Paul McGuigan was in the pub when fellow Scot Irvine Welsh of "Trainspotting" fame sold him on "The Acid House," the short story trilogy that became McGuigan's directorial debut in 1998. We, unfortunately, were not in the pub, but in a suite at the Ritz Carlton Boston Common when McGuigan told me that he started making movies because he was tired of photographing supermodels' asses.
At least I think this is what he said; mostly I remember trying to pick up every other word of his Loch Ness-thick Scottish accent and thinking, "This interview is going to be impossible to transcribe."
The man lounging on the couch in sleek blue jeans and tennis sneakers was cool, relaxed, and hip; the sometimes indistinguishable string of words emitting from his mouth made him entertaining and, at times, indecipherable. Of course, all these same adjectives could be used to tag his new film, "Lucky Number Slevin," the crime noir thriller opening tomorrow and starring Josh Hartnett, Morgan Freeman, Bruce Willis, Lucy Liu, and Sir Ben Kingsley.
Question: "Lucky Number Slevin" is an interesting project. What attracted you to this film?
Paul McGuigan: Just the voice of the writer, you know? It's such an unusual script, but the voice was very strong and shone through. It's very [famed writer/director David] Mamet in a way: most of the characters talk in the same, unusual, disjointed way. I liked the world in which it was set, and I liked the writer, Jason Smilovic, and that was important...
The scripts that you get through these days are most likely going to be very generic in the sense that it could be anyone who wrote it; you won't see one writer's stamp on it, because writers are more interested in plot, or narrative or whatever. But Jason's quite obsessive; he's a crazy-ass guy, but he's also the funniest guy you'll meet. And he's also genuinely smart. And I think that all comes over in the script.
Q: Was it difficult to work with this large, diversely talented group of actors?
PM: There were so many actors [that] it was difficult to keep tabs on who was in the film! But no, it wasn't difficult; these guys are the best, you know? They really are, so the challenge was to make sure I was up for it and [that] I could be trusted to direct them, and within two seconds it was all good and all fine.
Q: Your actors have said you have a tendency to let the camera roll on a take a lot longer than other directors. Why is this?
PM: I've never watched other directors' work, so when you say that, now I'm self-conscious of it!
Q: Well, I think Lucy meant it as a compliment.
PM: I'll tell you what it is: I like to see the whole scene in front of me and see how it looks, so I do the whole take for every scene for the whole 10 minutes or whatever. It's like a staged play at times, where I like to just sit there and watch the whole thing go, and then you see the subtleties and what's required, and you see how it works and you see the rhythm. So it makes a lot of sense to me.
If you say, "Let's do this shot close up," "Cut this shot here and that shot here," it becomes very mechanical to me. I've never been to film school, so I've never been taught how to do it on a machine; I've been taught to do it naturally and organically. That's the way I've always wanted to do it; it works for me, and I think actors like it.
Q: If you didn't go to film school, then how did you get your start?
PM: I was a photographer for a long time. And then I got a bit pissed off photographing supermodels' asses all the time, and you do, actually - believe it or not - think, "There must be more than this to my life."
So I went away for awhile and took pictures in South America - documentary-style stuff - and then I came back to Europe and had a few exhibitions of that work, and then some film channels back home asked me if I'd like to do documentaries based on that work. So I started doing documentaries, but, again, I'd never been taught anywhere near a film camera, so the documentaries used all these different formats...and they became very distinctive in that way.
And then Irvine Welsh, who wrote "Trainspotting" [1996], in the pub one day said, "Oh, I've got these short stories ['The Acid House']."
And I said, "But I can't believe they'll let you do it." Because there's like, a mom sodomizing the daughter in the ass with a dildo.
And I was like, "Really, they're going to let you do this? Well, check me, I'm in - just to see what happens here." So we did that [the film version in 1998], and it won all these awards and picked up its own momentum...
Q: This is your second time working with Josh Hartnett. Is there something about his acting that jibes particularly well with your style?
PM: Yeah, he's very light of touch. He doesn't overplay things too much. He's a challenge, and I mean that in the nicest way, because he doesn't suffer bad ideas well; he's always pushing you to do different things, and I like that about an actor, you know?
I just think that he's being allowed to act now, and a lot of the young actors of his generation have gone through their hunky phases, [like] Heath Ledger, you know? Well, they'll lose their looks at some point, so they'll have to rely on some good acting!
Q: In the past, I feel as if sometimes Lucy Liu has been cast as this mysterious, exquisite, Asian archetype, and here she's basically playing the bubbly blonde next door.
PM: She's [Liu is] great because she brings so much energy to it [the film]. I often wondered why she was so thin, because she eats like a truck driver, but then you see her on the set, in front of the camera, and you see all the energy she uses and you can see how [she stays trim].
And this role really suited her, because she's very funny and bubbly and irreverent and clever. And then doing these longer takes [was good for her] because she was able to show a lot of those quirks she has.
Q: There's a very convincing love scene with Lucy and Josh in the middle of this movie, and I thought one of the keys to that was the song "After Laughter Comes Tears" that played in the background. The movie basically had like two distinctive songs, and the rest of the film...
PM: Is score. Yeah, that's a good observation. I didn't want music throughout, because that would be overwhelming to have a particular...[song] with lyrics along with this particular dialogue. From day one, I said, "No, it has to be all score." It helps the audience relax.
The music composer, Josh Ralph, is a close friend of Jason [Smilovic]'s and he hadn't really done music for a movie before, but I said, "Believe me, if you've spent 16 years being told a story by your best mate, you're going to understand it very well." And I thought he'd be perfect, and sure enough, he was ideal.
And I think that's the spirit of the film: We're all friends, and it really helps. Jason didn't need to tell Josh what to do, Josh was just like, "Go away, I know what to do." And that's lovely when you can do that.
