Interview: Michael Connelly of ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’

Posted on March 16, 2011 at 8:00 am

Michael Connelly is a journalist-turned novelist whose enormously successful crime stories have filled 18 novels, translated into 13 languages. This week’s release, “The Lincoln Lawyer,” starring Matthew McConaughey as defense lawyer Mick Haller, Marisa Tomei as his prosecuting attorney ex-wife, and Ryan Phillippe as his wealthy client accused of murder, is based on his book. That’s “Lincoln” as in town car, not President, by the way.

How did what you learned as a journalist help you as a novelist?

A lot of what I did has a journalist has carried over into the books. The key has been the observation skills, to watch things and look for details to flesh out the picture. And when you’re a journalist you never have enough room. So you look for the telling details, instead of fifty, you have to find one to open up a window in people’s imagination and understanding. You listen for the dialogue that is more than fluff that actually carries information. Those are all day in, day out practices of journalism. Even though I’ve shifted to the kind of canvas where I can write unlimited pages and words I still follow the journalistic style. It doesn’t matter if it’s 400 pages. What matters is that there is momentum on every page. Shorter sentences that carry import in every sentence is the way to go.

Your main character is called the Lincoln lawyer because his office is in a Lincoln town car that he rides in from court to court and client to client. Is there really a Lincoln lawyer?

He’s retired now, but this whole project, book and movie, began about ten years ago next month, when I went to the first game of the year for the LA Dodgers, the home opener. I was invited by a friend and sat next to another one of his friends, whom I’d never met. During the course of the game there, it was “Who are you, what you do?” I had covered the courts in LA and I knew that if he told me where his office was, I could tell what kind of work he did. The courts in LA are all over, Century City, the Valley. That’s when he said, “It’s actually my car.”

He was very quick to say, “That’s not because I’m a bad attorney or not successful; I live in Malibu. It’s because it’s the best way of taking this city, with 40 courthouses, and I have a guy driving my car who is working off his legal fees.” By the 9th inning I had what I was sure was an idea that could go the distance. I get lots of ideas, but I really need one where I can spend a year with this character, where I can find 400 pages of a story about him. It happened to be when I was looking for a new character to write about. I had a lot of books about a detective and wanted to go to the other side and write about an attorney. And I knew this was what I was looking for.

He was a stranger to me. He gave me the idea with his lifestyle, but then it happened I was moving away, back to where I’m from in Florida. I reconnected with a guy I had known since college there, who was a criminal defense attorney. I told him I needed to know the nuts and bolts of what his job was like. On and off for three years I shadowed him and his partner, drank with them after work, had lunch with them, went to jail, went to court. And there was a judge who let me sit in her courtroom, follow her into chambers, see how she ran her courtroom.

I like the story’s contrast between the theory of justice and the reality. Your main character is not easily categorized. He’s very moral within his own construct.

One of the things that impressed me in the people that I worked with was the stuggle between the idealism of our justice system, the idea that that no matter how bad the crime, you’re entitled to the most vigorous defense. But you try practicing that, sitting all day next to a child molester or worse, it’s very hard to do. There’s lot of alcohol in the movie, but that’s the reality that I saw. The best research for this book occurred at 4:30 in the afternoon, when the courts are done for the day and everyone stops for a martini on the way home.
I could spend my day writing and then go to these two bars, and that’s where the real gems of this book came from. That’s where the line that’s in the book and the movie comes from: “There’s no client as scary as an innocent man.”

It’s that struggle between the idealism and the reality that has affected Mickey, and we get to see what that has done to him. I love in the movie how his investigator played by William H. Macy is telling him what he has to do in legal terms and he just cuts him off, saying, “I’ve just got to make it right.” That’s the crux of the story, that he feels he has to make it right.

Tell me how you go about creating a believable villain.

The villains are always the easiest because you don’t have bounds. They can be, as displayed in this movie, so convincingly sane and innocent and then be just the opposite. One of the things I love about this movie is the way it respects the viewer. It doesn’t try to hide who the villain is. The intrigue, the real story, is how Micky is going to get out of the trick bag he’s got into as he calls it.

The villains are the easiest people to write about — you get a certain amount of freedom to make villains smarter in fiction than they are in real life. You start with the idea that they have broken free of any societal restrictions and then you can layer on all kinds of stuff, camouflage and all that stuff. They’re fun!

I’d like to know something about adapting a book for a movie. To begin with, a screenplay is much shorter than a book.

I haven’t had a great history in Hollywood. I’ve sold ten or eleven books to be made into movies but this is only the second one to be filmed. They break down because of the scripts. The books live inside characters’ heads and scripts can’t. I’ve learned my lesson; that’s not my skill. I like to tell readers what the characters are thinking. I was very careful about who I gave this book to. It was almost like an interview process. I was at a stage of my life where I wasn’t worried about how much they were going to pay me. I just wanted to know how they were going to keep the integrity of the story. I talked to big studios, little independents, one actor who wanted to do it. But Tom Rosenberg of Lakeshore had been a trial attorney in Chicago. So he said, “This is a world I once inhabited. I know it and you got it right. I promise if you let me make it, the gritty realism will be preserved. It will be in the movie, I can guarantee you that.”

They went through about 14 drafts. It went from one where I thought it was missing stuff to one where I thought, “This is the book, this is the character.” Matthew McConaughey is not like the character in the book who is half-Mexican and described as very dark but with a name that did not indicate his background. He had lots of contradictions to add up to his feeling more like an outsider. I heard McConaughey had signed on. When I saw him as the sleazy agent in “Tropic Thunder” I leaned over to my wife and said, “He’d make a good Mickey Haller. And months later, maybe a year later, I heard he wanted to do it and wanted to meet me and talk about it. He spent a year studying and preparing. It was very impressive. So it doesn’t matter how he’s described in the book. He’s that guy. He totally owns it.

I liked the way you make Mickey defy our expectations in both his personal and professional lives.

There are now three more books with him as a character. Defense attorneys are generally misunderstood and blamed. People despise them because they think they’re trying to get the scum of the earth out of jail. Most of the time I write about a detective and it’s very easy because everyone is already on his side — you want the murderer to be caught. Maybe this is why I waited to my 15th book — I felt confident to take on a character most people would not like if not despise, and somehow make people want to like him and ride in that car with him. I was going to make him really good at gaming the system, even if it was going to be toward a goal people might think was negative, you couldn’t help but respect that. And the other aspect was I wanted him to have that higher moral code that would come out in the story. I’d want to hit them with the skills right away and then slowly bring out the moral code. In the book I enjoyed tricking the reader with Mickey talking about his office without revealing that his office is his car. In a visual medium like a movie, that’s not a trick you can pull.

Why do people like mysteries so much?

They’re stories where there are high stakes. Many of these people if they’re not stopped, they’ll do it again. We like to read these stories because it’s about people making a difficult choice to do the right thing, even though it could endanger them or their families, and we all want to know what we would do. Reading stories like that give us our ideas about how we could be.

Related Tags:

Interview: George Nolfi of ‘The Adjustment Bureau’

Posted on March 2, 2011 at 8:00 am

“The Adjustment Bureau” is the first great film of 2011, a big and hugely entertaining film that takes on big ideas — love, free will, destiny, God, and the meaning of life. I was lucky enough to speak with writer and first-time director George Nolfi about being inspired by a short story from Philip K. Dick.
The movie is very different from “Adjustment Team,” the original story by Philip K. Dick. How did you approach adapting it for the screen?
The short story is just that, short. And it has a character at the center of it who is explicitly an everyman and so there isn’t much of a character to play there. It was going to need some adaptation one way or another. I was interested in a different thing than Philip K. Dick was. The story can be read from one angle was “Is this real or is this not real?” I wanted it to be — this thing happens and it spins the guy’s whole life on its head and all of his conceptions about the laws of physics and the universe are turned upside down. And he has to accept it because the evidence is just so overwhelming. What does that do to a person?
When my producing partner brought me the short story, I thought, what a great conception for a movie, the idea that fate is a group of people subtly pushing you back on plan. He also said, “You could do this as a love story. Your lead falls in love for the first time in his life and the adjuster comes along and says, ‘Sorry, there’s been a mistake. You weren’t even supposed to meet her.'” For whatever reason, my reaction to that was, “I think I know how to write that.” I didn’t know what I was going to put in the script but I thought the blending of genres would be fascinating and it would get me into territories of these much larger questions that every great system of thought — philosophical, literary, science-fiction, theological — this story would allow me to get there. There are not many stories that make big movies that take you to those questions.
It is unusual for a big-time movie with big-time movies stars to take on questions of life and fate and meaning and free will. I love the fact that it wasn’t focus-grouped away from engaging on those issues.
I optioned the rights and controlled them for six or seven years. I gave the script to Matt Damon and got some thoughts from him about his character. Neither of us thought his character was fully developed yet. I rewrote it to give his character more layers and more interesting things for him to play. And he said yes and we got it financed outside the studio system, from a group called MRC. When we then went to the studios we were able to say, “We have this movie and we have this movie star” and give them a fully-formed movie, so you don’t have this automatic development process where it’s nobody’s fault but things tend to get homogenized.
And Universal was really supportive, right from the beginning. They were on board with the notion of trying something that was really reaching. They were just like — let’s go for it. They thought people would leave the theater feeling satisfied even though we were blending genres. I had no interference while I was making the movie. In post-production they had just a few thoughts which in the Hollywood scheme of things would be considered minuscule. They had thoughts about the music but that was temp music anyway. I didn’t think the original ending worked and they agreed. So it was good people we were in business with and we were all pulling the same way. They were completely supportive of what we were trying to do, and so was Matt.
As a screenwriter, you’ve worked with directors but this is the first time you have directed. What did you learn from the directors you’ve observed?
I was on the set for all the movies I am credited on. And for “Oceans 12,” I knew I was basically going to be there the whole time. I said to Steven Soderbergh, “I’m interested in being director, are you cool with my occasionally ask you why you’re doing what you’re doing?” And he was extremely gracious to explain some of his thought processes about why he was choosing certain shots and so on. But the single biggest piece of advice he gave me that really stuck with me was, “In a perfect world you want to choose your shots and assemble to the movie so that the sound could go out and people could still follow the story.” That’s telling a story through pictures.
Clearly you listened to him! For a writer turned director, this is a very visual film. The effects are very significant and essential to the narrative.
As a writer making the leap to directing the first time, it was very important to me to make a film that was visually significant, to use visuals and music and sound as well as the performances of the cast to tell the story — those are the things you don’t have as a writer. I really wanted to do visual story-telling. I write scripts that are very visual but you can’t know until you try it whether it would come easily to me as a director, but I loved it.
I liked the idea that the Adjusters could do a lot of things but in a way the humans adjusted their options, too. They were nudging each other.
Thematically, I had this idea that the Chairman was limiting the Bureau in all kinds of different ways. That’s too many ripples so you have to go to a higher authority. Or you can’t go through that door unless you are wearing a hat. Or it’s raining out and water kind of blocks our ability. Those are foreshadowing the way that the Chairman will turn out to be supportive of free will.
And of love! It’s a very romantic movie.
I hope so! I hope you experienced it that way. I think it is.
And it is very spiritual, as well.
I wasn’t trying to make a religious film per se, but the most comprehensive attempts to make sense of the world are theological. In terms of fate and free will, that’s the oldest question human beings struggle with. It’s there in Gilgamesh and ancient Greece. Is it fate or do we have choices? There’s a reason for that. Human beings are questioning animals and we want to understand our existence.
Looked at in much less grand terms, most people have some sense that the person they turned out to be, the job they have, their moral code, their interests, their religion, were shaped by what country they were born in, what neighborhood they were born into, their family, their friends, their schools, their chance encounters have put them on a path. Even things considered more deeply personal choices like who your spouse is — you were introduced by friends or met at a wedding or you had mutual interests or whatever it is. So we have this sense that the course of our life is shaped by outside forces, whether a divine hand or your surrounding influences. But we also experience our lives as a series of choices. No religion has successfully answered that. We did an inter-faith screening with an audience of followers of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and we had a discussion with experts in all all three. They discussed faith and free will and pointed out to the audience that the importance of free will was found in all of them. They have to, in order to make sense of existence.

Interview: John Wells of ‘The Company Men’

Posted on January 19, 2011 at 8:00 am

“The Company Men” is a recession-era drama that follows three downsized executives at a huge conglomerate. Writer/director John Wells (producer of “ER” and “West Wing”) talked to me about the research that helped him to develop the script, how he had to keep amending the screenplay to stay accurate, the surprising reaction from audiences who think they know who the villain is, and what he learned about how men and women react differently to job loss.
This movie has an amazing group of actors, including Tommy Lee Jones, Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper, Maria Bello, Kevin Costner, and Rosemary DeWitt. How did you assemble your cast?
I kept sending the script out to people and they kept saying yes. The biggest surprise was Kevin Costner, who had read the script from his agent for a different part, called me up and said he really wanted to play Jack, the brother-in-law. I thought the agent had made a mistake when he told me that. He said he connected with that character and would love to do it if we could work it out.
It feels very much of this moment and this economy. Did you do a lot of research?
I did a tremendous amount of research. It really came out because a member of my family lost his job. He started telling me about what was going on in his life in the time afterward. He had been very successful and this kind of caught him off guard and he had a lot of trouble finding another job because there were a lot of other people in his exact field looking at the same moment that he was. I went onto a bunch of different downsizing websites, places with chat rooms and put in little notices that said, “I’m a writer and I’m interested in this subject and if you want to tell me a few anecdotes, a few things about what’s happened in your life, let me know. I had a couple of thousand responses in the first weekend.
I ended up talking to literally hundreds of people, both people still working in companies, CEOs and human resources, and a lot of people who had actually or were actually going through this experience. A tremendous amount of the movie is just their experiences, things they told me.
I wrote an article about the corporation in the movies of 2010 and mentioned yours as exceptionally accurate, not just about the experience of being laid off but about the corporate environment and lines like the CEO saying that all that is left for American business is “health care, infrastructure, and power generation.”
Some of it changed as we made the movie because things kept changing. We made it right during the worst of the TARP period and were following things on a daily basis. When we made the film we assumed that the recession would be over by the time it was released and it would be an historical document. Things have gone on longer than we thought. When I was first writing about the film, I made it about the steel industry because I went to school in Pittsburgh. But when I went to scout it, it was gone.
So I had to talk to people about other heavy manufacturing and other and fabrication industries that might be suffering similar fates. One that was suggested was the auto industry, and I thought, “No, that’s ridiculous, no one would believe that the auto industry could go up in smoke.” Goes to show you what I knew! The other was non-military or non-protected ship-building. So I started looking around and we found that wonderful shipyard in Boston, which had only been closed a couple of years.
On a daily basis I had a couple of different people in the financial world who would keep me up to date on what was happening. When we started, there was still credit available. By the middle of it, we had to change things left and right to make corrections. The character Ben Affleck plays was originally working in new construction of homes. By the time we got to shooting it, the whole new home construction business had collapsed, so I had to switch to remodels. Six months later, that had also disappeared. The severity and depth of the recession is so much greater than anything I had ever experienced.
The things the corporate executives said to each other changed every day — the “infrastructure” line changed the day we shot it.
You focused on people we haven’t seen much of before, the top-level executives with six- and seven-figure incomes who are suddenly let go with no comparable alternative employment.
And it’s millions of people, tens of millions of people who felt that they had done everything they were supposed to do to fulfill the American dream. They got an education, they worked hard at companies, and really found themselves out in the cold. That’s what’s different about this recession that people don’t really understand, especially for older workers and by that I mean anyone over 40.
The characters seem to go through the Elizabeth Kubler-Ross grief stages but in different order — anger first, then denial.
Men don’t always respond to the stages the same way women do.
The women in the movie seem to be the truth-tellers, especially Rosemay DeWitt, who plays the wife of Ben Affleck’s character.
I found that to be true in the research that I did. One of the common themes was that the men involved in white collar work — finance, insurance, marketing — that the representation of what they did was how much they made and their possessions. So when they lost their possessions they lost their identity. And the common thread from the families I spoke to was how disturbing this was to the women, who didn’t understand that the men had built their self-respect on such a narrow base. They would say, “I was shocked at how losing his job completely undermined his sense of self-worth.” I kept hearing versions of the same stories, of them having to say, “Just do anything. Just get a job. Flip hamburgers. Just get out of the house and have a sense of going somewhere.”
The character a lot of people see as villainous in the picture is the woman who runs the outplacement service. I went to a number of different outplacement places and that woman and the tiger chant and all that, I asked, “Don’t you feel a little ridiculous when you’re doing that?” And she said, “Sure, it’s completely ridiculous. But you have to realize, these men come in here and they’ve been in something like a car accident. And I’m like the physical therapist who has to get you out of bed even if I have to slap you around to do it.”
There was a real difference to the way the women this happened to approached the loss of a job. It was equally devastating, equally economically difficult for their families. But they did not become unmoored in the same way the men did.
I liked the contrast in the film between the way the Kevin Costner and Craig T. Nelson characters thought about their employees.
Originally it was more of a screed and the Craig T. Nelson character existed and the Tommy Lee Jones character didn’t. But I felt I hadn’t given an explanation for the complexity of the way executives really look at this. So I interviewed a lot of people and a number of the things Craig T. Nelson says were things people really said to me. I was surprised by the number of CEOs who called me back. They really wanted to explain their responsibilities to the stockholders and the stockholders are us. One of the lines I snuck in was after the first big downsizing Tommy Lee Jones’ secretary says to him in the hallway, “Hey, my 401(k) stock is up!”
The thing we don’t quite accept is that we are the pressure — everyone who’s in a 401(k) or a public pension plan or a union pension plan — these large institutional investors have their responsibilities, too. You can demonize Goldman Sachs all you want and I’m sure there are reasons to do it. But the real pressure is all of us pressuring the companies for stock returns and that leads to all kinds of decisions. I was really trying to get across the two different attitudes that executives had. One was this attitude that my only responsibility is the corporation and the other was what the Gene character talks about, the sense that these are people who have put their faith in us.
It reminds me of the fight in the old movie “Executive Suite” between the guy who thought companies should provide meaningful work and make a commitment to the workers and the guy who thought it was all about cost-cutting.
I was trying to not make it too simple — I hope that comes across. Those jobs are gone and they’re not coming back and we haven’t had a conversation, except in the very unrealistic political arena, about what we’re going to do about it.
Even if it was a bit of a fairy tale, I was glad you provided some hope at the end, and I think it came from the right place — entrepreneurial spirit.
It came from a real story in the steel business about a guy who made a lot of money when his company was sold. And then the people he worked with all those years lost their jobs, everyone he cared about. He created a small, high-tensile steel side business. It could only employ about ten percent of the people, but they’re doing okay.

Related Tags:

Directors Interview Writers

Tribute: Blake Edwards

Posted on December 16, 2010 at 1:37 pm

I was very sad to hear that writer/director Blake Edwards died yesterday at age 88. He leaves behind his wife, Julie Andrews, and an extraordinary varied body of work. Even his sharpest satires had a glossy sheen of elegance and wit. And even his wildest comedies had a glow of warmth that came from the heart. His films include: “The Pink Panther,” “Days of Wine and Roses,” “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” “The Great Race,” and “Victor/Victoria,” which starred Andrews.

Related Tags:

Directors Tribute Writers

Interview: Edward Zwick of ‘Love and Other Drugs’

Posted on November 21, 2010 at 3:55 pm

Edward Zwick can create grand spectacle (“The Last Samurai,” “Glory,” “Defiance”) but he is unsurpassed in creating honest moments of intimacy in couple relationships, from “thirtysomething” to “Once and Again” with his frequent partner, Marshall Herzkovitz. Zwick is co-writer and director of “Love and Other Drugs,” a very sexy romance set in the 1990’s world of pharmaceutical sales and health care challenges. Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal, who played an unhappily married couple in “Brokeback Mountain” reunite in this film as a pair who are less naked with each other in the literal sense as they become more open to each other emotionally. I last spoke to Zwick about “Defiance” and was thrilled to have a chance to meet with him again to discuss one of my favorite films of the year.

Where did the movie come from?

Jamie Reidy wrote this book, Hard Sell, which doesn’t have a lot to do with the movie, but it is about his experiences as a pharmaceutical rep at the time of the introduction of Viagra. And a very talented guy named Charles Randolph wrote a draft of the script and it talked a lot about the Viagra experiences but it didn’t talk about the relationship that much. And then Marshall and I took that, keeping a lot of stuff that was Charles’ that was really good but also trying to add stuff we felt it needed.

It was a very interesting moment in American cultural history. Suddenly the FDA said they were relaxing the rules on advertising drugs to consumers. And consumers were going to their doctors and saying, “I want this.” Ad sales skyrocketed and drug sales skyrocketed. It was a go-go time in the 90’s. Everything was about making money and the character seemed to embody that to me.

We finished the script and then said, “Who is out there right now that really enchants us as actors?” I’d known Jake a little bit. His parents are in the business. I’d seen his work grow and grow and grow and I felt there were parts of him I knew that I hadn’t seen, that I felt I could show people and surprise them with. And Annie’s work was already great, and I saw her in “Rachel Getting Married” and especially Shakespeare in the Park and I said, “This girl is really great. She wants to take risks.” I said, “That’s who I want to do this movie.” I thought, “That’s a very sparkly, very sexy combo, and I went after them.”

They each had very interesting things to say about the script. They’re both very smart, intellectually smart and actor smart. We got to know each other very well. You have to gain a real level of trust to make a movie like this. Can we be both truthful and funny about squirmy personal things? Can we find moments that are relatable beyond just these two? It evoked all sorts of things in my own life and for other people, I hope. It’s contemporary not just about the relationship but about somebody not being able to get their meds.

I was glad to see one of my favorite actors, Hank Azaria, in the film and I thought he was superb as the doctor. He has a difficult part because he has to create a very full character while delivering a lot of information about the medical profession.

He can do anything and do it so effortlessly you don’t see him working. Doctors are kind of this shibboleth in our society. We know what they do and we depend on them but we don’t know a lot about what it feels like from their side. The fact that this guy’s life could be morally ambiguous in certain degrees or that he would have complaints or frustrations or a cynical view of certain things was an opportunity within his character to reveal certain things. It was intrinsic to who his character was as opposed to being a mouthpiece for a movie. The key to write him was to understand what his circumstance was. And Hank is so good he rounds that out and makes it organic.

And what a surprise to see Jill Clayburgh and George Segal, a blast from them 70’s past.

Just to sit on the set with George and Jill was like bathing in the 1970’s movie culture. It was so important to me. They had each done Paul Mazursky movies, “Blume in Love” and “An Unmarried Woman,” those were touchstones to my childhood. And they were generous and fun and we hung together.

One of my favorite scenes in the movie is the Parkinson’s patient group meeting. Those were actors, weren’t they?

No, those were real Parkinson’s patients. I’ve known Michael J. Fox for a long time and I talked to him a lot about this. He said to me, “You have to understand. You can’t make it funny enough.” I said, “I got it.” We got a lot of patients and I gave them a lot of things to say, and then I asked them to tell me about their experience. These are good-hearted funny people reflecting on their experience. Yes, illness is serious, but the indignities are also funny. And that defines my world view. There is nothing that is so serious that you can’t also see its comic side. Comedy is a way of talking about the most serious things. I’m interested in the word “and,” not the word “but.”

How do you market a movie like this?

By showing the movie, by word of mouth. It’s about letting the movie sell itself, by showing the film to people and letting them talk about it. It’ll be interesting because it’s not one thing. It’s not a sequel or a remake or a superhero. It’s not a conventional rom-com. I’m going to a bunch of cities to get the word out. It’s a harder time to make original, less conventional movies. But God, we need them!

Related Tags:

Directors Interview Writers