The Big Picture - 'A Cure for Wellness' Director Gore Verbinski on Making Something Outside the Box and the Future of the Industry | The Big Picture (Ep. 5)

Episode Date: February 17, 2017

Gore Verbinski has been directing movies for two decades now, including The Ring, Rango, The Lone Ranger, and the first three Pirates of the Caribbean features. His latest picture, A Cure for Wellness, breaks away from big-budget Hollywood features with a lesser-known cast and unique premise. On the latest Channel 33 episode, he spoke with Sean Fennessey about the joy in making something different and the future of the industry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, my name is Chris Ryan. My name's Andy Greenwald. And we are the co-hosts of The Watch, a pop culture podcast on the Ringer Podcast Network. We are on Mondays and Thursdays. We mostly talk about TV, movies, music, pop culture. Jeremy Renner, house flipping, the papacy, Reese Witherspoon dancing at wedding videos. We used to talk about Kanye West. He's in the timeout corner right now, though.

Never, ever talk about Christine Baranski. You can listen to The Watch on Mondays and Thursdays on SoundCloud, iTunes, anywhere you get podcasts. Subscribe now. And thanks for listening. It's a good hang. Hello and welcome to a special Channel 33 podcast. Yeah, yeah many others. Gore's new movie, a gothic thriller that explores paranoia, sickness, and some slithering things, is called A Cure for Wellness, and it's in theaters February 17th.

It's quite an interesting movie, to say the least. Gore, thank you for being here with me. Thank you, Sean. Good to be here. Gore, can you describe your movie for listeners? Not really. I mean, it's not immediately reducible. I mean, I think that's one of its challenges. But yeah, I guess we were just exploring with the idea of taking a health spot, which is so tranquil and seemingly benign, and sort of corrupting that and saying, what if this was a place that didn't indeed make you well? One of the things that we've been talking about a lot, my producer and I,

is how did you sell this movie to a studio? How did you present this idea and get them to say, yes, make this? Hypnosis. Yeah, you know, this is not a major. It's New Regency who have a distribution deal at Fox. So the people there were really supportive and willing to go for it. I mean, I've never been accused of being risk-averse. This was just, it felt like a good home for this movie.

You've made a lot of big-scale pictures. You've made a lot of unusual pictures. You tend to jump around genre-wise. Why did you decide to make this movie at this time? There's something about the genre that is appealing. I mean, it's sort of fundamentally two ways you tell a movie, I guess. There's the sort of hand on your back, you know, you're leading the audience through the darkened space. And then there's the kind of breadcrumbs, you know, approach. And I I think particularly in the case of A Cure for Wellness, our protagonist is sort of being summoned to this place in the Alps, this kind of ancient castle that has sort of been converted to a wellness center but has its own dark past. And as he makes that journey, he's kind of slipping out of the sort of waking state and

into the sort of dream logic of this place. And he's reluctantly becoming a patient at this facility. And really, you're observing him, Dane DeHaan's character, Lockhart, become a patient. But really, you're the patient, right? You're in the darkened room and we're using sound and image and bringing all the tools to bear to perform a sort of psychological experiment on the audience. And I think that that – there's no other genre that allows you to kind of do that so overtly. How do you think about health personally and did that inform this choice to make this movie? Well, I certainly think we are vulnerable. There's something that, you know, we live in an

increasingly irrational world and we know history, but we're just sort of driving this car into the wall and we can't seem to turn the wheel. And I think there's a real sort of horror in that. And I suppose, you know, as I drink my kale smoothie, you know, whether it's that or pharmaceutical advertisements, we must think something's wrong with us. Otherwise, we wouldn't, you know, if I asked you, when was the last time you slept well or do your feet hurt? At some point, you're going to go, yeah, I have that. Both of those things are true. I have that. And you're kind of almost clutching onto it as a, you know, and this place, you know, because it is sort of lotus eaters, certainly the phase one of this

place is that it's offering diagnosis almost as a form of absolution, right? You have a note from your doctor. You're not well. You're not responsible because you're not well. I think that is quite appealing to a particular type of person. Yeah, I think the notion of a wellness spa and the feeling of sort of perpetual illness feels very modern, but the palette that you use in the movie, the way that the spa itself looks feels trapped in a very specific time. And, you know, through the course of the film, you identify that this is a centuries

old concern that wealthy people have been traveling to remote places to get this sort of treatment for a long time. How did you go about building the world, what it looked like, what the colors were? Well, I always imagined it – you start with who would be susceptible to this diagnosis. And, you know, kind of it's a place that oligarchs and heads of industry might – I always imagined you could – if you went deeper into that steam room, Lockhart might bump into Dick Cheney with a towel wrapped around him sitting alone in the corner of the steam room. There's something about conquest or achievement that has a cost and the bills come due. And that – so the place itself becomes very much a character. I scouted all over Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Romania,

trying to find the perfect sort of castle that felt like it had a personality. And the place, although it feels like one place, is actually multiple. There's the castle that worked for the exterior, but the interior didn't really work well and found this old hospital outside of berlin that was um where hitler was actually treated after i think mustard gas after world war one so these places and some old swimming pools we found that were the tile kind of matched it was sort of collusion together all of these elements to make this feel like just you know, when you first arrive there, I think it has to be wonderful. You know, we've made sort of Manhattan, you know, a little dark. And this is sort of, you know, Lockhart sort of stepping into the light.

Yeah, as the film goes on and we go deeper into the bowels of the spa, you find it. You slip back in. It gets a little darker. It gets a little bit. Oh, yeah. The colors change just a little bit um i'm curious if you watched any movies before you started this and if you used anything as a frame of reference well i think it's it's all language so it's all in there there are you know there's some stuff from novels like thomas man's the magic mountain you know comes to mind

as i mentioned hp lovecraft you know there there are are movies from the late 60s and 70s like The Servant by Joseph Losey or Polanski's The Tenant or Don't Look Now, Jack Clayton's The Innocents. is there's almost an invisible force pulling the camera down the corridor or the protagonist towards his epiphany. And we just, you know, Justin Haith, the writer, and I early on were kind of experimenting, well, what if that was disease? What if we informed everything with a sense of there's a black spot on your x-ray or there's a cancer or there's some hidden force.

And particularly when you have a protagonist that's in denial, I think, you want to have the film itself not be in denial. You know, it's like, no, we are going nowhere. We are present and we are a disease. We are a sickness. What is your hope about the way the movie will be received? Because I think that there is – I've seen it described as one of the most unusual major film releases in the last 20 years in a good way. Is it that people are mortified, scandalized, excited? Well, I think it's really difficult to get people to get in a car and drive to a movie theater these days. And that's why you see the eventizing of that experience because, you know, it is such a strange and, you know, we're repeating what the record industry did, you know, note for note. And you can feel the sort of fabric tearing. And, you know, it's certainly a lot easier to get $150 million to make a movie or eight than it is to get 38.

You know, that middle is just gone. So and I think if you make something that's not immediately reducible, it's even, you know, that's like that's even more difficult. And then so I just, you know, there are opportunities in the middle when everybody sort of runs away from the middle. I think there are opportunities in the middle when everybody sort of runs away from the middle. I think there are opportunities there. But you do have to, you know, be conscious of the fact that, yeah, we're not – you try to convince people to remember what it was like to go to a movie and not know anything about what you were going to see. You know, quite often we've been to the theme park or we've played the video game or read the book or we understand the comic or the toy before we go in. And it's increasingly more and more difficult

to try to say come and not know, you know, and come without any expectations. So when you start a movie like this, do you think it's going to be a long and grueling shoot? Does it take hundreds of days to make something? Because it is a very precise and specific, not just tone, but look and feel and scope, even though we're talking about sort of that middle ground. Yeah, I think you put everything into any – you better be able to answer the fundamental question, which is why do you have to tell this story before you set sail? Because you do not want to be 40 days into an 80-day shoot and lose your grip on the steering wheel. And then once you have that, once you know that, I think you're going to bleed for it every day. And so it is sort of a tour of duty or you submerge.

I do. I cannot like – everything else just gets put on hold, literally everything because you're 24-7 on the film. And you just make it work. You talked about that middle ground, that middle lane movie. You've obviously had a lot of experience with big IP projects, with sequels. Was it important for you to not do something like that after the last five or six films? Sure. I think that's, you know, it's cathartic in a way to kind of return to the scale of The Ring, let's say, or something like that.

I remember making the second pirate movie, and the scariest thing was that the studio wasn't nervous. Do you know what I mean? It was like the first, you know, it's like, okay, you're going to make a pirate movie. That will never work, you know? And so you kind of go, yeah, that's what's so exciting about it. And then there are notes and people panicked about, you know,

Johnny's performance or this or that and you know and then you're making a second one and they're just you know just keep doing that thing you're doing we love it you know and you're and you kind of go whoa why am i really nervous now because um because you're no longer on that boundary of the unknown you know you're no longer and i think you know unknown. You know, you're no longer. And I think, you know, that's what was great about Rango. It was like, okay, I don't know how to make an animated movie. That makes it more exciting. And I think with Cure for Wellness, it's like, let's go to this area where you don't see movies like this anymore.

So operating on that kind of seam, that outer boundary of like you're not quite sure this is going to work, that's where the juices flow. That's where you kind of get excited every morning, get up and – I don't know. It's what keeps me going. There's something very poetic about you releasing this movie in the same year that there is a Ring sequel and another Pirates sequel. What is it like to look at some of these things that you've helped birth in this country? this movie in the same year that there is a Ring sequel and another Pirates sequel. What is it like to look at some of these things that you've helped birth in this country move on without you? I think it's fine. I think it's healthy.

I think you, you know, there's a, for me personally, there's a point, and I felt like there was a, you know, to do three Pirates of the Caribbean movies was kind of the perfect journey for me because it was more to do than just one in terms of learning and growth and exploring and trying different things. But after that, it's like you get to a place like I can't learn anymore from this. I can't – there's no more personal growth. And then if it becomes some sort of, you know, financial equation, it's not, you know, it's just not appealing. I don't think I'd rather sell real estate for a living or something. I want to go back a little bit in your career and how you got started. But before we talk about that, I'm curious what it's like to be 10 films into a largely major studio auteur kind of career, which is an increasingly uncommon thing.

You know, you've talked about the way that the middle has been crunched. Is it more difficult than ever to find the kind of project that you want to do that you feel good about that can still go for $40 or $50 or $60 million? Sure. I mean, it's, you know, the byproduct of of trying to you know the difficult task of getting people to get in their car and pay too much for popcorn and drive to drive to a movie theater is creating that sort of that eventizing of that experience that's consequently driving away good writers predominantly and and and people of talent

towards the television i mean with benefiting from amazon and netflix you know battling it out and the the the need for so much content has allowed really great stuff to to you know on your on your box at home you know there are more and more reasons not to go to the movie theater because there's there's good long form um so yeah it's like a self-fulfilling negative prophecy i mean you you you can you can feel it's like you you can feel the fabric ripping and and you you know once it starts it's really hard to stop is there any part of you that wants to get into that long form game the way things are changing sure i think that's that's inevitable if if if we keep going this way, that it's – yeah, because you

– I mean I love the kind of – the getting – sitting around a fire and telling a story, right? The sort of campfire aspect. There's something greater than the sum of its parts when you get a bunch of strangers in a darkened room. And certainly your movie is never going to look or sound better than that experience. But you see the kind of collapsing of your second act and which are typically your – that's generally your problem with your movie is usually your second act. Whereas it's an asset in the you know, the 13 episode long form.

So, yeah, they're just different types of narrative unfolding, more literate. I want to ask you about your career and how you got started. I honestly don't know very much about it. I know you're a musician. You're from Tennessee and you started directing music videos. Is that, how did that happen? Wow. I just went, oh, yeah, I was from Tennessee.

I was a musician. Are all those things true? Yeah. Well, I was born in Tennessee. My father was a nuclear physicist. But I grew up in San Diego. And then I was playing in a lot of bands and moved to LA and went to UCLA film school, but was also playing music and directing music videos for bands like Bad Religion and L7 and literally

working as a PA after film school at a company called Limelight Productions. And it was right when MTV was kind of blowing up. So there were opportunities, you know, to jump into music videos and then from there to commercials and then to features. How do you make that jump from, you know, you made a handful of very iconic commercials, especially in a time when there were a lot of aspiring filmmakers who were using commercials as a real springboard. How do you make that transition from maintaining the tone of the commercials that you set,

which was fairly unique, you know, the 100-foot-tall Michael Jordan, Air Jordan commercials, very famous. How do you translate that to something like your first film, Mouse Hunt, and say that this is my style? Yeah, you don't. You really can't. That's the danger. I mean, you really have to take off that hat. That, you know, trying to outwow or convey, you know, come up with a vehicle that conveys a 30-second idea that has to, you know, that's going to play in between a Chevy truck commercial and, you know, a Nike spot. You know, that is, you're putting everything, condensing everything into

this one little piece of marketing. Um, so you can't approach a film like that at all. You're, you're, you're running a marathon now. You, it's a completely different, um, you have to leave all that behind you. And I think there's value in kind of, certainly from, from music videos and there's value to moving into commercials and getting the means to learn the craft, you know, instead of, you know, it's not quite as low budge. But I also did a short film before I tackled a feature just because it's a different language. Did you specifically take things that you learned in the commercial space? Like there's some perspectives that you see, say, in an Intel commercial or in a Levi's commercial where, you know, the camera is sitting underneath something that you don't usually see a camera sitting underneath and say, I know I want to put this picture inside of a movie.

Or does it depend on the project that you're working on? The style you can use in a – again, you're sort of trying to outlaw these 30-second bursts. So you're deploying, you know, extreme versions of style in that space. And I think that doesn't work. You really don't want to wear the wrong dress to the party when you're composing a movie. In the case of A Cure for Wellness, there is a, you know, he's trying to find the right balance where there's something in the frame that feels intentional or feels like something inevitable is occurring that the protagonist maybe is oblivious to. That requires, sure, a commitment to a style, but you're not competing against, you're not competing against, you know,

something immediately adjacent to you. You have time, and I think you'd be thrown off the rails if you started to get sort of too wonky with that. In the new film, you know, you're obviously a very seasoned and confident filmmaker, and you know how to establish tone and look and style. When you're making a handful of jumps in the early stages of your career, Mouse Hunt, The Mexican, you know how to establish tone and look and style. When you're making a handful of jumps in the early stages of your career, Mouse Hunt, The Mexican, you know, those two movies

don't have a lot in common. Do you know that you want to be able to jump around stylistically or is it because you are trying to get the best possible job that you are making that transition? Every movie is a learning experience. You know, there are lessons you learn. I think there was probably 40 minutes on the floor of the editing room from Mouse Hunt. You know, just completely, you know, overly storyboarded the movie and sort of obsessive and then tried to kind of swing completely the other direction on the Mexican. I'm like, let's keep it loose, and I don't want to, like, and there are sort of, you know, and everybody was saying that, you know, it's such a great script, and you didn't,

you sort of stopped working on the script in a way, and, you know, there are lessons from that. It's like, okay, the next one, like, I'm never going to stop working on the script, and, you know, I am going to have, you know, a more defined plan, and there's less and less waste. You kind of get to the editing room and you're like, oh, it's only five minutes of the movie that you've cut out. You kind of – as you're working on the screenplay, you start to get a sense of the lessons of the past you're bringing to bear. But they're different for each genre and for each narrative.

You strike me as a very thoughtful and calm person. And oftentimes people who have to oversee a massive production like Pirates or The Lone Ranger can be a bit brusque and intense and loud. How do you command and maintain a set? I just try to communicate to everybody. I'm not like, I don't try to like hide anything in terms of, I will tell you if I don't know the answer to a question yet. I'm not trying to protect some vision. I'm going to share it with everybody and communicate that. So I usually – at the beginning of the day, I'll have my – I have like a four-foot piece of foam core with all the shots drawn out on the day in the way they're going to edit. So it's not a shot list.

It's not coverage. It's like this is, these are the, this is the mosaic. These are the pieces of the puzzle we are getting today. And then I'll put like a blue and red Sharpie around them for like lighting directions and say we're going to turn around at 3 in the afternoon or in the morning we're shooting this direction. And then we want to get out of the way so the grips can lay 30 feet of dolly track and then we'll shoot this piece.

And so you're kind of assembling a sort of – you're in triage mode once you start the production. And it's really important to have a kind of very specific plan. And, you know, my wife always says, you're no longer the architect or the contractor when I start a movie, you know, because there's all that planning. And then it's just you're in kind of execution mode. What do you do?

Do you build a Bible or a dossier ahead of time and share with people and say this is what is going to happen precisely? Sure. I try to be very accurate in – certainly in terms of budgeting and planning and saying this is really important. And things – events occur. You have weather or we – on the Cure for Wellness, the stage caught on fire and we burned down our entire set and the stage.

It's a nice reflection of some of the storytelling. There was like a three-month or no, there was like a six-week delay to kind of move the sets and reconstruct, salvage what we could and come back. So those curves happen and you adjust. But I try to say this is the movie we're telling so that everybody who is involved in resource management, there's no fiscal decision that isn't a creative decision ultimately. And you kind of want to squeeze as much as you can and say this is going to be on screen and that's why we're here. And sometimes it's as simple as like protecting that this is a really emotional scene

i want it really quiet i want to you know that's why we're shooting in this location is to protect the performance or other you know you're balancing all those things and you certainly don't want to be distracted if there's you know you've you've gotten there early in the morning you've you've put 400 pirates through wardrobe and they're swinging between two ships and you're out in the ocean but that's the background to somebody close to camera emoting or performing there's a mantra which is all movies are small

and you try to maintain that you try to say look let's make this because the performance is at the end of the day everything so the more you can plan all that stuff, the less it's in the way or the less it feels like it's a distraction. It's a very interesting paradox you described, every creative decision being a fiscal decision

and vice versa in some respects. Is it painful for you or difficult if something that you work hard on doesn't do well fiscally, even if you feel good about it creatively? Sure. I mean, yeah. I think that you just – you want to be able to do it again. You don't want your movies to lose money. That's not good for anybody. But I do – I may be naive, but I do feel that maybe even if they can't articulate it, that an audience wants something new.

Sure, the data may say they don't. But I feel like chasing yesterday's trends is not ultimately a wise financial decision in the long run. We are going to need new IP. It used to be our job to make the IP. ET wasn't a board game before it was a movie. It was a movie and then you had toys and dolls and all that stuff. There was – somehow the whole thing has become inverted because it's – people are so adverse to risk and, you know, relying

on the data. But the data collection itself is going to rely on what worked yesterday. Yeah. I remember around the time of Rango, you said that data is killing us specifically with regard to making films. This movie in a lot of ways feels like a reaction to that too. Sure. I think you need, you know, I was very fortunate to have a financier in Arnon Milshon who is

sort of one of the last people working in this industry with an intuitive – with some sense of a gut instinct. And the heads of all the studios used to have that. But it's like now and I think when we lost Amy Pascal, we lost another one. It's rare to find a person in that position who loves movies. Usually if you go around and you ask people, it's like, I hate this business. I hate movies. It's like – because it's – it is a crazy business. But you want to find a partner.

Certainly if you're a director, you want to find a partner. When it comes down to it, you can argue a point with somebody and the person across the table is like a fan of film. It's an unbelievable thing. I think it's why there's so much attrition too because you have a lot of people who don't love it enough to stick around. Sure. I think if you're just in it for the business, there are easier and more satisfying ways to make money. Let's talk about Rango really quickly. Probably one of my 10 favorite films of all time. How do you look back on that movie now? You won an Oscar for it. It was financially successful. You talked a little

bit when we were speaking earlier about wanting to do it because you had not done an animated film before and you wanted to take on a new chance. I'm curious specifically about that movie, but also about all your movies. If you go back and look at the things that you've done and try to reflect on them at all. Sure. I think that there was a spirit there. It's that kind of don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness mentality. There was never a point where we were asking for permission to make that movie. I pitched it to John Logan and then John Logan and I pitched it to Graham King and Graham King, we needed some startup money and he gave us some startup money

and then I had six artists in my house in La Cunada and we were just working every day in this little ranch house. And we spent 18 months on the story reel, just recording voices on a Mac. And there was never a moment where we thought, well, this wasn't going to happen. And then we brought in a bunch of studios to look at all the art. And I called Johnny and sort of took him through the story. And he said, yeah, Lizard, I'm in. And then, you know, yeah, that was kind of an interesting time.

And I think, you know, they needed product immediately. And we had this thing that was teed up. But the storyboard artists I used had not really worked on animated movies. Certainly all the guys that I used for creature design are more from live action. We ended up doing the final animation at ILM, who had never made an animated movie. So it was nice to kind of—all the people who were saying, you can't do that, you don't do it like this. And when we were recording the voices, I wanted everybody in the room and we were chasing them around with a boom mic and just sort of saying, well, we're going to make it the way I know how to make it, not the way somebody else does it, not to disvalue that.

I think that everybody has an approach. So I guess the long answer to your question is, yeah, you try to get back to that feeling of like, well, what are we doing next? And then you're just doing it. If you have to tell a story, you'll figure out a way, even if you have to do like sock puppets and an iPhone. It's amazing to hear you describe making a movie like creating a startup company. You know, often it seems a, it seems a lot different than that from the outside to a lot of people.

So how do you move forward from something as unique as a cure for wellness and figure out your next project? Does it have to be completely different for you, a new company? Yeah. I mean, I mean, pretty much. I mean, I've got, there were four or five things right now that were pushed to the back burner because, you know, the cure submarine was going under for, you know, two years.

So we're resurfacing and those are all going to come forward. And, you know, that same approach will be used. And then, you know, it's like one of them will become ripe and it becomes apparent pretty quickly like, oh, this feels like this is going to happen next and for all the right reasons or – and usually it has nothing to do with the financing at that point. It's like because you kind of feel like you've figured it out. Gore, thank you very much for joining me today. A Cure for Wellness is out February 17th. I appreciate the time.

Thank you very much. Great to see you.