Film Critic Mitch Emerson recently got a chance to sit down with Richard Shepard, the director of "Oxygen", "The Matador" (starring Pierce Brosnan) and now MGM's "The Hunting Party", starring Richard Gere and Terrence Howard, in theaters September 21st, 2007.
Mitch Emerson: I really enjoy your commentary tracks on your DVDs!
Richard Shepard: Yeah, 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? Coppola’s commentaries are really great. Sometimes the story behind it is more interesting than the movie.
ME: Did you have a similar experience in Bosnia filming The Hunting Party as you did in Mexico filming The Matador?
RS: I did. Mexico has 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? 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 of the crew having flashbacks?
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.
ME: 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, so in a way, you have this wide range of talent and they are completely fresh faces 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. I think that the local faces, the extras are so great because they don’t look like actors. You could shoot the woods of Bosnia in Vancouver, but at the same time you’d never get those extras, you’d never get that real feeling of being there.
ME: You used the term “mood-tage” on one of your commentaries.
RS: Without a doubt. It’s 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. Just their faces said so much more than any dialogue. 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?
ME: You said that you made this film 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 true story 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: Are you prepared to be answering those really hard questions about leaving out Russia’s involvement in the war?
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. 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. 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.
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 a day and he does a cameo in a movie of mine. 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. That was not an easy monologue and he killed it in two takes. He’s a great character actor, and I think that’s one of the reasons Terrence 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, because sometimes it’s only one scene. Terrence also comes from that school where he is a professional scene stealer. 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.
ME: I know you worked with the same crew for a lot of your earlier movies and you’ve got David Tattersall in The Matador and here in The Hunting Party.
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. 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 he was so much more experienced than I was, on every level. He had just shot the Star Wars movies, and it was funny because I 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 fucking movie in green screen.
ME: Did Gere and Howard do all of their own stunts?
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. We didn’t have the money for real sets so it was really a barn in the middle of nowhere at night. It was cold and wet.
ME: It’s fun to tie up Richard Gere?
RS: (laughs) Sometimes when the actors are pissing you off, I know we aren’t shooting for another ten minutes but I go ahead and tape their mouths and leave them up there anyways.
- Mitch Emerson
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