By Fred Topel | Image property of Warner Bros Pictures.
The Bucket List
Rob Reiner has tackled everything from psychological horror to mockumentary, but he is still best known for his heartwarming dramedies. Stand By Me, When Harry Met Sally and The American President make you laugh and cry, as he hopes The Bucket List does too.
Reiner's Bucket List
"When I first got this project it was to me, here I am now 60 years old," said Reiner. "I just turned 60 this year and you do think about your mortality. You do start thinking about whether you've led a meaningful life and if you've done the things in your life that you should've been doing, what your relationships with your family and friends are like. All of those things do come into play. I don't think that I would've done a movie like this 20 years ago."
Reiner appreciated the mention of Stand By Me though, because this film perhaps serves as a bookend to it. "20 years ago I made Stand By Me and that movie was about friends on a journey and their first experience with death. They go to see a dead body. They've never seen a dead body before and it's the emotion that's brought up in this context that these two friends, particularly Gordy and Chris, best friends help each other. That's about two friends on a journey with death as the underlying theme and how they help each other through a tough time in life. Here we are at the end of life with two characters who become friends while on a journey facing death and helping each other work through the issues that they need to work through before they pass away. So they're very complimentary in that way and they're also similar in tone."
The film stars Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman as men dying of cancer who make a list of things they want to do in their last year of life. Perhaps Christmas is not the best time for a deathbed movie.
"Initially, we talked about other things. It's actually going to be widely released January 11th. That's when the wide release happens. It was always thought that that's what we would do, that we'd put it out then as a wide release but as we started making it, these kinds of things take on a life of their own. We thought that we might have something that audiences might respond to and people might find at Christmas time, at that point all the Christmas pictures were kind of filled in and we said, 'Okay, but lets get it out though.' It's not about dying. It's about living. It's a very uplifting movie. It's about finding the joy in all of that. So we thought that we could have a picture that could work at that time of the year and then we'd go wide after the end of the year."
For the politically outspoken Reiner, it was also a chance to take some digs at the health care system. Neither character is treated well as a patient, and one even runs the hospital. "Yes, there are digs because ultimately at the end of the day our healthcare system is not what it needs to be. There is a different set of standards for people who have money and for people who don't. Jack's character in the movie tries to make it more egalitarian, the whole idea that you have two beds to a room and no exceptions. The reality is that if he hadn't made that statement publicly he probably would've said, 'Screw this. I want my own private room.' The point is that out healthcare system does leave a lot to be desired. That's not that main thing. That's in there, but it's certainly not a main thing that we're trying to focus on."
The Bucket List opens to theatres on December 25th.
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