I hope you had a chance to read part one before diving into part two of my 45-minute interview with Matthew Michael Carnahan, the writer of Friday’s release The Kingdom, but if not there will be a link at the bottom of the article to check it out. In part one we discuss The Kingdom and Lions for Lambs and things got rather political. Well, part two takes a turn to the criminal side as we discuss the upcoming films State of Play starring Brad Pitt and Ed Norton and White Jazz starring George Clooney.
There is a rather sad story that goes along with talking about his work on State of Play involving his 11-month-old daughter that will have you praying for her tonight and if you aren’t excited about seeing what his brother does with James Ellroy’s “White Jazz” after reading this interview then there is no hope for you.
Enjoy part two of the interview:
You’ve got Cruise, Redford and Streep in Lions and now we learn that Brad Pitt and Ed Norton are getting together again to do State of Play, another script of yours. Any chance you can get anymore big names attached to your scripts?
Matthew Carnahan (MC): [laughing] Believe me man, I’m thankful, we just moved from Chicago to Northern Virginia of all places, we live right across the river from D.C., that’s where my wife is from, and I am thankful I live there because I am removed enough from it that it doesn’t enter my daily existence. I am afraid that if I lived in Los Angeles it would be something people were patting me on the back about and heaven forbid I might start believe it. I might start to believe my own press.
I mean it is a Fight Club reunion, you can’t get any more excited about that.
MC: [laughing] Which I gotta tell you is one of my all-time favorite movies. Chuck Palahniuk, those books, I am an avid fan.
It doesn’t get any better and I am sure there is a ten year drought in my immediate future, but for now I’ll take it.
One thing that has been mentioned is that Tony Gilroy is doing a small rewrite on your State of Play script, which certainly says something since they are bringing on the guy that did the Bourne series to do a touch up. That gets me excited about the possibilities considering all involved.
MC: [a heavy sigh] I don’t know if I am speaking out of school here, but I will tell you and do with it what you will.
I have an 11-month-old little girl who has a vascular disorder right smack in the middle of her brain we found six months ago, it’s called a Vein of Galen Malformation and 15 years ago this killed 80-percent of the kids that had it and now there is a 95-percent cure rate. The guy that is responsible for that transformation is this guy, Dr. Berenstein, at Columbia in New York. So we started to go to him for treatment and this all fired up at the time Kevin Macdonald came on to direct. I went to London and he and I sat down for a few days and put some notes together and “this is how we have to change things around” and “this is what I want to do with the script” and etc.
I kind of did a cursory pass at it, but this was right on the eve of our first jaunt to New York to see this doctor and he called back and this is why I love the guy and I will work with him whenever he wants, he said, “I hate to even call you to talk to you about something as silly as a movie script when I know what is going on with your kids. So you tell me do you want to try and do both or we can get somebody to make these changes and you be with your family?” That’s when Tony came on to make those changes.
Now, things are going better with my daughter, a lot better.
Well that’s good to hear.
Yeah, she has had three of these procedures now and all of them have passed beautifully. It’s a different kind of anxiety and hell and blurry when it is this little adorable, precocious and beautiful 11-month-old baby.
That script, just the source material, the BBC series was so goddamn good. If you haven’t seen it, it’s six hours and I swear you will watch at least four of them back-to-back. It’s just so great and this wonderful story about whether or not someone is justified in doing a pretty awful thing, if they themselves are doing great things in other areas of their life? It was the question that helped me and made me want to adapt that mini-series. If they can keep that core question at the center of the movie I think it will be hopefully as much of a success as the mini-series was.
MC: Yeah, well Ellroy is on the short list as one of my heroes, just his writing style, there’s something about that clipped – it’s almost like modern art – just this clipped, sentence fragment after sentence fragment. All kinds of ‘50s slang thrown in and he forces you to almost ponder every word.
Oh yeah, it takes serious dedication to read his books.
MC: Absolutely, I tell yah, I loved adapting that because it is so twisted. It is such a twisted and ugly story. The hero of the movie – I mean Clooney is going to throw a vaguely retarded boxer out of the ninth story window of the Ambassador Hotel, and that’s in the first seven minutes. It’s just this dark, mean look at what is otherwise thought of as a gilded age in Los Angeles. It’s the 50s, the Dodgers coming to town, Chavez Ravine getting the new name Dodger Stadium and it turns it on its head and I love it. You’d be surprised, that book is written in the first person and I just took that to the script. The scene breaks and scene descriptions – I jump into the car, I start my car – it’s all written as though the reader is Dave Klein.
So will the film be narrated the entire way through?
MC: There are bits of voice over the entire way through, but the voice over is the older version of – because if you remember the book starts with him in Brazil staring at a mirror and it is twenty years later. I took that because that is one of the things that gave me chills when I finished that book, is that the whole story is memory. The whole story is him looking in a mirror going through everything that happened in preparation for getting up, grabbing a plane ticket and going back, going back twenty years later and trying to find this Brenda Bledsoe, this woman he was in love with. Trying to force these people he had known in his previous life to admit their guilt and he is going to try and make right on all these things he had just remembered. I love that about it.
It’s Ulysses, the great old warrior that comes back and still has this great skill and that really resonated with me. I just took that bookend and the first person narrative and tried to pick out the most valiant storylines, which was for us the Chavez Ravine and the Dodger Stadium bit because that is a great little piece of Los Angeles history that nobody knows and this love affair that he has with this B-movie actress who Howard Hughes has hired him on to find her in violation of her service contract. So there are these great beats that were actually fairly easy to lift from the book and make centerpieces of the story.
Have you and Joe talked about the look and design of the film?
MC: Just looking at his work as a template I would say it is going to be a lot closer to Narc in terms of its pacing and even its look. When you think of the 1950s L.A. you think of the Gilded Age, bright colors, big beautiful aero dynamic cars and I think Joe wants to turn that on its ear a little bit the same way Ellroy, in his story, has turned that on its ear just visually.
Now do you ever see directing in your future or are you just having too much fun writing right now?
MC: Yeah, that’s the thing, at some point I think it is inevitable because I think I am too much of a control freak to not want to do it, but my goal is to continue to write and write the best stuff I can. Hopefully I can establish myself as someone who people want to have write their things, someone people want to come to. I hope to establish myself on a short list of people that can do it and do it well.
So you’re saying you’re satisfied with people like Robert Redford, Peter Berg, your brother and Kevin Macdonald directing your stuff? I would say that would work for me.
MC: [laughing] Exactly, it’s not like I have had any horrible experience where suddenly a director wants to put an animatronic bear in there…
To check out part one of the interview click here and to also check out what Matt told me he is working on right now for DreamWorks click here.
The Kingdom hits theaters this Friday, September 28 get more here. Lions for Lambs hits
theaters on November 9th, for more on that one click here.
