Mr. Brooks
Bruce Evans On Creating a Serial Killer
“You’re doing something that’s unforbidden and you’re in territory that you can be dramatic without people questioning you,” said Evans. “There’s nobody that can say to you, ‘No, no, they don’t do that.’ Unless you got a call or one of the reviewers was a serial killer and said, ‘No, no, no, I would never do that.’ It lends itself to wonderful drama.”
In such a tried and true genre, Evans and cowriter Raynold Gideon set out to distinguish Mr. Brooks from the pack. “When we sat down to write it, we had the idea of doing something that was dark and we hit on the serial killer idea but what we wanted to do was something that you had never seen before. We wanted to do something that was 180 degrees from Silence of the Lambs where he is kind of gleefully a serial killer or Kevin Spacey in Se7en, he’s obviously troubled. We wanted to do something that they weren’t obviously troubled.”
At the beginning of the film, Mr. Brooks is already established and the audience only has a little time to catch up. It assumes we should already know who he is. “It seemed kind of redundant to try and tell everybody who he was. We thought that the man of the year celebration would tell us all we needed to know about him. And I think the less exposition that you do up front, if you can get all of what you need to do up front, it allows time for the story to develop. In the story you discover more about them.”
Throughout the film, Mr. Brooks speaks to an imaginary character played by William Hurt, seamlessly integrated into scenes where Brooks converses with real world characters at the same time. “It’s what Mr. Brooks is hearing in his head and we all hear voices in our heads telling us throughout the day our thoughts. We have contradictory thoughts about things, should I, shouldn’t I, should I, shouldn’t I? What we were trying to do is visualize or dramatize that process and we all have dark sides I think that we want something or we want to do something that we know is not necessarily do something for us.”
On the hunt for Mr. Brooks is Detective Atwood (Demi Moore), a tough cop who’s kind of in her own little action movie. “She is as troubled as the hero which was our conceit. Truthfully, [we] never thought of it that her side was more action packed. We fell in love with her character and put her in and it was just a natural evolution of the world that she was in. She hunts for these guys and then things could happen.”
What it means is that she might be tough enough to catch Mr. Brooks in the act. “Our conceit was that if you were in a room with 1000 people, Mr. Brooks was the smartest person in the room. He has an intuition as to people’s desires and fears. And if Detective Atwood was in the room with him, it would be almost equal in her ability to perceive desires and fears in people. These are two people who read people brilliantly without any conscious effort.”
Mr. Brooks opens to theaters on June 1st.
For trailers, stills and more movie info, go to Mr. Brooks Movie Page.
Stay tuned for updates.
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