Mr. Beaks Talks To The Hughes Brothers About THE BOOK OF ELI, Ring Rust, And Their Planned Three-Hour Richard Pryor Documentary!

They may be hardened, seventeen-year veterans of the motion picture industry, but, at the age of thirty-seven, Albert and Allen Hughes are still relatively "young" filmmakers. True, much was expected of them in the immediate wake of their still-electrifying 1993 debut, MENACE II SOCIETY, but it was unrealistic to expect them to suddenly make good on their long-term potential. The life-or-death immediacy that made MENACE II SOCIETY such a bracingly unforgettable film simply wasn't replicable. It was a young man's movie about the horror of life squandered at eighteen; it was, very specifically, something a pair of upstart twenty-one-year-old directors with a surfeit of "Fuck You" filmmaking craft could pull off. Was it their MEAN STREETS*? Perhaps. But Martin Scorsese was thirty-one when he put the film world on notice. He'd lived a little. The Hughes Brothers had only just reached the legal U.S. drinking age when they took the Cannes Film Festival by storm. What the fuck did they know about anything? It would've been fascinating to watch Albert and Allen Hughes mature as human beings (as well as directors) through their films over the next two decades, but they had no interest in working just to work. And so there have only been four more movies: DEAD PRESIDENTS, FROM HELL, the documentary AMERICAN PIMP and, opening this Friday, THE BOOK OF ELI. Their technical skill is undiminished: they went widescreen with their second picture, and have amply demonstrated that they know how to pack a frame. As for telling a good story, they had all the necessary elements in place, but struggled to rein in two very complex narratives with DEAD PRESIDENTS and FROM HELL. They've gone for something less sprawling with THE BOOK OF ELI, and the result is their most satisfying studio film to date. It's a bleak little yarn about a swordsman/gunslinger (a great Denzel Washington) wandering the post-apocalyptic American West with an extremely valuable book (The Bible) that happens to be coveted by a very bad man (Gary Oldman). Most of the action is confined to a dusted-over small town, which calls to mind YOJIMBO and Leone's first two "Man With No Name" films - and The Hughes Brothers have honored these pictures with some beautifully-shot 'scope compositions. They've also staged some old-school hand-to-hand combat that allows the audience to actually appreciate the fight choreography (courtesy of Dan Inosanto and stunt coordinator Jeff Imada). Hopefully, these scenes will help usher in a glorious new era of full-shots and minimal editing. As you'll see in the following interviews (done separately over the phone so as to preserve my sanity), Albert and Allen Hughes are smart guys who have a great deal of respect for the filmmaking process. They're particular, and they've little interest in wasting their time (and the studio's money) if they see a bevy of clusterfucks ahead. That said, I hope they're a little more willing to take chances in the near future, as they're nearing that age when talented directors tend to put everything together. But if they need to take the next four or five years to complete the epic Richard Pryor documentary Allen mentions below, I'm okay with another long layoff. 'Cuz that sounds like my favorite movie of whatever year it's released. Up first is Albert...

Mr. Beaks: There was a bit of a layoff between this and FROM HELL. All this time, were you looking to work in a specific genre? Or were you just waiting for the right project, regardless of genre?

Albert Hughes: It was just the right project. Genre doesn't matter to us. Actually, it rubs us the wrong way when we make a movie and people say it's this genre or that genre. Every genre has been done; it's just more about the script. If it had been a great horror script, we would've done it; if it had been a great cop script, we would've done it. The trouble with post-apocalyptic movies is that everyone says, "Oh, it's been done a thousand times before." And it's like, "No, actually, it's probably the least-filmed genre out there." So it was more about getting the right material. And we found the right material a couple of times; it was just that the variables weren't right. If there's one personality that we think we can't make it through the movie on - and it could be anyone either behind the scenes or on-camera - and we say to ourselves, "That's going to be a nightmare production," then we'll pull out. We'll bow out gracefully. And we've done that a couple of times. You know, life is too short to make a movie where you're miserable. So we just said, "We'll bide our time for now, make some commercials, and wait until we can find something right."

Beaks: That's got to be a little frustrating for your agent.

Albert Hughes: It definitely is. He had to pull me out of one movie. I remember I was doing pre-production on this movie by myself, and I called him up and said, "You've got to get me out of this. I can't do this. This is all wrong." He said, "Are you sure?" And I said, "I'm sure." So he called me back in an hour, and said "You're done. You're out." And I said, "Thank you. You're the greatest agent in the world. I couldn't do that."

Beaks: (Laughs) It's very uncommon that directors are so focused on maintaining the integrity of a production all the way through. For most directors, it's just about getting the job and enduring whatever trials or humiliations are heaped upon you.

Albert Hughes: Yeah, well, that's our shortcoming. Some people think we took time off just to... fuck off, basically, and it wasn't like that at all. Believe me, it frustrates us. Part of it is pickiness, but another part of it that we just don't want to put a bad movie out. We may put a bad movie out; the movie may not turn out the way we wanted it to or the way people hoped it would, but we tried everything to not let that happen. We didn't take a paycheck for six months to a year just to put some bullshit out in the market. We have a little bit of pride. A little bit.

Beaks: Was the film all there on the page, or did you have to rewrite Gary Whitta's script?

Albert Hughes: There was a lot of rewriting going on, and it was mostly about calming down the overtly religious banter from Eli, and making him not such a preachy-type character. We wanted to make his mission more personal, and make religion a more peripheral thing. He's not on a crusade or trying to convert people. That's dangerous. With my belief system, which is none, I want to believe in the story. It's like doing STAR WARS or LORD OF THE RINGS: it's a mythic movie, but you've got to believe in the myth. So I had to believe in the mythology of the movie, whether it was The Bible or Middle Earth. But I didn't want it to come off as a religious-type movie. So, during the rewrite, we were taking out lines and trying to make it more subtle.

Beaks: I liked that you didn't make it specific to one sect of Christianity. It's also interesting how you use The Bible as this coveted civilizing influence, when it's probably the thing that got us into all of this trouble in the first place.

Albert Hughes: (Laughs) Exactly.

Beaks: I like how that undercurrent runs throughout the film. On one hand, you're rooting for humanity to straighten things out again, but, on the other hand, it's just restarting this whole cycle.

Albert Hughes: Yeah, you've got Carnegie (Gary Oldman), who can take [The Bible] and do something bad with it, and then you've got Eli, who can do something good with it. We always say it's a classic MacGuffin: the book could be about how to build the perfect bomb to kill 100,000 people. If the wrong guy gets his hands on it, bad things are going to happen; and if the right guy gets it, he's going to try to protect it from ever getting into that wrong guy's hands.

Beaks: So when you settled on this screenplay as your next project, did you immediately think of Denzel for Eli?

Albert Hughes: There were about four or five names thrown around. My brother tells a story about how he was imagining these different names saying the lines, and once Denzel came into his head, he was like, "Yeah, I can buy Denzel saying that." (Laughs) Denzel can read the Yellow Pages and make that sound exciting.

Beaks: So was this one of those situations where, once you've got Denzel attached, everything else fell into place?

Albert Hughes: No, it wasn't that easy. It was at Warner Bros. first, and they [gave us] a number on the budget. Other filmmakers would've been like, "Okay, we can do it for that," and then start shooting the film and let the budget balloon. We were like, "No, we can't do it for that." There was some haggling about other stuff, and it was a year. Then the writers strike came up, Denzel went to do [THE TAKING OF PELHAM 1, 2, 3], and we thought it was over. Then Alcon, the company that eventually financed the film, showed up with Andrew Kosove and Broderick Johnson, and... they're great. They're like New Line used to be. Everything's in-house. And they were really passionate about reinstating the things that were great about the script - because after a year or so with Warner Bros., it kind of got watered down going for a PG-13. That wasn't the movie we wanted to make, so Alcon - and Denzel - was really good about being true to the material.

Beaks: So after all of this time off, you're finally on a set making a movie again. A big, widescreen movie. Was there any rust in the early going?

Albert Hughes: Oh, yeah. There's always rust. We told Johnny Depp this on FROM HELL. We said, "Please excuse us for the first two weeks while we shake this rust off." Even though, in the meantime, as a hobby, I make short films in Prague to [experiment with] different techniques of editing. I've been doing that for eight years, and it hones your skills. But it doesn't hone your skills for working on a movie. Two weeks into this, we kept asking for a lot of takes from Denzel. He usually likes doing two or three; I like seven or eight, and I'll go to ten or fifteen sometimes. (Laughs) So he'd often be like, "You've got it, you've got it," and I'd say, "No, I need one more." So by the second weekend, I sent him an email saying..., "You're great. Thanks for being patient with us. We're a little rusty." I suspect we'll always be a little rusty if we don't do another film right away. But I sort of like the naiveté of the rustiness. It's like we're still trying to find our feet. It's like what we did on [MENACE II SOCIETY]: we were so naive, we didn't know what we couldn't do; we didn't realize what wasn't possible, so we tried everything. On [THE BOOK OF ELI], I came into this movie applying everything I had done on my own, for myself, over eight years, but it still doesn't work on a large format. The larger format is slower; the more people you get involved, the less it becomes about one singular vision. No matter how strong a director's vision is, there's too many variables on big movies. You have to corral all of those variables - and that's where the rust comes in, too.

Beaks: Do you spend a lot of time thinking about your aesthetic, about what "An Albert Hughes Film" looks like?

Albert Hughes: Mmm... I'm definitely fixated on the visual. Even when I go out to see a movie, if it doesn't catch me on the visuals, it better have a great story. I don't spend a lot of time thinking "What is my style?" Mostly, I'm thinking, "What do I like?" I've said before that it doesn't have to be a movie that influences me; it could be a tampon commercial. I could say, "Hey, I like how that's lit." And how to construct the shots and how they speak to each other, as I get older I'm studying more the language of that. For me, the fun part is the construction of a movie. Not so much doing the movie; it's more editing, shot-listing, storyboarding and the designing of colors. And then you get variables thrown at you, like Denzel, He's an actor who likes to go from the gut. You can do all the planning in the world, but if he doesn't want to be in a certain position, he's not going to be in that position. So you've got to think on your feet. And, like I said, those eight years when I was working by myself, I didn't have someone saying, "No, I don't feel like standing there." Again, that's where the rustiness comes in. The perfect movie for me is a visual movie that tells a story without words, and I have yet to see anything like that.

Beaks: Thinking about the aesthetic of your movie, as well as its milieu, one film that kept jumping into my head as I was watching it was YOJIMBO. It's not a direct reference to YOJIMBO, but it does feel a little like it. Were you thinking about that film at all while you were planning THE BOOK OF ELI?

Albert Hughes: It's interesting. I did take one frame grab from YOJIMBO: it was a wide-framed long shot of him walking in the dust. I hadn't seen [YOJIMBO] in a while; I just took the frame grab and didn't re-watch the movie. Then I watched all of the Spaghetti Westerns again, which were sort of based on YOJIMBO, right? Then I watched the ZATOICHI movies, and realized that Sergio Leone was greatly infuenced by them, too. But nobody ever mentions that. So I was more influenced by the framings of ZATOICHI more than anything, because they always did these really wide profile shots. I was really into the framings, and wondering why they were doing it from the profile and not frontal - because YOJIMBO was more frontal- or back-shot of a small character in the frame with a long lens. I was fascinated that everyone misses that when they talk about Leone. Sure, he was influenced by YOJIMBO, but I think he was even more influenced by ZATOICHI.

Beaks: You said you spent a great deal of time trying to find the right script. Have you thought about writing your own?

Albert Hughes: We never did that. We always worked on the story. We have tried that before, but... I don't know what it is. We're just retarded.

Beaks: (Laughing) I don't think you're retarded.

Albert Hughes: Well, if you look up the definition of "retard" in the dictionary... and the French actually use it when there's a delayed flight. "Retard," right? Well, we're delayed. (Laughs) We are "retarded" in the original, true sense.

And here's Allen...

Beaks: Are you accustomed to talking to press separately?

Allen Hughes: We're not, but it's a comforting thing for phoners. When another guy is on the phone across the room from you, and he's your twin? Twins are hyper-sensitive to one another's body language and energy, so unless we're looking at a camera it can be problematic.

Beaks: That's understandable. So, according to Albert, the long layoff was attributable to your desire to wait for the right screenplay and the ideal production, so that you knew you could make it all the way through the shoot without any significant problems. It's rare that someone will hold off that long. Do you ever feel pressure to just say, "Fuck it!" and take a gig?

Allen Hughes: The last four years, when the great drought came upon the nation and hit every business... yeah, I felt the pressure. I had a kid in high school getting ready to go to college, and I started feeling mortal. The money won't keep rolling in. Even if you're doing commercials, you've got to feed your family, so you might have to take some jobs you don't want to take. Some of our greatest filmmaking heroes took a lot of jobs they didn't want to take - one being Francis Ford Coppola when he took THE GODFATHER. He did not want to make that movie. But he had to feed his family. Fortunately, we didn't quite get to that point. ELI came right in time, and we got Denzel Washington. I know this might sound a little cheesy, but if you've got good intentions, if you're in it for the right reasons and you know what your strengths and weaknesses are, it'll happen the right way eventually. To add to that, we made FROM HELL when we were twenty-eight. We were still boys. You might call that "young men", but we were boys.

Beaks: I always forget that you were so young when you made MENACE II SOCIETY. It started so early for you guys.

Allen Hughes: We were nineteen when we got the greenlight for MENACE. We were on the set at twenty. It's a gift and a curse. It's a gift in that it's early success, and maybe certain things are taken care of - especially if you have a kid, like I did at a young age. You can buy your mom a new car. But the drawback is - and I've talked about this with my comedian friends like Chris Rock; I also got to know Richard Pryor a little. Writers, comedians and directors all have one thing in common: their job is to observe human behavior and life itself. And the moment the observer becomes the observed, your craft or your art or whatever it is that you're good at starts to die. And after MENACE, we were everywhere. I mean, we weren't insane like Quentin, but... enough. (Laughs) People would run up to us, and things would be happening, and you're a bit of a so-called celebrity. That didn't scare us, but it put us off. We were like, "Wow, this is not good." So little by little we started trying to withdraw, and did our best to touch or grab what is considered "real life". Whether it be our kids, whether it's getting out in nature and fishing a lot, whether it's getting out and meeting interesting people in the suburbs or in the big cities across America and Europe... we just made a conscious effort to surround ourselves with people who did not give a fuck - and that were very combative and charismatic and interesting. Whether they were a wino or a CEO... you've got to touch and feel people. And they've got to really not give a fuck about what you do. I mean that in a real way. I know a lot of filmmakers who may act like that, but they really want to have their cock sucked. "Oh, my god! You're such a genius!" That's such an overused word: "genius". We should probably retire that word now.

Beaks: What makes you vital as a filmmaker is what you draw from real life. And when you become a commodity, it subverts the experience. It taints the things that made you special in the first place.

Allen Hughes: Absolutely.

Beaks: I talked about this a little with Albert, but when you knew you were going to be making a post-apocalyptic film, did you watch a lot of the successful films from that genre as a reference for what you did or did not want to do?

Allen Hughes: There are only two definitive post-apocalyptic movies in my opinion. The first being the original PLANET OF THE APES with Charlton Heston, and the second being THE ROAD WARRIOR. Everything else is trying to jockey for that third position - and unless I'm forgetting something, I don't know what that is. That being said, all of that being consumed so early in our lives, and having meticulously gone over them, we did not have to watch those movies again. We had to watch the modern ones that maybe aren't as good, are mediocre, or maybe there's something special about them. Like CHILDREN OF MEN. My brother wouldn't watch it because he didn't want to be influenced by it, but... it's a great movie! I don't consider it a post-apocalyptic movie, because...

Beaks: It's more dystopian.

Allen Hughes: Yeah. And you know what? It's a movie that should've made a lot of money because it was so significant, but it taught me this about America: because it was set in Britain, the critics loved it, but the people couldn't relate to it. Other than that... I went and saw TERMINATOR SALVATION. I'm not going to get into that. Everything, whether it's a beautiful vision of the post-apocalyptic experience or a complete piece of shit, you're going to learn something from both of them.

Beaks: I talked to Albert about shaking off the rust. Did you guys schedule your first two weeks to account for that process?

Allen Hughes: Yes, we did. (Laughs) Because there was a lot of ring rust. All filmmakers are different, but we pride ourselves on being very decisive and communicating really well with our cast and crew. So when you're working with veterans like Gary Oldman, Denzel Washington, and a lot of the crew... you're going to have a hard time articulating what you want. You're not using your set "power words", where you can say one word and everyone understands what that means. It takes about a week or two to get to that point. Communicating is mostly what it is.

Beaks: I had the opportunity to talk with Jeff Imada on the set of THE GREEN HORNET a few weeks back, and I complimented him on his work in THE BOOK OF ELI. It's great stuff. Were there any specific points of reference for Eli's fighting style?

Allen Hughes: A guy who is traveling that far and wide... I always had this theory that he bumped into a guy that was special with a sword, a guy that was gifted in hand-to-hand combat. He also may have fallen in love along the way. There are all these things that he had to pick up because of survival. But the most important thing about working with Imada and Dan Inosanto, who was overseeing and stepping in a little bit - Dan Inosanto being Bruce Lee's right-hand man, of course. Bruce Lee's like my god, man. My guest bedroom is called "The Lee Room". It really is. It's got a 200-year-old Chinese wedding bed, and a big European poster of ENTER THE DRAGON, and everything he ever wrote - because he was a good philosopher as well. But the thing about Lee... what made [his films] special is that he did all of the [fights] usually in one shot. And it was usually knees-up or head-to-toe shots. It's like watching Fred Astaire or Michael Jackson - and what was so effective about Michael Jackson is that he knew you had to see his whole body; he was getting ready to do things... well, he wasn't even sure what he was getting ready to do sometimes. (Laughs) So with Jeff, we worked it out that we were going to shoot the fights in one take. And if not one take, the shots must at least show that this man is doing everything, because it will just resonate emotionally and be a lot more effective. OLDBOY was the one that reminded me of the importance of that.

Beaks: It's harder to do it that way. Nowadays, everyone wants to edit their fight scenes all to hell.

Allen Hughes: Like the BOURNE movies, in fact. As good as Imada's work is in there, you don't really know how good it really was because they're just chopping in a bunch of sound effects. (Mimics the frantic sounds of a Jason Bourne fight) What the fuck is going on? It sounds like some shit is going down, but I can't see a fucking thing.

Beaks: Have you guys thought about writing your own scripts?

Allen Hughes: We still improvise and riff and do improvisational workshops, and that all goes into the script. But as far as being at the keyboard, we've never done that. We start with an outline, we write the story, and then we bring in a writer with a special skill set to write [that particular script]. It's a rare writer-director who can do both without some kind of input. You need some objectivity. You need a writing partner - or the writer needs a directing partner. I won't name names, but there are some great directors who just need another writer or some objectivity. You really need that.

Beaks: This is a little out of left field, but you mentioned that you got to know Pryor. There's obviously one Pryor film coming together right now, but have you ever thought of doing a Pryor movie?

Allen Hughes: I want to do the ultimate, Ken Burns, three-and-a-half-hour epic documentary of Pryor's life. I think it's disgraceful to think about doing a film about him. No one, no matter how talented they are, can live up to that. It's like when they tried to do Ali. You can't do Ali. Richard Pryor and Muhammad Ali were two of the greatest communicators of the twentieth century before they got struck down by MS and Parkinson's. Now, these are real geniuses. Don't do it. Don't make a movie about it. I never would. But I would love to do the documentary, though. So would Albert.

Beaks: So... are you working on it?

Allen Hughes: (Laughing) Trying. Right when we were in the middle of talking about it with [Pryor], he was in really bad shape. Unfortunately, it's kind of like Howard Hughes in his last days - or even Barry White. People start getting power of attorney, things start disintegrating, bad decisions are made, and everything gets fucked up.

Beaks: Well, not to put any pressure on you, but I really want to see that documentary.

Allen Hughes: You would love it. When you do a documentary like that, the subject is going to dictate how incredible it is - if the director doesn't get in the way. That's a dream project. A dream project.

There's no reason the Hughes Brothers' documentary can't exist alongside Bill Condon's film. In fact, particularly when it comes to younger people who've never experienced the brilliance of Richard Pryor, it'd be valuable to have both out there. Let's make it happen - or I'm gonna sic Orwell on your ass. That's 422 pounds of man. Hit him with a stick and see what happens. THE BOOK OF ELI opens this Friday, January 15th. Check it out. Faithfully submitted, Mr. Beaks

*Not Scorsese's debut, I know, but certainly his first major work.