Interview: David Dobkin of “The Judge”

Interviewing David Dobkin was a double pleasure for me. First, I loved the film he co-wrote and directed, “The Judge,” starring Robert Downey, Jr. and Robert Duvall. And second, he is the son of old friends Jim and Irma Dobkin, now sadly gone, but still great influences on the lives of our family. The night before our interview, I did a Q&A with David at a screening of the film, and he talked about how his lawyer father used to cross-examine in him in the kitchen when he got into trouble, and how that experience inspired the father-son relationships at the heart of the film. Dobkin, best known for wild comedies like “Wedding Crashers,” brings to “The Judge” a maturity and richness of storytelling, and co-producer/star Robert Downey, Jr. gives his most open and vulnerable performance as the arrogant criminal defense lawyer whose own defenses must crumble.

I love the use of sun flares in the movie, visually striking but also dramatically impactful.

Janusz Kaminski and I spoke very early on. It’s such an honor to work with Janusz. I couldn’t believe it; he was the eye I wanted and when I first sat down with him like five minutes in I said, “Look, if you do the movie…” and he’s like, “No, no, I’m going to do the movie.” And I was like, “He just said he’s going to do the movie!” But I said, “You know, I think that the movie’s about perception and the movie’s also told strictly through Hank’s point of view.” And I wanted to rack focus , I wanted there to be layers and depth and I wanted there to be the idea of the things that we perceive and then the things that are real. And he just started to backlight and hit the lens with the flares all the time and with the lights, it’s his instinct to start to do that and especially in the courtroom and in other certain moments. And at moments it’s beautiful and at moments it’s distracting and interesting, you know, like when he pulls into the driveway and he talks to his daughter and there’s that beautiful sunset which is really a light that he put right in the frame. So he had this weird subconscious thing going on and you just trust. You speak about what the ideas are and he will find a language to make that happen.

And the color palette was very elegant and elegiac without being too somber.

Just keeping it very realistic and not too glossy. We didn’t want the movie to be inaccessible. We wanted it to be real. We didn’t want to over-Hollywood it. We want to feel the people. You know, even the make-up for the women, there’s very little going on.

How did being the son of a lawyer influence you in thinking about these characters?

A lot of it was subconscious at first. I think that I was very drawn to the drama of the law. I got in trouble a number of times when I was younger with the law and having my father be a lawyer, that was a very sacred thing. And there were a few times, I never lied to my father, it was something that he kind of imbued on me very early on that I would always be okay if I didn’t, but the few times I’d tried to, there were a couple times when I was in the kitchen in my house trying to get out of a situation and not quite telling the truth and the way he could look at me and cross-examine me I was like, “Wow.” I knew what it was like to be in that dynamic and I chose very quickly not to. I was like, “I’m just going to tell the truth and he’ll help me sort it out.”

So, you know, the law was always something that was very sacred. That courtroom in the film was like a church to me, not in the religious sense, but in the sense that Robert Duvall’s character really revered what the law stood for, as a man. \He believed in honor, he believed in responsibility and consequences. All those things were very important to him and they were imbued into me so I thought naturally all of the sudden I’m making a family drama based on some very autobiographical elements and the courtroom just suddenly showed up as the place where that was going to happen.

My father believed that people, if given compassion, will actually become the best of themselves. Looking back, for a guy who never went to therapy, it was more a therapist’s kind of point of view than a lawyer’s point of view. Which is that “I understand the behavior that happened in this incident came from something and somewhere that was unintended.” And we can heal that. He really believed in that and so that was his sense of justice and I think as a storyteller, I think that’s been imbued in me because my characters always go through their hard lessons of what they need in order to come to a place where they can find compassion for the people that they’re in conflict with.

Even in your comedies, you have had a lot of characters who have a lot of growing up to do. It’s interesting to me what in this film, the big confrontation goes right back to the teenage years.

I remember every Thanksgiving coming home and you know, I deeply love my parents and you would come home and the first few hours was so pure. Maybe even though it was only the first hour, but as soon as people’s behavior kicks in and it’s just, you know, it’s rote, you just happen to, you know, an inflection of a voice listening, you know within a day, you’re like, “Oh, we’re back into this again! Like I’m fourteen years old.”

No matter how long you’ve been away, you still sit in the same seats at the dinner table.

That’s interesting you said that. I always explained it to Downey that “You come home, your mother is gone so there’s an empty seat at the table, but you don’t have a seat. You’re not really invited back with the family. They go to breakfast, they leave you behind. And when your father gets in trouble, it is a chance for you to try to win back that seat and your place that you finally have something to do. By the way there was a scene that is not in the movie where someone says to him, “The way a surgeon is not supposed to operate on their patients, a lawyer should not represent his family.” And he says, basically, he goes, “The one place, the one thing I can control is the courtroom.” It is amazing that we’re always trying to win that acceptance still, you know. Or some of us are, at least for me I was trying to. No matter how much they were accepting me, I somehow thought there was more I had to do.

You have a lovely, very classical, Hollywood score in the film from Thomas Newman.

He did this really amazing thing -— and he did it unconsciously because he’s a true artist — but the first time we see the courthouse, he brought horns in and it seemed like “Oh yeah, that’s a color we expect to hear.” It felt like an old movie thing which I really loved. And then he did something really brilliant which is when the judge later in the movie talks to Hank about the importance of honor and the importance of legacy, he brings the horns back in. It imprints on you: “Oh, this guy actually has a very deep sense of the world and the way he believes it should run. That’s what he’s been protecting. It’s not just his own personal legacy, it’s what this town expects and it’s important to him.” He says, “Forty-two years I sat on that bench,” and they don’t deserve what he’s gotten them into, that’s what he’s concerned about and the pressure that it places on Hank. And at the end of the movie in a very significant moment when he does something truly unexpected and he claims responsibility for his actions which he preaches from the beginning. His words come back in and that scene played a certain way always. It was always a really powerful moment but when the horns came in and you understood it, the movie’s intelligence rose exponentially like it’s just that the emotionality of it. There’s no way you could have contextualized that moment that way without that color coming in from the horns, even if you are not aware of it.

You worked very closely with Robert Downey, Jr. on the development of this script. What was that like?

He is Tony Stark. He is that colorful and that fun as a person like if you bump into him and you’re sitting at the craft service table and he’s just as funny and entertaining. So Tony Stark is very much him which is I think we know that, that’s why we love that character. It was really fun to use that same persona in this movie – something similar and say, “Here’s what a real version of that guy would be like and here’s what would happen if we took that persona and we took him through a true dramatic arc and saw what happens when that guy’s got to go home and face his family.”

I like the way you have him begin with the fancy suit and the fancy car and the fancy house and then end up in his old bedroom with junk all over, wearing his high school Metallica t-shirt and riding a bicycle.

It was fun because there was a very clear delineation between this guy who’s so snapped together and then he goes home and he is slowly unraveling and becoming his younger self again. You know the bicycle was Robert’s idea. Originally that scene was Hank putting on his clothes and they don’t quite fit anymore and going for a jog and realizing that he can’t even make it. And Robert had this memory of this old bicycle that he had. The one we got is the exact bike that he had as a kid. He said, “I used to go ride with my bike and I would bike down the road and close my eyes.” That’s exactly what he used to like to do when he felt free and comfortable and he felt taken care of. And I was like, “God, that seems broad but let’s do it.” And as usual with Robert, it was just—-there’s something fun about seeing him kind of get beaten up a little bit, you know, everything go wrong for him. Seeing like just the normality of life get the best of him is really satisfying.
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