If you’re a career criminal, move to England without delay. Why? Because you’re bound to be caught, and in a U.S. prison, you’ll be lucky to survive past your first lunch break without being stabbed in the back–at least, that’s the scenario if HBO’s Oz is to be believed.
However, in Great Britain, if you believe three recent movie imports, being jailed is no worse than attending your local high school–the dress code is just stricter. In Greenfingers, murderers are rehabilitated by planting roses and lilies. In Borstal Boy, would-be terrorists paint walls for the warden’s daughter. Now comes Lucky Break, in which hoodlums get to perform an original musical based on the life of British Naval Admiral Nelson.
(For those unschooled in military matters, Nelson lost an eye and an arm in battle, had a scandalous love affair and then perished in combat. It’s not exactly Cats.)
So why did Oscar-nominated director Peter Cattaneo, the man who made out-of-shape steel workers sexy in The Full Monty, wait four years to direct a little film about love, theater and a prison escape as his follow-up feature? After all, when the modestly budgeted The Full Monty ($3.5 million) accrued a global box office in excess of $250 million, Hollywood came running with very generous offers.
The dimpled Cattaneo, attired in a black-and-white floral-patterned shirt that hung helter-skelter over excessively baggy, well-worn jeans, smiles at the question. “Rejecting them was made easier by the royalties from The Full Monty,” he explains. “The offers were quite ridiculous in their generosity, but I just had this gut feeling that I had made only one film, so for me to go Hollywood was a folly.
“I was a bit scared,” Cattaneo adds, “but in a way, I’m getting closer to the idea. It’s not that I hate the idea of Hollywood. I love it. I’ll go see an American movie before a British one most of the time. But I wouldn’t have known anyone who I’d be working with. I didn’t know the scene. Didn’t know anyone in a studio. It was just the sense of not knowing the town.”
And then there were the personal reasons for staying in London. “My main excuses, though, were–and are–my babies.” The first one arrived five days before Cattaneo lost the Academy Award for Best Director to James Cameron in 1998.
Despite Cattaneo‘s time off, his creative juices were still flowing. He just needed the right idea for a movie to come along.
Cattaneo‘s inspiration for Lucky Break came to him while taking a bath in his “not that luxurious” home. (“It’s hard to imagine how much you need to get a truly impressive house in North London,” he notes. “So we have a very nice apartment in a very nice area.”) Well, in the tub in that very nice apartment, Peter recalled an actual drama-therapy production of Guys and Dolls he’d seen in a prison in London. Eureka! Why not a film about a group of inmates who staged a musical as a cover-up for their escape? Sound simple?
“I know Lucky Break is supposed to be a little British film which doesn’t have a major star in it, but it’s actually quite complicated. There are a lot of characters, and there’s quite a lot of business,” Peter explains. “You know, all that escaping and going around and music played back and all that stuff was quite difficult. Especially the last 20 minutes.”
As for the biggest mishap during this complex production, it was really quite “fowl.” In one scene, a bird carrying drugs is supposed to be electrocuted on the prison’s fence.
“We moved up the shooting schedule of that scene at the very last minute,” Peter recalls, “and the prop man, who’s like the best prop man in British film history, insisted, ‘You can’t do that today. I haven’t got the pigeon. The pigeon’s still frozen.’ Well, there was this close-up of the pigeon hitting the concrete that we needed so we did it anyway with the frozen pigeon, and the pigeon bounced. The prop man was very upset. He begged, ‘Please shoot it again. I’ll get you another pigeon by tomorrow morning.’ Later on, he was spotted in the local square near where the prison was with a big net and bread, and he got one. So the next day, we reshot the scene with a new star. A new pigeon.”
Death seems to be a given in a Cattaneo movie. In The Full Monty, there’s a mock suicide–and in Lucky Break, there’s a completed one. When you learn that when Cattaneo was 17, his beloved older sister jumped off a building to her death, you wonder if he might be grappling with that tragedy through his art.
“I’m not conscious about it,” he replies, “but both films are about regeneration, about giving someone a second chance–a way back from a desperate place.”
Happily, Cattaneo and most of his characters seem to have made that journey.
