How director Rupert Wyatt’s big Hollywood gamble paid off

Share

This is a story about filmmaking in the 21st century. Is it a drama, a tragedy or a farce? Will it end happily? Only time will tell.

Rupert Wyatt, now 42, is a British-born director. Handsome, well-spoken, candid, he studies in England and Paris. He reveres the cinema of the 1960s and '70s, especially stories of outsiders pushing back against society: Cool Hand Luke, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, If… . Realizing there's a ton of talent and creative freedom in Britain, but no money, he co-founds a collective, Picture Farm, to produce shorts, documentaries and features. He spends some time in New York, developing scripts.

In 2007, Wyatt gets his shot: He directs an indie about a prison break, The Escapist, starring Brian Cox and Damian Lewis. It's witty and stylish, and it clicks. They praise it in Britain. They love it at Sundance. 20th Century Fox hands Wyatt the ultimate prize: a franchise, Planet of the Apes.

This is huge. The 1968 original, starring Charlton Heston, was a money tree, spawning four sequels and two television series. Tim Burton remade it in 2001, but his version didn't take. The studio is convinced there's more gold to be mined. They give Wyatt a script, a rebooted origin story, by the successful writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver. In it, Wyatt sees "a Spartacus story, an uprising story, that I knew I could do," he says during an interview in Toronto. "I knew it was a bit of a poisoned chalice – that if I failed, it would be hard to get another film off the ground. It was a high tightrope. It took a lot out of me mentally. Luckily, I won the lottery and it did great" – $480-million (U.S.) worldwide great.

Naturally, the studio wants a sequel, and Wyatt wants to direct it. He has a specific idea of what the movie should be, and he develops the script. Soon, however, he realizes, "I wasn't going to be able to work from a script I wanted to work from," he says.

Wait a minute. Wyatt is the director, the boss. He's already made a hit. But he doesn't have authority over the script? "No," he says simply. "It's not my franchise."

There's a specific set of rules to making these movies, he continues: "It's like being captain of an oil tanker. You can't be nimble. You're previewing all the time, which is a good tool, but not necessarily conducive to spontaneity. I realized that fighting the battles I thought needed to be fought was going to be an exhausting process, and I knew I wouldn't win them all." Director Matt Reeves steps in. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes grosses $700-million worldwide.

Wyatt, meanwhile, wants to scale down, to get back to the kind of filmmaking that originally excited him: "character-driven." Ah, that magic phrase. Every director wants to make character-driven films, with "real consequences to the characters' actions," Wyatt says. "Look at The Parallax View, Klute, All the President's Men. Those were studio movies, but they were real-world stories. They were incredibly entertaining, but also thought-provoking and challenging."

But these days, few studios will finance them. "We're at a crossroads," Wyatt says. "In tent-pole movies, most of the stories are fantasy, escapism. There's a danger to that, because they don't reflect what we're about as human beings. I liken it to when you stand and watch an amazing firework display. You have a visceral thrill, but who remembers it?"

So Wyatt signs on to remake another seventies film – but a smaller one this time, a one-off: The Gambler, which starred James Caan. The original was a story about addiction; the remake is about something else: divesting. "It's the study of a man who's dissatisfied with his lot in life, and wants to get out," Wyatt says. "He wants to lose everything. But I never saw him as self-destructive – more prepared to die in the process of escape. Kind of like a samurai. He has a clear code. He knows he's putting his life on the line, because it's the only way to separate himself." (Do you hear a metaphor about the filmmaker's career? Me, too.)

The script has been through a few iterations – at one point Martin Scorsese was going to make it with Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead. When Wyatt comes along, Mark Wahlberg is attached to star. He's a mogul, a force. "Mark is aware of his value," Wyatt says. "He's the kind of movie star who has the power say, 'I'm going to do Transformers and make the studio a lot of money, then do something for me.' He was born into hardscrabble life, had a blue-collar upbringing. He's made his way in the world, he's been given opportunities which he's taken with both hands. With his success has come great privilege and material wealth. But I think he's at a place in his life where he's looking for something more. He signed up to do The Gambler because he found the role and the film challenging. If there was more of that, there could be a sea-change in Hollywood. But it's a risk, because if it doesn't do well your value goes down."

Here's the part of the story I find most poignant: When Wyatt and Wahlberg sit down with Paramount execs to discuss The Gambler, "they all, from the head of the studio on down, looked at each other and said, 'We're proud we get to make one of these films every year,'" Wyatt recalls. "Last year it was Nebraska, the year before it was Flight."

Which means that even heads of studios can't necessarily make the movies they want. "Tent-pole films have expanded from summer into a year-round enterprise, and they make a great deal of money," Wyatt sums up. "It's not about the politics or taste of the people at the studios. It's that so many people go to see big event movies, you can't not make them."

The Gambler opened on Christmas day. So far it's grossed $16-million in North America. Two tent-poles it's up against, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 have grossed $168-million and $306-million, respectively.

At one point in The Gambler, Wahlberg's love interest, played by Brie Larson, asks him about a novel he wrote. "Did you write it because you really believed in it, or because you thought it was what people wanted?" she wonders.

"That wasn't lost on me," Wyatt says. "When you make a movie, are you making it because you really believe in it, or because you think it's the right movie to make? Everything we do is a gamble. The career choices we make, the people we spend time with, the people we marry. There are particular moments in life where you have to make a choice and go with it. Some you win, some you lose. I thought that was a story worth telling."