British writer and director Rupert Wyatt discusses his latest film The Gambler.
After the directorial debut of British writer and filmmaker Rupert Wyatt, The Escapist (2008) was released to critical acclaim and entering into the Sundance Film Festival, his career has taken off by storm. His second feature saw Wyatt direct Oscar nominee James Franco in science-fiction franchise Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011). The film grossed a staggering $480million and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.
WARNING: trailer contains strong language
Wyatt now returns to the director’s chair with his latest crime drama The Gambler, a remake of the 1974 picture starring James Caan. Wyatt directs Mark Wahlberg in the lead role of literary professor Jim Bennett whose severe addiction to gambling results in him having to borrow money from a loan shark. His relationships around him begin to crumble as he falls deeper and deeper into debt.
We spoke with Wyatt about the remaking the 1974 film, his relationship with Mark Wahlberg and the true art of professional gambling.
After the success of Rise of the Planet of the Apes you must have been approached with a lot of scripts. What was is about William’s that stood out for you?
Well, there were some scripts that were optioned for me to potentially direct after ROTPOTA, and I spent a few months on a project of my own which I’m developing and still intend on making. I had one in particular that I wanted to make which turned out a lot longer than I had initially thought. So I was really keen to get back to work and was therefore looking out for a script that was fully formed, available for me to work on right away and didn’t need to rewrite; and that was the case with William’s script. I could visualise it very clearly, and obviously with Mark [Wahlberg] coming to me with the project I could see that working out very well. All of those things added up to what was essentially me jumping onto a moving train.
It is a remake of sorts, with the original being released in 1974, but how do you see the contrast between James Caan’s Axel and Mark Wahlberg’s Jim? How does it play in your mind?
The big fundamental difference to me is that the original film is all about addiction and ours is actually a story of a man with a clear agenda; he wants out of his life; he wants out of the trappings of the kind of gilded cage in which he’s become trapped for years. He’s an overdog wanting to become an underdog in a sense, and so therefore he uses gambling as a means for reconstruction, for him to blow it up and start all over again. On one level you could say that he is self-destructive but not in a suicidal way. He’s willing to risk his life to get out, but it is ultimately a redemption story. Whereas, in the original, the protagonist is much more of a man circling the drain and not in control of his actions and, as a result of his actions, hurting the people around him. So, those are two very different approaches to the title and the story.
Read our interview with The Gambler screenwriter William Monahan
It’s interesting that the story has shifted in the original from the East to the West. How much is location a key player in terms of narrative, on this project specifically?
A great deal. The original was trapped in the malaise of 1970s New York City, and gambling as an institution was on the rise, but it’s much more oblique form of gambling that works in that geographical context. Ours, set in the West Coast in the 21st century, is on one level a study of western material excess and our constant drive for the accumulation of great wealth or prestige, or reaching for the very top. Los Angeles is wholly representative of that; it is a city of haves and have-nots, so it seemed a perfect place to locate it.
It is a city of absolute contrasts: on one level you have the gigantic mansions then on the other what are the equivalent of favelas rife with poverty. It’s a real striking place of contrast.
It’s incredibly diverse, and I think the journey that Jim goes on starts on the West Coast in this Mount Olympus-style environment high up in this beautiful villa, and then he journeys East and gradually descends to a point where he essentially ends up in the belly of the beast in this underworld in Korea Town downtown. So it’s got a heaven and hell aspect to it, and the great thing for me was that that journey takes him through these different environments where he comes across all these different and colourful characters.
What research did you get into to get into that mind-set of the gambling world? I imagine, because they’re illegal you didn’t, but that you didn’t frequent any gambling rings…
Mark and I went to a few behind-closed-doors poker games up in the hills peopled with these very high-stakes individuals; professional gamblers and just incredibly wealthy men who we were told host private gambling events in the mansions of their private homes in Beverly Hills. Those were fascinating to watch as there was a rather extraordinary amount of money exchanging hands, but the thing I took away from it was the extraordinary lack of emotion shown with the winners of the lots. This kind of inspired me to shoot my blackjack scene like it was a gunfight and approach it in the way Sergio Leone shot his westerns, which is much more a style made up of pauses, the focus on eyelines, etc.
