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Legends In The Making An odyssey indeed. One that began when its star, 31-year-old Mr. William Bradley Pitt, currently fighting off only a handful of contenders for the title of America’s sexiest man alive, was still in puberty. One that began when the director was still a hopeful film school student. Zwick first read Jim Harrison’s short story, about a father and his three sons growing up in Montana in the 1900s, when it was published in Esquire in 1978. He was 26 and studying at L.A.’s American Film Institute. “I called the agents and publishers,” recalls Zwick of the beginning of his 17-year quest to bring the tale to the screen, “but I was still in school, and they laughed at me and told me the rights were owned by other people.” For a long time, Legends was regarded as a not-too hot commercial proposition. A sweeping account of the strife, loves and sagas of the Ludlow family-Anthony Hopkins plays the old colonel father, Pitt, Aidan Quinn and Henry Thomas his sons-most of the major characters get sick, die, go mad or commit suicide. But when Zwick did finally get all the ingredients together, the stars were aligned just right. Not the kind that glitter in the sky, but actors who reap box office rewards. Zwick’s major coup was casting Brad Pitt-which he did before the $105 million box office bloodfest Interview With The Vampire. Throw in Anthony Hopkins and dazzling British newcomer Julia Ormond-now signed for the title role in Harrison’s Ford remake of Sabrina-and it’s not surprising that Legends became the number one film at the US box office for four straight weeks, on its way to takings of $60 million and counting… But back in August 1993, when Empire visited the cold and damp Legends set just outside the Canadian province of Calgary in Alberta, the outcome wasn’t so predictable. In the muddy parking lot of a local ice rink-a place normally host to curling, a warped ice-bound version of bowls that Zwick makes lots of jokes about-the crew have broken for lunch and come pouring outside, trudging through the food line to hit the catering truck. Zwick grabs a muffin and guides us into a room upstairs to talk about his passion for this film with the same kind of energy he uses to systematically dissect his food. While Zwick’s casting choices now seem inspired-throwing in a regal Oscar-winner (Hopkins) with a washed-up child star (E.T.’s Henry Thomas) and mixing up established actors like Aidan Quinn with the lesser-known Pitt and the completely unknown Ormond-he admits he was not always convinced he was right. “But I like to think that’s what a good movie does,” he says of this odd group. “It lets you see someone in a way you’ve never seen them before and it endows them with whatever aspects of the part that the movie has to offer.” Henry Thomas had a certain amount of nail-biting to do while waiting to get the dream role of baby brother Samuel in this, his comeback from E.T. Zwick auditioned every other actor in town before giving in. “I was auditioned for the role before anyone was cast besides Brad,” says Thomas, he too having popped upstairs to eat his lunch away from the rabble. “Then I heard Aidan Quinn was in it and I thought, ‘Oh, it’s getting better and better.’ Then I heard Anthony Hopkins, and I was like, ‘Oh wow, hope I get this.’ And then finally after they cast Julia, the cast me, and a week later rehearsals started and I really let myself get excited.” Julia Ormond says she only gets impressed about her famous co-stars when she talks about it with the press. “When you’re focused on your work and put your nose to the grindstone with people like Brad and Aidan, who everyone perceives as big stars, at the end of the day they just become friends and work colleagues,” she counsels. “But then you go out to talk about the people you worked with and you really stop and think, ‘Well, Christ, yeah, look who I’m working with!’” While the mood today seems generally subdued-largely due to weeks of intense night-shooting at the nearby Indian reserve that has doubled for the blood and trench-filled battleground of Ypres (where the Ludlow brothers end up after joining a Canadian regiment in 1915)-Anthony Hopkins still seems lively and chatty as he walks his wife through the food line, asking for no special treatment. Lunch eaten, the jolly 59-year-old thesp meets us upstairs to waffle on about his first ever Western. “I turned up on the set the other day and said to the director, ‘I’ve done Shakespeare, Ibsen and Chekhov, but I’ve been rehearsing to be a cowboy all my life.” He says cheerfully, gesturing at his cowboy hat, boots and bright red scarf around his neck. “look at me-I’m not discovering a cure for cancer. I’m just getting paid to play out all my childhood fantasies.” Hopkins says he had been smiling around Los Angeles, post-Hannibal Oscar, when his agent called and told him he’d been offered a cowboy role. Something he’d lusted after since his schoolboy days watching John Ford movies. “This role gets me out of those stiff English parts and helps me star on the move, which is what I love best,” he chortles. “Being paid to be a modern-day cowboy…” The casting of Brad Pitt as Tristan, the rugged and unpredictable firebrand lover in the family, wasn’t as immediate as that of Hopkins. “Brad read the script two years before I was able to even cast it,” relates Zwick. “He’d not even done Thelma And Louise then. Not many people know that he had done two day’s work on Thirtysomething (Zwick’s successful yuppie TV series that-not surprisingly-doesn’t rate a mention on Pitt’s C.V.) and we started to meet and talk about his role while his career began to unfold. “He was quite passionate about it and as I struggled to get the movie made, I was able to see his work as it began to emerge. It’s a very difficult thing to embody the kind of lifeforce that this character has and you had to be willing to take certain emotional risks and certain challenges. I knew the toughest role belong to Tristan, but how do you send out a casting call for a force of nature? It became obvious Brad was the right choice, but the studio were hesitant and it wasn’t until I got Tony Hopkins that they gave us the go-ahead.” In the meanwhile Zwick married, had children and lived through success, failure and the death of his brother-all of which made him only more determined to get this story made. “I relate to a man’s life being defined by his losses and grief as well as his victories,” he says. “Tristan is a wish-fulfilment for all of us, someone who expresses the most primitive thoughts we all have and act on them, unbound by convention.” The film itself was first taken on by former TriStar chief Jeff Sagansky after Zwick used the success of his 1986 yuppie film, About Last Night (with Rob Lowe and Demi Moore), to get what he really wanted. “The studio was keen to work with me again and I found out the rights to this story were available for one day, and I prevailed upon them to option it on my behalf,” he explains craftily. “I tried to find the right writer but he became unavailable. Then I met Bill Wittcliff. But he had to do Lonesome Dove and that took a year before he could start work, so I went off and made Glory (the civil war film which won Denzel Washington a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award) and came back and he had a draft, but the studio had been sold and they weren’t interested. So I made another movie (Leaving Normal) and then somewhere along the line I met Brad, and the studio got involved again and it all started finally coming together.” Finding someone for the part which went to Ormond proved one of his toughest tasks-despite the fact that every established American actress was begging for the role. “I wanted someone who really understood that Susannah was a female Tristan, bound by the convention of that time,” reflects Zwick. “I met so many actresses and couldn’t find one I really liked until I saw a tape of Julia in the movie Stalin. I contacted her in England and arranged for her to come to New York, to which Brad and I took a red-eye flight, so that they could do a screen test together. “She really understood and knew this character and then I had to convince the studio to trust me with an unknown actress playing the only female lead.” Once Zwick had pulled together his dream cast and script, the next major problem was the $32 million budget. Both he and Pitt deferred most of their salaries to help out. “I used all my experience in TV of how to stretch your dollars a long way,” states the director. “And that’s something I take pride in…” We’re in what must be the world’s smallest set a room no bigger than a closet that Pitt and Hopkins just about fit into. They are about to shoot a tense bar-room scene in which Pitt tries to knock a barman’s block off. Pitt broods in a corner in readiness for the scene. In the take, Pitt has a barney with the bartender, who refuses to serve his Indian friend. Hopkins manages to calm him down for a moment, but it all ends in tears when Pitt sets about the bigot with a stout length of wood. Another take and the worn-out Pitt shows up to talk about his role. Without a hint of egomania, he says that Tristan is the character he was born to play. “I’ve always felt when I’ve done a part that there was someone who was better for it than me,” the bearded lovegod begins modestly, picking at the dirt under his nails with sudden fascination. “This one I felt was right. I knew the corners and the bends of the journey this guy takes-and no one could play it better than me.” Filming may be indoors today, but Legends is very much a sweeping outdoors kind of movie. The World War I scenes gave Zwick a chance to play big-time director, with trenches, zig-zagging the prairies, hundreds of explosives planted to simulate artillery fire, and 800 extras posing as dying soldiers amid the explosions. But Zwick had a knack of making every dollar count. Moving Montana to Canada, he says, saved the production a hefty $2 million (thanks to the conversion rate), and he used a touch of cleverness to cut down the expenses. “My background is in theatre, where the suggestion is important,” he explains. “We had 800 people one night during a war scene but then only 300 the next night and then the other two nights we had 100 people. Yet the size seemed much larger because we kept the frame alive. The street in the main town was just one block of a street we carefully blocked. “We went to Jamaica for three days and in that time we made Jamaica be New Guinea, Africa, Jamaica and the South Seas in a boat. We did all this with little things created only in one direction for the lens to see and you and your imagination to fill out. There is almost a way in which this movie was deliberately illustrated like a book, with one strong image rather than a five-minute sequence.” Zwick choose to shoot in Calgary, smack in southern central Canada, because it was traditionally one of the driest parts of the country. Then his crew moved in and the weather decided to break with tradition and deliver record rainfalls. “Of course, the movie wouldn’t be as beautiful if we didn’t have that extraordinary weather, because everything you see in the movie is before a storm hit or just after a hit-but it certainly made things tough,” he laments. “For every beautiful cumulus cloud you see, you don’t see the three hours of us huddling under these awful tarps with lightning striking the dolly. Although today’s bar-room scene gives everyone the chance to avoid mother nature’s stormy tantrums, the tension between Zwick and Pitt suggests it’s not all sunshine on set. As the pair discuss ways in which Pitt could break a piece of wood over someone’s head, they huddle together in corners for long periods at a time. Even to those out of earshot, the intense nature of their dialogue is clearly visible from the body language alone. “You saw him,” says Zwick after when challenged on the issue. “Of course he’s intense, but as a director you learn to communicate with the individual actor according to his individual needs-and God knows, Brad and I spent a lot of time getting to know each other, trying to understand each other’s process.” “People want to hear that we were not getting along,” reflects Pitt, offering his version of today’s little tiff. “You read things in scripts and envision them. Remember in Spinal Tap when they wanted the big Stonehenge and it came out tiny?” So what was the main problem? “I didn’t want my character to show his cards so blatantly and Ed did. So you’ve got two people who care about the film and the character and we had different views. Fortunately, something good is going to be squeezed out of that…” Sixteen months later when we next meet, it appears something very good indeed was squeezed out of that movie, experience. Pitt’s now earning a staggering $7 million for his next film, the detective thriller Seven in which he and Morgan Freeman star as two cops trying to unravel a bizarre series of murders mimicking the seven deadly sins. And, as Seven producer Arnold Kopelson boldly puts it, he’s “Beyond hot”. Kopelson, who worked with Harrison Ford on The Fugitive and Michael Douglas on Falling Down, knows a thing or two about charisma. “I knew Pitt was going to a star but nobody knew he was going to be the star of the magnitude that he is today,” he gushes. “He is the grandest movie star of his age group I have seen in 30 years. He’s a trowback to the 1940s-we don’t see stars like him today-and I think he’ll go the distance. Brad is a phenomenon.” The phenomenon arrives for our follow-up interview one cold December morning in L.A. with the most entertaining of excuses for being only minutes late. Throwing himself into an over-stuffed chair, his straggle long blond hair falling around his unshaven face, he explains. “It’s so crazy. With all my family arriving (for the Interview With A Vampire premiere later that night), I figured I had to go rent a van, right,” he says. “So I got it all figured out; I’m going to pick up this van and I’m going to be there at this hotel in plenty of time, and I’m tearing down the road and I come to an intersection and I’m thinking, ‘I hope they have good food at this hotel because I’m hungry and forgot to eat,’ and then an attractive woman crosses the road and I realise it’s a friend of mine who has changed her hair and is less beautiful, so I stopped to say hi and burned a little time.” “Then I’m five minutes late dropping off the car to get it cleaned. It’s a little one-man shop and he’s not there and I sit waiting 20 minutes. Now I’ve got to run around the corner and get the van and I start running and my belt comes undone and these pants are like big enough for us all to get in and invite some out friends too.” He stands up and thrusts his thumbs behind his waistbelt to prove his baggy jeans are, indeed, loose. “So I get to the place for my driver’s license, which I left in the other car, and I finally get the van and I’m flying here and I suddenly realised I’m an hour out-I’d been gone all last week and hadn’t put my clocks back.” It’s hardly surprising that Pitt has trouble telling the time these days. When you’re dubbed Sexiest Man Alive by People magazine-and you just co-starred with the not-too-shabby Tom Cruise and Antonio Banderas-one could announce with some degree of certainty that you’ve arrived. In a big way. Still, the southern Baptist boy says with mock sadness that he has to accept his career may have peaked with the back-to-back successes of Interview With The Vampire and Legends Of The Fall. “What has changed is that you can no longer surprise people,” he explains, looking regretful at the loss of his underdog status. “It’s more that now they expect it-you see the difference?” Er, yeah. “Everyone wants to say you’re James Dean and later they want to say you’re gay.” Pitt shakes his head in confusion.” People just amaze me that they want to get you classified. I don’t know what to make of all this-the whole movie star thing confuses me…” |
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