ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 30, 1997 TAG: 9703290011
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: IAN FISHER THE NEW YORK TIMES
The new movie "The Devil's Own" was plagued with script problems, rumors of ego clashes between stars Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt and reports that it would be this year's "Waterworld."
Even Alan J. Pakula, the veteran director who has seen his share of hard times on movie sets, does not shy away from the word ``disaster'' to describe some aspects of filming ``The Devil's Own'' last year.
Brad Pitt, one of the two stars, threatened to quit early in the shoot, complaining that the script was incomplete and incoherent. He later denounced the movie as ``the most irresponsible bit of filmmaking - if you can even call it that - that I've ever seen.''
The co-star, Harrison Ford, kept his mouth shut at the time but said recently that there was little that he would disagree with in Pitt's criticisms. Ego clashes, budget overruns and long delays plagued the project.
Every few years, Hollywood produces a movie that months before its release is labeled the next ``Ishtar,'' ``Bonfire of the Vanities'' or ``Heaven's Gate.'' Usually the same factors are present - big stars, a big-name director, big money and big last-minute rewrites, all colliding like cars in a freeway pileup.
``The Devil's Own,'' which opened March 26, had all those elements. And yet, judging from the early reviews, it has avoided joining Hollywood's pantheon of debacles. Even Weekly Variety said that the movie, ``a well-crafted suspenser, bears no signs of the much-reported on-set difficulties.''
The film tells the story of a New York City police officer (Ford) who takes into his family's home a young man (Pitt) who turns out to be a fugitive Irish Republican Army soldier.
Hollywood has a long tradition of being able to redeem the most troubled shoots with good, and occasionally great, movies. ``Casablanca'' and ``The Godfather'' are two prominent examples.
Still, Pakula does not seem eager to repeat the experience of ``The Devil's Own.''
``I can't imagine what it would have been like if it had been my first film,'' he said in his New York City office, recounting the stream of negative stories that appeared last year in the Hollywood trade papers and the mainstream press during the shoot's six long months.
All the same, for Pakula, the generally positive reviews offer some vindication, suggesting that perhaps things were not as bad as they seemed. He was quick to point out that other films he had made had not exactly gone smoothly either: Jane Fonda tried to quit his second movie, the 1971 film ``Klute,'' and in ``All the President's Men'' (1976), Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman would often, separately, call their real-life reporter counterparts, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, to decide how a certain scene should be played.
``There's rewriting, and there's rewriting,'' said Pakula, who will be 69 next month and who, with his white beard and conservative blazers, looks and speaks like an English professor who happens to have a connection to Hollywood. ``There's rewriting when you start to make one kind of movie and then everybody panics, or the studio panics, and you wind up making another. That was never the case here. How to tell the story might have changed; individual plot things might have changed. It was always telling the same story.''
The ripest bit of gossip from the set - personal animosity between the stars over whether this would be a Brad Pitt film or a Harrison Ford film - was not true, Pakula said, despite many media reports that the two actors were not on speaking terms for months.
In recent interviews, both Pitt, who at 33 has become a big box-office draw, and Ford, at 54 an aging star who nonetheless is at the top of his game, said there had been no personal conflicts between them. (``It wasn't the clash of the titans the press made it out to be,'' said a crew member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. ``After all, you were dealing with two guys who probably wouldn't have had much in common under ordinary circumstances.'')
No one griped about the size of trailers or the number of close-ups, Pakula said; rather, the conflicts were artistic. Because Pitt and Ford are both stars, the original script had to be rewritten to create a more complicated relationship between the two, and specifically to create a fuller role for Ford's character, a good-hearted Irish-American street sergeant named Tom O'Meara.
Pakula said there also was a secondary problem, derived from the fact that the film's plot did not fall along conventionally simple Hollywood lines. The characters played by Ford and Pitt are both ``good guys'' according to their own distinct moral codes: Ford as the upright American cop who deplores violence and Pitt as an IRA gunman for whom violence is a reasonable solution to his people's 300 years of troubles.
But the story requires a conflict between the two men, and one of them has to die, even though there are few film stars in leading roles who relish being rubbed out.
``In American film, there is a good guy and a bad guy,'' Pakula said. ``It's the first thing my grandson always asks: Who's the good guy and who's the bad guy? When I say Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt are both good guys, that throws him.''
``What's interesting to me is what happens when people with two different senses of what is right and what is wrong meet,'' he added. ``What's interesting is the fact that these two men can love and respect each other. It makes it more complicated. Much more interesting and much more human.''
But Pitt worried that his role might descend into that of a traditional bad guy pursued by Ford, a la ``The Fugitive.'' Pakula said this was never his intention. To find an analogy, he went back to the 1948 western ``Red River,'' in which a weathered rancher, John Wayne, is defied by his young protege, Montgomery Clift, on an epic cattle drive from Texas to Missouri.
In ``Red River,'' all turns out well when the tart-talking woman (Joanne Dru) separating the men reminds them that they really love each other. ``The whole picture was leading up to something very different,'' Pakula said. But the studio executives ``just felt it was too unconventional, too dangerous, to have one great star kill another star.''
The final showdown of ``The Devil's Own'' was a central part of the original script by Kevin Jarre, who wrote ``Tombstone'' and ``Glory.'' About five years ago, the producer Lawrence Gordon, whose earlier projects include ``Field of Dreams,'' ``48 Hours'' and ``Waterworld,'' the Kevin Costner film memorable largely for having been wildly over budget, took the script to Pitt, who was not yet a household name.
The project languished until 1995, when Pitt suggested taking the script to Ford. To many people's surprise, Ford accepted, even though O'Meara was originally conceived more as a character role, an emotional backstop to Pitt. Ford suggested Pakula - the two had worked together in ``Presumed Innocent'' in 1990 - and filming started last February, in the midst of an unusually harsh winter in New York.
Trouble began immediately, because the script was still in flux. This is what prompted Pitt's comment to Newsweek about how ``irresponsible'' it was to be going ahead with the movie at that point.
The comment was considered a major blow to the picture's potential for success. But no one has really disagreed with him.
``We were all a bit unhinged by the failure to come up with more of a script,'' Ford said in a recent telephone interview. ``So I didn't have any dispute with him over the accuracy of the comments.''
Ford acknowledged, however, that the comments put a certain spin on the publicity: ``At least you know what the first few questions will be,'' he said. And while he said he was satisfied by the final product, he did not give it an unqualified endorsement. ``I make them; you decide if you like them,'' he said.``I'm pleased with a great deal of work in this film, but I'm not ever really, really happy. I'm a perfectionist, I suppose. So I am denied the pleasure.''
At a recent news conference for the movie, Pitt made it clear that he had made his comments at the very outset of the filming, long before any part of the production was finished. ``I have to be honest about what I said, even though it didn't do anyone any good,'' he said. He added, ``How can we start a film when we don't have it all lined up?''
Several script doctors were brought in to address the problems, which delayed the picture, pushed up the budget and only added to tensions on the set. Gordon, the producer, would not say what the film finally cost, but he disputed numbers widely reported in Hollywood trade papers. He said the original budget was ``much higher'' than the reported $50 million and that the final cost was lower than $90 million. ``I won't say much lower but lower.''
``There's no secret that we were writing and shooting'' at the same time, Gordon said. ``That's a very unpleasant approach to filmmaking. You just slog through it. It's like being in the infantry and fighting in the rain and snow.''
He added, however, that things could have been much worse. ``I'm coming off `Waterworld,''' he said. ``For me, you know, it was not that tough.''
LENGTH: Long : 156 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Alan J. Pakula (left) directs stars Harrison Fordby CNB(center) and Brad Pitt on the New York set of the suspense thriller
``The Devil's Own.''