Moriarty Takes A Trip To The DÉJÀ VU Editing Room!!

I was kind of rough on Tony Scott’s last movie. In fact, I had this to say at one point in the review: “Y'know who deserves the most blame, though? Tony Scott. No question about it. Seriously, dude, it's time for an intervention. We need to take his Avid away, we need to give him a script for a simple two-character one-act play, and we need to force him into a boot camp on the basics of storytelling, because he has lost his motherfucking mind.” I stand behind that statement. And thankfully, it appears that Jerry Bruckheimer has staged that intervention I called for. I first met Bruckheimer earlier this year when I was invited to drop by the editing room of PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN 2, and it was an interesting afternoon. He wasn’t at all what I expected him to be. Slim, immediately engaging, and fairly soft-spoken, he’s not the stereotype of the Hollywood producer that we’re constantly sold by shows like ENTOURAGE. That encounter went well enough that I wasn’t shocked when I was invited to visit him again, this time to see how DÉJÀ VU is looking about a month out from its release. I was a little taken aback, though, when I was told that Tony Scott would be there as well. I told Disney that I hadn’t always had nice things to say about Scott’s work, and they told me that wasn’t a problem. They were confident that I would change my mind once I saw what they were working on. I like it when people sound confident about their work, so I set a date, and one recent afternoon, after a full morning of press screenings for the AFI Festival, I hopped in my car and hauled ass out to Santa Monica, where Bruckheimer’s company has its offices. There are two main buildings that the company occupies. I’ve been in the office building before in my “screenwriter” disguise, but on this particular afternoon, I was led across the street to where the editing suites are located. I think I waited all of about six minutes before I saw Bruckheimer walking out to greet me. Inside the editing room, we were joined by Tony Scott and by Chris Lebenzon, who’s cutting the picture. Scott was dressed in a loud Hawaiian shirt and shorts, and when he greeted me, he spoke in a thick English accent. Scott talked to me for a few moments about how he approached this film, which is ostensibly science-fiction, like he would any drama, doing his best to ground it so that the fantastic elements would seem plausible. He had to get back to do some more looping work, though, so he quickly handed me over to Bruckheimer, who sat down on the other end of the long leather couch facing the Avid set-up. The first thing that struck me is how the style of the film (shot by Paul Cameron, the same cinematographer as MAN ON FIRE) is much more subdued than either of Tony Scott’s last few films. This script, co-written by Bill Marsilli and Terry Rossio, was something that Marsilli first started working on nine years ago. It’s a carefully constructed narrative puzzle that is has a strong narrative spine. This isn’t the same sort of loud, empty action film that Scott’s career has been studded with in the past. Sure, there are many stylistic flourishes that it appears to have in common with his other work, but as with MAN ON FIRE, there’s some meat on these bones, and he seems to have intentionally pushed his visual fireworks in a new direction. Have you seen the most recent trailer for the film? Well, now that I’ve seen roughly 45 minutes or so of the movie, that trailer strikes me as more of a hindrance than a help. Although it finally starts to explain some of the premise, it still obfuscates a little too much, and it actually makes the film look like it’s going to be much more aggressively overstylized, like DOMINO or MAN ON FIRE. Yes, the film is about the investigation of a ferryboat explosion. Doug Carlin (Denzel Washington) is an ATF agent involved in checking out the crime scene. What the trailer just hints at, though, is what happens when he hooks up with Agent Pryzwarra (Val Kilmer), head of a special unit that has created a technology that allows them to look backwards in time exactly four days. They can look pretty much anywhere (depending on where their hardware is physically located), but only once, and only in real-time. So far so good. That’s an intriguing enough idea, being able to see back in time but not really being able to affect what you’re looking at. It takes a while for Carlin to really start to believe what he’s looking at, but once he gets a sense of the potential, he embraces it. My favorite scene out of everything I was shown, and the one that I think is going to be a real trip for audiences, is a car chase that’s utterly unlike any car chase I’ve ever seen. They fit Agent Carlin with a portable headpiece, like goggles, that allows him to “walk” through the past, looking around himself. He ends up behind the wheel of a truck, though, with one eye looking at the road in the present and the other eye looking at the road in the past, doing his best to catch up to the person he suspects of being the bomber. I don’t want to ruin the twists of the chase or the specifics, but I have to say... it’s an invigorating sequence, and incredibly clever. The bad guy in the movie, played with a creepy calm by Jim Caviezel, came across as menacing and effective in the scenes I saw. I didn’t really get a look at much of Paula Patton, the female lead, but I saw enough to know that she’s the lynchpin of the entire piece. She’s a key piece of the mystery, and when Washington finally does what they believe to be impossible, sending himself physically back in time, it’s not only to stop the bombing, but to save her life. Time travel can be incredibly difficult to get right on film because of the paradox that such a premise inherently creates, but this film embraces that and plays with it in smart and original ways. This may be the first time since BACK TO THE FUTURE that I’ve seen someone wring something new from the idea, and as a longtime SF fan, I like the fact that this film isn’t overladen with geekspeak and futuristic production design. Instead, it’s handled very matter-of-fact, something that should open this up to a broad audience instead of turning it into another STARGATE. Will it work as a whole? Impossible to tell at this point, but I walked out of that editing room excited about a Tony Scott film for the first time in recent memory. For once, it appears that his style is in service to the substance of the piece instead of vice-versa, and that’s a pleasant surprise. I’ve been very hard on his work in the past, but he won me over enough to say that when DÉJÀ VU does open, I’ll be there for sure. Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles