Faraci interviews The Rat!
Q: A couple of weeks ago I spent some time talking to James Toback, who I know you’re friends with – Ratner: My favorite guy in the world.
Q: You’re in The Outsider, the documentary about him. He’s your favorite director, but you’re very different directors – you’re a big, mainstream director and he’s got a very different, smaller thing going on. Do you see yourself going that way, heading in a Tobackian direction?Ratner: [laughs] No. Look, I do my little projects, I do my little photo books, but I’m storyteller. And my sensibilities are more mainstream, more commercial. But the fact that I have relationship with Toback – that people who get to know me not on a superficial level, not by my work, but get to know me for who I am – shows that I’m not just the hack or the commercial sell out. I have respect from Toback and Polanski and all these guys because
I’m a real filmmaker. Whether or not you like the genre I’m in, you can’t deny I know what I’m doing. I’m not leaving it up to the actors. There’s some point of view. And you’ll see it in the making of – I was watching it the other day, and you see me coming up with this idea, that idea, I piece it together and how I make it work.
I realized when I got a call from Polanski after I did Rush Hour that directors aren’t snobs. Maybe some are. But mostly directors appreciate a well made film, and it doesn’t matter what kind of a film it is.
Q: Why is that different now? Why is that when you do the Rush Hour films you get pegged as just an action director?Ratner: If you really look at my work
I’m one of the only guys who – well, of course Spielberg and Zemeckis jump genres – but there’s no other guy who has done action comedy then romantic fantasy then Red Dragon, which is a psychological thriller, and then X-Men. I’m not saying I’m better than other directors, what I’m saying is that my approach is that I’m a filmmaker and I should be able to tell any story.
Q: But why is it that today there is so much pigeonholing?Ratner: I don’t know. I don’t know. That’s just the way the system works. Back in the day the system worked differently. It was an assembly line. Directors didn’t even edit their own movies. It’s a different world now, but Billy Wilder and these other directors made so many kinds of pictures.
Look, I think there’s a blurred line between my public persona and my work. It just happened. I think eventually people are going to look back and go, Wow. I’m not going to be in the tabloids anymore, I’m not going to be in US Magazine, and they’re going to be able to look at the film and how it holds up as a film on its own. It won’t be about ‘Brett Ratner speaks in the third person, so he’s an asshole.’ And I don’t speak in the third person, but that’s what they say.Q: I can go on the record as saying you are not currently speaking in the third person. Ratner: I’ve never spoke in the third person. But I did just say ‘Brett Ratner speaks in the third person,’ so now you can say I did talk in the third person.
Q: Where does that come from?Ratner:
People have always hated me.Q: It’s a jealousy thing?Ratner: That’s what my mom tells me, but that’s my mom. I don’t know.
Q: Is it funny to open up the tabloids and see stuff about you in there or is it annoying?Ratner: It’s not annoying at all.
The meanest group is Defamer and Harry Knowles. I don’t take myself that seriously. It’s like, come on. I totally laugh at it. If I did take it seriously, it would probably be worse than what it is.
I love what I do. I love filmmakers. Werner Herzog is here – how cool is that? The biggest star could be in the room and I care about the filmmakers – the directors and cinematographers and the producers. These are the people that I admire. And I love movies. I drove up from LA and the whole ride we played The Movie Game. We did movies with animals as the star. I went on and on and on and I was like, ‘Woah, I have seen a lot of movies!’
At the end of the day I want to leave a mark somehow. If one of my films holds up 100 years from now I’ll be happy wherever I’m watching from.
What’s amazing about sitting down with Ratner for any amount of time (and Davis and I ended up hanging out with him for longer than the time that’s represented here) is watching him do what may be his real life’s work: hitting on girls. The guy is relentless, saying “Hey sweetie,” or trading flirty banter with every single female that walks by. At one point he brought Woody Harrelson over to this attractive extra he had been hitting on, introducing her as his next girlfriend. He half-jokingly tried to talk a crew member out of her engagement.
“Always find something you have in common,” he tutored me. Ratner talks glowingly of the book The Game (note from ak: remember this one, guys?) as a great guide on how to score with women. I wondered if this was something that came to Ratner once he became a famous director, but in the last week I’ve talked to a lot of people who have known him for some time, and this, they tell me, is who Brett is. The guy’s charming, even when he’s operating on three hours of sleep and dressed as a whiny Jewish poker player.
Q: What’s going to make this one different from the last two?Ratner: It’s a buddy comedy but it’s got elements of fish out of water comedy. It mixes genres. Jackie Chan in the first one came to LA and was a fish out of water. Chris Tucker in the second one went to Hong Kong. Now they’re both going to Paris, where they don’t speak the language. If you really, really know films and you watch my films you’ll know my inspirations. It’s like if you watch Boogie Nights, although his are a little more obvious. I am Cuba or Putney Swope. My movies are a little more Enter the Dragon, 48 Hours, Beverly Hills Cop.
Q: The movies we grew up on.Ratner: Yeah, but movies that don’t have a style, per se.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s inspirations are very stylized.Q: Whether or not it was on purpose or not, there was a sense of competition with you taking on X3, Bryan taking on Superman and the two films coming out in the same general time frame. X3 is one of the biggest hits of the year, but Superman isn’t doing as well as they hoped. What happened? What went wrong?Ratner: I think good luck comes from good ideas. X3 is a good fucking idea.
Superman – and I started to feel this a little bit when I was in the process of making it – seems like less and less of a good idea. Contemporizing that, and the fact that there were five – I would get from a lot of people, ‘Oh, are you making Superman 7?’ From a lot of people. The studio probably thought that would benefit, but the fact that is that you have to revitalize a franchise. It’s almost like what happened with Red Dragon. Hannibal was a huge hit, but it burned a lot of the women because it was so violent. More violent than Silence of the Lambs. It burned a lot of people from the franchise. A lot of people didn’t turn out for that – even though it was a huge hit. I’m not complaining about it, but it wasn’t as big as Hannibal.
Because of the poor performances of the bad Supermans there was a stigma on it. That was the problem – how do you take that and contemporize it? It’s very difficult, and I think JJ [Abrams] had a brilliant interpretation of that story. I don’t know if you read that script?
Q: I didn’t.Ratner: I thought it was brilliant because it showed something that could have happened previous to the mythology that people knew. It said that Superman’s father had this brother and they were the two leaders of Krypton and there was this civil war on the planet. 40 minutes of the movie took place on Krypton. We were going to build a fucking planet! That makes it worthwhile to make a Superman movie! People would have been like, ‘Holy shit, this is mindblowing!’ Unfortunately it was too expensive – my version going in was 260 to 280 million dollars. And if you go in there you know you’re going to end up over 300.
Q: After the Sunset is a movie that seems like it should have performed. What happened?Ratner: I don’t know. You can blame marketing,
you can blame Pierce and Salma [note: Brett Ratner wrote in to clarify this point: "It sounds like I'm blaming them for the movie not performing. I didn't mean it like that. I loved the movie and I wouldn't change a thing if I could do it again." Sorry for any confusion on this point in the transcript]. Take the same movie with Brad and Angelina and it’s a 200 million dollar movie. That’s what I’m saying – I should have made that my little indy, grunge heist picture, the same way Ridley did that movie with Nic Cage.Note from ak: that right there is a HACK, ladies and gentlemen, he's blaming the problems of "Sunset" on the actors! Fucking rat! Fuck fuck fuck fuck!
Q: You can walk in at any random time and catch a show.Ratner: Any random fucking time. But there’s nothing like the anticipation of waiting in line to see the biggest spectacle in the world. And what was going on in the world at that time, because there were only three channels on TV and you never saw anything like that ever.
That’s why now Psycho doesn’t work. A guy getting stabbed in the shower – you’ve seen people’s heads getting cut off now because of what’s going on in the world. The interesting this is that I could show a kid the exact same movie I saw when I was six or seven and it’s not going to have the same meaning. That’s why filmmakers have different inspirations, because of what they saw as a kid.
I appreciate Peeping Tom, by Michael Powell, and I appreciate Spielberg and Scorsese’s Kurosawa inspirations, but they don’t mean the same thing to me. Beverly Hills Cop and 48 Hours mean more to me. And that’s because that’s what I grew up on. That was the age when I discovered the dream of being a director – I was 8 – and those were the popular movies of the time. I’m a product of my generation.
Q: Do you feel like you have to apologize for that?Ratner: I say it because when Polanski called me [about Rush Hour] I said, ‘I made Beverly Hills Cop,’ meaning I made a version of Beverly Hills Cop, he said, ‘Brett, you made a movie with pace that was funny and it’s hard to make a movie that works.’ I apologize for my movies, but it’s a product of who I am. I’m not apologizing for 48 Hours or Beverly Hills Cop, because those are incredible movies. I’m apologizing because my movies are contemporary versions of those movies just like Spielberg made contemporary versions of the movies he watched as a kid.
Brett Ratner on Harry Knowles(note from ak: If you read nothing else, please please please, just read this!)[/b]
Q: Harry Knowles has come up a couple of times. Have you met him?Ratner: I might have my facts a little bit off, but I think this is true. You can post this and see if he responds – he probably won’t, because he’s too busy with whatever he’s doing.
I think Harry Knowles is a complete hypocrite. That’s my personal opinion of him, because he’s become a different guy. I met him over the internet in 1996 or 7, when they first started. Somebody told me there was this cool guy doing reviews and I went to check him out. Nobody in Hollywood knew about him. What I’m saying, if my facts are straight, is that Quentin Tarantino was the person who knew and maybe Quentin told me about him.
I don’t remember how I got introduced to Harry. But I started emailing the guy, because I love movies. That’s all I know! I know shit. I started talking to him – ‘Did you see this one,’ ‘Yeah, tell me what you think!’ When I would see a movie I would write in, but he never printed my reviews because I’m a filmmaker.
Q: Did you have anything out yet?Ratner: This was before Money Talks! I wasn’t even a fucking feature director. I was a film student basically, doing music videos. I would do these fucking emails back and forth with the guy and then we would start talking on the phone. And we would talk and talk and talk and talk and talk. For hours and hours and hours. This was before he had any influence, so I had no reason… this guy was my friend. I was the first guy. Nobody talked to this guy, you know what I’m saying?
I got $150,000 to direct Money Talks. I had negative $250,000 in the bank. Do you understand? I had no money. I had no money. I took the only money
I had left and flew him and his fat fucking father to fucking LA. Him and his fat fucking father to LA for the premiere of Money Talks. The first fucking time Harry Knowles was in LA…Q: And you flew him out there.Ratner: I flew him out there. I brought him to LA. Now he might say, ‘Not true! In 1996 I blah blah,’ maybe Robert Rodriguez flew him to the set of El Mariachi, I don’t know. All I know is I remember putting him in the fucking Mondrian Hotel, him and his father. I got a limousine to fucking drive his ass to my premiere for no other reason than I liked talking movies with this guy and I wanted to know what he thought.
Now if I recall – it wasn’t like he said, ‘I love this movie, you’re an amazing filmmaker,’ I don’t know if those words were said, but he wrote a whole rave review for Money Talks. I don’t remember if I brought him out for Rush Hour, but I know one thing, and you can do the research and look in the archives – the review on Rush Hour was even fucking better. The biggest blow job you ever read in your fucking life. Because he really liked it. I was not the hack I am today.
Then I did Family Man. I don’t remember if it was good or bad, but I wasn’t angry with him because I was still his friend. I would never have gotten into it. Then one day I got a call and they wanted to hire me for Superman. I call up Harry and say, ‘Guess what, I’m doing Superman!’ And he was like [gasps]. I was like, ‘Why are you so shocked?’ ‘I don’t know, I just duhduhduh, duhduhduh.’
Q: And this is after Rush Hour 2?Ratner: Yes! This is his territory. The minute I go into Superman and I told him, ‘I’m going to hire you as a consultant on the movie because you know every Superman comic book.’ I read those growing up, but I don’t retain that stuff the way that Zak and Simon [Kinberg] does. I’m a different kind of pop culture [guy]. I said, ‘I want you as a consultant.’ He says, ‘Thank you, thank you very much!’ The next time I read a review – and it might have been of the JJ Abrams script – it says I called him up and said I never heard of Superman, who’s Superman?
Who is Superman? You have to be from another fucking planet not to know. There’s not a person on Earth – [to an extra walking by] Have you heard of Superman, sir?
Man: Yeah.
Ratner: Miss, have you ever heard of Superman?
Woman: Yes.
Ratner: OK. He’s as famous as Jesus Christ. I don’t think there’s a pop character – and this guy said I called him to say I don’t know who he was. Complete fucking lies. That was it. I don’t know what I did but get that job.
Now I don’t recall – did he say, ‘Thank God Brett’s off, McG’s going to come save the day?’ How can he take a guy with one movie – I’m not knocking McG! He’s my friend! But how do you fucking take McG and say that ‘It’s obvious from Charlie’s Angels that he’s going to do a better job than Brett Ratner on Superman’?
Q: At least you have a full name. Ratner: [laughs] Exactly. It’s crazy!
Q: And it’s been…Ratner: Ever since.
Q: There’s been no contact?Ratner: I’ve called him at least five times and he won’t return my calls. But I think Harry Knowles has much less influence. Did you see what happened on X-Men, where there was this great review from Moriarty? Simon Kinberg took him to the movie, he loved the movie. Then what’s his name saw the movie, Harry saw it, and said, ‘It’s the worst piece of shit ever made.’ He completely wrote this whole scathing thing that Moriarty’s wrong, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And all the TalkBacks…
Q: Please tell me you don’t read the TalkBacks.Ratner: I don’t. But they tell me. I don’t read any of this shit. But the studio reads every fucking word.
