Freitag: How was the response to the screening?

Condon: It was really good.  Last night was great.  It was great seeing the film in that palace [The Music Box], my God!  It’s just such a dream!  It was told it was built in the 20’s, which is when Whale came to Hollywood, and probably that was a neighborhood house that would have played his movies.  It was incredible.  I hadn’t seen it in a theater like that before.  To see it with a packed audience... it was really a thrill.  I’ve seen it so many times now, sometimes you think, ‘Well, I won’t stay,’ but as soon as I got into the theater and felt the audience, I just sat there the whole time.  They were so smart, they got everything.
How did you happen to come across the book?
I met Chris Bram a few years ago, and I’d known his fiction, but it was only actually hearing that he’d written a book about Whale that I got it.  I just went and bought it and read it, and I have a friend who I thank at the end of the movie who is a good friend of Chris’ who talked to him and found out that the rights were available and that was it.  I talked to Chris, and he looked at a few of my movies and said it seemed okay and we were off.

Was Christopher Bram at all connected with the project?

Well, I sent him my script to hear his reaction, and he was very pleased, he thought I’d gotten all the good parts and the parts that were left out weren’t essential.  There were a few things he would’ve liked to have seen back in that didn’t make it.  And then throughout, he came to visit the set.  I loved the book so much that I was concerned that he’d feel comfortable with what we were doing with it, and he did.  I’d written film criticism for “The Native” years ago, and I think that’s part of why the book works [as a film].  It’s really well-structured dramatically, because it’s about a filmmaker, because Chris loves films so much himself that there’s sort of this innate sense of three-act structure in the book.

I’d read you had originally wanted Peter O’Toole to play James Whale.

You read that in “Scarlet Street.”  No, that’s not true.  It was always McKellen.  We had an initial discussion where we went through a list and he was definitely on it, but McKellen was always the only choice.  I wish that hadn’t appeared.  There are things that get printed that you can’t get rid of.

Was it much of a struggle to get McKellen for the film?

Well, I have an agent who knew his agent in London, and Chris had sent the book to him a year previous, and he hadn’t read that, and then we sent the script and he didn’t read it, and then about three months later he finally read it.  He came over here and we met at Clive Barker’s house, one of his contributions, that we could meet at a very big, pretty house, instead of my little house, so we didn’t seem like complete bums because we didn’t have money together.  Then Ian and I met again the next day.  One concern he expressed to me was how old he was in this film and he’d agreed to do “Apt Pupil,” where he was going to be ten years older, and he sensed at this point in his life he was sort of making a conscious effort to make movies for the first time, and that people would think he was at death’s door after these two films.  [laughs]  And I reminded him that he’d be playing Whale at 45, and I showed him a still of Whale directing “Bride of Frankenstein” and he said, ‘Oo, he’s rather dishy, isn’t he.’ So that kind of convinced him.  He jokes about which character audiences will find more repellent--the unrepentant Nazi or the homosexual.  [laughs]

Was Clive Barker immediately involved?

What happened was, Clive and I had worked together [on “Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh”] and we’d talked about doing other things and I optioned the novel with my partner, Gregg Fienberg, started writing the script and I’d just assumed that Clive was only interested in shepherding things based on his own works, and I mentioned it to him, and he said, ‘Yeah, I’d be interested.’  So he became kind of our patron godfather, helping to get it together, using his clout whenever we needed it.  It’s something Clive is interested in doing, sort of promoting other people’s work when he has an interest in it.

How did you go about researching Whale?

It’s interesting how many people are alive who knew him.  My friend Curtis Harrington I’ve known for years, and that’s part of the other reason that drew me to this novel is that Curtis knew him for the last ten years of his life, and so I’d heard stories about him already.  But he was invaluable--we actually went to Whale’s house, Goldie Hawn has owned it.  [Hawn mentioned this at the Oscar ceremony after Condon won for Best Adapted Screenplay] Goldie Hawn, of course, completely redid it in this Laura Ashley nightmare.  So there’s not a lot of it left, but the woman who owns it now said that when she’d moved in she’d felt Whale’s presence and had had hired an exorcist to get rid of him, and McKellen said ‘Why the fuck did you do that?’ [laughs]
But Curtis was amazing with stories, Jack Larson knew him a bit, Jack Larson knew [Whale’s lover] David Lewis, Gavin Lambert knew him quite well, Roddy McDowall wasn’t interested in talking, he said nobody liked James Whale.  Because [McDowall] was a great friend of George Cukor, so it’s interesting that 40 years later [the feud between Cukor and Whale] was still going on.  So I just talked to everybody I could.

And recreating the set of “Bride of Frankenstein?”

Richard Sherman, the production designer, did it from stills.  He created all those props, too.  That was so thrilling, to actually step onto that set and see it there again, and watch [the slab] go up... The only thing was that it doesn’t go as high because we were on a smaller stage.  Our stage was where “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane” was shot, so there is some history there.  [laughs]

There’s fewer flashbacks in the film than in the book.  Was there a particular reason for excluding, say, the Charles Laughton bits?

Yeah, I just thought those things were fascinating and wonderful to read, but not essential.  And also, I think that, though it isn’t true in the book at all, in a film, if you do too many, it starts to feel like a biopic, and I really didn’t want to hold onto the idea.  But with one or two exceptions, they’re not flashbacks as much as jabbing stabs of memory, often with more emotional than factual content.  For example, when he’s talking to the interviewer at the beginning and he lies about where he comes from, it’s a jab of memory of knowing his grim, working-class background, but also of his father making fun of him for being a sissy.  In the middle of all this, you’re picturing him and the sissy-boy he’s looking at.  That spelled important to me.  Plus, I think it’s tricky in movies, with icons like Laughton.  I think we get away with it with [Elsa] Lanchester, because Rosiland Ayres is, thank God, so close to her, and Karloff, and we get away with Elizabeth Taylor from a far distance, but any more than that... Hollywood stories tend to make the mistake of centering on the people who are more well-known, but you’ve got to have the people who are sort of off to the side, and tell the story that way.

Was it tough finding financial backing for the film?

YES.  You know, start with gay, and then you add on a story about suicide, and there’s a certain darkness to it...

And it's about a fairly obscure horror movie director...

Exactly.  Pretty obscure.  It was hard.  In fact, some of the places thought would have been a bit more gay-friendly, we kind of faced the P.C. police there.  It’s like, ‘Here’s a guy who was openly homosexual in the ‘30s and thrived, why not tell that story, which will make everybody feel good, as opposed to the story about him in decline?’  Obviously, the answer is we can’t just make role-model, cheerful setting... I mean, it’s more interesting.  The end of his life and the arc of his career is more interesting than just his moment of triumph.  It was that typical thing that happens with independent movies.  We got one company, Regent, involved, and then we pieced together a cast only for foreign bankers.  The challenge I think, for independent filmmakers, especially ones like me who don’t have a track record or a name that takes care of that, is to really get the cast that you want and push it through those people.  For example, Brendan had not opened in “George of the Jungle” then, he’d had some movies that had been financial disappointments, so they were saying no to Brendan.  And then it took getting Lynn [Redgrave] and Lolita [Davidovich] to get things going.  But the names they do push on you are appalling.  So when you see movies where there’s this oddball person who seems miscast, it’s often because of that process.  The biggest fight of all is to not have to use all those people who were wrong for the parts.

Who were they trying to push for the film?

Well, for some bizarre reason Jared Leto is big overseas according to them, or was, almost two years ago.

Who’s completely the wrong physical type.

It couldn’t be more wrong.  Or Benicio del Toro, who just couldn’t be more wrong in a different way.

This is your third theatrical feature after doing several TV-movies.  How have you found them to differ?

Well, for me, I think of this as my first movie, because like a lot of writers, I think my best scripts are the ones that haven’t been made.  I’ve occasionally rewritten the films I’ve directed but I’ve never actually written anything that I’ve directed before until this.  What happened to me is that I did Sister, Sister very quickly and I love so much about it, but it was a failure commercially and critically, and so I went to what a friend of mine calls the movie jail, which meant making all those cable movies.  I have to say that was a great experience for me--I made five of them in three years and it was really my Corman-like film school.  They were all different genres, which you don’t get to do in features, there was the racial drama [White Lie], a black comedy [Dead in the Water], a sort of Agatha Christie murder mystery [Murder 101], an action film [The Man Who Wouldn’t Die] and a docu-drama [Deadly Relations].  But if you make them with the budget, which is small, and stay on schedule, they really do leave you alone.  So I had a great time, and I like a few of those movies very, very much, I’m very proud of them.  But you sort of hit that wall with them.  Now I think cable has become just like network, very controlled.  So that is why I was pushing to do another theatrical film when Candyman came along.

It must be a bit odd going from strictly writing to directing only the works of others.

It is.  It’s been very schizophrenic for me.  It’s weird.  I’ve had sort of a pretty solid studio writing career, but never a directing career, and sort of solid television directing career but I’ve never been that interested in writing there.    It was difficult making this movie, it was made in 24 days for not much money, but it was a dream on every level.  There were never any script notes, there were never any editing notes, and it’s all I want to do now.

So what’s your next project?

It’s a small independent feature called “Vickie Oberjeane: Alone in the Night,” and it’s very much in the spirit of “Spinal Tap.”  It follows this character that Nancy Cassara, who wrote it with me, played in New York about ten years ago, an amazing creation, I guess close to Judy Garland, but a little more intense than that.  It follows her career from when she was Little Miss Beauty Mark in the ‘30s, through the ‘40s when she did musicals like “Mint Julip,” to ‘50s dramas, she was in a biblical epic, in the ‘60s she did movies like “Divorce Brazilian Style” with Carrie Saunders, she started shooting “Virginia Woolf” but by then the drugs and the booze and everything was so bad that they had to shut down.  Basically, most of it is the lost documentary footage from her 1966 Thanksgiving special, “Thank You, Vickie Oberjeane,” where she had this amazing comeback and became the queen of seasonal specials with “Vickie’s Disco Christmas” and “Vickie Cottontail” and all these sorts of things.  Dustin Hoffman and Alec Baldwin are both involved as producers, and they’ll be talking about how Vickie affected them.  We hope to get going on that in February.
 

Thanks to Bill Condon, Joe Kane and Jim Pickett.