Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here. So who the heck is Davis Guggenheim, and why am I interviewing him? Having worked largely in television in recent years, you'd think I wouldn't be that interested in Mr. Guggenheim, until you take a look at the shows he has directed for: "The Shield," "Deadwood," "24," "Alias," "NYPD Blue," and "The Unit." Davis also is the lucky SOB who married Elizabeth Shue and gets to live out all of our ADVENTURES IN BABYSITTING fantasies on a daily basis. Oh, and earlier this year, Guggenheim won an Oscar…for a documentary…maybe you've heard of it…it's called AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH…it has a vice president in it. Dig around on Google; I'm sure you'll find something about it there. Davis's current project, opening this Friday, is GRACIE, a film whose story is based partly on the lives of his wife and her family dealing with the tragedy of losing the oldest Shue sibling, Elizabeth's brother Will, many years ago. The film also doubles as a well-told look at a young girl in crisis, trying to pull her life together by filling her dead brother's slot on his high school soccer team at a time in America where girls did not play sports with boys. The film works best as a coming-of-age story (with 16-year-old Carly Schroeder handling the weighty role), and is less about sports than the trailers would have you believe. It's clear from GRACIE and AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH that Guggenheim believes a great deal on passion projects, and he was very open and honest about his wife's trials and tribulations during this time in her life and the process of getting this and other films made.
Capone: Tell me about the first time Elizabeth told you the story about her family that led into the movie?
Davis Guggenheim: You mean about her brother?
C: Yeah
DG: Well, when I met Lisa--everyone calls her Lisa--it was a year after Will had died. And, she was still in this deep, deep fog…and devastated. When I met her brothers, you could just feel this whole family still in pieces. So, that was the context and the world that I entered when I fell in love with my wife. And, when I fell in love with my wife, I fell in love with her family. Then I saw how they sort of persevered and how out of that tragedy came these incredibly beautiful new lives. And, how Will kind of lives through them. I saw it with Lisa, who it totally changed as an actress. She was always playing these nice girlfriend, babysitter roles…
C: How many years ago are we talking about here?
DG: I met her when I was--when was the first Gulf War? 1990, maybe? I met her in November of 1989. So, we’re almost coming up on 18 years. So, it wasn’t just like I was learning about a terrible thing; it was during it. I mean, her life was in pieces. But, even though it was like this heavy, heavy, heavy thing, you also felt this…because they would always talk about him, I felt like I knew Will. They would just talk about him with such love. Tied into that was her being the only girl and losing her protector, like, Will was her protector. And, that’s sort of theme that is thrown into the beginning of this movie that when Johnny dies, Gracie loses her protector. So, when Andrew [Shue, Elizabeth's actor brother] had this idea about making the movie, it was originally about a father and a son. And, I was, like, Well, I’m glad you’re doing it, and ‘Good luck’ and all that, and I’d love to help. But, when he suddenly said, “What if we made it about a girl?” that was really interesting to me, because her story growing up in that family, in a weird way, she was an ugly duckling. She was really a swan, but no one saw her. They treated her like a duck, you know, like an ugly duck, because she didn’t belong. She wasn’t a soccer player, or she wasn’t a boy. But, she had this fierce fight that no one saw. So, that became immediately interesting to me.
C: At what point did you become involved as the director? Was it around the time that the story sort of focused on the one female in the mix, or was it after that?
DG: Andrew was toying around with making a movie about soccer, making a movie about his brother who died. And, only when it came up--and I forget who figured it out first when we said ‘Let’s make it about a girl’--that’s when I realized that there was a really special story there. I was, like, ‘Let’s not shy away from this family. Let’s make it about Lisa and the family and this family that lives and breathes soccer, you know, where it’s religion.
C: So, how long ago was that then?
DG: I would say three or four years ago.
C: So, I guess the real question is, since you’re not just dealing with a story about some anonymous death; you’re dealing with a death where, like you said, you were right there after it happened. What steps do you have to take not to trivialize or compromise the weight of this material, because it’s there, it’s in your heart. You’re not a director for hire on this one. This is your family's story, in a way. How do you protect it?
DG: Well, first, any director who’s worth his salt, any director who’s any good, has to feel that way about any story. They have to feel like ‘I have to get this story right.’ The last movie I made was AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH. It was, like, ‘God, if we don’t get this movie right, this message is going to get lost, and we’re not going to do our part with global warming.’ It felt the same way with this. Man, there are so many movies where people use a death in the family as a sort of story point that manipulates the audience so that they can get their story done. It’s like paint-by-numbers. Step 3: Sibling dies in fighting incident. So, yeah, there was this feeling…and, I think, on Lisa’s part particularly, she had a real, sometimes ill feeling of ‘maybe we shouldn’t do this.’ Just the minute you see something on the page…where you read a scene when you’re auditioning it, like, ‘Aww, this isn’t right. This feels like we’re cheapening this thing, that we’re turning this family thing into a product.’ So, the only thing you can do is fight like hell to make it right. And, make it authentic and make it real.
C: You mentioned before that the last two films you’ve done have dealt with subject matters very close to your heart. When you start looking for another project from this point on, how do you step back from something that personal?
DG: The harder thing is ‘How am I going to find another story that I feel that deeply about?’ On the one hand, there are a couple of projects where it feels like, well, this might be just plain old fun. That’s okay. But, I don’t think that’s going to last too long. I think it’s actually easier to tell a story if you feel really passionate about it, if you really believe that this is so important that you got to tell it. I’ve worked on a lot of TV shows where you’re, like, ‘Okay, this is the investigation scene where they have to interrogate the killer, and we know it’s the killer, but they can’t find a way to incriminate him, and how am I going to make this interesting, because they had the exact same scene in the last episode.’ That’s the worst place to be.
C: Actually, I have a list here of the TV shows that you’ve worked on. And, it really is like looking at a list of some of my favorite shows from the last few years, I mean, seriously--“The Shield,” “Deadwood,” “24,” “The Unit”--these are some of the great shows that are out there.
DG: Thank you.
C: I gotta ask you, Which episodes of “The Shield,” or which seasons did you work on? Do you remember what was happening in the story?
DG: Let me try to remember…you know, Shawn Ryan, who produced “The Shield,” did “The Unit,” so I went on to do that with him. Maybe you know the show better than I do. They had a drunk cop that went on a bender, and they sent him off to Mexico.
C: Right. Actually, I don’t usually do TV writing for our site, but I happened to get a hold of screeners for all the episodes of this season, and that story line has actually kind of come back into play in the season that’s airing right now. Yeah, I definitely remember that.
DG: Well, this was about three seasons ago. Maybe the second season of the show--or the first season of the show. I’m not sure.
C: It was one of those two. It was early on, for sure.
DG: That’s a great show.
C: It is. Tell me about what’s different about shooting that show, because what you just said about ‘Oh, here comes another scene…at a police station,’ that can’t be "The Shield" that you’re talking about when you say that.
DG: Not “The Shield,” I mean, that’s why I did it, because the writing is so good. My father [Charles Guggenheim, winner of three Oscars in the Best Documentary Short category and passed away in 2002] made documentaries, and that’s what I grew up watching. And, I always had this debate as I started doing television, which was: Do I want to make documentaries, do I want to make movies, do I want to make television shows? And, I realized that that’s the wrong way to ask the question. The question is ‘How do I find stories that are meaningful to me?’ And, it can be as diverse as an episode of “The Shield,” a show about a dirty cop, or a show about the American West in 1865, or it could be about global warming, or it could be about a girl who wants to play soccer. Those are really random and different subjects, but if the story has any kind of emotional weight, I’m in. And, if it doesn’t, I don’t care how much you can dress it up. You see a lot of these movies, and I think that’s what happens with Hollywood movies. I’ve seen big-budget movies, I’ve been sent the scripts, and I can’t imagine why they would ever make that movie. And, then they put a big actor in it, and then you see the trailer, and, like, ‘Well, okay. Wow, I must have missed something’. And, then, I watch the movie, and I go, ‘No, I didn’t miss anything,’ because they dress it up. They get a real famous person. They pay him $10 million or $15 million, you know, and they shoot the hell out of it, and they pay a lot of money for locations and sexy visuals. But, when it comes down to it, and you watch it, you say ‘Nope, that’s pretty empty.’ That’s why I’m proud of GRACIE, you know, it’s a small movie, but it packs a punch, man. It really packs a big punch.
C: When you think about your wife in those times when she was younger and, in a lot of ways, being marginalized, and then you have to re-create that to a certain degree for this film. Is that tough to have to think of your wife going through those times when she was so marginalized and then have to re-create those moments for the film, actually see it in front of you?
DG: No, because she’s still fighting. I think all of us are always sort of fighting the battles that we never got to win when we were younger. Me, too. And, Lisa still would rather beat her brothers at a sport than to be at the fanciest premiere of the fanciest movie and win the fanciest award. I think all of us, when you get down to it, feel that way. But, you know, she still has demons, and making this film was a way to work those out. How wonderful that she got to play the mother of ‘herself,’ because she plays the mother of Gracie. And, she gets to come in the last minute and give her this beautiful gift of leading her in the right direction. When you shoot scenes like that, and you see them in the movie and they’re so emotional, you say, ‘This is why we make movies,’ because those moments are so special.
C: That’s true, but I’m not sure every actress could play their own mother…
DG: [Laughs]
C:…or would want to, for that matter.
DG: It was strange at times. And for Lisa, who is really not that kind of woman: a bit beaten down and a bit passive and a bit resigned to her state. And her mother’s very different than the woman Lisa is playing in the movie.
C: It’s really great seeing Dermot Mulroney back on his game, back in a such solid role.
DG: Did you like him in it?
C: Absolutely, and it’s actually been a fun year watching him in films like ZODIAC, or in GEORGIA RULE that just came out. He’s been great this year. He comes into this project as something of an outsider. What qualities does he bring to his part?
DG: He had done a movie with Lisa at least 10 years ago called THE TRIGGER EFFECT.
C: Oh yeah. I loved that movie. One of David Koepp's first films as a director. That’s a great one.
DG: And, I think, Dermot got to know very intimately what Lisa was going through with Will, so when he read GRACIE, he said this to me, he knew it wasn’t just a soccer movie. This is really about a family; he knew that it would be special, because he knew Lisa, and he knew Will. He didn’t know Will, but he knew about how she lost Will, and so he signed on knowing that it would be a family project, and that there was more there than what was on the page. So, he fit right in. With him and Carly, we were so lucky, because Carly was so great, I mean, as good an actress as any of them out there, if not better. But [she] embodied that spirit of Lisa, and it’s hard to find girls of that kind of feisty spirit.
C: She and I talked about how her life could not have been more different than the character she plays in this film. She was brought up a completely different way. Yet, you’re right, she nailed it.
DG: The thing that I’m learning--and it sounds so cliché--but when you tell a story, your first instinct is to get the facts right, and then you realize over time that the facts don’t mean anything. What you’re really trying to capture is the spirit--a spirit of a person. You can’t quantify it, you can’t break it down--it’s either there, or it’s not. And, if you can capture the spirit, the facts all fit together, and the story fits together, because you got that right. And, that was Carly. Without her, the movie wouldn’t work. She is that spirit. Very different than Lisa, in a beautiful way, but embodies that fierce, fighting spirit.
C: I should have said this right off the bat: first of all, belated congratulations on your Oscar for Best Documentary.
DG: Thank you.
C: I’m sure you’re sick to death of questions about the film.
DG: Not at all.
C: I did have one question that hopefully looks at AN INCONVENIANT TRUTH from a little more current perspective.
DG: Sure.
C: The film’s been out for a while. It’s hugely successful, and more importantly, people are thinking much differently about the subject matter of climate change. Does it still astonish you that there are people out there picking apart the facts that are put forth in this film? I was watching CNN Headline News the other day, and Glenn Beck is on there, gathering all these experts to discredit the film, almost scene by scene. Why is this still happening?
DG: Well, Al Gore quotes Churchill, when Churchill is talking about WWII and the “gathering storm,” and using that as an analogy for global warming, that there is this gathering storm, whether we like it or not. The writing is on the wall, and a reasonable person will know it. They watch the movie, they can dispute some of the facts, but they know it’s true. And, what Churchill also said, he had this great line about, you know, that people were “dithering.” A great word that you never use or hear, right? It sort of stuck in the back of my head, because, in the end, that’s what’s happening in some ways. Rather than face this terrifying reality--and it’s terrifying to conceive of it--what if it’s right, what if half the predictions are right, it’s still terrifying. When they were thinking about WWII and the obvious threat of Hitler, there was still a large percentage of people who were dithering, like, ‘Well, maybe, he’s just going into Poland. Maybe he’s just establishing order in a very complicated time.’ That’s dithering, and that’s what’s happening. In truth, in the scientific community, in areas of reasonable debate, there’s really no significant questioning of the science. There are always going to be some, and there should be some. There are reasonable scientists saying, “Well, maybe Gore went a little too far over here and maybe not far enough over here.” But, it’s a complicated issue, and that’s fine.
C: It’s interesting you mention, ‘What if only half of it is true?’. I actually have in my notes right here: What if only 50 percent of what he says in this movie is accurate, or if the impact is only about half of what he claims it will be? It still makes this information startling.
DG: I’m not even backing off from it. I think there are a lot of people who say it’s worse. I spent a lot of time with Al Gore as we went through all these statistics, and there would be a hundred more predictions that were twice as severe. We would read them very carefully, and he would say, “You know what, that’s a very interesting report. It’s too soon to say. I can’t stand by that.” He was very thoughtful about the choices of when to include something and when not to. In the scientific world, I think, he’s right down the middle and was very careful about this. The scientist from NASA, the most respected person who models the climate, he said last year “We have 10 years to face this thing before we hit a point of no return.” They asked him this year, just a couple of weeks ago, “What do you think now?” And, he said, “We have nine years.” I don’t know why that hit me so hard, but that’s nine years. A year has gone by.
C: I don’t know if you saw it, but one of the other films that was nominated alongside yours in the Documentary category was JESUS CAMP. Did you see it?
DG: Yeah.
C: There’s that scene near the beginning where the mother is home schooling her son, and they’re talking about global warming. And, she sort of dismisses it as junk science. I don’t remember exactly which of the two films I saw first, because I saw them both pretty early, but that’s what you’re up against in a lot of places.
DG: Maybe I only hear the good news, because people only want to tell me the good stuff, but there are so many cases, I mean, so-o-o-o many cases, I get 10 e-mails a day from, say, a high school friend who’s a Republican, who said, “I didn’t look at this film for six months because I thought it would be biased, and Al Gore is in it, and now, I watched it. Wow, holy crap, it’s real!” That’s happening a lot. I was in Missouri, where I was born, which is pretty conservative country, you know, I would say more Republicans than Democrats by a large majority, and I polled the audience. Ninety percent of the people who saw it agreed with it mostly. And half the audience was Republican. That’s pretty great. So, the movie is reaching people. Obviously, it has taken some time, but it’s starting to reach across boundaries. To me, that’s really exciting.
C: It’s one of those movies that’s going to have a lot of staying power for a few years. Not like something you just see once and say, ‘Okay, I’ve seen it.’ It’s something that’s going to stick with you, especially some of the recommendations on things to do to change your environmental footprint.
DG: Yeah, I think there are a bunch of people who said, “I’m not going to watch it because it’s politically charged and because it’s Al Gore, and therefore, it’s got to be biased.” And then, over time, people are starting to say, “Wait a minute, you know what, too many people are talking about it. Too many intelligent people are saying, ‘This is worth seeing’.”
C: The cynical part of me wonders if now that it’s clear that Gore is not running for president that maybe a lot more people are willing to take a look at it.
DG: Yeah, and that his motives are pure, that he just believes this so deeply. I mean, that’s what you feel when you meet him, that he’s got no other interest than 'This is real, and we’ve got to do something about it.'
C: Those are all the questions that I came armed with. Davis, thank you so much for talking to us.
DG: Not at all. And, you gave a very thoughtful, lovely interview. So, thank you.
C: Sometimes, we Internet guys pay attention.
DG: [Laughing] And, sometimes not.
C: Please tell your wife and Andrew ‘congratulations’ on getting this movie made.
DG: I will.
Capone capone@aintitcool.com
