Mr. Brooks
Raynold Gideon Talks Mr. Brooks
“You might say we wanted to write an adult film,” said Gideon. “We were getting a lot of work for PGs like Stand By Me and Starman. All of those were. We thought, ‘Ah, let’s change our image, if you wish, in Hollywood here and write something that is adult, R rated.’ Then of course, what do you write about? Then we thought, ‘Well, maybe we should write about addiction.’ Then we thought the ultimate addition would be murder.”
Because the concept was addiction, Gideon had no worries about glorifying a classy, charismatic serial killer. “We think he’s a very moral man. He definitely has a sickness. We gave him a sickness. It is a virus that he’s desperately, desperately trying to get rid of, trying to fight. We’re all addicted to something. You’re probably addicted to movies as we are. Other people are addicted to chocolate, to wine, to sex, to drugs. Unless they say, ‘Oh, the heck with it, it doesn’t bother me, I don’t care. I’m just a chocoholic or an alcoholic or a drug addict,’ I think most people who are in that situation fight it and try to correct it. Mr. Brooks, to watch it, it’s a very moral movie. It is not encouraging. It is basically saying you need to fight your addiction.”
Not that Mr. Brooks is a message movie. It is first and foremost a fun ride. “[We] just wanted to tell a good story, an entertaining story. Didn’t want to make any point of it, any specific point. Anybody that says, ‘Oh, this is an important movie,’ not about Mr. Brooks but others, you go, ‘Uh, you don’t write important movies. You write movies to entertain people. Then if there is some importance that falls from it as it moves through the world, then fine.’ We’re not trying to give anybody a lesson or teach anybody anything, but if some of the repercussions are that whoa, wait a second, he has an incredibly horrific addiction but he’s fighting it.”
Real life serial killers unfortunately made the film all too plausible. “Serial killers have always been fascinating to us because they live within their community, they go out and they kill, nobody knows about it. Then of course when we finished the script, a lot of people said, ‘Hey, no, no, no, he can’t be a successful normal guy. These are weirdos that live in attics and kill chickens in their spare time.’ We said, ‘No, no, no, no, no.’ Then the BTK Killer came out and here’s a guy who’s an elder in the church and teaches Sunday school. He had a couple of kids and he had murdered half a dozen people. So it seems because of the BTK Killer, the FBI has changed their profile on the serial killers. They now look for anybody, any normal guy, the guy who lives next door to you might be.”
If Mr. Brooks sounds polished, he is actually one of Gideon and Evans’ least rewritten characters. “We wrote it very fast. We wrote it in about eight weeks, 8-10 weeks I think which is fast for us. They just came out. Usually when somebody reads a script of ours, we have rewritten each scene five, six, seven eight times to get it right, to get it right, to get it right. So when you read it, you’re reading our fifth or sixth draft. But we don’t write the whole script and then come and rewrite it, rewrite it. We rewrite each scene and don’t go onto the next scene before we’ve done this scene. So here, there’s some scenes for example, when she goes to her father’s office and she says, ‘I dropped out of school,’ that was written just one morning, boom, just came out and that’s exactly the way it was. It just flowed quite easily.”
Mr. Brooks is out in theaters now.
For trailers, stills and more movie info, go to Mr. Brooks Movie Page.
Stay tuned for updates.
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