Filmmakers have long done narrative features based on incidents and people of significance within their own lives. Mario Van Peebles directed BAADASSSSS! about his father’s thorny film career, and even played lead role as the complicated Melvin Van Peebles, himself. Julian Schnabel directed Basquiat based on the turbulent, enigmatic life of one of his best friends. And now, Todd Robinson has taken a similar journey of the soul into uncharted territory.
By writing and directing Lonely Hearts, Robinson is telling the frank, and often heartrending real life story of his detective grandfather, Elmer C. Robinson, who feverishly hunted down and captured the famed Lonely Hearts Killers during the late 1940’s. In this real life adaptation, Elmer C. Robinson [played by John Travolta] is in disrepair by the time he encounters the first victims of the Lonely Hearts Killers. His wife has just committed suicide, and his relationship with his son [Todd Robinson’s father] is severely strained.
Besides the personal connection, Todd Robinson has come to this project with the pedigree of directing several television movies, and working with the great Ridley Scott on White Squall.
[IMG:L]Hollywood.com: Is this the same murder case portrayed in the cult classic, The Honeymoon Killers, where the woman killer was over 200 pounds? If so, it’s curious because in Lonely Hearts the role is played by stunner, Salma Hayek.
Todd Robinson: It had been done twice, so what’s the point? I’m fond of both of those movies, Honeymoon Killers and Deep Crimson. But those movies have already been made, and the roles actually have been played that way, wonderfully.
HW: With you being so close to the film, did you then feel at liberty to adjust certain realities in terms of casting?
TR: There are all kinds of other concerns that come into play–that nobody will ever know about–that have to do with [the film] business, and everything else. People won’t complain about Salma Hayek because she delivers. She adds a whole new level of consideration to the notion of beauty being skin deep, because this is a woman who, in that form, could get you in a lot of trouble.
HW: Your approach was clearly alternative.
TR: My responsibility as the director is really to help an actor deliver a performance, and for me to deliver someone [to the screen] who’s authentic. There are a lot of ways to view the real Martha Beck. She was overweight and she was unattractive; and many like to interpret that superficially, which is to draw the conclusion that she was lonely, unhappy and crazy because of the way she looked. That’s completely unfair and disregarding what happened to her as a child. She was the object of serial, systematic incest.
HW: So your directorial interpretation was also emotional?
TR: My spin on this, and what Salma and I talked about, was that her appearance really had more to do with creating some emotional armor, thereby avoiding intimacy because intimacy always led to this traumatic outcome. It is also true that beautiful women are abused as well, so we thought that dealing with this story from the inside out, rather than the outside in was a valid way to approach the story. That combined with Salma’s complete disregard for the danger of playing a part like this almost immediately made me abandon any concerns that I had. I’m going to take hits. She’s going to take hits. But it was really very thoughtfully gone about. It wasn’t just some Hollywood choice. I wanted somebody who had the mojo to do it, and she delivered.
HW: Was John Travolta the first person you cast?
TR: Certainly that piece of casting turned the key to the financing. However, I actually cast James Gandolfini first. He came onboard and wanted to help me and support the project. Then it turned out that John actually really wanted to work with him in a significant way, so Jim being in the film actually ended up becoming a condition of John‘s contract. It was a little touch and go there for a while because he had to leave on a given date because of The Sopranos. I literally chased him with a camera all the way to the airport.
[IMG:R]HW: Travolta and Gandolfini have a similar energy in some of the characters that they’ve played in the past. Did you think they would mesh well or did you have concerns?
TR: I had no doubt at all that Jimmy and John would be great together. They have a separate, but shared childhood. They’re both from New Jersey so they share some of those things in common. Jim told me that his dad used to buy tires for his truck at the Travolta tire shop. But also we’re talking about arguably one of the greatest movie stars of the last 25 years, and one of the greatest TV stars–even though Jimmy started out in films. It was just a privilege to work with those two guys and be the person that was able to put them together.
HW: Was it because of your personal connection to the story that you decided to focus the movie more on the detectives rather than the killers?
TR: Yeah, there was no reason to tell a story that had already been told twice. That’s what makes it personal…and look, how many people have painted the Champs-Élysées? It’s all about the filter that you put it through and the prism you see it through.
HW: Your father passed away during the making of the movie but was he a big part of helping you make the movie?
TR: Absolutely, I knew my grandfather. But the events surrounding my grandmother’s death, which were revealed to me when I started sniffing around this with my family, made me realize that I had something to write about. In the end you don’t know how precious time is with people and all that time that I spent deconstructing my dad’s relationship with his father, I was doing the same thing between he and I. It was forcing both of us to look at our relationship and that made me reflect on my relationship with my own son. So in the end, that time became very special and precious because I was unaware just how short a time that it was.
HW: Has creating and now promoting the film been tough on your family?
TR: Yeah, it’s tough. Grief is something that is only eased by time. My father was very much a supporter of me. He was my best friend, and that’s a hole that’s unfillable. So I’m glad I did it. I think he was glad he got to see a rough cut before he passed. Something like this is bittersweet.
HW: Debating the death penalty in the context of the movie’s time period, we think that everyone wants to pull the switch. But that is certainly not the case with the ending of Lonely Hearts. Was the anti-death penalty sentiment stemming from your feelings, or Elmer’s?
TR: I know that later he became ambivalent about what it was that he was part of–a system that applied the death penalty unevenly. Poor people, people of color and immigrants were executed on a much more regular basis than European Americans. I think that troubled him, and also because in the end it didn’t necessarily resolve anything, at least not for him. But police work–and this is another point in the film–as applied to the existential forces in the world, somehow seem to categorize it in a way that makes it understandable.
HW: How so?
TR: In other words, you have a beginning, a middle and an end. There’s a crime committed that may be unexplainable but you persecute, you prosecute, you punish and somehow that allows you to go on. Once he [Elmer] experienced his own real life trauma and started seeing the world through that prism, his view on what it is he was doing was changed and that’s the point of the end of the movie.
HW: Was the movie independent enough so that there was no question about what ending you would have?
TR: There was lots of discussion about the ending. The folks involved really thought the movie was over when Travolta walks up the stairs and I was like, “Absolutely not. Nothing’s resolved.” The scene in the boat at the end, which basically tells you that he chose the woman he loves and his son was his shot at redemption, because this thing [the case] that he was using to define himself…no longer works. To get that shot, I basically had to pony-up myself so I went out to Sag Harbor and got a boat, and got a couple of people…and stuck look-alikes in the boat. I had to have that final beat, which I can hope is an upbeat moment–but it is ambivalent.
HW: Did it just happen that this case came along at a very sensitive time in Elmer’s life or would he have gone through all those changes regardless if he had not ever chased the Lonely Hearts Killers?
TR: This movie really could have been about any of the nearly 1,000 homicides he worked in his 38-year career. I just took the most salacious case that he had because it really is irresistible in its tabloid aspects, but it was also one of the most well-documented cases. The case is far less the point of the movie than the internal emotional revelations and resolutions.
HW: The movie is reminiscent of westerns, and when I saw your filmography, you had worked on several. Did you see it in that style?
TR: No, it never occurred to me to think of it as a western. This whole movie is driven by this rather unfortunate relationship between my grandfather, my dad and his [my grandfather’s] wife. It’s really rooted in the very real tangible collateral effects that what you do has on the people you care about. That was my motivation for making the film.
HW: Did you shoot in any of the locations in which the story really took place?
TR: Well, I was obligated to shoot in Florida because, even though John came aboard to support the movie, I had to make it simple for him. He lives in Florida so we shot there. But the estuaries and the marine environment there is very much as I remember Eastern Long Island being, when I was growing up.
HW: Other spots?
TR: Here are a couple of fun pieces of trivia. At the end of the movie when the body comes out of the house in the box, that’s actually my grandfather’s house. The coal chute where the body’s found was actually staged in my granddad’s basement because we still own that house. We did it there for no particular reason, except I had to do it somewhere and the house has those great Long Island storm doors.
HW: What do you think about people being able to digitally download the film just a few weeks after its theatrical release?
TR: Yeah, Cstar.com is releasing the film digitally and I think it’s the wave of the future. I don’t think the theatrical experience of motion pictures is ever going to go away because that’s really a social experience. But people are going to be getting their movies on their computers. As a filmmaker I would rather have somebody looking at a laptop eight inches away from their face and really seeing the full frame rather than seeing it across the room on a TV. I’m excited about that aspect of it and I predict that 10 years down the line you’re going to have a dedicated computer in your house that basically delivers everything to you. So it’s exciting to be involved with Cstar.com.
[IMG:L]HW: What is your upcoming pilot, The Inside, with Jimmy Smits about?
TR: It’s a pretty cool story about a guy who essentially abandons his life in the States and goes underground and becomes part of the Tijuana drug cartel. Then he is forced to compromise everything he every thought he was about. It is for FX and Touchstone Films.
HW: Is that’s Smits‘s role?
TR: Yeah and Jimmy‘s my producing partner as well.
HW: Is it on FX because it’s ‘edgy’, or was that just the right place for it?
TR: I’ve wanted to work with [President and General Manager of FX Networks] John Landgraf for a long time. I love the freedom that cable television gives you; and since you’re only really doing 12 episodes as opposed to 22 for a major network, you actually have a shot at doing some quality work because you’re not being forced to just feed the monster every week.
HW: How was it co-writing and producing White Squall [with Ridley Scott as director]?
TR: Ridley mentored me, and he remains a supporter. He’s a brilliant man and honestly I would work with him again in a second.
HW: When you watched him work what popped out at you and made you think “I want to do that when I direct”?
TR: One studies everyone’s work that one admires. When I think of Ridley, I think of The Duellists [1977] in terms of how he used ‘still life’ for transitions, and how he worked with very little to really control the frame to make a period movie in Napoleonic France. I had many of the same challenges on Lonely Hearts, so that was a great reference for me. Hopefully you stand around these guys long enough, a little bit of what they’re doing rubs off.
HW: How did it relate to what you did on Lonely Hearts?
TR: Certainly the notion of natural lighting with The Duellists in particular. Also I decided to limit myself essentially to the tools that I would have had in the 1940’s to make a movie. I think there are only two shots in the movie that are Steadicam and I regret it. But everything else was constructed with those early tools and I think it gives an unconscious sense of reality to the movie as opposed to adding the contemporary, stylistic junk to the movie.
HW: Are you still doing The Last Full Measure?
TR: Yeah. Hard at work.
HW: When do you start shooting?
TR: Probably in the fall. We’re hard at work prepping and putting everything together.
HW: It has such a great cast with Morgan Freeman, Robert Duvall, Bruce Willis, Andy Garcia, Laurence Fishburne, what’s it about?
TR: It’s a true story about how a group of veterans, who had survived the bloodiest battle of the Vietnam War, came together 34 years after the death of the man who saved all of their lives. He was a paramedic, and with the help of a very reluctant young Washington bureaucrat–who’s really the star of the movie–they got Congress to award this guy the Medal of Honor. The paramedic had been put up for in ’66 but because of political reasons it had been dissed. So it’s really about their healing and the initiation of this young guy who is all about himself. It’s really a beautiful story.
HW: It sounds like you’ve got a full plate. Is it all due to Lonely Hearts?
TR: I hope Lonely Hearts helps. It is my first feature effort and I hope it’s competent enough that the powers that be will look at it and go, “Well he can put a movie together.” It makes it easier.
