Paul McGuigan Q&A

The 'Lucky Number Slevin' director discusses working with Bruce Willis and Morgan Freeman on his new flick.

Feb 24 2006

Having announced his arrival on the film scene with an adaptation of Irvine Welsh's 'The Acid House' in 1998, Scottish director Paul McGuigan then made a star of Paul Bettany with 'Gangster No.1' before adapting French thriller 'L'Appartement', as 'Wicker Park' in 2004. Tomorrow sees the release of his fourth feature, 'Lucky Number Slevin', an unconventional thriller that stars Josh Hartnett, Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman and Ben Kingsley.

How did the 'Lucky Number Slevin' script end up in your hands?

I'd done a film called 'Gangster No.1' a few years ago, and it got kind of lost in the 'Lock Stock' melee. But when he saw it, Jason Smilovic, who wrote 'Lucky Number Slevin', sent the script to my agent. He didn't send it to anyone else, he just decided I was the guy, which is pretty unusual in Hollywood – every script usually gets sent to everyone. It stayed under my bed because I was editing another movie at the time, and I'm quite lazy, but my agent told me I had to read it, and when I did, I was blown away. A bit like when I read 'Gangster' – I knew I had to do it – it had such a strong idea of itself. The language, the very well defined characters – everything was great. On the original script, half-way through reading it I wrote 'why do all these people talk the same?' And I was going to bring it up as a criticism of the film, but when I got to the end I realised that they should talk the same, that's the power and quality of it – it's got such a distinctive voice – it's kind of musical in a sense.

How did you put together such a high-profile cast?

To get a cast like this, you have to do one of two things – you either pay them lots of money, or have a good script. You can have both of course, but we had a good script, and what everyone said was that 'we don't want to touch the words'.

So the finished film is similar to the original screenplay then?

The script didn't stay the same, but that's because Jason was with me all the way through. And it was amazing, I was getting calls from all these incredible people – Bruce Willis was a fan of 'Gangster', and we’d spoke before about working together – then he phoned me and said 'I hear you're looking for someone to play Goodcat? What the hell is this? Why didn't you come to me?' And I told him 'Bruce, you're too expensive for me to be honest'. He laughed and said we'd sort it out. But that's what I love about the man – he just loves movies – he'd do it to be in the same film as Morgan Freeman and Ben Kingsley. And it wouldn't be unusual to see him sitting on the floor off camera on his days off watching Ben and Morgan do their stuff.

Visually it's a very stylish film – where did you take your inspiration from?

I'm a great admirer of English moviemaking, especially of the 1960s. It was a very conscious decision of mine to make a film that didn't have a pounding soundtrack or the coolest music out. I wanted a score, to make it pure, like an old '60s soundtrack. I wanted the music to tell the story, not to tell you what era you're in. That's too easy – I was guilty of that on the last movie I did because it required it, but this one didn't. Also, my cinematic memories are of '60s movies and I wanted to approach it like that – not to make it too contemporary. I always come back to the classics like 'The Ipcress File', 'Get Carter' and 'Performance'. 'Performance' is seen as a gangster movie, but it starts off as that and then it goes into this other realm. And I always said 'Gangster No.1' wasn't a gangster movie but rather a portrait of someone who was psychotic.

So 'Lucky Number Slevin' isn't a gangster movie then?

It sort of supersedes genre because it's got such an unusual script, and it's such a distinctive voice that it doesn't fit any genre, it kind of plays with them. It's not going to change the world and it's not going to make you go home and thing about your life and have deep thoughts about yourself, but it's a good Friday night movie that you can go down the pub afterwards and talk about.

Morgan Freeman doesn't usually play villains, so why did you decide to cast him as a bad guy?

It's always a struggle with things like this to do it different to how people expect, so having Morgan Freeman as the boss of a gang – he's such a cool, nice man. He's the epitome of cool – I insisted he wear slippers because I loved the fact that he could shimmy along the floors. And if you have Morgan Freeman, who's very quietly spoken and chilled, saying 'I'm going to have to kill you', the piss would start running down my leg, because you'd believe him. Whereas if you have some Rottweiller always shouting at you, after a while that dilutes itself. And Bruce wanted to play a tired hitman blending into the background rather than a black suited cliché, so we were trying to break the taboos of the genre. Because it's fucking annoying when you see the same things over and over again.

The shifts in tone are quite dramatic throughout – was it difficult to make the film work as a cohesive whole?

Definitely, and it was a struggle trying to keep all the pieces together and explain it all at the end. It was a fucking nightmare because it's such a puzzle. But from day one we said 'we don't care if people get it from the beginning', because it's more interesting to see how it's constructed – the journey we take to get there and why we go on that journey. And that's the beauty of it. It was confusing to put together though.

But it sounds like you had fun making it.

Everything was quality, so it was nice to go on set and think that, quite frankly, if this fucks up it's my fault. And that was a pressure of its own. Usually I can worm my way out of it by blaming the script of something else, there are so many different factors, but here the factors just came together really nicely.

What are you up to next?

I've signed up to do a film version of 'The Equalizer', and I'm also trying to get a movie made here in the UK because I'm fed up with walking out of the house and saying to my wife 'I'll see you in a year and a half's time'.

'Lucky Number Slevin' is released tomorrow. And to find out more about McGuigan's 'The Equalizer', click here.

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