Whos Making Money

One of the prime topics of conversation during NBA All Star Weekend is the league’s labor agreement or lack thereof.

The league is enjoying an unprecedented level of popularity and its future is bright. Midway through the 2010-11 season, the league's talent level is deeper than ever and many of the those talented players are just beginning their careers. The NBA’s marketing machine is world class and interest in the league is at an all-time high.

However its road to success is approaching a giant pothole – otherwise known as its next labor agreement — and to me we’re entering a fascinating point in league history.

Forbes Magazine has reported that 12 of the 30 NBA teams lost money last season. And NBA Commissioner David Stern, several weeks back, claimed that league owners were projecting a cumulative loss this season of approximately 350 million dollars.

Stern has declared that the current labor situation is untenable because the players are being paid too much guaranteed money. The players for their part are digging in and this labor dispute shows few if any signs of getting resolved anytime soon.

There is also one glaring problem that I personally feel the NBA needs to fix because, if you ask me, it’s the one negative the league has faced for as long as Stern has been commissioner. Each season, too many teams have zero chance of making the playoffs.

Let’s face it, if you’re a fan of the Timberwolves, Wizards, Nets and a bunch of other teams, you’re basically watching games to see the opposing team because your team’s best chance to improve is to lose as many games as possible, get a high lottery draft pick and then have the ping pong balls fall the right way on lottery night. Luck plays too big a role in who’s good and who’s not.

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I think the whole rhythm of the filmmaking and the dialogue is different than what it would have been. It flows in a more emotional and staccato way. It’s interwoven and interlaced with a level of humor and emotional intensity that are based on the realism of the characters. Also the movie within a movie, the HBO documentary about Dicky, the Christian Bale character, is real and I seized upon that as a filmmaker and wanted to use that as a device in the film. Not only dramatically as a defining moment, which Scott Silver had focused on, but I wanted to also use it as a framing device throughout the film, that there was this documentary crew around and you could do interviews with the characters. So we did interviews with Mark and Christian as the characters on the fly and we did interviews with the sisters. We did interviews with local people who used to be mayor and town manager and real people about Dicky and Micky and their impact on the city, and that all got used in the movie as part of the story.

Music was also something that I really focused on, the style of music that these guys would listen to and the kind of soundtrack that would really propel through their story and that resulted in some of the great music that’s in the movie that I think is married well to the dramatic turns.

We actually had the opportunity to ask some of our listeners what questions they might have for you and Ben here asks, “I’d like to hear about the choice to use the song ‘Here Again I Go On My Own’. Was the scene where the two brothers sing along while walking to the ring based on reality or was it just the most incredible filmmaking choice of 2010? And if it was invented, who invented it? The power of that moment where these two guys find solidarity in this song before the big moment, combined with the fact that it is a song more associated with hair metal silliness more than emotion, made it probably my favorite scene of the year and I’d like to hear David O. Russell talk about it. Any thoughts about that particular choice?

That song, the Whitesnake song, was one Micky actually used as his entrance song for many of his fights. I always want to look for the most emotional and poignant thing, such as the moment when Alice sings in the car with Dicky and they sing that Bee Gees song, which to me that was a very powerful way to show their special bond. In this case, to show the bond between the two brothers, I thought it was very affecting to see them in the tunnel, to see their emotional bond before they went out to this big event and for Dicky to be singing the song with Micky and for them to be singing it together, so that was an idea I brought to the film.

You mention that song with Christian Bale and Melissa Leo. “Jag” asks about incest relationships in your films, [one being] Spanking the Monkey obviously. But also according to “Jag”, I don’t know if this is correct, that you have said before that Melissa Leo and Christian Bale’s relationship feels in some ways incestuous, especially in the scene where Bale is singing to her in the car. Can you comment on that or is that way off base?

No, that’s absolutely true. When I was first looking at the story, I immediately said there’s an incestuous relationship thing going on here and when I was selling myself as a director, I said I want to make more of the emotion of the relationship. This movie’s in my wheelhouse because I totally get those kind of family relationships having done Spanking the Monkey and Flirting With Disaster and I really think that sort of odd bond between Alice and Dicky should really be felt emotionally and almost romantically. When you look at their family albums, Alice, god bless her after having had nine kids, is still a beautiful woman who could look like she was as much her son’s girlfriend as much as she was his mom so that is true.

I promise this will be the last time I mention Darren Aronofsky’s name during this interview –

You can mention him as many times as you want because I was happy that Darren’s credit showed up on the film right before we went to final print. I said, “What that all about?” and they said he had the right to put his name on the film contractually and he saw the film and loved it and he wants his name on it so I take it as a compliment.

Right, because you mentioned in the EW interview that you were taken aback when he called to tell you about wanting to getting executive producer credit and I kind of wanted you to elaborate on that if you could.

Oh no he didn’t call me, I saw the credit on the final cut of the film and I said “What?” And yeah, I was taken aback. But then he was very sweet about it when I did see him. He embraced me and told me how much he loved the film and I’d heard he wanted his name on there because he loved the film and I think that’s a great compliment coming from a great filmmaker.

It’s been a number of years since your last film and we’ve heard about a bunch of projects that you’ve been attached to, for example Grackle with Matthew McConaughey and Nailed as well. For some reason these projects haven’t gone very smoothly. I’m wondering if you could talk a little about these projects and are there any sort of common factors that you can identify that cause problems, do you feel like you choose tricky projects or tricky ways of financing them?

Well, we need to be specific about what’s what because people, especially in the age of the Internet, just start chucking ideas around which are not based in fact and they pretty much just get picked up as fact. They’re all different. I wrote a couple of things after Huckabees that didn’t get made and that was my own responsibility because I decided not to make them. I was going through a period where I wasn’t feeling the material and a harder period for me as a filmmaker. It also resulted in me becoming a better filmmaker and a better writer and a more instinctive one. But there was a period there where I was questioning everything and Huckabees wasn’t entirely what I wanted it to be and I was going through a divorce so I can take responsibility for that.

Nailed was a project that any of the troubles with that had nothing to do with me. Those was about the company was financing it, and this was during the Madoff era, was inconsistent. I had never seen anything like it. Our financing got turned on and off like a faucet and we were shut down nine times during the production, having nothing to do with me, just having to do with the nature of the financing company. After that went on enough times I had to move on with my life, I have a family to support and I had to move on and write other things and make other films, you know? I spent almost two years trying to get that finished and I just said ok, I got to move on.

The Grackle was a picture that was written by the guys who wrote Bad Santa, [John] Requa and [Glenn] Ficarra, really funny, smart writers. They were the guys who also made I Love You Phillip Morris, great directors too. I thought that could be really funny. I was talking about making that and getting them to do a draft when my dear friend Mark Wahlberg came to me with The Fighter. So as much as I thought that was really a funny project, if I have to pick between someone who’s a little like a brother to me and that other project I’m going to have to go with The Fighter.

Those guys wrote me, Requa and Ficarra, and they said, “Gee, now you’re really sorry you didn’t make The Grackle aren’t you?” They meant it as a joke. [laughs]

[laughs] I think you made the right choice, actually.

[laughs]

Well that’s interesting and I apologize, I did not mean to perpetuate –

Oh no need to apologize man, I’m happy to answer any of those questions, I just want to set them straight.

Right, right. Now last question about projects. This is from Rodrigo from The Playlist who’s asking these questions about Old St. Louis with Vince Vaughn.

Let’s talk about that. That was a really good project that I re-wrote for Vince kind of in the vein of Paper Moon. I thought I’d be making that this autumn but it’s really not up to me a lot of times. In that case a lot of it was up to Vince who decided to make the Ron Howard project instead, because we were supposed to making that, and he went off to make The Dilemma with Kevin James and that’s what happened with that. So, you know –

Yeah, sometimes things just don’t work out or don’t happen, I understand.

Well there’s still talk about making that project and we may still make it when the timing’s right. That happens all the time in this business.

I gotta ask you about Uncharted. Can you talk about your relationship with the property to begin with, had you played the games before you were approached with the project in the first place and just talk a little about that because it’s certainly one of my favorite games on the Playstation.

Ah, big game player!

I wouldn’t describe it that way, but sure.

My good friend Chuck Roven who produced the Batman movies like The Dark Knight, and produced Three Kings with me, came to me with Avi Arad who used to run Marvel Comics and who does the Spider-Man movies, with Amy Pascal, the head of Sony, and said, “What do you think? Would you like to try to create a really smart, interesting, intense franchise based on this game?” And I said yeah, let me check it out.

My son plays most of the games in our house, and I will play them with him but I’m not hardcore. I’m not going to present myself as hardcore. But I played the game a bunch of times and I also read as much as I could about the game and I met the game’s creator, Amy Hennig, who’s really cool. I started to brew together what I thought could be a really cool idea that I’d never seen in a film before…Really intense action and really intense family dynamics on a global stage. To grow a game into a movie is an interesting proposition because a game is a very different experience than a movie. You guys are playing the game, and it’s about playing the game. It’s not about a narrative embracing you emotionally. You know what I’m saying? So, I want to create a world that is worthy of a really great film that people want to watch and rewatch, so that’s what I’m working on right now.

My last question is, I don’t know if you’ve read on the interwebs but a lot of people have made a number of suggestions as to how one should go about making an Uncharted game. I wonder if you have any reaction to that, or do you even know what I’m talking about to begin with?

Well I’ve had people come up to me after screenings and pitch people they think should play the roles and I think we’ve seen that before with movies like Interview with the Vampire where there was a lot of fans of Anne Rice’s book and there were a lot of strong opinions about how to make it.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m very respectful as far as the core content and sprit of the game, but beyond that it’s my job as a filmmaker to make what I think is going to be an amazing movie. People have to trust that and let that go, I think. There’s not a bunch of movies you can point to that are made from games that are amazing movies, that stand up to time as a franchise or as [individual films]. I personally think it’s really cool when you see that someone like Darren Aronofsky is going to make an X-Men movie or to get someone such as myself to make this picture. You can be guaranteed that it’s going to be real, it’s going to be raw, it’s going to be intense, it’s going to be original, and it’s going to be propulsive. And those are all the things that I want when I go to watch a movie like that.

Well David O. Russell it’s been an honor to speak with you today. Thanks so much for joining us on the Slashfilmcast and thank you for taking time to answer our questions and those of our readers and listeners.

Thank you David for having me. Rock on and I’ll be talking to you soon I hope.

Good luck at the Oscars this year.

Thank you. We’ll need it!

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