"The Jacket" Interviews: Adrien Brody, Jennifer Jason Leigh and director John Maybury
By Sharon Knolle, Special to Hollywood.com
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Friday, March 04, 2005
Adrien Brody stars in The Jacket |
In the thriller The Jacket, Adrien Brody plays Jack Starks, an amnesiac Gulf War veteran who comes back to the States, is framed for a murder he's sure he didn't commit--but can't remember--and sent to a mental institution. He's then subjected to a series of bizarre treatments that involve strapping him in a straitjacket and leaving him locked in a morgue drawer for hours--but it allows him to travel forward in time, where he encounters Jackie (Keira Knightley). Together, they try to solve Jack's own impending murder.
We sat down with Brody, Jennifer Jason Leigh, who plays a more sympathetic doctor at the institution, and director John Maybury. This was Maybury's first Hollywood film, made under the wing of George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh's Section 8 production company. Better known--if he's known at all--for his art house movies such as Love is the Devil, the British Maybury was shockingly candid about his contempt for the system but still hopeful to work within it.
"I bloody well hope so," he said when asked if he would welcome the chance to do another Hollywood film. "I think within Hollywood, there is this framework you can work within that is very vital and full of energy. And I want to be part of that. And I hope The Jacket is. Even though it's being sold as The Ring. Of course, I want to sell this movie and I want it to be really commercial and Keira Knightley gets her [breasts] out and it's just great."
How would you classify this film? It's being marketed as a horror film, but it really isn't.
Adrien Brody: "That's up to you. It's pretty amazing to go to a movie and not be spoon-fed everything. I like the ambiguity of it. Things are ambiguous. And people are ambiguous. And people's interpretations of people are ambiguous."
John Maybury: "Marketing has created a new world. They're making this film a horror film, which is a lie. It's going to be a disaster the first weekend, when all the kids think they're going to see [a horror film] find out they're watching some European drama. How would I market it? That's not my job, unfortunately. I have to defer to the people here in particular because of the dollars they spent on the film. What can you do? I don't think that 'You have to go, it's a really interesting film' is going to come across as a very strong tagline. I described it from the get-go as a subversive, psychological thriller, which seems to be a kind of meaningless phrase. It plays with conventions. The film, I think, changes genre with each reel. In a way, it's the ambiguity of the film that I find interesting. It's the challenge I hope I'm offering to audiences. I want audiences to do the work and make decisions about what this film is."
Jennifer Jason Leigh: "The thing about this film that I like is that you can't pigeonhole it. As soon as you think it's one kind of genre, it becomes something else entirely. And so it's really what you're left with individually. I was left with a very dark, twisted, It's a Wonderful Life."
What attracted you to this movie?
Brody: "The fact that the character is not really defined by ethnicity, his religious beliefs, where he's from, on any level, that's not described. Nor does he have any allegiance to his own past, which defines us, how we are raised and told who are and what we are. I think that's a remarkable place to be as an actor. It's liberating but at the same time, who are you? And that's a very exciting concept to explore in depth. I have my own ideas of what the film is about, but I also have to suspend that too when I'm doing it. Not even in explaining to you, but my process is that I have to believe everything that my character is believing while he's experiencing it. If my character's going mad, whether I'm dead or my character's dreaming, I'm going mad in that moment and I have to experience that as part of my reality."
Leigh: "If I read something and I like it, I'll take it, or if I like the director. I love John Maybury and I was very, very impressed with Love is the Devil. I try to do things that appeal to me. I'm not usually attracted to very mainstream things."
Maybury: "I think The Jacket was a screenplay that started off in Hollywood about four years ago. It was going to be an Antoine Fuqua movie with Colin Farrell. It was just another one of that particular trend of that time of films like Memento and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I just came on last of all, at the tail-end of a really tired old formula. I don't have contempt for Charlie Kaufman. He's a brilliant screenwriter. I love those kind of films. But I knew if I got my hands on the screenplay, it wouldn't be that [kind of film] anyway. I've made a romance that has a subtext about being about Guantanamo Bay. I think I've made a much more interesting, much more demanding film."
What did you do to prepare for your role?
Brody: "To be locked in a morgue drawer? I grew up living in New York, in an apartment there. Pretty small! I actually found a sensory deprivation chamber where we were shooting in Glasgow. Are you familiar with those? It's a tank you lay in with dead saline solution. It was a really interesting experience. I would do quadruple sessions and they were pretty amazed that I could do it. You become very aware of how your mind works and how typical thoughts are and how you can guide them, mediate in a way and separate yourself from your physical being. I don't really remember the exact time, but hours on end."
Leigh: "I know two people personally who pretty much have exactly this job, so I spent a lot of time talking to them. And then I watched the documentary Titicut Follies. It's amazing. I showed it to John Maybury and the production designer too. As horrifying and creepy and grotesque as this movie is at times, it doesn't come close to the real thing. There are images from that movie that will stay with me for a long time and I don't even know that I want those images in my psyche at all. It's so disturbing."
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