Behind the Scenes: The Crying Game (Jordan, 1992) with Stephen Rea and Jaye Davidson

I was always writing, you know, from when I was very young, and I published a book of stories around 1974, which, you know, was quite well regarded and won a few prizes at the time. Neil stayed with me in London and we got to know each other quite well and I read his wonderful collection of fiction, which had just recently won, at that time, in the early 80s, the Guardian Prize for Best First Work. And I knew Neil as a short story writer and a novelist. I didn't know he was going to make a film. I made my first movie, Angel, in about 1982, and there hadn't been a feature film made here for about 20, 30 years. And then he told me he was going to do this film and did I want to be in it? I said, yeah. So it was much simpler in those times. The first film that Stephen distributed was Angel, called Danny Boy in the States. It was the film that he set up his distribution company, Palace, with. I asked Neil what else he was working on and he gave me a script, which subsequently became The Crying Game. At that point it was simply called The Soldier's Story or The Soldier's Wife. Then a movie called Cow was made, with very similar kind of themes. And so Neil abandoned trying to finish this script and we took up another project, Company of Wolves. Company of Wolves was quite a commercial success all around Europe, not so much in America. We then went on to make a little film called Mona Lisa. And Mona Lisa was quite a big success. Bob got nominated for Academy Awards and all that sort of stuff. And I had never anticipated this kind of thing. European directors had a hard time. Every time they went to Hollywood, it was like being caught in a meat grinder, basically. And every director... If you remember, Antonioni went there and had a hard... Wim Wenders went there, had a hard time, Werner Herzog. It's kind of an endless process, really, of the European sensibility meeting the machine. And that was my experience. It's been many directors' experiences. I made two movies there that were considered not to be successful, but I still enjoyed making them. So Neil had really come off of Winnow Angels and High Spirits feeling not that pleased with Hollywood. I didn't enjoy making High Spirits because it was interfered with and the cut was taken from my hands. But with Winnow Angels, I was a director for hire. I think both the three temperaments involved, myself and Robert De Niro and Sean Penn, and David Mamet, actually, were a bit too dark for a kind of comedy the studio thought they were getting. So then Neil came back to Europe and wanted to make a smaller film. We'd always discussed The Miracle. I just write something that's quite personal, so I wrote The Miracle and it was based on the short stories I'd written in my 20s, you know, and I made that film and nobody went to see it, so I was kind of unemployable. The Miracle could be one of Neil's most critically well-received films. It didn't work. It was a flop. And coupled with The Big Man being a flop, those two films began a sort of downward spiral for my own company. And Neil said, Do you remember the story? It must have been two in the morning or something. Do you remember the story? The soldier's story, the soldier's wife. And I said, Yeah, I remember it well. The plot basically was a man who has been responsible in some way for the death of a black soldier that he'd kidnapped, and he goes to contact his wife out of feelings of guilt, in an attempt to make things somehow understandable to him, maybe to see is she all right kind of thing. When we were making Mona Lisa, we discovered a transvestite bar called Madame Jojo's, which we used to go to occasionally and always, always sit there and just not believe that these incredibly beautiful-looking women were men. And I thought, if I make this woman a man, it'll become a different kind of story and it will go into the areas that I want to go into. And he said, Well, what if when he comes back it's a man, like those guys in Madame Jojo's? I want to make a movie that started with realities of a specific political situation, you know, and then to bring it into territory that will even question the basis of those politics, you know. So when I made that character, Dil, the wife of the black soldier who was killed, when I made her into a man, the whole balance of the story changed, you know, and it became very exciting. And when he gave me the completed script, I just loved it. I thought it was fantastic. I just thought it was really wonderful work and magical and very funny and really exciting. I had a very strong feeling, actually, and it was very simple. I thought, OK, I've written a script, it's profoundly interesting to me, you know. It's got something kind of universal in it, in a way. You know, I mean, it starts with realities of Irish life but goes beyond that into something quite different. And I thought, if nobody makes this, you know, I'll just return to fiction, you know, because it's... I didn't really want to work in an industry where it wasn't possible, you know, to make a statement as interesting, I thought, as that was, you know. There's so much in that script. It's such a beautiful piece of work. And I kind of felt, also for Neil, that this is what he should be doing, that it was right. This is exactly right for Neil. When I got to Cannes and the script had gone out to all these people that I thought would love the film and all the Americans were in Cannes, nobody liked it. And in quite the reverse, they hated it. I mean, they literally hated it to the point where they made me feel like I was some sleazy squirt trying to steal their wallets, you know. It wasn't just, like, go to a meeting about, well, Soldier's Wife, it was their no, and to find out whether they liked it or not. But they would push the script across the table at you as if they had just been contaminated with something. I mean, I certainly think on paper the reason why no American company wanted to invest in the script, invest in the project beforehand, which is usual, was because of the subject matter. So it was taboo. The first time that I recall reading Crying Game, which was not a first draft script, was on a trip from Madrid to Paris. And it was so fantastic that I had decided I was going to meet a French company called CB. And I was just really going for a make-contact type meeting. I wasn't punting any pictures to them. But I actually did to them my first ever pitch of the Crying Game, which was really rather delicious because, you know, I started out saying, you know, it's set in Northern Ireland. And the French guy said, that is a negative. And then I went in, I said, well, it involves this black English soldier. He said, that is another negative. And then I said, you know, our hero is a member of the IRA. And he went, that is yet another negative. But I kept on going because, you know, I'm a trier. And he kept on saying, and then he falls in love with the black soldier's ex-partner. And he says, that is another negative. And he kept on going through this negative, negative. And then I got to the end of the pitch and he said, but I love it. Nick Powell and Steve Woolley were very keen to bring Miramax in up front. They felt that that would close the fancy and give them a good US distribution partner. And Bob and Harvey Weinstein were deeply concerned about the casting of the film. There was a real issue about the role that Jay Davidson ends up playing because, of course, she is a she and then ends up being a he, which is a very, very difficult piece of casting to pull off. And I think Bob and Harvey didn't believe that Neil and Stephen were going to pull it off. And they were reticent to come in up front. And I needed to get their money. I mean, it had to be the, I could see what the future was. The future was making the film without an American, any American money. And we've been very supportive to them with Miramax. They've been quite, been good to us. It was very, very tough on Nick and Steve at the point that they really needed this film to go into production. And Miramax had no interest in coming in up front. And so I was somewhat upset and surprised that Miramax weren't going to come into The Crying Game. I think it's, it was so difficult to finance because, I mean, of the political, the racial, the sexual themes, but more importantly because I couldn't get arrested, you know what I mean? That was, I think that was the real reason. It's hard to find that. Film 4, the filmmaking arm of Channel 4, had been very keen on considering investing in The Crying Game. But they had taken a long, long time to make a final decision putting up money. Channel 4 had some problems, I believe, with the nature of the film itself. They felt that Jay Davidson's character, Dill, should have been revealed from the outset as a transvestite. They felt it was very gimmicky to reveal her as a him in this way, halfway through the film. The big hang-up was over the ending. And we, and Jack, who was the number two guy on the creative side at Channel 4, was delegated by David Orkin, the head of Channel 4, before they would put the money in, to sort out the ending. So the plan we came up with was that we would send Jack to Dublin, where Neil would take him to a pub, and they would stay in that pub until they had a resolution to the ending, and therefore Jack could say it's okay to put the money in. We'd managed to get Channel 4 in. We then managed to get some money from British Screen, who were very nervous about our credit rating because they knew that Palace was going down, so that was very hard because they felt that it might be sucked in with the rest of Palace. And then we had to get the rest of the money from a little bunch of people, Euro trustees. So myself and Stephen had put together a European distribution company of five independent distributors from us in the UK, Centre in Germany, Back in France, Gomez in Spain, another company in Italy. We loved each other. And of course we'd got no work done. We used to go out drinking and eating and telling jokes and having the best fun. And we had our first meeting in Venice to organise the company and decide what was the first film we were going to buy. And Steve was really only interested in the last item on the agenda, which was any other business, which was our whole purpose of forming the company was to get them to finance The Crying Game, or parts of it. And they did. They had all read it. They loved it. They were all big supporters of Neil. And they all came in, but they didn't have enough cash. It was a jigsaw. It was a mess. It was a whole smorgasbord of different financing entities who all had to be happy with each other. So yeah, I did really give Channel 4 a very hard time. And I really did threaten to set fire to myself in the lobby, which was slightly tongue-in-cheek. But I think they felt that it might happen. I just decided I wasn't going to do any more theatre. I was going to do film. And the only thing to do was to just turn down theatre until someone offered me a film. And about 3 weeks later, I met Stephen Woolley in a pub in London, and he said, I've got a script for you. And it was The Crying Game, so how lucky can you be, you know? Neil met with Forrest Whitaker, and Neil loved Forrest, so we both agreed that we would, if we could, make allowances for the fact that Forrest's American, but casting him in our film. The casting of Forrest Whitaker was to appeal to an American audience, to get an American name actor. And he's a lovely actor, and he obviously would have suited Neil not just for his vision of this character, but also because of his other roles in Bird, for example. But anyhow, we did get a lot of flack from certain quarters when we cast Forrest, but I needed Forrest for the film. The film was picketed by one of the actors' unions for the casting of a black American actor as opposed to a black British actor. I never, I can never work out Brits who think you can't cast Americans in films when it's okay for Brits to be Americans in American films. Does anybody ever say, Anthony Hopkins is Welsh in America? I mean, do they ever say that? No. I had to find somebody for that role that nobody knew. I mean, if I'd cast Wesley Snipes, for example, and don't laugh, you know, or if I'd cast Prince, you know, or Michael Jackson, just a series of choices, okay? Everybody would say, oh, that's Prince in a dress, that's Wesley Snipes, you know, with lipstick. Whereas it had to be somebody that they didn't know, you know, so I had to find an unknown. We were looking for somebody who was a transvestite male, okay? So we had to go to all the clubs in London, you know, I had to send Susie Figg as the casting director around every possible club in England, you know? I tested and tested and tested, and eventually found Jay. Actually, Jay was the only person who could possibly even have approached the part, even in terms of physical illusion of being a convincing woman, you know? I would go to my cinema, and I owned my own repertory cinema in London, the Scala Cinema, where Palace originated from, the video side, and just take the day's takings. Stephen Woolley called me up and said, we need the box office takings because we're shooting a film, and the entire casting crew is going to walk off set unless we give them some money. You know, it was that hand-to-mouth. It was that hand-to-mouth. So I said, yes, boss, and gave him the money from the tills, and that was it, he owned the cinema, he took the money. So everything was being dribbled, and I was just dribbling £100 here, £20 there, just to keep it going. It was just barely keeping our nose above water. Stephen Woolley was run and run and getting cash to pay people from the video outlet for Palace, and it was really crazy, you know. Crazy. Oh, it was actually extraordinarily fraught because there was so little money to make a film with, you know, and actually there was, you know, it dealt with some quite large elements, you know, that were quite expensive, and the glass house was shot to pieces, and various sequence of violence. And, you know, what was daring about Neil, you know, was there wasn't time, but he made them take the time to get the big shots, because they were big emotional shots. And I could feel Neil really, really expanding as a director at that time. You know, it was a film that demanded to have some, that demanded some, I don't think the word is style, but it demanded a certain kind of grace in the camera, you know what I mean? So it had to be made very, very carefully. It has to go like clockwork. Things have to move efficiently and well. And so one finds oneself, you know, being eaten away with stress every day. People were literally physically fighting behind me in the set as I was looking through the camera and directing a scene, you know, they'd be doing it in silence, everyone trying to get their space and stuff like that. I think there was very much a sense that this was make or break for Neil, both in a personal sense and in a professional sense as well. I think he'd said that if he, if The Crying Game wasn't a success as a film, then he would go back to being a writer. The Crying Game's release in the UK was quite troubled. For a start, anything with the IRA or Irish politics tends to arouse a certain level of criticism that normal British films don't get. There was a bombing in, I think, North London of a pub, you know, which was blamed on the IRA, so there was a lot of anti-IRA press at the same time. It turned the press off the film. People didn't really want to see a sympathetic portrayal, I think, of an IRA terrorist at this time. Including a certain gentleman who's now deceased called Alexander Walker, the chief critic of The Evening Standard, who completely lambasted the film. They weren't keen on the fact that an IRA man could be seen to have a conscience or could have had a conscience to be disturbed by what was happening, so they didn't really take to that. The same kind of lethargy and the same ignorance as to judging a book by its cover existed in the media. And as soon as the critics gave it a good kicking, it pretty much died a death. Miramax weren't affected by this at all. They were very solidly into it. Once Bob had seen the film, Bob Weinstein, Harvey's brother, Bob really believed in it. I mean, over and above Harvey. And Harvey really trusted Bob's tastes in terms of what is populist and what could go wide. This was such an interesting love affair anyway and so well told that Harvey, I think, believed in the story. Bob could see the exploitation value of The Crying Game. Harvey could see that it was a good movie. The toughness and the hardness that Nick and Stephen experienced was equalised by Harvey's absolute passion to find an audience for this film. The first American review, the first trade review, which was not only a wonderful review but also specifically said, do not under any circumstances tell people what the twist is in the movie. That reverberated across all of the journalists in America. Nobody, nobody, nobody revealed it. I think the way that Miramax turned the nature of the film around for its marketing was brilliant. They came up with a very sexy campaign, a lovely image of Miranda Richardson, very film noir, with a smoking gun. And the most brilliant thing they did was encourage an entire audience to buy into the hook of keeping a secret. The gimmick worked, but the good movies survive a gimmick. You see, the gimmick got people in, got people talking, but they would never have talked about it if the film itself hadn't worked. It was like wildfire. I saw the film once in New York with a packed house. The film had been running for 6, 7, 8 weeks. It was ridiculous. I mean, you can't imagine what it was like. There'd be movie theaters where there'd be three screens and the crying game would be on all screens. This woman did it, and oh, my God, oh, my God. Standing in her seat, she was cheerleading the surprise. She was turning this look of, like, how could my girlfriends have kept this from me? How could my friends not have told me this? How comes this a secret? And you could see it was pure pleasure because she was just so blown away. There was certainly almost a kind of interactive element to the campaign that Miramax achieved. People got blown away to the point where they secretly decided they weren't going to tell their friends. See, because in America, they didn't care about the politics, the Irish politics. They cared about the sexual politics a great deal. Like, Americans really just went for the sex in their quaint, old-fashioned way, you know. Because it's only in America, really, that these extraordinary kind of turnaround events can happen. They don't happen in Britain. I mean, I'm walking down into Washington Square Park and there's a gay pride rally, and they all start chanting my name. David Ray! David Ray! It's only in America it became this phenomenon, you know. That's the wonderful thing, though, if a movie hits in America, you know. They let you know. If it hits in England, they say, Oh, quite good. We heard the news in the offices here, and Bob Weinstein was on the phone saying, OK, OK, they're coming up now, and he's reading it off the TV. And he was saying, Oh, my God, oh, my God, best supporting actor, Jay. You know, he had a big cheer in the office, and best actor, Stephen, and then best screenplay, Neil, best film. But we were in a ironic, if you like, situation in that we were in Los Angeles, you know, with six nominations, going to the Oscars. But I couldn't pay the hotel bill. Fortunately, Harvey did. He was very generous. He not only paid the hotel bill, but he paid the extras, which was really sweet of him. So my son had a ball, cos once he found out we weren't paying for the extras, we were getting pizzas and ice cream every, like, 45 minutes. I defy anyone to be curmudgeonly or to be mean-spirited about the effect that the Academy Awards have on you if you actually are a film fan. I think the Academy Awards are hilarious because everybody lies through their teeth, you know. And it wasn't about winning. It was about having those nominations. For me, I think for Neil, it may have been different. Everybody says, Oh, it's not actually, it's not a competition. You know, and it's all about, I mean, they're wonderful films. There's so-and-so's movie, there's so-and-so. It shouldn't, the competitive aspect is horrible. And you know they would cut off people's throats to get that bloody statuette, you know. So it's hilarious, you know. Of course it transformed my life. I had a career in America, which I never had before. And I had a career in film, which I never had before. Well, it's not so much the movie changed my life. It's the fact that you can make a movie like that and people will go to see it. You know, that made me say to myself, it is worthwhile to keep making movies, continuing to make films.