GOD'S HANDS: An interview with Frailty writer Brent Hanley By Warren Curry 4/7/02 Part 2 of 2

What is Holes about?

Holes is about a little boy. It's apparently a very popular book; I didn't know this. Until they sent it over, I'd never read it. Phoenix Pictures is doing with it Andrew Davis, and it's about a little boy, who mistakenly gets sent to a detention camp out in Texas where they make you dig holes every day to build character. Of course, you find out that the warden really is looking for buried treasure. There are all these back-stories going on that involve the land because it used to be the biggest lake in Texas, and now it's this dried up lakebed where they all dig holes. There's this whole kind of western back-story going on about this outlaw, Kissin' Kate Barlow. It was really fun. After Frailty, I really wanted to get away from dark stuff. I actually had nightmares about Frailty, because when I write I obsess, and anything I'm doing I always dream about. If I spend all day doing something, I'll usually dream about it that night. Even if it's like washing dishes for an incredibly long time, I'll dream about washing dishes. So, I dreamed about Frailty just again and again and had these terrible, terrible nightmares. After Frailty, I wrote a script, which I'm about to go out with in the next month or so. This one I might hold onto, since I've written two, so I have a choice of holding onto one. I wrote a dramedy called Texas Pretty, which is very light stuff. It has some drama to it, but I went more the Capra (route) -- I'm incredibly influenced by Capra and Sturges and those guys -- and that was a really nice thing. I have to admit when Frailty started up again, the dreams started coming back, because I was working on it a lot. Holes was a really nice thing to balance it out with, because it was just a great book. Just like when I was a kid I read Judy Blume's Tales of A Fourth Grade Nothing, and that was such a fun read and Holes has that childhood magic to it.

How about the John Woo project?

The John Woo thing is based on an idea that they've been trying to do for eight years. It's based on an unpublished novel and they had a script, which I never read, but they hated apparently. It was going to be a TV series and they had a written four or five pilot episodes for this thing, and I just took the basic idea and it's a -- like I said I'm heavily influenced by Jim Thompson, and in some ways this is my Jim Thompson and also my film noir. This is a detective film with a spiritual, supernatural element thrown in there. It's somewhat similar to Angel Heart in some ways -- that's something we've been using as a prototype. It has elements of Dead Zone, even Dead Again, although I'm not a huge fan of that picture, but it certainly has the idea of a back-story, which is the past. It's simply karma -- the idea that you did something in a past life that came back to bite you in the butt later.

Like Flatliners?

Well to some degree, but not really so much, because that's more about them dying. I guess you could somewhat draw that comparison. This takes place in the present day and the 40's, and I always wanted to do something in the 40's; that's my absolute favorite period. There's definitely a love triangle going on and definitely hints of Double Indemnity. It's also a Cain and Abel story in the back-story as well.

Since it's John Woo is there lots of action?

Not so much. He's producing this -- there was a director attached when I got involved, but apparently he had some falling out with the studio, so he walked. There's been some talk that John Woo may be directing it. Terence Chang, who's been his producing partner forever, is such a great guy. He's so calm; anytime you get upset and he walks in the room, you automatically calm down. He really wants John to do something a little more quiet like this. There are not really any big action sequences, but there's murder -- there is always murder in anything I do -- but no big action scenes.

It seems that most of your projects involve flashbacks or back-story. What draws you to that story structure?

Well, film noir is huge for me; my all time favorite film is Out of the Past. My first script was very much an homage to this film, just like Miller's Crossing is an homage to The Glass Key or Reservoir Dogs is an homage to The Killing or The Asphalt Jungle. Not a remake, but an homage. There's something about the folded narrative that just turns me on. I think audiences are incredibly smart, and if you fold your narrative, you're able to fool them more, because you're feeding the information as you want them to know it. It sets it up for reveals and twists and flips, which I find very interesting. The only script that I've written so far, called Straight Paranoid, which is the other script I might be sending out in the next month, is the only one that has a linear narrative. For some reason, my mind just works better in a folded narrative than a linear narrative.

Considering how dark some aspects the film are, was it very difficult to get made?

It's been surprisingly easy with this piece. It only took a year and a half, from it being optioned to it being made. It got made all of a sudden. We did the second draft in about two months -- it was very easy to do and there wasn't very much that got altered. It was just a matter of the ending getting tightened more. When you work by yourself and no one else is reading it, when you finally send it out you have a habit -- when you work in a vacuum like I do, (the script) makes perfect sense to you, but it doesn't make perfect sense to everybody else, but they still like it. They get parts of it, but they don't get everything. We had to fix that a little bit just to make sure everyone was getting what was going down at the end. Some people still might get confused, because it is complicated. It really didn't take long at all. There was a time period when I thought, "Christ, this is never going to get made" and that went on for about nine months. Then we got Bill to read it and he really responded. At the time he was going to give it to some other directors like Carl Franklin and Sam Raimi, but he ended up falling in love with it and really wanted to direct it. When I met with him, I knew he could do it. He'd been around film for so long, and I was fan of his work as an actor. We're kind of from the same place -- he's from Fort Worth, where my wife's from. He's got a good 15 years on me, but at the same time he understood the tone and the characters. He got it very quickly and once that happened, Matthew, who I'd been talking to for a while about doing this; he basically told me to come to him when it was set up and ready to go. We threw it to him, and within a couple of weeks he was signed on to do it and that really snowballed everything. You get a movie star attached and a lot of times the financing comes right after that. It was right down to the wire. Originally David Kirshner got Newmarket/Good Machine to option it. He bought my contract out and had it set up with German financiers and that fell through right at the last minute. Lions Gate came in like true saviors and really picked it up. David Kirshner was monumental in getting this film made. He actually put up his own money. We had already gone into pre-production, and this is when the German financiers pulled out and he was left holding the bag, but he kept spending money. If you stop the momentum then you're dead. It's going to cost you so much more money if you stop right before a film gets made. A lot of films do this -- they die right at the end and our film almost did, but David really saved us.

As a Texan, what do you see in movies today that make you mad about how they are portrayed?

I can't say that I've seen anything recently that's disturbed me. The walkin', talkin' stereotype always gets a little old, but there are walkin', talkin' stereotypes in Texas. It depends where you are; Dallas, Austin, Houston, these are big, metropolitan areas and you have all kinds of people. I can't say I've been too upset by anything I've seen. The whole cowboy thing is just not all that accurate. I really want to do a piece that revolves around a Mexican family. I feel like that's a part of Texas that hasn't really been explored, and that's a huge part of Texas. I grew up in what they call "Little Mexico" in Grand Prarie, and my experiences there I've never seen put on film and I'm very interested in doing that. Matthew McConaughey, Paxton and I have all talked about this at great length -- we have an agenda to put Texas on the cinematic map, much like Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese have put New York on the map. There are other filmmakers out there -- Richard Linklater, Robert Rodriguez, Tim McCanlies, who's a writer that did Iron Giant, and he has a script called Second Hand Lines that is going to start shooting in Austin in the summer. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on in Austin. I'm actually going to move -- my wife and I are looking for a house right now in Austin. It's always been the dream to come out here, establish yourself and then go down to Austin and make films. I'm supposed to direct a film this summer or fall and I want to do that all in Texas. Texas has a space that's very much my cinema. I love the wide-open plains and the huge skies. My one regret about Frailty is that we weren't able to shoot in Texas. We shot here, but we doubled it really well. As a Texan, I can tell you that it looked really good. We did miss out on the huge storm clouds coming over the plains -- you just can't get that here. That's something that I really lamented -- losing that one shot, because in the script we do track the storm. It was hard to do it here -- it was all processed rain, which was a blast to see. That was my first bit of movie magic -- seeing them make it rain. I'm a simpleton, but I thought that was amazing (laughs).

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