Scott Frank Interview, The Lookout

Movies Online had the pleasure of talking to writer/director Scott Frank ("Out of Sight”) about his new movie, The Lookout, which marks his directorial feature debut. Filled with riveting performances, the film is an inventive and moving new riff on the crime thriller with a most unusual person at its center: Chris Pratt (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a night janitor who, in the wake of a traumatic car accident, suffers from a leaky memory and an unreliable sense of self that makes even everyday situations challenging… and changes everything when he finds himself swept up in a bold, multi-million dollar bank heist.

Frank’s captivating tale revolves not only around the crime but around the alternately heartbreaking and exhilarating re-emergence of Chris Pratt, who was once a Golden Boy athletic hero in his small Midwestern town. Chris had it all – a beautiful girlfriend, a well-heeled family and a shining future. But after a serious accident, Chris has found himself in a strange new world where the most basic things seem to fall through holes in his memory and nothing quite makes sense. Unable to make it on his own, he lives with his mentor in navigating this surreal life – the wisecracking, fiercely independent blind man, Lewis (Jeff Daniels, "The Squid and the Whale”). For a job, Chris sweeps the floor at the bank, waiting for his halted life to come unstuck.

Things suddenly shift when he meets Gary Spargo (Matthew Goode, "Match Point”), an old school acquaintance and street philosopher who begins to revive Chris’s shattered confidence, even helping him find a girlfriend – albeit a stripper named Luvlee Lemons (Isla Fisher, "Wedding Crashers”). But Gary has bigger plans, and when he recruits Chris into his grand scheme to rob the bank where he works, Chris appears to be in way over his damaged head. As the bank heist unravels into chaos, both Chris’s uncertain future and even more importantly Lewis’s survival are on the line. Now it is up to this young outcast who can’t always think straight to figure out how to outwit and take down his manipulators…his own way.

Scott Frank loves thrillers, but even more than thrillers, he loves great characters. This first became abundantly apparent in his early career with his screenplay for the imaginative and romantic thriller "Dead Again,” directed by Kenneth Branagh, as well as his moving tale of a misunderstood child genius in "Little Man Tate” directed by Jodie Foster.

Frank also became known as the ultimate adapter of one of the most character-driven crime novelists today, Elmore Leonard, with the run-away hit "Get Shorty.” This was followed by "Out of Sight,” an unsparingly clever adaptation of another Leonard novel that put the zig-zagging romance between a rogue criminal and a female Federal Marshall front and center. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, and featuring the breakthrough performances of George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez, the film garnered Frank an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Now, with "The Lookout,” Frank puts one of the most unconventional and compelling sets of characters he’s ever written at the heart of an audacious small-town crime. His lead character, and completely unlikely hero, is the kind of person that writers typically avoid – a brain-damaged janitor who appears to have little hope for any of the things people usually strive for in life: love, money or a meaningful future. Heartbreaking and seriously damaged, Chris Pratt might not be what anybody expects as the big gun of a heist movie – but that’s exactly what intrigued Scott Frank.

"I’ve always loved those European thrillers that were dark and interesting and full of people that you really care about,” says Frank. "There’s this overriding sense of dread and suspense because you’re so invested in the characters – and I always wanted to write a movie like that.”

Scott Frank is a fabulous guy and we really appreciated his time. Here’s what the acclaimed screenwriter had to tell us about his directorial debut with "The Lookout”:

Q: You had this movie cooking for a little while. Can you talk about how long it took you to bring this to the screen?

Scott Frank: Yes. I think I pitched this movie to Walter Parks and Steven Spielberg when Walter went to work at Amblin before Dreamworks even happened. It was on the cusp of Dreamworks becoming a company when Amblin became Dreamworks so we're mid 90's probably. I pitched this idea and to answer another question I knew someone peripherally who had had this horrible head injury and I'd always been fascinated because they were kind of funny, athletic. They were a med student and just a completely different individual before the accident than they were after the accident, and I kept thinking people are so obsessed with their identity.

We all think about who we are. We go to therapy for it and it’s just we really do focus on our identity, and I thought, imagine waking up one day and you don't know yourself. It's not amnesia. You're literally another person, yet you can still see that person you were 6 weeks before you went into a coma. I was fascinated with that and also right about that time reading about these little banks in rural America in Nebraska, Iowa and Kansas who would get USDA money twice a year and they were 2 separate ideas, and for whatever reason, I thought ‘Man, it would be great to kind of locate this guy.’

I didn’t want to make a movie about his head injury. That would be a movie of the week. I'm not interested in pathology so much as what that does to a story. I started for whatever silly reason, those 2 stories became 1 story, and I started putting him in the rural environment. So I pitched that to them, and it was really that and I had this idea that he would get involved with this bank robbery, and he would have to use his deficits or overcome his deficits in the last part of the story. It was as vague as I'm saying it is now, and they bought the story and so that was in the mid 90's.

What happened is I had 3 kids all sleeping in one room. I had 2 of them born close together and we needed to move and I had just bought a house and I couldn't afford it and God handed me Out Of Sight and he had just finished this new book and he said ‘would you adapt it?’ and I had no intention of ever adapting another Elmore Leonard novel again. I had the great experience and I didn't want to ruin it. I remember the first time I met Elmore Leonard and we had lunch, and he told me all these horror stories about his films. How this one had been ruined and that one had been ruined, and I thought I'm for sure going to be the subject of someone else’s lunch someday. I got away with it on Get Shorty. I felt like okay and yet I really needed to do something and then here's Out Of Sight, and so I took this project for the most mercenary of reasons and yet it ended up becoming maybe the most satisfying creative experience I've ever had.

Also, I took it because I thought I could do it quickly. It took me a year, a year and a half. I took it because I thought it would be easy, and it was one of the hardest things I've ever done. So that postponed The Lookout, so then I went back to the Lookout after Out Of Sight and started writing it in earnest and finished it in ’99, and Sam Mendes came on to direct and this was right before American Beauty was released. He and I worked on it for a while and he became interested in Road to Perdition and left the project and The Lookout languished for a while and I went to work on Minority Report and some other things. Then David Fincher came on after a couple of years, and David Fincher and I worked on the script together, and we were talking with and working with Leonardo DiCaprio, and David was going to make the movie for $80 million and the studio was ‘Uhhhhh this little thriller? We're not sure.’ He got frustrated with them and he left to do go Zodiac and so---

Q: How crazy was this making you?

Scott Frank: Not at all because I always said if it was the only thing in my life, and also all my movies have similar histories. I really wasn't too worried about it. So then Michael Mann was thinking about it. I was supposed to go have breakfast with Michael Mann. I live in Pasadena and I'm driving from Pasadena to Santa Monica and I was an hour late because of traffic. I thought there's a Freudian thing going on here. The whole time I'm driving there I'm thinking about going through this whole process with a new director, and I sat down with Michael and I realized two things. One I don't think Michael really wanted to do it. He wanted to meet and talk. And I also realized I wanted to do it. I found myself talking him out of it. I don't think he needed much talking out of it. I think he was already just… you know… and so we started talking about other projects. We hardly even talked about it. ‘What about this?’ and ‘You should read’ and ‘I've got the script.’ It was all about other things.

I really had reached a point in my life where I was very happy. I was happy in my personal life. The reason I had not directed up to this point -- and I'd make films in college and I really thought I would -- but the reason I hadn't up until now was because I was really comfortable with the directors I'd worked with. I worked with a pretty great group of directors and I felt very good. And I realized driving to see Michael Mann that I was too comfortable. I was just too comfortable, and that in a few years I was going to be bored if I wasn’t careful. I really wanted a different creative experience and I wanted to feel more connected to the work I was doing. That's really why I started to do this movie and that's basically the history. That probably answers like 9 questions.

Q: Were Walter Parks and Lauren McDonald supporting you all the way?

Scott Frank: They were. Walter really wanted DreamWorks to make this movie. They ultimately did not. He had left, he was running the company and by the time we were really ready to make the movie, he was just a producer at the company. He still exerted an enormous influence, but he couldn't get them to pull the trigger on a movie like this. They didn't want to make this kind of movie for whatever reason and that's when Roger Birnbaum and Gary Barber and Spyglass stepped in and said ‘we'll make this move, we'll pay for all of it.’

Q: By going to Manitoba you made sure that it wasn't going to cost $80 million?

Scott Frank: It cost $16 million. And I wanted to shoot in Kansas and it would have cost $20 something in Kansas. I saw Capote and Capote was shot in Winnipeg and Capote looks beautiful. I was shocked when I heard that was Winnipeg because it had a very similar look to what I wanted to do. I was really actually shockingly excited about going to Winnipeg.

Q: Can you talk a bit about choosing Joseph for the role? He's an excellent young actor. What did you see in him that was particularly compelling?

Scott Frank: What was great about Joe is that he did a lot with a little. He's very still, yet he can still make you sympathize with him. He can still make you understand him, and he also more importantly shows you the other guy still peeking through the old Chris now and then. We'd have conversations on the day, you know, that we need to see a little of that here otherwise the character is in danger of being incredibly surly because he's a sad guy, he’s an angry guy, and if you just play that pathology over and over again from scene to scene, you get tired of him. He is really able to do all of that at once. He has a great smile, but he's also got depth to him. You feel like there's a lot and there is a lot to him as a person. There's a lot going on.

Q: I imagine you wrote a lot of silences into his part.

Scott Frank: Yes, without a doubt.

Q: What are the challenges of balancing the crime story with the human drama?

Scott Frank: Well, for me, that's the fun. For me, I really like the human drama embedded in a crime story and I like the way European films do that. I love Claude Chabrol. He is my hero. I love the way they take their time to tell you this other melodrama while the thriller is....you feel this tension of this story unfolding. That for me is the fun. Some audiences find that too slow. They feel like ‘Ok, I get it and let’s just get to the shooting part.’ I really care more about the human drama than I do the thriller stuff. I love the tension and the thriller aspects because it's all part of the puzzle for me. I think what makes me want to write a story like this are the characters more than the situation.

Q: I thought Joseph did a very good job, but do you think Chris Pratt would be different if Leonardo DiCaprio had played him?

Scott Frank: Not much. Not much. I think that we would be....no, I think actually he would have been a great Chris Pratt. I think, of course, it would be different because physically they're two different people, but I think the kind of character, the essence of the character would be the same. I'm guessing. He wasn't even sure he wanted to. We were talking but he was kind of in and out a little bit. That was part of David's frustration.

Q: The texture of the film I suspect would be quite different with a David Fincher or a Michael Mann.

Scott Frank: Oh, completely. It would have been better shot, it would have been a much different movie, and it would have been...I shot it in 45 days; they would have shot in 90 days. It would have been a different animal altogether. And the heist would have been more detailed. See, I didn't care about the heist. They cut a hole in the wall, that's really all you need to know.

Q: You had a great DP. The scenes at the farm house with that creepy guy with the long hair and glasses sitting silently are particularly striking.

Scott Frank: Alar Kivilo is a great DP. He shot A Simple Plan, he shot Ice Harvest, and this is like the third in his snow trilogy, and he vowed never to go near the snow again. I mean it was really cold. It was like 30-40 below and we're shooting outside at night. You can feel icicles on your spleen. Even though you're in a down jacket and bundled up, that wind really gets you.

Q: Do you usually have to wrap up the cameras in something warm when you're outside?

Scott Frank: We shot with a high-def camera. We shot with a Genesis camera which they used on Apocalypto which has a beautiful look. And the film looks like film because I didn't want to do what Michael did on Collateral and Miami Vice which looked great but they didn't look like film. I really wanted this to look like film. So we used a different camera and I wanted to shoot wide screen, and I would have loved to shoot using anamorphic lenses but they require a lot of light. They're very long lenses and so they require a lot of light. We were on dark farm roads in the middle of nowhere and we don't have the time or money to bring in all that lighting. I thought about shooting in the format that's called Super 35 which is like what Capote was shot in, but often times you want to color correct now. There a DI and a $250,000 item in your budget and I didn't have the money to do that in my budget.

We tested all three just to see what they would look like compared. We tested the Genesis, Super 35 and Anamorphic. We didn't mark them. Only the projectionist knew what we were looking at and we sat in the screening room in Toronto. We shot the same three little scenes and we shot them near the end of the day when the light was going away so we could see how they'd react in low light. Anamorphic is the most...the blacks are just beautiful. It looks gorgeous. But, in a close 2nd place, was the Genesis. The deluxe guy who was sitting there with us said, ‘Man, I'm a film guy and that looks beautiful.’ That looks like film because we also printed it back on film stock the way it would be in release so it looked exactly the way it would look when you all saw it on film.

Q: Who was that old guy in the farmhouse?

Scott Frank: That's his farmhouse. They took it from him.

Q: It wasn't really explained in the movie.

Scott Frank: I didn't want to. They basically say ‘where'd you get the farm house?’ ‘What? Whose farm house? My Uncle Bone found it. He negotiated with the owner,’ and this guy comes out and you put two and two together...or not.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about working with Matthew? It's an unusual role for him. Did he come in and audition for you?

Scott Frank: Many times. When someone first brought him up, I went ‘the Rupert Everett guy from Match Point? Are you kidding me? I don't think so.’ My casting director, I had a great casting director, Marsha Ross, and she said ‘You should meet him because he's closer to your guy than that guy.’ I said ok. He came in with a shaved head, bouncing all over the room.

Q: Did he come in with an American accent?

Scott Frank: Well he spoke to me just before doing the scene with a British accent, and I'm thinking ‘this guy, there's no way,’ but I liked the way he looked. He's a good looking guy and he had great energy and there was danger and sexuality and all the things I was looking for. Then he turned it on. This accent that was flawless. It didn't get in the way of his acting the way those kinds of things frequently do and he was amazing. He was just amazing. I sort of had a different idea in my head about the character and I kept bringing him back because I needed to slowly...I couldn't stop thinking about what he was doing and really liked his performance and not once during the shoot did I ever, ever have to police that accent. He never ever, ever had a problem. It's amazing.

Q: Speaking of accents, what about Isla Fisher?

Scott Frank: Strong Australian accent. How about that? Her accent was great and sometimes she would say to me, and she also does a beautiful American accent, but sometimes her accent would just sneak in a little bit and she would say ‘I can fix that.’ She would know when it happened right away because she's really, really good. I would say ‘No, don't’ because I really wanted a little kid like quality, and when it slipped in, you're not sure if you don't know she's Australian. You don't know that's what you're hearing. It's just a nice lilt to her voice. I actually liked it.

Q: You know her as a comedic actress more than anything else. What made you think that she was right for this role?

Scott Frank: Yeah and I didn't think she was going to be right for the role when her name was first brought up. Walter Parks brought her name up and knew her. It again was based on her work and I thought about Wedding Crashers and I'm going ‘really?’ He said, ‘You should just meet her.’ She came into the room and she was completely different again than what I thought she was going to be. She played much younger and she had this childlike quality and she was far more interesting, and a lot of women wanted to play that role, but she was way more interesting than anybody because she made some really specific choices, and she wasn't the femme fatale which I didn't want. I wanted this girl to be dumb. But her secret is she's really smart, if that makes sense. She's gotten by on her sexuality and her physicality, but the thing nobody knows is that she's smarter than she lets on. So at a certain point she has to wake up in the course of the movie. In order for her to wake up, I need someone who can play the first part of the movie kind of with that childlike "Let's set him up to rob a bank.That will be fun." Then when that gun comes out of the bag, it's like you know that this really isn't fun anymore. She could do that great.

Q: What about Jeff?

Scott Frank: Jeff. I saw The Squid and the Whale and I keep saying there's an actor who just got born again, who just completely re-booted his career. He was so amazing in that movie and there are other people I've been thinking about, and I've been thinking him as well, but once I saw him in that movie, I really had to have him because I knew he could do everything. He plays a reprehensible asshole in that movie and you still cannot take your eyes off him. That really did it for me. When I saw that, I said let me get him on the heels of that. He's obviously in a place where he wants to try different things.

Q: Can you comment on what you're working on right now? Are there any plans for any directing?

Scott Frank: Well, I'd love to do it again if they let me. I really would. I have to wait because I really again don't want to sacrifice my personal life. It's a very hard thing on your life to go off and direct. It's really tough so that I'm going to write all this year. There's a Western I wrote last year that I spent a couple of years working on that I'd really love to direct. Sadly, Westerns are not in demand. I know they just made 3:10 to Yuma for $60 million bucks. We'll see how that goes over, but I'd really love to make this movie. It may be like The Lookout or other scripts I've done. Then I'll just hold onto it and at some point I'll do it.

In the meantime, I'm writing a movie called 44 for Universal which is my mid-life crisis movie. It's basically about a guy running amuck the week before his 45th birthday. It's set in the world of automotive design. I'm working on that and I'm also adapting a Jonathan Trouper novel for Paramount. I don't know if you know his books called After Hailey which is about a 28-year-old kid who falls in love with this beautiful 40-year-old woman, and she dies a year later and he's left to raise her 15-year-old stoner delinquent son. It's a very funny, dark little book.

Q: Can you talk about the Western that you wrote? What’s it about? Does it have a title?

Scott Frank: Sure. It's called Godless, which will go over well in the red states I'm sure. It is essentially the story of a severely wounded outlaw who ends up in this mining town in New Mexico where all the able-bodied men have died in the mine. It's run all by women. He ends up on a ranch just outside of town with the one woman the other women have ostracized, who's nursing him back to health. What he realizes coming after him are his old gang members -- or however you want to say it -- fellow outlaws laying waste to every town they come to, and you realize they're coming here soon and really that's sort of the bare bones of the plot. It would be like me telling you The Lookout is about a guy who robs a bank. It's all about these characters and the relationships between all these people, and his relationship with the guy who’s coming for him. It all comes to a head in the middle of this town full of women.

Q: What year does it take place?

Scott Frank: 1888.

Q: Thank you very much.

Scott Frank: Thank you all.

"The Lookout” opens in theaters on March 30^th. I invite you to read my interviews with actors Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Isla Fisher.