STEALING LADY LUCK: An interview with Owning Mahowny director Richard Kwietniowski. By Warren Curry 5/1/03 Part 1 of 2

Director Richard Kwietniowski.

It's been over 5 years since director Richard Kwietniowski last brought a film to the big screen. After the indie success of his previous effort, Love and Death on Long Island, the filmmaker has kept a relatively low profile, but he is now returning to the public eye of the independent film world with his newest offering, Owning Mawhony. Based on true-life events documented by author Gary Stephen Ross in his book, Stung, Owning Mahowny is a non-judgmental look at Dan Mahowny, a Toronto banker who served jail time in the early 80s for embezzling millions of dollars from his place of employment in order to fund his gambling addiction. As played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Mahowny couldn't be any more of a contradiction -- a man who is simultaneously proactive and reactive, intelligent and foolish, aggressive and timid. The ultimate futility of his addiction is best summed up by John Hurt, who plays scheming Atlantic City casino manager Victor Foss, when he observes that the only reason Mahowny wants to win money is so that he has more to lose.

CinemaSpeak recently had a chance to sit down with Kwietniowski to discuss Owning Mahowny. I shared the interview with one other journalist (a two-on-one, if you will), so about (if not exactly) half the questions below were posed by yours truly. The film also stars Minnie Driver and Maury Chakin. Sony Pictures Classics will release Owning Mahowny in New York and Los Angeles on May 2, 2003.

(Read the review of Owning Mahowny)

It's been 5 years since your last film -- why Owning Mahowny?

Firstly, I didn't want to wait this long to make a follow up. This was one of the scripts that was sent to me. I was intrigued by the extremity of the story, and it was a good script but I felt it wasn't my kind of project -- it was kind of a conventional treatment of gambling, addiction; something quite macho. I turned it down, but the production company gave me the book and I got much more interested then, because the book does a lot to fill in the nature of addiction, how casinos operate, how banks operate. I just became more and more interested in the idea of trying to tell a story like this differently. In a sense you can say that Love and Death on Long Island was a small story told kind of big as melodrama -- a sort of ridiculous story that I wanted to make people kind of care about, somehow. With this one I felt that since it's such a massive story -- an act of self-destruction on this huge scale -- why not try to tell this story small and self contained, so you're kind of close to the person? Possibly to suggest that addiction isn't just something that kind of happens to a small minority with a chemical imbalance. We're all aware of what addiction is but I don't think most of us will go down that route.

You said that you like to tell small stories big, but in this case you wanted to tell an extraordinary story in an unextraordinary way. When making this film did it feel like you were working against your natural instincts as a storyteller?

Not really because when you start working you get so internal to the film. For instance, I actually had $1.4 million in fake money made and would make people look at it and they'd be like, "That's all it is?" The same thing when (Mahowny's) gambling $70,000 a hand. In a sense, the kind of magnitude or the scale of the story doesn't make any sense. What matters is the kind of human element and our closeness to him going through this extraordinary journey. Something very strange happened when we were filming. We filmed all of the casino stuff right at the end of the shoot, because that's where I was allowed my 200 extras as opposed to the 3 in the rest of the film. Finally, when we ended up in the casino, Philip said one day, "Do we really have to do these scenes?" We had just done all of these harrowing scenes about what he's put his girlfriend through, the deceptions at work and so on, and how he has suffered as well. And now we actually have to do the playing, and is it really necessary? Suddenly, the subject of the film shifted from being about this compulsive gambler who had stolen money, to the consequences of those actions. That was the strangest thing, but I thought we should shoot them. But it was if they were almost irrelevant. They're very important in the edit and the final film obviously. I tried to film in a casino differently from the way it's usually filmed, so it's actually quite dull and threadbare and desperate, like the bottom of an aquarium and he's bobbing around like a fish. You never once see the result of a card being played, which I think is a first in the history of the cinema.

Another thing you never see is his motivation behind his compulsion for gambling. Would you say that this story is about all addictions and how we're all vulnerable?

Well, initially, the script that I was first shown had an explanatory voiceover and flashbacks to a troubled upbringing. It did that very well, but I felt that it immediately didn't interest me. A lot of people told me that audiences have to be told in a very straightforward way why somebody is the way they are -- no, they don't. I didn't want to simply suggest that he had some tragic flaw that meant he was more susceptible to compulsive behavior or addictions. Simply, if a guy who looks like (Mahowny) can be so susceptible then it can happen to any of us.

What's interesting about the character is that aside from his gambling obsession, he almost lives his life like a Puritan. He doesn't want alcohol or drugs or the prostitute that the casino sends up to his room. He just wants to gamble.

What he says to the prostitute is, "Thank you, but I'm only interested in lady luck." That in a sense is the nature of the addiction. It very much simplifies your life because that is the only thing you're interested in, really. The irony is that it's such vast amounts of money he's dealing with in the bank and the casino, but he would never buy a new car. In the scene when he plays with the sun visor and the cops are waiting around the corner -- my cut had that twice as long and I loved that. The producer said, "You have to cut that down; nothing's happening." I said, "Exactly!" He's totally preoccupied with this thing, and he's tried to fix it 1000 times before and he's never going to pay someone $30 to fix it.

Is there something about Mahowny's story that's specific to the 80s?

It's interesting because you think back to that period in Britain and the U.S., and presumably Canada, of being so Reagan/Thatcher monetarism. The vulgarity of the ostentatiousness of people with money, who suddenly had to have a Porsche 911 or a BMW -- I suppose that's sort of underpinning it. What I wanted to do with the period thing was to sort of use it as a way of cooling down and simplifying the look of the whole film. There were fewer cars and people there -- it's Toronto, which is like the safest place in the world. Nobody had cell phones, there were hardly any computers -- I just wanted to use it as a way of cooling down the world and making it look a little different. The fashions and styles there are not really so different from now. Because the film has its own spaces -- like the casino, which is a world unto itself -- you forget that it was set 20 years ago and you sort of just let it happen. I'm very kind of pleased with that, because it also meant that I could allow things to be a little bit strange or quirky and pretend that's because it was period. Everything is authentic actually. Just outside Toronto it's very easy to buy clothes from that period.

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