A FAILURE YOU CANNOT OWN

In the late eighties, his artistry was endorsed by none other than Stanley Kubrick. What did Jeremiah Chechik make that Kubrick was so fond of? Beer commercials. Two years later he made one of the most beloved Christmas movies of all time, the hilarious CHRISTMAS VACATION with Chevy Chase. He followed that with the romantic BENNY & JOON, starring Johnny Depp, another movie that has stood the test of time. His remake of Henri Clouzot’s classic psycho-thriller LES DIABOLIQUES proved a difficult shoot, when stars Sharon Stone and Isabelle Adjani clashed. But it was the much publicized failure of THE AVENGERS, which the studio re-cut heavily, that landed him ‘in movie jail’. It made him rethink his existence, in places like the sub-Sahara and the Colombian jungle. When Chechik finally re-appeared in Hollywood, he wasn’t afraid of failure anymore. ‘I was washed up! What did I care?’ He has been a successful television director and producer ever since. Roel Haanen talked to him via Zoom in November 2021.

You’re currently preparing the television series Fat Vampire. Because your last directing credit is from 2017 and you’ve been doing art projects, I had assumed you had retired from directing.

No. From 2017 on I had been focused on writing a television series, which hopefully will follow Fat Vampire. I started a company, Modern Story, with a partner [Harley Peyton], and we took 2018 and 2019 to build it and prepare projects. We were pretty much ready to go when the pandemic hit. So, we had to pause. Fat Vampire is our first project.

At the same time, I did shows with my art in Argentina and Los Angeles and I’ll probably do shows in New York and possibly Berlin in the spring. I’ve been involved in the art world and the film and television world for a long time now.

In which of those worlds do you feel most comfortable, photography or film and television?

That’s a good question, but not one that really directs too much thought for me. Because I wake up every morning thinking: What can I make today, that did not exist yesterday? I’m very fluid in terms of media.

Also, I wouldn’t call my art work pure photography. It really has evolved digitally. Some of it is completely abstracted forms. Some of it is animated, some of it is still. It’s an exploration and refining of techniques that I’ve been doing for a long time. With the advent of NFT’s and the market for that, there’s now a way to present that work that didn’t exist three years ago. I do love that part of my creative life, because there are no other voices in my head but my own which is loud and chaotic enough.

Directing film or television is part of my DNA. But it’s a group process. There’s something fun about the collective energy. So, to me it’s not one or the other. Both disciplines have their manifestations of creativity.

I’ve been very fortunate that I continue to be active. Certainly in the art space. Most of the people I work with in the crypto world are in their twenties. In the more traditional art world they’re in their forties. When it comes to film and television financing, that’s where people are mostly above forty. It’s really exciting for me to move laterally across these worlds.

As a director you started out making commercials. I don’t mean this to sound snobbish, but I wonder how a studio can determine if a commercial director is even able to direct a feature film. To me, commercials seem like such a specific medium, with its own rules.

Absolutely. They’re completely different. Not in terms of pushing the camera around, creating good shots, knowing how a crew works. That part is the same. However, that’s not film making. Film making is story telling. Whenever I taught directing, students would ask me: How do you know where to put the camera? I always reply: You put the camera where the story is. But to understand story you have to read. Getting your information from Twitter, Insta, Google and a variety of one paragraph short stories doesn’t really prepare you as a director. You have to do the work. Otherwise you’re basically going to be pushed around the camera, making bigger commercials, by which I mean branded movies. A director doesn’t have that much control over the costumes, the casting, the script. Even the performances are pretty well locked in by the actors who know their characters. You’re just responsible for getting all the moving pieces together.

So, how did you make the transition from commercials to features?

I was very lucky. Some of the commercials I was doing just hit at the right time, which made me one of the more visible commercial directors. It wasn’t that common for a commercial director to direct feature films in those days. I’ve told this story many times: I was on a plane from New York to L.A. and I was reading an interview in The New York Times with Stanley Kubrick who was promoting FULL METAL JACKET. And they asked him if there was an example of contemporary American filmmaking that he really liked and he said: Well, I really like these beer commercials. They’re story telling in such a small format. And he described them. I’m reading this and I’m going: Oh my god! Those are my commercials! I patted myself on the shoulder and that was it. But a few weeks later I got a call from Steven Spielberg and he asked if I wanted to come in. I walked out of that meeting with an office at Amblin and a deal to make a movie.

We decided on a small movie that I would make for Warners. I plunged in and got to know everyone at Warner Brothers. Then the studio wanted this small movie [about the Apollo Theatre in Harlem] to become a really big movie. But I didn’t want to do that. I really felt that the fundamentals of that story needed to be small in order to get the theme across. So I said no, which was a bold decision on my part. Stupid even, at that point in my career. What was I thinking? Bottom line is that Warners kept sending me scripts after that and one of them was CHRISTMAS VACATION. I loved it right away. That’s how I ended up at Warners as a feature director.

I assume you were you familiar with Chevy Chase’s work.

[Chuckles] You mean his oeuvre? Certainly. I loved CADDYSHACK and all that. But I never saw myself as a director of that kind of movie. I had heard he was quite difficult, but I never found that to be the case.

But you had not seen the previous VACATION movies, and you didn’t watch them in preparation, I believe.

No, still haven’t. Because John Hughes, who as a producer was fantastic, had written this great story Christmas ’59, which he adapted into the screenplay, and because of my own ego, I had decided I wanted to make a wholly original movie. So, I forced myself not to watch those other two. I didn’t want to be influenced. I approached it as an original film, which is how John conceptualized it anyway.

I think CHRISTMAS VACATION is the best in the series, because here Clark Griswold is more than a bumbling dad. His attempts to create the best Christmas for his family, really have an emotional core. There are some genuinely touching moments, like the scene in the attic where Clark finds the old 8MM reels of his family. And the conversation with his own father, played by John Randolph, in the kitchen.

Those are two of my favorite scenes. The way I approached the film has a lot to do with how I saw myself as a director. The Preston Sturges movie SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS was on my mind. It’s about a film director who’s very successful in broad comedy, but he wants to make a movie about the struggle of the working class. He goes to jail, works on a chain gang, and the turning point is when he watches a cartoon with the other prisoners, who have no hope, and he looks around and he sees them all laughing and he reaches this profound understanding that comedy is a gift. With CHRISTMAS VACATION I tried to define what is important to me in a comedy. I looked for any opportunity to ground the film in real life emotion. That was my number one concern. When I could, I needed to address the foundation of emotion in order to make the comedy work. If left on its own, the comedy would be funny. People would laugh, but they would walk out of the theater with very little resonance.

When we test-screened the film, people were laughing at all the right times. So, I started to relax a bit, because I was nervous as hell. There was a scene where Clark Griswold wants to light up all the Christmas lights on his house. He slowly puts the plug in the socket and nothing happens. The entire audience went: Ooohhhh! That’s when I knew I had something. Terry Semel, who was the head of the studio, leaned over and said: I think you have a hit. Because that moment wasn’t about the jokes. It meant the audience was invested in this man who was so desperate to do something good for his family, he’s capable of destroying everything in the process and crushing himself with self-doubt. I don’t mean to be overly intellectual about a broad comedy, but that metaphor is something you can carry and it was something I thought about when I was preparing the movie.

You assembled a tremendous cast for CHRISTMAS VACATION, who all get their moment to shine in the movie.

I did cast great actors who surrounded me with their experience. I was very open about my own inexperience. E.G. Marshall, John Randolph, those guys were giants. Mae Questel was the voice of Betty Boop in the thirties. And Wiliam Hickey was one of the great acting teachers of New York. They all had been through Hollywood at its worst and best. For them to be in a broad comedy was absolutely great. And Randy Quaid provided all of the popcorn.

How much of the role did Chevy Chase improvise?

Very little. John Hughes’s script was really amazing and funny. There were these scenes where Chevy had to do pages of dialogue, when he’s ranting and ranting. We would put up all these cue cards everywhere and help him along. It was too much to memorize.

When you’re directing a comedy like that, with so many jokes, how do you determine the rhythm? Did you have any kill-your-darlings situations where you had to cut a good joke for the flow of the movie?

There’s an old adage in comedy: Don’t kill funny. Jerry Greenberg, who had edited a number of classics like THE FRENCH CONNECTION, didn’t have much experience in comedy. And it was my first film. But we decided during editing that if it was funny to us, it’s going to be funny to at least one other person. But when you screen it for an audience, that’s when you realize you have to fill in some gaps, because you don’t want a laugh on top of another laugh. A drama you can edit without previews, because that’s about the expression of the intention of the writer, director and actors. You can sort of feel if the rhythm is right. But with comedy people laugh at odd things. And they also laugh in anticipation. That is hard to predict, especially when you yourself have seen the film a hundred thousand times in editing. A comedy, when you screen it, belongs as much to the audience as it does to you.

What did CHRISTMAS VACATION do for your career? Were you offered many other comedies after that?

I was, but I didn’t want to do them. Was that a mistake? I don’t know. My influences as a director preceded the specialty directors that came later: the action guy, the comedy guy, the superhero guy. My influences were Billy Wilder and Howard Hawks. They would do a war film and then a screwball comedy. I love that. As a television director I still try to do that. Like you said, comedy needs an emotional foundation. And drama works even better if you punctuate it with lightness or laughter.

When you did BENNY & JOON, your second picture, were you already on board when Laura Dern and Woody Harrelson were cast and then left?

Woody was cast, but then he got this offer to do INDECENT PROPOSAL with Robert Redford. A big pay day for him. So, he went on to do that. Laura was considered, not cast. We had met several times. She was interested in doing it, but I don’t remember if she passed on it or I did.

Do you consider it a lucky turn of events in hindsight? Because I think Aiden Quinn is especially terrific in the movie.

I can’t imagine the movie without Aiden to be honest.

Or Johnny Depp.

No. I don’t think there was anybody who could have done it. Not only the way he did it, but inhabiting that character. And that character was not written that way in the initial drafts. He was written as a more Robin Williams type character, in terms of the energy. I worked with Barry, the writer, to really transform the character into what you see in the film.

How did you work with Depp on the role?

We worked really hard on this character for month before we started shooting. We watched Buster Keaton movies on the big screen in a silent movie theater in LA. The studio even allowed us to get an organist. It was a difficult part to play, but Johnny got it absolutely right. He was truly amazing.

Speaking of amazing casts: in TALL TALE you not only had Scott Glenn and Patrick Swayze in the leads, but all these great character actors in small parts, all the way from Stephen Lang, Catherine O’Hara and Burgess Meredith to John P. Ryan and Scott Wilson as those two dirty outlaws.

You just nailed it. And let’s not forget Nick Stahl, who is about to have a resurrection. He’s had some drug issues, but he’s come out of it. He’s been sober for a while now and he has started working again. I look forward to working with him any time. Because he’s truly an amazing actor.

But TALL TALE is kind of a disappointment to me. Not how it turned out. It’s exactly the movie I wanted to make. I stand behind it, I love it. It’s gorgeously shot by Janusz Kaminski. It was a great script. The shoot was a dream come true. Great cast. Great crew. Just imagine, when we weren’t shooting I’d be sitting at Burgess Meredith’s knee just listening to his stories about all the directors he had worked with. It was a joy every day. We shot for like five month at every inch of the country.

The commercial failure of the movie had to do with the fact that Disney could not find the audience for it. When we had screenings, it scored in the upper nineties. Which meant that if you happened to see the movie you’d probably like it. But to get people to buy a ticket for it… They did research afterwards which indicated that the title TALL TALE sounded too much like a book, like a lesson. At the end of the day I’m not blaming anybody in particular, but I do feel the marketing went off the rails there. I say that because the reviews were good, the audience’s reaction was good. And it had a second life on the small screen, although I wasn’t happy about the pan & scan. That movie was really meant to be seen in 2.35.

TALL TALE came at the end of that whole western revival. There had been UNFORGIVEN, TOMBSTONE, WYATT EARP, POSSE, BAD GIRLS and so on. Could that have been a factor in its commercial failure?

It’s possible that the opposite is also true: that TALL TALE would never have been green-lit if westerns hadn’t made a comeback.

I saw your remake of DIABOLIQUE twice before I ever saw Clouzot’s, which I don’t particularly like. I prefer your version.

That’s interesting. I’ll tell you why I wanted to make it. When they offered it to me, I needed a reason to make it. I had seen Clouzot’s movie several times and for all its positives it’s a significantly misogynistic movie. It victimizes the women. It makes them not very smart. I wanted to take the same structure and make a feminist movie. I thought that if I could flip the point of view, it would be a great challenge for me, a male, to explore the feminist side of that story. I know this sounds as a bunch of bullshit to people, that I’m over-intellectualizing, but I needed a way into the story. Not in terms of dialogue and structure – on that level we followed the original in many ways – but the point of view with which we approached the scenes.

One thing that makes me prefer your version over the original is Sharon Stone’s deliciously bitchy performance. I think the performances are at that level where they are in danger of going over the top but never do.  

I had known Sharon socially. We had each other’s phone numbers. I was in a meeting at the studio and they said: We love the script, but we need a star. So, right there in the board room I called Sharon and said: DIABOLIQUE. She said: Oh my god, I am in! That was it. The movie was green-lit. Then I thought: who can I get to play opposite Sharon that is as powerful in a completely different way? I decided to go after Isabelle Adjani. Everyone said: Forget it. You’re not going to get her. I flew to Paris, we went to dinner and hit it off. That’s when the trouble began. Oil and water. It was an incredibly difficult shoot. Their egos clashed and they were both going through difficult times in their personal lives. But I think everyone used it to their best ability. And I agree with you that the performances were just at the top of world building, but still grounded.

By the way, at one point Jack Nicholson was interested in playing Guy Baran, but he had a commitment to a movie he was going to do with Bob Rafelson. That was an indie production. He told me that if that came together he would go and do that. Otherwise he would play Baran. I would have loved to work with Jack, but if he was in it, you would have suspected that something was up. You’re not going to kill Jack Nicholson in the first act. With Chazz that was possible.

I love how your DIABOLIQUE creates its own universe. The lighting, the costumes, the location. It’s all rather exaggerated.

You’ll appreciate this. I so tried to get the studio to let me shoot this at an American school in Morocco, in bright sunlight. I wanted to flip that part of the movie as well. But they wanted noir. I worked with director of photography Peter James to give Sharon strong light, which works great with her beauty, her cheekbones. But Isabelle Adjani needed softer light. When they were both in one scene it was technically very difficult. And the costumes were another challenge. We wanted to contrast Sharon’s Chanel-look with Isabelle’s conservative look, but then Sharon had Michael Kaplan fired. Luckily L’Wren Scott came in and she did a great job managing Sharon’s expectations.

In Clouzot’s original there’s a hint of intimacy between the two female leads. Your version never goes beyond that hint. It is never as lurid or risqué as it could have been in 1996. Because psycho-sexual thrillers were so in vogue at the time, I was wondering if the studio ever put pressure on you to make it more erotic.

No. They loved the script by Don Roos, who’s a wonderful writer. If that movie would be done today, there’s no way the studio would hire a white male director to do it, and probably for good reason. Exploring the feminist shadow is something I will never venture in again. If it were made today, it would have a lot more interplay between the women. That would probably be subtext of the piece. Maybe it’s something I missed, but I just wasn’t thinking about that.

DIABOLIQUE got mixed reviews and reading the negative ones, I really got the impression that it caught some flack just because it dared to be a remake of Clouzot’s film.

Here’s the funny thing: all my best reviews were in France, where I thought I’d be killed. I even did live interviews in French, which was a bit scary for me. Oddly, they embraced my feminist point of view. Over the years it has gotten much better reviews, I’ve noticed. At the end of the day, I think the movie stands on its own. It’s a solid movie and I don’t think it’s particularly dated.

Let’s talk about THE AVENGERS. I re-watched it and was struck by how faithful it tries to be to the original TV series in terms of style and atmosphere. Right down to the depopulated streets of London. Could that have been a mistake in hindsight? Because it gives the film a strange feel that, if you’re not familiar with the series, might not come off right.

You’re talking about a film with the most pain points for me. The cut that is out there is not my cut.

I know.

It’s the greatest disappointment of my career, the failure of that movie. I don’t mean in a commercial sense – even though it did fail commercially – but in the sense that it was the first time a movie of mine was ever interfered with by a studio. Their cut makes no sense to me. I can’t even watch it. Whether or not the movie adheres to the tone of the original series is something I never questioned. I grew up with The Avengers and it’s the reason I wanted to do it.

It was a great shoot. The script was excellent. It had passed muster with both Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg, the original Avengers. And as I usually do, I had assembled a great cast. The crew was fantastic. They went on to do the first Harry Potter movie. So, I went in feeling the wind in my sails. As I was nearing the end of shooting there was a big upheaval in the studio and the people who green-lit THE AVENGERS were out. The people who never wanted to make the movie were in. I knew it was going to end badly and it did. But I had to keep going. I was very happy with the footage I had, but I was getting these calls. Terry Gilliam was editing down the hall and he would comfort me. He had been down that road so many times. He got me through the editing process – Thank you, Terry! But when I brought the film back to L.A. it really got ugly. That’s when I realized they didn’t want anything to do with this movie. They made me cut out the whole teddy bear theme. They made me cut the whole opening scene of the movie, with evil Emma. They cut things so that it didn’t even make sense anymore. Michael Kamen had done a great score that was extremely dark, which contrasted with the frothy quality of the movie, as if to say: Laugh now, but evil is coming! There were a lot of discordant, interesting things that they took out. 

I take responsibility for it, because I directed it and I couldn’t get past the studio blockade. There’s a whole movement on social media to get my cut of the movie released. By the way, my cut may not have been any more commercially successful, it may not have found its audience. At least I would have owned it. I could say: Yeah, nobody liked it, but that’s the movie I wanted to make. But nobody has seen that movie.

So, what did that failure do to you?

The failure of that movie was very profound for me. It made me question if I ever wanted to direct again. It ended up transforming me in ways that were so good. Because it’s hard when they attribute to you a failure you cannot own. So, I went on a walkabout around the globe, trying to rediscover who I was. I wanted to get to the root of my humanity, which I had forgotten by the whole Hollywood experience. I went to war zones. The Xinjiang province. Colombia. These places transformed me as a human being and as an artist.

Did you go there to work as a photographer?

I took my camera, of course. But I went there initially to connect with people who eked out an existence. People who owned nothing more than one goat. I went to all these crazy places alone, like the sub-Sahara. Or to the FARC in Colombia. I would sometimes be stopped at gun point. People would ask me: Why are you here? I said: Because I’m curious. That was all it took. Those were transformative years, the best that ever happened to me.

But when you make a box office disaster, what happens with the relationships you have in Hollywood? What does your agent say to you?

They basically say: You’re in movie jail. Nobody calls anymore. Turns out that my agent at the time had fallen into becoming a drug addict. He had left CAA. So, when I returned from my travels I was technically still at CAA, but there was nobody waving my flag. I had to rebuild my career as a television director, which happened at exactly the right time, because story-telling on television became much more interesting.

So, how did you rebuild your career?

I was visiting a friend who was making a television biopic of Tookie Williams, the founder of the Crips,  starring Jamie Foxx. And I was just hanging around the set and I got to talking to the executives and the head of the network. Just shooting the shit. And a month later they just sent me a script for a TV movie called MELTDOWN. First thing I did was turn it down. I was quietly writing my own script in Hawaii when the head of the network called me and asked: If you could do anything with it, what would you do? I said I would make a movie like BLOODY SUNDAY or THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS. He said: Stop right there. You’re making this. This was at Christmas and the movie was to be on television in June. No prep. I shot it in twenty-one days. One of the best experiences of my life. Because I wasn‘t afraid of failure. I was washed-up! What did I care? The head of the network said: You’re gonna get a lot of notes. A lot of people’s opinions. Just ignore it. Do what you said on the phone. And I did. That was my springboard into TV.

You also got some great reviews for The Bronx is Burning.

That was an incredible delight to make. An eight hour movie. It was a story I knew well. I had tried to buy the book but it had already been optioned. It circled back to me, which was interesting. It got a lot of nominations.

You worked with Oliver Platt for the third time on that, right?

Yeah, I worked with Big Ollie a number of times. He’s a friend. He’s in my go-to cabal of actors who I can just call. Stephen Lang is another one.

When is Fat Vampire coming out?

I hope in about a year. Over here it will be on SyFy and Hulu, and it’s already been sold internationally. It’s going to be great. It’s about body shaming, there’s horror, romance, comedy, drama. It’s very bold. I hope it’s a good start for our production company.

On the art side there’s a project coming up on CHRISTMAS VACATION. It’s based on my memories of the characters, all twenty-two of them. That will drop in December, on OpenSea.

Speaking of CHRISTMAS VACATION, did you ever see Chevy Chase again?

Yeah, when I did two episodes of Chuck, he was also working on that show. I didn’t direct him, but we went to dinner.

There’s a story that Chris Columbus met with Chevy Chase over dinner and that Columbus decided he could not work with him.

I never spoke to Chris Columbus. The only thing I knew was that Chevy had met with him and didn’t like him. People have their own stories. I did read somewhere that he was going to direct CHRISTMAS VACATION, which is definitely not true. I have the very first script that John Hughes wrote and all the subsequent scripts that were developed in my purview. Certainly, Chris is no slouch, he did some amazing things, but he didn’t work on CHRISTMAS VACATION. I came in, the studio wanted me, John wanted me, Chevy wanted me. That was the end of the story.  

Back to the homepage

This talk was edited for length and clarity.

You can find out more about Jeremiah Chechik’s art projects on his website: www.jeremiahchechik.com.