ROBERT DE NIRO and producer ART LINSON chat about their film What Just Happened?, the pressures of producing, terrible test screenings, and biting the hand that feeds.
MMM: Your book, which the film’s based on, is subtitled Bitter Tales from the Hollywood Front Line, but the movie is more bittersweet, more comedic. Why did you decide to go that particular way?
Linson: Bitter to me is usually funny – everybody has a different sense of what makes them laugh. Other people’s bitterness often makes me laugh. The movie’s fictionalised only in the sense that it was taken from my last book and we had to compress it into some sort of a time frame, and that automatically forces things to be fictionalised. But the actual incidents, other than the names we changed to protect the guilty, are all true.
MMM: One of the pleasures of the book is that you name names, which doesn’t happen in the movie.
Linson: I think naming names in a movie makes it something too specific. This is a movie about allowing people to see what it feels like being in Hollywood – how treacherous it is, how funny it is. It’s just like every place else except multiplied by ten. There’s an intensity to the backstage of the film industry that I think echoes everywhere, but it’s perversely funny when you see it happening to agents, and actors, and so on.
MMM: Whose idea was it to adapt the book into a film?
De Niro: I read the book and I laughed all the way through it and I said to Art, “You should write a screenplay and we could make a movie out of it and I could play the part.”
MMM: Did you have any ideas about how you’d like him to develop it?
De Niro: No, it’s so hard to write a screenplay and Art was always complaining to me about the process of that, so I felt it was best to leave him alone and give him as much support as I could.
MMM: Can you remember the first time you experienced the brutality of the business, when you’re flavour of the month on the Friday and after disappointing weekend box office figures, your calls aren’t returned?
Linson: It happens every couple of years! That’s happened to me so many times that I don’t even like to recall the pain. I think it might be like childbirth for women. My second movie as a producer was Car Wash, which was very successful, but my first movie was Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins. I remember we screened the movie and I asked a guy called Roy Silver, who owns a Chinese restaurant called Roy’s on Sunset [Boulevard], what he thought of it, and he said, “I just couldn’t understand why anybody would want to make a movie like that.” Then it came out a week later and it profoundly bombed – you couldn’t give it away. I remember the executive going to the theatre with me on opening night, and he walked into the lobby, looked in the theatre and came back out and said, “It’s over!” So I got a very rude beginning and that sort of behaviour continues all through your career.
MMM: Writing the book and making this film, were you ever worried about biting the hand that feeds you?
Linson: I never saw it as biting the hand that feeds because the hand that feeds is some God-like presence that no one can ever take a meeting with anymore, so everybody, including executives, seem to be under the same pressures. You don’t ever get to meet that guy or girl who’s really running anything. It’s an industry where the competition is so fierce that everybody is like a snail on a pane of glass, hanging on for dear life, trying not to slide down. They don’t even care if they go up – they just don’t want to slide down. I think that’s what makes it so funny.
MMM: How close is Ben, the central producer character, to you?
Linson: I just keep thinking of John Turturro’s character who has a stomach disorder. When Bob says, “I know what the problem is with you and your client – you’re scared of him.” And he [Turturro] says, in his underwear, about to throw up, “I’m scared of all of them.” That’s when it’s getting closest to the world I see.
MMM: We see the whole process of test screenings in the film, what do you think of them?
De Niro: I think they have validity. I know directors who really take them seriously and they should, more for comedies. I’m impressed with how they gauge certain things. I think they have a value but it depends what kind of movie it is.
Linson: I remember being at a dinner once after Goodfellas previewed in Seattle. Marty [Scorsese] was sitting next to a director friend of ours who asked him how it went, and he said, “A third of the people walked out and the cards were disastrous.” And then we all ate! [Laughs] So, you know, I think Bob’s right, a comedy, you might be able to fine-tune the timing of something, but often you can experience that from watching an audience laugh or not.
MMM: How does anyone cope with the kind of pressure we see Ben go through in the film?
De Niro: When I’m acting I don’t have the director’s problems or the producing problems – things like scheduling, moment-to-moment decisions which always boil down to money, and the pressure from the money people to keep the cost down. I’ve been through it – but I like it when I don’t have that pressure.
Linson: I’ve often asked myself that same question. I think you just learn to take it on. For those of you out there who’ve had some major disappointments and continue going, that’s what it is. Everybody knows how to handle good news, but you’re really tested when you’re handling bad news and in Hollywood you get a lot of it.
The sad part about all of this is that you never leave Hollywood; it leaves you. You can talk about wanting to leave, but you can rarely get over the addiction. So, no matter how bad things get, you tend to forge ahead.
With regards to how you stay sane, I don’t think it’s any harder than a young couple raising kids, trying to pay the bills. So I hope people realise this movie’s not just about Hollywood. It’s a metaphor and that’s the framework, but it is about a man juggling his life trying to hold on to things. I think everybody feels those pressures in some way; it may not just be as exotic as Hollywood.
By film journalist Jan Gilbert
