The Press Box - Ep 261: Interview With ‘A Cure for Wellness’ Director Gore Verbinski

Episode Date: February 16, 2017

Ringer editor-in-chief Sean Fennessey sits down with Academy Award winning director Gore Verbinski to discuss his new film 'A Cure For Wellness' (0:40)as well as his career arc of going from directing music videos and television commercials to big budget features like the 'Pirates of the Caribbean' and 'Rango' (11:00). 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-host 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 Weatherspoon dancing at wedding videos. We used to talk about Kanye West. He's in the, like, timeout corner right now.

Never ever talk about Christine Bransky. 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. My name is Sean Fennessey. I'm the editor-in-chief of The Ringer, and I am joined today by Gore Vrbinski, a filmmaker with a fascinating career.

He's directed the first three films in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, The Ring, the Oscar-winning Rango, and 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. 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, you know, it's 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'm not, 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 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 dark in space.

And then there's the kind of breadcrumbs, you know, approach. And 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 there's some, you know, 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 DeHan'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 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 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... my kale smoothie, you know, whether it's, 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 for me. Yeah, exactly, 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 fact.

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 century's 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 end. 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, you know, a cost and the bills come due. And 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, you know, had a personality. And the place, although it feels like one place, is actually multiple. There's the castle. And then we found that worked for the exterior, but the interior didn't really work well. And we found this old hospital outside of Berlin that was where Hitler was actually treated after, I think, mustard gas after World War I. So these places and some old swimming pools we found that were the tile kind of mass. And we're sort of clusying together all of these elements to make this feel like, you know, when you first arrive there, I think it has to be wonderful.

You know, we've made sort of Manhattan and, you know, a little dark. And this is sort of, you know, Lockhart's 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 the... It gets a little darker. It gets a little bit. Oh, yeah. 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 all language, so it's all in there. There's some stuff from novels like Thomas Mann's, The Magic Mountain, you know, comes to mind, as I mentioned, H.P. Lovecrafts. You know, there 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 Innocence, these movies all have, and The Shining, of course, have a real sense of something inevitable, 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 Hathar writer and I, early on were kind of experimenting, well, what if that was disease? What if we informed everything with the 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. 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

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 the 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. 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 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? Do you, do you, 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, 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, and lose your grip on the steering wheel. So, and then once you have that, once you know that, I think you will, you know, you're going to bleed for it every day. And so it is a sort of a tour of duty or, you know, you submerge. I do. I cannot, like, you know, everything else just gets put on hold, literally everything, because you're 24-7 on the film. And you just make it work, you know. 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, you're going to, 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 you're no longer on that boundary of the unknown. You know, you're no longer. And I think, you know, that's what was great about Rango. It was like, okay, 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. 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, you know, that's where the juice is full. That's where you kind of get excited every morning and get up. I don't know, but 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 pirate sequel.

And what does 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 it's, 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 to be 10 films into a largely major studio otore 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 trying to, you know, the difficult task of getting people to get in their car and pay too much for popcorn and drive to a movie theater is creating that sort of that eventizing of that experience. That's consequently driving away good writers predominantly and people of talent towards the television. I mean, with benefiting from Amazon and Netflix, you know, battling it out.

and the need for so much content has allowed really great stuff to, you know, on your box at home, you know. There are more and more reasons not to go to the movie theater because there's good long form. So, yeah, it's like a self-fulfilling negative prophecy. I mean, you can feel, it's like you can feel the fabric ripping. And, you know, once it starts, it's really hard to stop. Is there any part of you that wants to get into that long? long-form game the way things are changing? Sure, I think that's inevitable if we keep going this way, that it's, yeah, because

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

Whereas it's an asset in the 13 episodes 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 were a musician. You're from Tennessee, and you started directing music videos. How did that happen? Wow.

I just went, oh, yeah, I was from Tennessee. I was a musician. 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 L.A. and went to UCLA Film School, but was also playing music.

directing music videos for, you know, bands like bad religion and L7 and, you know, literally making, you know, working as a PA and after film school, at a company called Limelight productions. And it was like right at the, 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 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 out wow 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. So you can't approach a film like that at all. You're running a marathon now.

it's a completely different you have to leave all that behind you and I think there's value in kind of certainly from music videos and there's value to moving into commercials and getting the means to to learn the craft

you know instead of you know it's not quite as low budge but I also do 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 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 is it depend on the project that you're working on? The style you can use in a, again, you're sort of trying to outw 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 trying to find the right balance where you're like, 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 don't want to, 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 on the Mexican, you know, those two movies don't have a lot in common.

And 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 try 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 and everybody was saying that it's such a great script and you didn't

you sort of stopped working on the script in a way and there are lessons from that it's like okay the next one I'm never going to stop working on the script and I am going to have a more defined plan and there's less and less waste you know you kind of

you get to the editing room and you're like, oh, there's only five minutes of the movie that you've cut out. Or you kind of, as you're working on the screenplay, you start to get a sense of, you know, 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, 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 set tell you if I don't know the answer to a question yet. I'm not trying to protect some vision, you know, I'm going to share it with everybody and communicate that.

So I usually, you know, 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 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, you know, we want to get out of the way so the grips can lay, you know, 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 dossier ahead of time and share it 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 know, 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. So a nice reflection of the storytelling. There was like, exactly. There was like a three-month, or no, it was like 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 the 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. You know, you're balancing all those things. And you certainly don't want to be distracted if there's, you know, you've gotten there early in the morning. You've put 400 pirates through wardrobe and they're swinging, you know, between two ships and you're out in the ocean. But that's the background to somebody in the close to camera, you know, emoting or performing.

And you want to make, 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 of 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 know, you don't want your movies to lose money. That's not good for anybody. But I do, you know, maybe naive, but I do feel that maybe even if they can't articulate it, that an audience wants something new.

You know, that sure, the data may say they don't. But I feel like, you know, chasing yesterday's trends is is not ultimately a wise financial decision in the long run. We are going to need new IP. You know, it used to be our job to make the IP, right? E.T. wasn't, you know, a board game before it was a movie. You know, it was a movie. And then you had toys and dolls and all that stuff. So, you know, there was, somehow the whole thing's become inverted because it's, you know, 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 Milshan, who is sort of one of the last people working in this industry,

with an intuitive, you know, with some sense of a gut instinct. And, you know, the heads of all the studios used to have that, you know. But it's like now, and, you know, I think when, you know, Amy Pascal, when we lost Amy Pascal, we lost, you know, another one. It's like, you know, it's rare to find a person in that position who loves movies, you know. Usually if you go around and you ask people, it's like, I hate this business, you know, I hate movies. It's like, you know, because it's, it isn't, it is a, you know, it's a crazy business.

Right. 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, you know.

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, you know, 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, right? 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 Cagnada, 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, you know, a bunch of studios to look at all the art. And I called Johnny and sort of took him to 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 so and then but none the storyboard artists storyboard artists I used had not really worked on animated movies

the certain certainly all the guys that I used for creature design and 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 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, 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. And usually it has nothing to do with the financing at that point. It's like because you've 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.