‘The other actor’s in his corner and somebody rings a bell and you come out and do your business.’
– Russell Crowe
Based on the 1990 novel by esteemed crime fiction writer James Ellroy, L.A. Confidential tells the story of a group of Los Angeles policemen in the 1950s against the backdrop of police corruption and Hollywood sleaze.
Producer Curtis Hanson said that the reason for doing the film was his love of Ellroy’s characters. ‘What hooked me on them was that as I met them, one after the other, I didn’t like them – but as I continued reading, I started to care about them.’
Screenwriter Brian Helgeland was such a fan of the book, and indeed Ellroy’s L.A. quartet series, in which L.A. Confidential was the third part, that he not only lobbied hard for the job of writing the film but he worked on the script for two years with Hanson – and wrote seven drafts for free.
‘Curtis had a doggedness about him,’ Helgeland recalled. ‘He would turn down other jobs. I would be doing drafts for free. Whenever there was a day when I didn’t want to get up any more, Curtis tipped the bed and rolled me out on the floor.’
The task of tackling Ellroy’s sprawling novel was a mammoth one, and not many, including the writer himself, were convinced that the book could be condensed into a film. But Helgeland managed it.
‘They preserved the basic integrity of the book and its main theme … Brian and Curtis took a work of fiction that had eight plotlines, reduced those to three, and retained the dramatic force of three men working out their destiny,’ Ellroy said later.
In a 2009 interview with Empire, he added, ‘It’s the greatest thing that has happened in my career, in that I had nothing to do with it. I was given a world that sprang from my imagination, but a world I could have not imagined on my own.’
To convince studio bosses to take a chance on his film, Hanson put together a visual presentation that included postcards and pictures of L.A. in that time period (items that he had amassed all through his life). A picture of ‘the famous shot of [Robert] Mitchum coming out of jail on his marijuana charge, where he looks incredibly handsome and buffed out’ flirted with images of musicians, while other celebrities of the time filled out the other parts of the presentation.
‘Always,’ Hanson said, ‘I emphasised that the period would be in the background, the characters and emotions in the foreground. And I said there would be something lurid and flashy and fun about it. Near the end I brought out a couple of old movie-star glamour things, including one of Veronica Lake, and said, “This is what we’re not doing, except when Lynn Bracken is selling it to the suckers.”
‘Then I wrapped up with a couple of modern shots by Helmut Newton of sexy women today wearing retro-style clothes, to show why the guys in the audience would be going, “Yeah!”’
Producer Arnon Milchan was suitably impressed (‘I see the movie in your eyes,’ he told Hanson) and agreed to make the movie.
The two most important characters in the film are policemen Bud White and Ed Exley, both of whom were to be played by two relatively unknown Australian actors – Russell and Guy Pearce respectively. Like Russell, Pearce had been an actor on Neighbours.
Hanson knew straight away that Russell fitted the visual description of Bud White, and he was convinced that he could handle the dramatic side after seeing Romper Stomper – a performance that Hanson said he found ‘repulsive and scary but captivating’. ‘We flew him over here, I met with him, we talked about the character and I put him on tape doing a scene.’ The tape shows a long-haired Russell Crowe acting out an intense scene from the start of the film.
Pearce had shot to fame playing a man in drag in The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert. ‘Curtis hadn’t seen Priscilla at the time I auditioned as Ed Exley,’ the actor said. ‘He decided not to, which was a good idea. He thought it might influence his judgment if he had a vivid impression of me running around in drag for two hours. It might have messed things up. I had met him only the day before I read.’
Russell and Pearce were hired because Hanson wanted audiences to go through the same feeling that he had while reading the book. ‘You don’t like any of these characters at first, but the deeper you get into their story, the more you begin to sympathise with them. I didn’t want actors [that] audiences knew and already liked,’ he said.
The decision to mould the film around Russell and Pearce was a brave one, and one that Arnon Milchan – one of the film’s backers – worried about. ‘Is this movie going to have any stars?’ he is reported to have said after agreeing to cast the two actors.
‘His backing me at the start about those two guys empowered me with every move I made from then on,’ Hanson told the Dallas Observer in 1997. ‘It put me in the unique position of going to Kim Basinger and Kevin Spacey and Danny DeVito and saying, “I’m making this movie that I love. We start shooting in three weeks. Do you want to be in it?”’
Hanson added, ‘I have been a director-for-hire, and as such you get what you can get and do the best you can. I have been lucky enough to have had a couple of commercial successes which empowered me and gave me some clout. In a sense, this was both a major studio film, which it needed to be because of the cost of making it [an estimated $50 million], and an independent movie. Miraculously, Warner Bros not only embraced my ideas but went along with this wacky casting.’
Hanson had wanted Basinger for the part in one of his earlier films, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, but after she had made disparaging remarks about Disney after finishing The Marrying Man, there was no way the company was going to re-hire her for the thriller.
‘Kim was the character to me,’ Hanson said. ‘What beauty today could project the glamour of Hollywood’s Golden Age? Plus, what actress can play the role? I’ve always been a fan of Kim’s and wanted to work with her in the past. I think she’s the only one who could play this part.’
Before shooting began, Russell and Pearce were taken to Los Angeles for nearly two months to immerse them in the city; they also watched several film noirs from that period, including Robert Aldrich’s excellent Kiss Me Deadly.
‘Russell and I had bumped into each other back home but we hadn’t worked together and weren’t pals,’ Pearce explained. ‘I didn’t test with him for L.A. Confidential. But coming on board so early gave us a funny advantage. We developed a fairly strong friendship but also started to think of the whole thing as our show.
‘Russell and I were going to what were called rehearsals, which consisted of us and Curtis and the screenwriter, Brian Helgeland, sitting around and discussing each scene. I had met Kevin [Spacey] at a party during that period and told him that I thought one of the roles, Pierce Patchett, would suit him admirably. And it would have, but now he’s rather too important for such a small role.
‘We turned up for rehearsals for one day and there was Kevin, about to read for Jack Vincennes, the third of the tarnished police heroes.’
Both lead actors found that the vintage films were more useful than working with modern-day policemen, with Pearce hating his time around one certain police officer because he was racist. They would work on the script each day with Hanson and Helgeland, going through each scene.
For Pearce, this was a chance to make a Hollywood movie of old, rather than the ones of late. He told the Washington Post in 1997, ‘Most American movies are about some guy that’s kind of living on the edge and saves the world and has the chick and does the gun stuff. And it’s full of all those stupid one-liners that mean nothing. I want something a lot more than that. Have you seen Face/Off? I hate slagging off other movies but I thought it was rubbish. Banal chase scenes, trained shooters missing their targets…’
He added, ‘This was much bigger than anything I’ve done, but I don’t think this was considered to be a big-budget American film. We were such a close-knit group. Danny was wonderful. And Kim is just adorable.’
Russell would say about Guy, ‘One of the best things about doing this movie was working with him. It was so great to have someone like him there to help me through. I mean, when the days were long and the thing feels like a real job, hard work, it was terrific to have someone there who was both a great actor and a great guy,’ he told Celluloid in 1997.
‘One of the things that we discussed when we first talked, when we knew we were going to do the job, was when we did actually come together as a team, it should be like two halves of a whole. These two guys should actually make up one decent cop.’
Talking about Spacey, he added, ‘He’s the most charming man. He’s the Oscar Wilde of our time. I only had one moment with him in that film and it’s a great source of regret. I love spending time with him. He’s always very open and effusive. His interest in you is genuine.’
Talking about his character, Russell said, ‘He’s a racist. He’s self-righteous. He’s foul-mouthed. He’s a son of a bitch. However, in the course of the movie, you get an indication as to why he’s taken this attitude toward life. He doesn’t realise just how much he’s looking for love and affection and confirmation of his good points, buried as they may be. … I think he is a good man – but he’s very much a product of his environment and his job.’
Although Bud and Exley are central to the story, it’s the city that is probably the main character of the film.
Hanson, who gave the film noir story a modern visual look, told the Dallas Observer, ‘I also found myself thinking about the city. Ellroy gave me the opportunity to set a movie at a point in time when the whole dream of Los Angeles, from that apparently golden era of the 1920s and 1930s, was being bulldozed. The area was changing from this group of individual little communities to the megalopolis that the freeways created.
‘The mood after World War II was very un-noirish. It was one of optimism and economic boom. And there were a lot of things starting here, new and exciting, that for better or worse are still very much with us today. The freeways, the whole idea of suburbia. Television, tabloid journalism. It’s the period that I lived through as a child, and this seemed to be an opportunity to tell a story about these characters and that city all in one.’
The Formosa Café seen in the film was going to be torn down by Warner Bros because they owned the studios across the street and they wanted to build a car park. ‘I’m one of the advisors on the L.A. Conservancy,’ said Hanson. ‘So I told them about the plans, they got on the case and prevented Warners from doing it.’
To prepare for the role, Russell said, ‘I hired a flat that was very small. I could hardly even fit into the doorway of the bathroom but to me, every day doing that I felt like I was big. I was oversized for my environment, which was the mentality that Bud White was supposed to have.’
He also stopped drinking beer. ‘One of the most painful things of the L.A. Confidential character I played was that the author, James Ellroy, kept telling me that Bud White didn’t drink beer, but scotch. Now I can tell what’s blended and what’s single malt. But I haven’t actually had any since the moment we finished shooting this movie, because it’s disgusting.’
Russell is defensive about accusations that such acts are ultimately self-indulgent and don’t add much to the acting process. ‘I assure you it’s not a silly game that I played during the shoot, to see if Ellroy will allow me a drink or not,’ he said in an interview. ‘That trait was an essential part of the guy, it was one of his defining traits. You can’t drink beer when that act alters the character in such a fundamental way.’
He would continue, ‘But that is something natural. Let’s say that you more or less keep the character in your head. But don’t think that I’m one of those crazy actors that answer in the character’s voice when people talk to them on the street, or that during the shoot they insist on being called with the character’s name, or that only dress in the movie’s clothes and so on. No, nothing like that. The only thing I do is try to maintain the right atmosphere day by day during all of the shoot.
‘It’s something subtle, something inner: it’s like a kind of physical training. You have to fill yourself with the character’s information and appropriate it, even subconsciously. And then certain attitudes surface naturally and that makes things work better on the set. Of course nobody has to know if I drank a beer or not during the five months of shooting L.A. Confidential, but the thing is, I have the impression that in the end, the effort shows.’
Russell was praised for his performance, with the Washington Post saying the actor had a ‘unique and sexy toughness’, and the New York Observer adding, ‘Mr Crowe strikes the deepest registers with the tortured character of Bud White, a part that has had less cut out of it from the book than either Mr Spacey’s or Mr Pearce’s … but Mr Crowe at moments reminded me of James Cagney’s poignant performance in Charles Vidor’s Love Me or Leave Me, and I can think of no higher praise.’
Roger Ebert, the famous ‘two thumbs up’ film critic, said, ‘L.A. Confidential is seductive and beautiful, cynical and twisted, and one of the best films of the year,’ adding that ‘Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce are two Australian actors who here move convincingly into star-making roles.’
Russell would remember of his time on the film, ‘It’s a really nice movie. Guy does a great job, Kevin Spacey is fabulous, Kim Basinger gives her best performance. I shouldn’t say that because it sounds like I’m judging her work, but she takes you to a fluttering, emotional core that she hasn’t brought you to for quite some time. She’s been doing Wayne’s World 2-type celebrity stuff and this is a real acting role. My favourite moments in the movie are hers.
‘And it’s got Danny DeVito in it – it’s a wonderful ensemble cast. We went to Cannes together and the thing I really felt was how much we all liked each other, and we had a wonderful time of discussion and discovery on the movie. It’s the first truly ensemble piece I’ve done in America. I don’t mean that negatively but so often when you work here, you’re in your corner, the other actor’s in his corner and somebody rings a bell and you come out and do your business.’