Mr. Brooks may seem to come out of nowhere from the writer of Stand By Me and the director of Kuffs. Bruce A. Evans has been working consistently in the decades since those films. It’s just that Brooks was the first one to fall into place.
Bruce Evans On Mr. Brooks
“I directed Kuffs 15 years ago,” said Evans. “What happened was we had jobs and the things that we wrote were too big for financiers to trust me with. And with this one, we just said, ‘Let’s go out on a limb with this.’”
It has not been 15 years in the making though. “Oh, no, no, no. This one is only about three years old, three and a half years old.”
Evans and partner Raynold Gideon’s last screen credit was 1997’s Jungle 2 Jungle but they have remained busy. “We’ve done screenplays and rewrites and all of that kind of stuff in between.”
Mr. Brooks
Among their interesting projects was the famous blockbuster-to-be Cutthroat Island. “Well, Cutthroat was written for Michael Douglas and he was supposed to do the Geena Davis part. It was basically Pirates of the Caribbean. Geena Davis was to play the girl and Michael the guy and basically what they did is they made Matthew Modine the girl and Geena that guy. We were called in to rewrite it and ended up getting story credit so you know how much we did.”
Getting back behind the camera 15 years after Kuffs was only a slight adjustment, and one for the better. “It was kind of like riding a bicycle. The only thing is this time I knew more how to prepare. And I had a great team around me. Jim Wilson, Kevin Costner, Ray Gideon as producers, that’s a great, great team. Christian Slater was very good and Milla [Jovovich] was very good but if you get a chance to work with Kevin and William [Hurt] and Dane [Cook] and Demi [Moore] and Marg [Helgenberger], those are people that can make you look really good.”
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