Fracture
Gregory Hoblit on Fracture Thrills
In the film, Willy Beachum (Ryan Gosling) is an ambitious DA about to leave for a corporate gig when his last case gets the better of him. An affair with his new boss (Rosamund Pike) complicates his commitments. Now imagine the drama if instead of a boss, Pike's character was a stripper.
"It wasn't just a stripper," said Hoblit. "She was an Asian tattooed pole dancer stripper. It was a vestige of the Dan Pine version of this. It wasn't so much her that I was uncomfortable with. It was Willy. And by changing Willy, you had to change her. I was not interested in that but Willy was a kind of the ne'er do well, trust fund kind of kid, just a surfer dude. He smoked dope and his dad got him into SC law school and got him into the DA's office just to keep him out of trouble because his dad was a very powerful man and just wanted his kid to not be a problem for him."
In the film, Willy attends his boss's family Thanksgiving where it comes out that he has not let go of this case in order to focus on his new job. "The Thanksgiving scene which in this movie is set at her house was at his house where Willy brings his girlfriend home with him in kind of a f*** you to his family. And then she sits there and she gets some backbone. She goes, 'You can't do this to me. I'm out of here.' But I was more interested in the Willy that you have in the movie right now, so in changing him, by design you had to change her and the notion became for me that if I made her part of the system that he comes to realize that he can't abide by, it's just an added layer."
A veteran of TV cop and lawyer shows, Hoblit also knew when the original screenwriters were winging it with the lingo. "Also my dad was an FBI agent for 26 years so I grew up in that culture, I had a pretty good instinct when things are being done right and being done wrong, and how procedures, when they're honest and when they're being fudged or people are playing fast and loose. So I think between the mechanical end of it all and the intuitive end of it all, it seems to work pretty well for me so I can smell when things are not true. This script here, all the procedural stuff was just horrible. From the hostage negotiator stuff up front to all the criminal stuff, all the cop side of it, I just knew was not there. So I went at it with GlennGers the writer and we really just pounded away. And the law stuff too, the legal stuff, got in people who were essentially technical advisors to say, 'This is exactly how it would go. This is exactly what would happen.'"
With so many problems, it almost seems a wonder why a filmmaker would try so hard to fix them. "Listen, Primal Fear was walking around for years before. A lot of people read it, really smart people read it and just didn't quite see a way to solve it and a lot of people read this none. It just rang my bell. To begin with, I thought the Crawford character was fascinating. A sociopath so clear about what he was going to do and so clear about thinking he could get away with it was interesting to me, and the setup was interesting. I liked the ending although we've changed the ending. I liked what it was. And sometimes you pick up a script and you can see the movie as you read it and I could just see it."
Fracture opens to theatres on April 20th.
For the trailer, poster, stills and more movie info, go to the Fracture
Movie Page.
Stay tuned for updates.
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