Behind the Scenes: Narc (Carnahan, 2002) with Ray Liotta and Jason Patric

My wife, who was the head of Paramount Pictures, had a cassette of it, a video cassette, and she said, you might be interested in this because the fellow who directed this is a big fan of yours. Well, of course, that was not a turn-on for me. I've heard that before and looked at stuff and been disappointed. So I first saw this on a video cassette on not a very large television screen, and I was mesmerized. I thought it was a great, great film. So then, this is before it came out, I had a private screening of it, and it confirmed my thought when I first saw it, that this is really the most honest film about police procedure I've ever seen. I actually didn't relate it to The French Connection other than I was told that Joe did. I mean, he deals a lot more and very successfully with the personal lives of these guys, which I didn't really go near. In fact, I did. In the original version of French Connection, I had nine more scenes that was about their personal life that I cut out because I thought it was irrelevant to what I was doing then. But he managed to integrate their personal lives wonderfully. And the way that the Jason Patrick character and his wife and son interact is something that I've seen over and over again in the real lives of these detectives who are away a lot, do difficult work, it screws up their brains. And what Carnahan did was just let it be played. He did not do any sort of fancy camera work to pump it up. The heart of NARC is the personal relationships. The work of the detectives in the street, we've all seen before, but not as realistic as this is. But the thing that made it for me was the honesty with which their lives away from police work is portrayed. The other thing, I guess, that's similar to French Connection and what I respond to from the films that I've made is his characters are on the thin line between good and evil. And that is the truth. Every good cop has the soul of a criminal. And if he wasn't a cop, he would probably be a criminal. And that's why he's good, because he understands the nature of the criminal. This is the truth of good police work. They can think like the criminal, and that's why they're effective in dealing with them. There's no question about the fact that he was not putting violence in the foreground in the making, although it's a very violent film. It's a violent world. It's a world about people who risk their lives every day when they go out to work. It's something that most of us who will see this film cannot experience. You know, the fact that there's death waiting around every corner or something worse. Here's another qualitative difference about the French Connection and NARC. In the days of the French Connection, those cops owned the streets. It was before the Miranda law. They could go out and rough up suspects, beat them up, and get away with it, not face any charges whatsoever. But the cops in NARC do not have the support of the public or the police department to do this. And so there's a different atmosphere at work when they go out and play with a suspect the way they do in this picture. I mean, the French Connection cops would win police awards for doing that. Today, if they do that, they get kicked off the force. But it is still very honest as to what occasionally happens. And it's another illustration of how difficult it is to do any kind of police work in the streets. You weren't approached or asked in any way to keep tabs on me for IA. No, I was not. Hey, don't blame me for asking. Don't do what I did and just waltz back in. What does that tell you? That tells me that this investigation is running on fumes. There's no doubt that Jason Patrick and Ray Liotta really, really prepared for this film and not only got themselves up physically, but mentally to portray these very real detectives. And Ray Liotta, especially, his performance was reminiscent to me of what Orson Welles did in Touch of Evil. Very reminiscent, but very original. This film will last because of its performances. They are so real. They are so lacking in the sense of acting. What do you want to do about this? Nothing. Slit art finish up, recovery sweep through. If they find something good, if they get a stolen weapons hit, great. What we came here to do is corroborate Ruiz's story, which we obviously can't do. Sorry, I think it was all bullshit anyway. The films that last are the ones like The Godfather, where the performances are not really grandiose. They're scaled down to a human level. And that's true of NARC. And the budget of NARC is, well, it's like the catering budget of most films done today. You know, how much is spent on the cast and crew eating lunch or something? Now, I don't judge a film by its budget, but nevertheless, the achievement of Carnahan, to me as a filmmaker, is magnified by how inexpensively he brought off his effects. I mean, NARC is set in Detroit. He had one day in Detroit. He had one day to make you feel like you were in Detroit. The rest of the picture is shot in Toronto, but it feels exactly like where he wants you to feel you are. And there are a lot of films shot in Toronto that attempt to look like the United States, and they just don't. But Carnahan is totally in command of the medium. NARC ends on an ambiguous note. And so, of course, is The French Connection. I mean, the guys who perpetrated the crimes were not brought to justice. And in the 1970s, that was not a very difficult thing to bring off. That was accepted. And it was accepted on every level. The audience, the critics, the Academy, which gave it an Academy Award for Best Picture. That doesn't happen today. NARC comes into a climate where people say, there's good guys and there's bad guys, and the good guys have to win. Your gun and your shield on the ground now. The audience today, unfortunately, is mostly conditioned by television. And the cops are hugely successful on television. They're superheroes. They're cowboys. And the audience is conditioned today to that. So something like NARC comes along that is something of a throwback and retro to a period when you could express more and didn't have to worry about what was politically correct or not. A lot of people now talk about the great renaissance in American film in the 70s, which I think was true with people like Coppola and Scorsese and Spielberg and Bogdanovich and many others. One of the differences between those directors then and the younger group today is that the people in the 70s had great success with their films. The audience was on the same wavelength with them. Today, I think these young filmmakers are every bit as talented as those guys, but they are not really connecting with the mainstream audience. The people like Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson and Spike Jonze and now Joe Carnahan. As far as I'm concerned, their films are the equivalent and have taken American cinema further than we did. But the audience has not caught up to them. Critics have. There's great critical affection for all of these films, and I think they're brilliant, especially Carnahan. Few American films today carry the weight that a film like NARC does. Yeah, I wanted to be more proactive with my career. I wasn't crazy about some of the movies that I was getting, so I formed a production company, which is anybody could do. The thing manager. I just wanted to shake things up a bit, and like I say, just do it on my own. The agency that I went to over at Endeavor, one of the agents who happened to be Joe's agents, gave me the script. I read it, and I just really responded to it. It reminded me very much of a 70s type movie, The Antihero. It wasn't your typical Hollywood kind of, or what they're making now. It reminded me of the movies that they were making then. If I wanted to do it, if anybody wanted to do it in terms of acting or producing, whatever, he was going to direct it. So obviously I wanted to see what his work was, so I rented Blood, Guts, Bullets, and Octane and liked it. But you don't really necessarily see NARC in that. It's two different movies. I just wanted to take it the next step, because I still wasn't sure, and decided to meet Joe. Then when I met him, that's when it all came into place for me, because I'm a big believer in doing your homework and knowing what it is that you want to do before you even start the project. I knew that if we weren't going to get any money for it, it was going to be very minimal, which it was. We only got a few million dollars for it. It was going to be an independent movie, and having done enough independent movies, I knew that the director really had to know what he wanted before he even started. Well, at first, it was pretty much wanting to get involved in the casting of it. I wanted a say in that. I wanted a say in terms of being on the set and being more of a cheerleader and producing it as I was doing it. It didn't bother me. I've done enough movies where I kind of see what goes on. The more prepared, especially if you're one of the main guys, you pretty much can set an example for everybody else around you just by your commitment and what you're doing, your preparation when you come on and you do it. As a producer, I wanted to set an example or produce it by my own actions. I've got a part where my wife, Michelle, is a producer on it, so I trusted her and this woman, Diane Nabatoff, who's produced a lot of movies before, was who really was going to be doing the nuts and bolts, everyday sort of stuff. What happened was our loan wasn't in place, so we got through pre-production fine, eight days into filming, everything was fine, and then all of a sudden, there was no money. That's when it really had to kick in in terms of chasing down the money for the movie and the difficulties. Every night, Diane and I would be calling and finding out where it was and where would we get the money. We didn't want the movie to break apart because we only had 20 more days to shoot, and it was just very stressful on everybody. We tried to keep it from as many people as we could, but then when the crew realized the checks weren't coming on time and everything else, it made it difficult. There were other actors that, Joe, as a producer, you're thinking, well, you want to raise money, so you start thinking like they do, which kind of upset myself. I got mad at myself for starting to think like that because, does he have enough foreign? Are we going to get the money? All this garbage that goes along has nothing to do with really what it's about. Luckily, a couple people turned us down, thank God, and Joe came up with Jason. I said fine because by that time, I was into whatever Joe wanted. I think the biggest job of a producer is to support your director and their vision and what they want to do. That's what we tried to do as much as we could. He came up with Jason, and we met him. Luckily, he was interested. He hadn't worked in a few years for whatever reasons. He was just right. His energy was right. He was mature enough that he wasn't going to try to compete because my character is very intense and pointing fingers and bullying. Sometimes, an actor doesn't allow themselves. Their ego comes into it aside from what they're supposed to be doing on screen. Jason, he's just a solid actor. He fulfilled his responsibilities with his character like I think I did with mine. Well, because we didn't have the money, we never saw dailies. There were no dailies because the vendors weren't paid, which was really true. I wouldn't watch dailies anyhow. At least, I wouldn't watch my own. Since I was in a lot of this stuff, I would have watched Jason's. But because the money, the vendors weren't paid, we never saw dailies until three months after we finished the movie, which was really stressful for Joe. A lot of times, we didn't know. It got so bad in terms of the money. We would someday only have so much footage left to shoot. We would have to ask Joe what he had planned for that day and would he be able to get it with X number of feet of film left because that's all. Some days, we only had a few hundred feet to finish the day or whatever. Aside from that, he never saw anything. From what he says, I don't know if he told you that he would pretty much just lay awake at night just trying to picture if he got everything. Because we moved the camera so much, we didn't know if stuff was going to be in focus. If it was in focus, if he was getting everything he wanted. But again, because he was so solid in his vision of what he wanted, that really saved us a lot of extra shooting. Some days, he got what he wanted. He felt very strong because of his vision of when he had something. If we weren't doing an independent movie and it was more of a Hollywood movie, if you will, where you have to tie it up a little neater and so people maybe feel a little better, that'd be one thing. But we weren't making that kind of movie. We're trying to be as truthful and real to the story to make it as raw and honest as we could. From what I gather, after Sundance, we started getting a buzz in Sundance because that was the first time that people were getting to see it. They were just one of a group of people who started, you know, there's nothing more seductive in this town than a talented director who can also write. So, people wanted to find out who the new kid on the block was and they started hearing about the movie and Joe was getting, you know, and well-deserved a lot of attention because of his, you know, he's just a really talented guy. So, I think Paula Wagner saw it, Tom Cruise's producing partner, then Tom saw it and Tom, I think maybe called Joe or somebody and said that he was, you know, he really liked the movie, if there was anything that he could do to help because originally Lionsgate was going to release it and then all of a sudden after that, Tom being, his production company being housed at Paramount, he got Paramount to buy it or I don't know the real story on that either, what if they were going to do it anyhow or they were thinking about it or Tom said, I really think you should do it or what the real deal was. Well, I mean, it's really, it's very satisfying but it's, there's a complicated answer to this one that I'm not sure I really want to get into because at one thing, at its core, it's about the work and the doing of the work and the acting. After that, as an actor, it's beyond our control. It goes to the editor, it goes to the director, that's why as a producer, it was kind of nice because coming into the editing process, seeing, you know, certain rough cuts of it and thinking that there should be trims here or there which were really minimal. So, there's the actor's approach to it where it's just about the work and the doing the work and the experience and taking on the part and figuring it out and putting the puzzle together. Then, as a producer or what happens after, it's pretty much out of your control and out of your, I mean, once you put the movie together, I mean, it's extremely nice. I mean, I would be just as proud of this movie if, you know, it stayed independent just with Lionsgate as I would be or as I am now with it, you know, becoming this bigger thing with Paramount and these bigger people involved. But as far as the acting part of it, it was just all about the work. Yeah, I think you just have to be more prepared when you're shooting, you know, on such a minimal budget. You're doing a lot of material in a short amount of time, especially a movie like this and what this story was telling. But it's just, I mean, it's all about doing your homework, whether it's a big movie or a little movie. Sometimes you just might have two days to tell, you know, a couple pages and here you might have three or four or five pages to tell in a short time. But it doesn't change the way you're acting. We didn't all of a sudden speed up because we were on a shorter schedule. We still made sure that we got done what we needed to get done. It's sometimes hard to describe things while you're still working on it, but his name is Nick Tellis and he's a detective, was an undercover narc and then ran into some, you know, substance abuse problems, became a bit of a junkie and needs a job, comes back on to give an opportunity to get in this investigation with this dead cop. And then he hooks up with Oak, who's Leota's character. And, you know, then it starts from there. So he's, I guess, someone who's going back to a place he's been before, but he's a totally different person and, you know, facing the scary things along the way. I don't know, Joe asked me, you know, do you want to do it? And so I took a look at it and I don't know. I've always liked characters that are dealing on a primal level with some kind of struggle. And it's had that, that primal struggle and the behavior that comes from that. So just being a cop and then, you know, having a story just sort of accentuates those other aspects that I find interesting. I don't know. I tend to find that actors who talk excessively about their preparation are patting themselves on the back, you know, as opposed to letting the character breathe. But, you know, each character, I tend to find a new inroad or a new technique. But yeah, I like to base it all on real specifics. I don't know if, you know, it all depends on the people involved, you know. So a good story to tell. There's lots of stories that are really good, but, you know, or bad movies. I don't know. I think the actors are interesting. And I like working with new people. And the director, you know, Joe Carnahan's new and has a, you know, sort of zest and, you know, passion for something. And, you know, I like that. It's always, as opposed to, you know, filling in a slot for someone who's already has some established routine, you know, or a director who makes a certain type movie. I like to see what kind of movie he's going to make. And he's confident he's going to bring something across. So if I can, you know, add something to that, that's good. Like everything in the story, you think you got a, you think you got a beat on who everyone is and where everything's going. And then in sort of like a realistic Rashomon type way, you really see a different perspective. I mean, that's one of the good things about working in, you know, movies. One of the few good things is that you're forced into a situation to work with people, to talk to them, live with them in an intense way that normally would take years of getting to know someone else. And, you know, I don't know anything about the hip hop community, really. And I don't, I've never been in that and I don't know people like that. But, you know, I got forced, you know, into a situation with Busta and, you know, I really like, you know, coming in contact with other parts of the world or cultures. And that's one of them. And, you know, he was a pleasure to work with and extremely committed. So whether you're in something like this or anything you do to see someone really give it and give it all they do, all they can, that's good and inspiring. Well, Reza, you know, Reza, you know, obviously is a real intensity, you know, for an actor in a certain presence. And, you know, he's another guy who does a lot of specific work and just formatted those parts of himself into this character and made it larger, made it older, made it grizzled without losing any of that sort of natural edge that has made him, you know, the good actor that he is. To me, it's hard to make movies, you know, it's hard to really play characters and find those things. And if you're intense, look, we try to get away from stress in life. You know, we have the most comfortable chairs we can, we have special pillows, we have therapists and pleasing music and easy digestible food, you know. So to put yourself in a situation where there's nothing but stress and, you know, if you try to do that somewhat realistically, it takes its toll. So, I mean, ultimately, in the end, it's, you know, people and the experience, you know, so that's worth it. You only can play yourself, really. So you're finding different parts of yourself that satisfy this character. And so it's a challenge to bring them up and to realistically fill them and color them enough. And so you have to find areas of yourself that maybe you're not too comfortable with or have been lying dormant for quite some time. And so, and to truth and behavior, acting should be about behavior, not about grandstanding. So that's always a challenge. Ambiguity is a no-no in movies because it confuses people. You need something that is clearly identifiable as good, evil, bad, right, you know, satisfying, unsatisfying, you know, to be able to be expressed, you know, on a logo on the internet or in a 30 second trailer. So this is not that way. I mean, most of the movies I've done are not that way, but they're certainly not the ones that are popular. You know, I mean, it's quite clear that the type of crap that people go to see, it's very clear who the bad guy is and who the good guy is in the resolution, because it's just easier to sell. So I don't know if people are attracted to this kind of stuff. It's more real because it's about the things that we all deal with in our lives every day. As I said, that it's worth the sort of sometimes brutal and futile journey that people may find themselves at at the end of something to get to the truth. And whether that's the truth about a murder or the truth about yourself in a situation or deciding to really test your character, to go beyond what people say you are so you can find out who you really are going to be. And, you know, each character has to do that, you know, at all costs.