‘The great actors are never easy.’
– Ridley Scott
‘Information is the bottom line and the subtext of that could be that you cannot trust anyone, not even your best friend. Turn your back for a second and you will be used. And if you are running an organisation that is important to national security, without the attitude you will be weaker and vulnerable. That’s the job,’ surmised Scott about his and Russell’s next venture, Body of Lies (2008).
It was based on a book by novelist and Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who had covered stories in the Middle East. Scott was fascinated by the source material. ‘The characters and David Ignatius’s view I think is mostly the truth. If you’re a Washington Post journalist for 30 years, foreign correspondent, he is fluent in Arabic… his passion, he’s obviously a romantic, his passion is the Middle East. When you read his book you get a full sense that you’re reading the truth. All he’s done is change the names.’
Ignatius said, ‘This really began from work I did with Ridley on an earlier project. In the course of that we got to know each other so when I finished the first draft of Body of Lies I let Ridley know about it.
‘When I finished the book I had a different title. It was called Penetration because it told what agents do, which is penetrate their adversary. Penetration these days for most folks sounds like an X-rated movie. That seemed to be the opinion of most folk, but Ridley liked it.’
Five weeks before shooting began, Scott told MTV, ‘It’s based on David Ignatius’ book, which originally was called Penetration, and then it was called Body of Lies. So we’re still wrestling with the title. There’s another interesting title called Chatter.
‘So send in which one you like,’ he joked, suggesting an online poll. ‘It’s between Chatter, Penetration or Body of Lies. It’s not about sex; it’s about politics in the Middle East, and it’s really good.’ They ended up keeping the Body of Lies title.
Despite being one of the most influential and successful directors in Hollywood, Scott found it difficult to get the movie made. ‘It always is, but you can’t really think about it. I read the manuscript 19 months ago, went, “Wow”, negotiated, bought it, found a writer, negotiate, got him writing. That was slow, wasn’t too happy. That took a few months. I’d delivered American Gangster and I’m staring at this material which then needs a lot of work on it. In that time, the world’s constantly changing. All you can do is make sure that you deliver what you feel is the best you can do.
‘In Hollywood there’s some of the smartest and toughest motherfuckers you’re ever likely to meet. A really bad combination. Also, the most uneasy thing is where they recognise passion as a weakness. If they know you want to do something, you’re gonna pay for that. You have to hide the fact that you’re really desperate to do it.’
The film’s writer, William Monahan, said, ‘David Ignatius’s book was a very complicated thriller. My job was to capture the essence of the book, while compressing it as a film. The usual problem on doing movies from books is that the ideal way is fourteen Tuesday nights but we have to make it a two-hour movie. And in here the compression was arduous.
‘I had to go away for a week to a house on the East Coast to get away from everybody and cut basically 30 pages from the script that I didn’t want to lose. Everything was good. I said to David that you could do another movie from the book.’
The book certainly focused more on the nitty-gritty work of being a CIA operative, with Russell’s Hoffman character pushed more into the background. Hoffman is CIA operative Roger Ferris’s (played by DiCaprio) control at CIA headquarters in Langley. Ignatius said, ‘I think this larger story of the CIA abroad and its efforts to recruit people, is a process of seduction and abandonment, both of the people that they work with and sometimes its own employees. It’s a theme that’s fascinated me in all my books. We’re living through a period right now where we’re seeing how horrific intelligence operations can be. I think one of strengths of the movie is that it does transcend the here and now and tells a story that could be told about the agency at any point in its history or its future. It’s a basic dynamic that surrounds their work.’
Getting Russell wasn’t as easy as Scott would have liked, either. ‘I called him up and said do you want to do this?
‘He said, “I want the lead part,” I said, “You can’t, Leo’s got that.” He said, “He’s got the best part.”
‘I said, “Not necessarily – think of your part as a character study.” That always appeals to him. I said, “He can be stocky, have bad knees from football, looks after the kids, is bullied by the wife, but is master of the universe. He probably has a box at the CIA where he doesn’t have to answer to anyone, can do what the fuck he wants and he’s a bastard, but he actually drives the kids to school.”
He said, “OK, I’ll do it.”’
Russell’s version of events differed somewhat. ‘The first thing that I got was a phone call from Ridley saying, “How’d you like to put on a large amount of weight?” And that always appeals to me, so that was a sell right there. He said that he wanted Hoffman to feel like an ex-football player with bad knees who still had some grace about him. Everything else comes from the book and the way the character talks.’
Talking about the film, Russell said in the production notes, ‘Obviously, it’s a movie and is not meant to be taken as fact, but it was important to me to give people an idea of what it really takes, in terms of deception, to operate an organisation like the CIA, especially in a place where there’s a definite culture clash. You have to stand back a long way to see where that river runs.
‘At Hoffman’s level, it’s not a matter of being a chess player. It’s about being able to see seven different chessboards situated on seven different planes, and manipulating all those multiples of seven simultaneously.’
Talking on the film’s DVD commentary, Scott revealed, ‘Russell loves to take on completely different personas and also take on physical differences. You saw it when he did The Insider. That’s part of his art. He thinks it’s important – the physical appearance, the hair, the accent. That’s why I like working with him; he’s 100 per cent all out.
‘I was up for Hoffman being in no offices. We never even had an office set for Hoffman, so his set was his kitchen, his back garden, his kid’s school, his garden, a restaurant. Because of that he’s always eating.’
Ignatius recalled, ‘The first time I talked to Russell he asked me, “Where’s Hoffman from?” And I said, “I don’t know.” I said, “Maybe he’s from Massachusetts. I kind of can imagine Worcester or some working-class town in Massachusetts,” and Russell said, “No, he’s not. He’s from Arkansas.”
‘And he had decided that that was where this character was from and that’s how this character was going to talk. They obviously re-imagined the characters in a hundred different ways, and that’s now who these people are. I’ll never be able to read the book and read about Hoffman and not think about Russell, and the same thing with Ferris and Leo.’
For Russell it meant teaming up again with his The Quick and the Dead co-star Leonardo DiCaprio. The pair had become close friends while working on the film. ‘You had Gene Hackman and Sharon Stone and these actors who had been in the business for 30 years. We had only done a couple of small movies, and we weren’t part of that superstar club. So we forged a friendship and started our own club’, Russell said.
‘Working with him is a little like hopping on a train’ said DiCaprio. ‘You just have to have faith and make that leap. But once you’re on, you realise how focused he really is.’
Russell, meanwhile, had harboured some concerns about his pal after seeing him propelled to superstardom in Titanic. ‘I was a little worried about him after Titanic. The massive success of something like that, it’s not always a positive, particularly when you’re that young. Suddenly you find yourself on lunchboxes and bedroom slippers. That can have a deteriorating effect on the inside.’
This time most of their scenes were of them talking on phones, with Russell saying, ‘It’s the same as if you’re doing a CGI film and you’re supposed to be floating in a flock of black ravens. In fact, most of the time when you’re on a film set, what you see in the audience has nothing to do with the experience of the actor.
‘So you’ve always got to be shutting off things that are going to affect your focus and all that sort of stuff. So it’s the same sort of thing where you just zero in on the phone call. Some guys try to attempt to do that thing of having both people on the phone at the same time which is just utterly a waste of time. It’s better that you just do the groove by yourself.
‘And then if you shot it first, the next person gets to hear where you were and they will fold into that, or if you’re doing it second, it’s the same thing. You listen to what they said and then you have a think about it.’
Scott, having worked with the vocal team of Russell and Washington, was again pairing his regular collaborator with a heavyweight A-Lister – and again he was faced with a pairing that didn’t keep quiet if they aren’t happy with the script. ‘Both actors get into it in a very big way. They’re in it from the word go. They’re in it from the book, through to “Who’s the writer?” through to constant readjustments of the script. This happens right up to the first week of principal photography.’
‘So they’re encouraged – well, not Russell and Leo, they’re not going to be shy in coming forward, believe me! – but I mean, if I’ve got someone coming in new, like Mark Strong – I hadn’t worked with him before and I really enjoyed that experience – so I liked to include him in the process. Everything, right down to how he looks. What do you think, what do you think, what do you think?’
It’s a process that Scott likes. He doesn’t do a lot of rehearsals, so he likes every actor to do their homework – forming and creating their characters before they appear in front of the camera.
Russell said of filming with Scott, ‘People make the assumption that we agree on everything. That’s ridiculous. On any subject we have an instinctive disagreement about 70 per cent of the time. But over time we’ve perfected the art of the wordless argument, and we enjoy the process of problem-solving.
‘The thing about me and Ridley is I really listen to him, which I think scares him sometimes. But he appreciates it because he’ll say something to me early on and then get really involved in all of the other details. But he knows I’ll keep the integrity of his original concepts alive as we go through the arc of the story.’
Talking about the closeness of their relationship, DiCaprio – or ‘the new guy’ as called himself – remarked, ‘They have such a shorthand together, they know how to solve problems immediately. I embrace that kind of energy. It’s really rewarding and exhilarating to work with these type of people. Once you’ve rehearsed the scene and established the arc of what the outcome should be, Ridley gets all the cameras up and it’s go time. And Russell is intensely real and very present.
‘I just think he is one of the great actors of our time, so it was great to go at him again. We had some powerfully dynamic, combative scenes together in this film. You relish these moments when you have another actor sitting across from you that can match everything you do and give more back. It’s an adrenaline rush.’
Praising Russell’s performance, producer Donald De Line said, ‘Russell brings a lot of levity and humour to Hoffman, which I didn’t expect. Hoffman is a morally questionable character, and you’re not always sure how you feel about him. But he’s so straightforward about who he is and what he believes, it’s kind of refreshing. You almost can’t begrudge him for it.’
Russell had gained weight for the part – something which amused DiCaprio, who admitted that he ‘couldn’t stop’ laughing at his pal’s newfound bulk. Russell’s yo-yo weight gain and loss depending on the part was taking its toll, and after Body of Lies he was forced to take a health check after an embarrassing incident. ‘At one point I worried about it from a health point of view because I had my cholesterol checked. It had reached dangerous territory. I was surprised that my body was taking all of it so seriously. I was enjoying myself, because I was eating and drinking what I liked, but my body was objecting. The most frightening thing was having to rock back and forwards to get out of a car. Instead of stepping out, I had to tip myself out.’
Scott wanted to film in Dubai, but the film’s searing political theme was too controversial for the federation’s National Media Council, who refused to give permission. The CEO of Filmworks, Tim Smyth, whose Dubai-based company were hired by Warner Bros to set up shooting there, said, ‘After receiving approval, it was later rejected, as Dubai does not want to do any scripts that are of a political nature.
‘It’s unfortunate and limits the options of films to come to Dubai to help develop the industry, as to date 85 per cent of all films we have been approached about have some form of political nature.
Talking about shooting on location, Scott said, ‘This is the fourth time I’ve filmed in North Africa, so I’m something of an expert. I knew what I could do with the locations.’
The film’s Middle East Technical Advisor and Consultant, Sam Sako, said, ‘Mr Scott has a good background here. He has shot four films in Morocco, so I call him Scott of Arabia. He has been in this country for such a long time he should buy a villa and just shoot films here. Why not?’
One of the more intense scenes saw Leonardo DiCaprio’s character being tortured. Scott recalls of shooting that scene: ‘In Alien the studio said, “Gee you’re gross!” and I said, “Hang on, I’m paid to be gross!” because that was a horror movie. In this instance it’s tricky because now we’re dealing with a horrible reality. So I have to imagine what it would really be like… But also we’ve got good text, we’ve got good words, and we’ve got great actors. So in the end, it’s theatre.’
DiCaprio added, ‘We knew that there was this pivotal end moment in the movie where I’m in the hands of the enemy. This was something I think I knew way back when Bill Monahan first gave me the script and told me about this project, and told me about Ridley and about the whole relationship. We talked about that scene. This was the scene that needed to be the pivotal moment in the film, that unless that worked and was believable and had the guts to it and the intensity to it and the weight, the film wouldn’t work almost.
‘It was something we talked about at great length and analysed in every possible direction. What would a CIA agent trying to do his best in this world finally say if he’s in that situation? What are the words that would come out of his mouth? What kind of tactics would he use to try to get out of the situation? What is he thinking about? Is he thinking about his own survival, the betterment of his country, what secrets does he release?
‘It was one of the more complimented scenes for the movie and one of the most intense in the sense that we knew we had to knock it out of the park. I actually got sick after the scene for three days because there was just so much intensity put into that.’
Taking only $13 million in its first week in the US, the film seemed to split the critics. The main consensus was that despite its gritty look and topical subject matter, it resorted to the clichés of the spy thriller of old. However, it wouldn’t be too far fetched to assume that maybe the world didn’t need this kind of film at a time when the news was saturated with similar content.
Not that that was a surprise to the people involved making the film. Russell said before filming, ‘It’s machinations and creations of the American government, in terms of its foreign policy. I don’t think it’s so responsive to what’s happening now – because what’s happening now is actually the fruit of seeds planted two or three decades ago, if not more. But I think it’s timely to do a movie like that… it’s important, and Ridley is up for [portraying] the true negatives of this web of intrigue that’s been created.’
‘I don’t think it will be very popular. But that’s never been part of my project choice process.’