When people approach me to talk about a movie, it’s almost always Midnight Run. The real force behind that movie was Martin Brest, who earlier had directed Beverly Hills Cop with Eddie Murphy. It was Martin Brest who got Robert DeNiro. It was Martin Brest who got the whole cast, including me, who was the tough sell! I did the movie Isthar a year before Midnight Run. Isthar is a movie I like, but it was not a hit, to put it mildly.
Paramount Pictures, the studio that was to finance Midnight Run, wanted Cher for my role. You can’t make this up!
Martin Brest didn’t want Cher. He wanted me, but Paramount wouldn’t make it with me, so Martin Brest went to Universal Studios, who said they would.
I had never met Robert DeNiro or Martin Brest when I walked into a hotel room in New York City and spent the next several hours auditioning. Bob and I read the script for Marty. We improvised on the script. I believe there were two such sessions. I may have spent as much as ten hours auditioning with Marty and Bob. Then Marty called me from an airplane. The connection wasn’t good, but I gathered he wanted me to come to Los Angeles and audition some more. I asked him what it was he wanted to see that he hadn’t seen. The line broke up when he answered, and I chose not to pursue the question.
Instead, I called my agent and told him to tell the studio that I wasn’t sure we could agree on a fee, and I named a figure something like four times higher than I’d ever been paid. It worked. Marty Brest called me and said, “If I say you have the part, would you do it for less?” I said, “Absolutely.” I give Marty a lot of credit for understanding and respecting that I felt I had auditioned enough.
Marty Brest had no limits on the demands he would make of everyone, which was no problem at all for DeNiro and me, but it was for the cinematographer. In the middle of the movie he decided to quit and of course take his enormous crew with him. I remember walking by Marty as he was talking to the cinematographer in the lobby of a motel in Globe, Arizona. Evidently, Marty felt the cinematographer hadn’t given him a good enough reason why he was leaving, and I heard Marty say, “Look, we’re making a great movie here, and if you don’t want to be part of it we’re going to make a great movie anyway.” Marty brought in a new cinematographer with a whole new crew.
Neither Bob nor I had ever seen anything like that before, and I, of course, being the talker between the two of us, said to him, “Let’s stay out of this, whatever it is, and just concentrate on our responsibilities.” We did.
The screenwriter of the movie didn’t travel, so sometimes there would be only an outline of a scene, and we’d have to make it up. I remember sitting in a boxcar with Bob who, in the story, was furious with me, and yet the challenge of the scene was that by the end he had to kind of like me. I was handcuffed to something, and I just started to say things to try to amuse DeNiro. It didn’t work.
Marty came over and whispered in my ear, “I love you. I think you’re great, but this is not working. You’ve got to come up with something else.” I thought for a moment and then asked Bob, “Have you ever had sex with an animal?” That brought his head up, and he stared at me. I then said something like, “I’m asking, because I saw you eyeing one of those chickens on that Indian reservation where we were working.” That did it. DeNiro started laughing, and we fulfilled what the scene needed. I credit Marty Brest with continuingly challenging me. At one point Marty told me that DeNiro had come to him and said, “Ya know, Chuck really is getting on my nerves.” Marty said, “Great!”
I think he’s a magnificent director who never really got the credit he deserved for that outstanding picture.