks a return to the hybrid noir-comedy genre. It stars Ben Kingsley as an alcoholic contract killer in Buffalo whose boss, a small-time racketeer (Philip Baker Hall), exiles him to San Francisco to dry out. While working part-time in a funeral parlor, he finds a sympathetic A.A. sponsor (Luke Wilson) and a new love (Téa Leoni). We spoke to Dahl when he was in town last week.

 

Who’d have thought that Ben Kingsley, whose big break was playing the title role in Ghandi, would later become a specialist in projecting physical menace?

 

Yeah, there was a real perspective shift about Ben after he did 'Sexy Beast'. And I think for a while he was kind of running away from Ghandi—it was almost like a yoke around his neck.

 

Now its almost as if he's been counter-typecast, as the anti-Ghandi. But he never brings less than his A-game. I don't know if you saw the performance he delivered in a terrible movie called 'Suspect Zero'?

 

I not only saw it, it so happens I also read the script. This was years ago, when it was really a good script, at least as serial killer stuff goes. I actually thought about doing it for a while, but there were, like, scenes of people hanging from hooks in meat lockers and stuff, and I didn't want to be around that for a whole year of my life. But when I saw the movie they ultimately made from it I just hated it. I remember thinking, Hopefully this movie sinks forever the entire serial-killer-as-artist-guy genre. It was dreadful, but as you say, Ben Kingsley was really good. In fact, I was flipping around the dial the other day and I stumbled on what looked like some kind of biblical movie with tents and robes and sandals and stuff, desert scenes lit by a campfire—that kind of thing. So I started watching and it turns out it's this TV movie of the story of Moses and Ben Kingsley is playing Moses, and he totally nailed it, you know? He got me. He's got such a commanding presence that you say, Of course that's Moses! Who else is God gonna pick if not that guy? How tall is he? Maybe five six? At most? But it's completely irrelevant because he's not afraid to play big parts. If I was an actor I could never play Moses or Hitler or whoever, but Ben's not afraid of anything.

How did you pick Téa Leoni to play his love interest?

 

Ben was already cast when I got the script, and the way I saw the script working was that Ben would play the hitman character utterly straight and we would surround him with people whose reactions are funny. Because although it's a comedy, the script isn't hilarious to read, right? It’s dry. And Tea Leoni I remembered from 'Flirting With Disaster' as being great at playing smart and sexy but also edgy and a bit hard. Also, she was the sexiest woman I could think of who could plausibly fall in love with an older bald guy who works in a mortuary and kills people for a living. It's easy to credit her with a complicated personality.I liked that the film let the characters speak for themselves, rather than laying on the backstory with a trowel. Her fixation with finding a man who won't later tell her he's gay, for instance, is left unexplained.Yeah, the script doesn't actually impart a whole lot of information about what happened to Téa’s character in the past, or even what she's doing now. We know she sells advertising time for a TV station, but what the hell does that tell us? I was actually under some pressure for a while to fill in the blanks on her character a bit, but finally the producers realized it actually worked better with less exposition.The film is set in Buffalo and San Francisco but filmed in Winnipeg. It so happens I used to live in Winnipeg, but I didn't recognize it at all until the very end, when you had a shot of a restaurant where friends of mine used to work.I had you until then, huh? Well, that's the miracle of digital for you.

Substituting Winnipeg for Buffalo seems almost like a gimme, but San Francisco somewhat less so, given that Winnipeg is flat as a flounder and 1,000 miles from the ocean.

 

Actually Buffalo was more work than San Francisco. For San Francisco I found a building to use as the funeral parlor and we shot it in such a way that we were able to digitally insert the Transam building in on the skyline. Buffalo took more work: We went to Winnipeg in March for the snow, of which there was plenty, and the rivers were frozen and it was cold and perfect. I flew home to Los Angeles for the weekend and when I came back, it was spring. All of the snow was gone and suddenly we're scrambling to get the Buffalo scenes finished before the trees turn green. If you look closely at the exterior scenes in Buffalo, you'll notice that what look like barren trees are really just brown. We used Apple computers to turn the leaves brown and replace the snow we'd lost.

 

Does that cost a fortune?

 

Not any more. Digital effects are becoming so inexpensive, it's just incredible. My last movie was a WWII picture ('The Great Raid') and our shooting budget was $49 million, or which maybe a million was spent on digital effects, about 250 of them. 'You Kill Me' was a four million dollar movie, of which about $100 thousand was spent on almost the same number of effects. It's unreal how much stuff can be done now for next to no money. If I could find a movie I could make for $50 thousand I'd do it, just to take the studio suits and the politics out of the equation. I'm constantly telling young filmmakers, don't bother with the studios, go your own way.

 

The movie has a lot of fun with the penny-ante nature of the crime syndicate Frank works for. You can't get much lower on the organized crime scale than snowplow racketeers.

 

Yeah, but its sort of exotic at the same time. It's not New York City, it's Buffalo. It's not the Italian Cosa Nostra, it's Polish mobsters against Irish mobsters. All very fresh and unfamiliar material.

 

Your film’s a black comedy, but there’s something heartfelt and sincere about Frank’s regeneration through A.A. Are the writers graduates of a 12-step program?

 

No, but one of them, Chris Markus, had a family member who was in recovery and just to lend support he’d go to meetings with her. And that’s where the idea for the script came from. He and his writing partner Steve McFeely were trying to figure out what to write, and Chris mentioned how you can say absolutely anything in these meetings. So they decided to test the boundaries: What about a hit man bearing his soul about how his drinking is interfering with his work? But they discovered it only works if you play the program straight too. This isn’t 'Analyze This', which goofs on psychiatry as much as the mob. This is about as black and dry as humor gets without turning into tragedy.

When 'The Last Seduction' was released, Linda Fiorentino's evil femme fatale created a huge media stir and launched a thousand newspaper op-eds and public radio think pieces. Did you expect to hit that nerve so hard?

 

Not at all. None of us had any idea. Here's how naïve I am: It never occurred to me that 'The Last Seduction' would or could be taken as a film noir. I saw it as a silly black comedy, like 'Ruthless People'. You can't predict that kind of thing, because you're picture is going to get dropped into the 24-hour news feed no matter what, and you can't predict what that news feed is going to be doing on your release date. This script, for example, was written over ten years ago, but this spring I'm watching as all of these celebrities head off to rehab, one after another. And I'm scratching my head and wondering, is this good or bad? Are we suddenly topical or will there be a backlash of rehab fatigue at the box office? What's going to happen before June 22? Maybe somehow we'll hit the jackpot the way 'The China Syndrome' did from 'Three Mile Island'. You just never know.

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