From the "People" Archives:

by A.G. Basoli

"Hurlyburly" helmer Anthony Drazan is hard to miss at the Venice International Airport the day after the Venice Film Festival Closing Night Awards Ceremony. Prominently on display next to his carry-on luggage is the voluminous Volpi Cup for Best Actor which he collected the previous night on behalf of "Hurlyburly" star Sean Penn, who was unable to travel to Venice for personal reasons.

Drazan himself is no stranger to awards. His Oliver-Stone-exec-produced debut feature "Zebrahead" won him the Filmmaker's Trophy at Sundance in 1992. Anthony Drazan's third flick "Hurlyburly" (it follows the Harvey Keitel-starrer "Imaginary Crimes" which was based on Sheila Ballantyne's novel) is an adaptation of David Rabe's own late 80's Broadway hit. Set against a hi-tech, glossy, alienating LA backdrop, the Fine Line release is a comedy of tragic proportions. It features knock-out performances from Sean Penn as the drugged-up, love-starved Eddie (a disillusioned casting director struggling to define himself in relation to his career), Robin Penn-Wright as Darlene, the woman he loves, and Kevin Spacey and Chazz Palminteri, as a pair of sadistic friends.

While waiting for his flight, Drazan's tall and lanky frame is wrapped around the book on his lap, titled "Bitch." "The British edition," he says. "I liked the red cover better." (The U.S. edition has a white cover). Drazan is personable and likes to share war-stories. "I discovered Bruce Willis," he claims. "In my last year in film school he acted in one of my shorts. He was just starting out, then. I remember in class, when I showed my movie somebody raised their hand and wanted to know 'How did you get the ambulance for the film.' A few years later I went back to show some of my early work and I showed the same short. So this one guy raises his hand and goes 'How did you get Bruce Willis for the film?'" Drazan speaks here about transforming a text from stage to screen, finding the elements that defined his cinematic style and working with Oscar winners.

indieWIRE: How did the project come about, at what point did you come in?

Anthony Drazan: I optioned the play. I came in at the very, very beginning as the producer of the film as well as the director. I rediscovered "Hurlyburly" in acting workshop and discussed it with Harvey Keitel whom I've done a small film with and contacted David Rabe, the playwright, who's seen a lot of my films and we began a long distance dialogue from LA to Connecticut, where he lives. Then we met and decided to go forward and collaborated on the adaptation.

iW: From the moment you got in touch with him to the finished product, how long did it take?

Drazan: We're going on three years now. I met him in October '95. We sat down in his barn in Connecticut in February '96; we took the month of February to adapt the piece - having spent several months thinking about it and constructing my blueprint for a screenplay and getting him to think about his text, dialogues and so on. And in the snow and blizzards of winter in Lakewood, Connecticut we wrote about these guys on the Hollywood Hills. And then sent it off to Sean Penn who had done the piece on stage in Westwood, California for a few weeks and he responded immediately. He wanted to do it.

iW: Had you seen him do it on stage?

Drazan: No.

iW: Did you see any of the actors in the film do it on stage?

Drazan: I saw Harvey Keitel do the role of Phil in N.Y. at the Promenade with Bill Hurt, Chris Block, Sigourney Weaver, Judith Ivy, Cynthia Nix and Jerry Stiller - how's that? And I was frustrated by the play when I first saw it. I thought the language was great, it was as funny as could be, but it was lacking focus and I learned later that certain edits that the director of the play had made kind of compromised the integrity of the play itself. What I mean by that is that at the heart of "Hurlyburly" is Eddie's struggle to define himself in relationship to two opposing forces that exist within him and also apart from him. Phil, who is sort of totally consumed by his shadowy side, his emotions and in opposition to that there's Micky who's cerebral and intellectual, detached, loveless, etc. And in his life, Eddie's dealing with these guys and within himself he's dealing with these guys too.

iW: Speaking about those members of the cast who had already done the play on stage, like Sean Penn and Kevin Spacey, how did that effect their performance in the film?

Drazan: Kevin Spacey was an understudy in New York for a few months, so he knew the piece but he hadn't actually done it. I think he went on to do all the parts at one time or another; it was very early in his career. It had relevance to them in their preparation - that they had done it, they were more familiar with it - but none to me. In fact, I didn't want to know anything about their past relationship to the play, because I wanted to make a film and not film a play.

iW: There is usually a lot of danger in transposing a play to film -- they either lose something in the process or become very wordy. In this case the dialogue is the strength of the film and you were just completely unafraid of the words. Or so it seemed.

Drazan: I guess love is blind. I loved the words. I dug it. So I didn't want to cut the dialogue, yet I didn't want to shoot the words. So I think the strength of the film, in part, is the language, -- certainly it is the inspiration for the film -- but to me it's the behavior: watching these characters, watching the manner in which they are photographed, which to me is the strength of the film. And there is such a nice relationship between the words spoken and the relationship between the characters.

iW: Tell me about how you went about finding the language for the film.

Drazan: Well, there were two parts to the process. One was streamlining this very elaborate text, that ran close to three hours, cut out all the redundancy and sharpen the focus on Eddie's dilemma -- if you will. And then the second part of it was to find an analogous film grammar to the language used by Rabe -- the kind of muscular aggressive alert qualities that define the stage text. I wanted to find it in film. Looking at filmmakers, I was interested in, let's say how Stanley Kubrik would treat it. And that was the second part of the process: to understand the theme or themes of the piece and figure out how that relates to movies - how does obsessive, compulsive behavior translate to behavior on the screen.

iW: How did you choose the house?

Drazan: We looked at a lot of houses. This one just reeked with these guys living there. It's the kind of house you find in the Hills that are often for rent, that people pay far too much for - living beyond their means -- and it's this sort of antiseptic chaotic space. With rooms linking to rooms, hard surfaces and reflective surfaces. Particularly the reflective surfaces were very valuable to me.

iW: Is that the set you had in mind when you first started looking?

Drazan: I try not to have too much in mind when I start putting the plastic elements of the film together. You kind of want to discover what works and it's like casting actors. Each location offers you a different possibility. If we were to set it in Malibu, what would it mean? The implications would be we would set it in a dark wood paneled home. What would it mean in terms of how these guys relate or move about the house as opposed to this.

iW: But it wasn't something that was decided as part of the original screenplay?

Drazan: We didn't do that. We had ideas, but I wanted to keep it open until I hired my production designer. And that would be another collaboration. But that's how I work. Not everybody works that way.

iW: After Sean Penn committed to play the part, how did you choose the others. Was he in any part involved in the casting process?

Drazan: I began the process almost immediately after I hired a casting director. We began to see and meet with actors and weed some. And we began to think about who was the best Micky to Sean's Eddie, the best Phil to Sean's Eddie. And consider the ensemble as a whole. Sean would certainly express an opinion about an actor. And it's very simple: I couldn't have hoped for a better partner and collaborator than Sean Penn. I am so proud of my relationship to him as an actor, our evolving friendship, his commitment to his work and to his willingness to be directed by me.

iW: You put together a tremendous cast, all Oscar winners or nominees.

Drazan: I had very specific ideas about how I wanted to make a movie out of "Hurlyburly." They weren't abstract. Changwei Gu as director of photography said something about how I wanted the film to look. I was looking for a kind of humanistic feeling to complement the very rough-edge qualities of these guys and their personas. Michael Haller who had been Hal Ashby's closest collaborator through some of the most important films of Ashby's career brought in a certain pragmatism and realism and sense of now and real circumstances of the characters that was invaluable and a composition to the theatrical leanings of the language. So it all started working together and then I took my cues from each of the actors and the way they worked. All of them were collaborative and interactive, but someone like Anna was very much in the moment and others were more into the preparation. It was measuring all those things up.

iW: Did their own ideas of their characters interfere with your vision of them, at all?

Drazan: Fortunately. . . and I know this sounds like butter and milk-toast production -- I would come to the set each day with a blueprint in my back pocket of how I thought a scene might be constructed and then I would not show it to them at all. We didn't have any pre-rehearsal time -- the only time we had was the thirty or forty minutes that I took at the beginning of each day. And we would sort of block out -- I would see where they were moving, what their inclination was, and every day I would get something from them that -- because my own limitation -- or not being in the scene -- I could have never imagined. . . . When Sean approaches Meg, when Eddie approaches Bonnie with the joint in his mouth and blows her that trackline and makes this whole scene about this "come on" -- that wasn't in my blueprint. It's not in the text, it's not suggested by David's words, but it was suggested by the way they worked together and it became so wonderfully perverse that you'd be an idiot not to see it and not to want to shoot it that way. Having done my own preparation I was not trying to keep up with myself. So that when I came on the set I was very much able to watch what would happen. Every now and then I would surprise them with those reflections on the table, Sean under the table and Gary is leaning over him to get these wonderful reflections. Kevin came on the set and I said, "You're going to have to move here." "What do you mean, I thought we were going to block everything together." "Well I have something specific in mind here visually" and I would show them in the camera and Kevin started laughing and he said "Oh, that's great, let's do it." So it was just not trying to be too strategic, certainly not manipulating the process, . . . making a movie.

iW: You used a lot of long shots or ensemble shots versus singles especially in the scenes where they were all together. There seemed to be some genuine fun going on, not only from the actors in front of the camera, but also from those behind the camera.

Drazan: We did that to capture the camaraderie of the boys. Cause boys will be boys and we did that also to juxtapose that to the very internal and dramatic counterpoint of each of these guys individually. So you notice when they're all together, it's very loose; there's the joking about this, and about that, the story about the guy in the back seat and little girl up front which becomes a confrontation, for the moment, between Micky and Eddie that resonates because of its juxtaposition to the looser feel of the stuff before.

iW: Were all those scenes rehearsed?

Drazan: No, we had no rehearsal at all. It was just on the day of. Shooting from the hip a little bit, but not as much as you would think.

iW: Sean Penn's performance is really phenomenal and certainly worth an Oscar consideration -- is that something you thought of when you were shooting or is it something you're thinking about now?

Drazan: Not only while we were making the movie, but from the moment we started cutting it, and thought about securing some distribution -- which we didn't have going in -- and finding a general audience and not a festival audience, not an arthouse audience but reaching a larger crowd - I thought "there can't be a better performance out of a movie this year than Sean's" and to a very great extent it reaches the level it does . . . because of the other actors supporting him. So in my sense of it, Sean is the best actor of the year and Kevin, Chazz, Robin, Meg, Anna, and Gary are the best supporting actors of the year and of those I think one or two will have a chance. So, yes I think about it now. You can't work for it, you can't plan it. I'm certain, though, the distribution company now would like to see it happen, because it will mean life for the movie. A movie like this that is both funny and tough, dark, provocative, unsettling needs that kind of support, unfortunately, to have a life in the American theaters.

iW: So you hope to reach a larger audience instead of a limited sort of cultured audience given the film's roots in the stage play -- you think the film appeals to more than the average arthouse audience?

Drazan: I've shown the film to beautiful models, guys who are hanging out in the street corner who grew up with Chazz in the neighborhood and I am sure that there is an audience that goes outside the cultured audience. I'm not even sure that that is the best audience for the movie. I don't think it's "The English Patient" crowd who is going to first and foremost dig "Hurlyburly." I think we have a better chance with the "Armageddon" crowd.

iW: Why?

Drazan: Because it's raw, it's authentic, it's got a real visceral quality. . . it's not refined. It gets you. It gets you in the solar plexus. It bangs you around a little bit. It's a bit of a roller coaster. Not a Disneyland roller coaster.

iW: How did you finance the film?

Drazan: The film was financed by presales of territories overseas that covered two thirds of the budget and then a bank in Los Angeles gave us the rest of the money and covered the gap between those presales and the money I needed to actually make the movie. And I guess you can call it a truly independently financed film. We went into it without US distribution and it isn't the kind of pseudo-independents that is financed by New Line.

iW: Were the presales on the basis of the play or of the cast?

Drazan: The cast.

[A.G. Basoli is a freelance writer based in New York.]