CALAMITY JANE
Director Lynne Ramsay and stars Michael Fassbender, Bradley Cooper and Jude Law all bolted, but revenge western Jane Got A Gun refused to be dead and buried. Saddle up with Natalie Portman for the choppiest production of the year…
How much pre-production chaos can a film handle before buckling? That question hovered in the air following the bustle of business surrounding Edgar Wright’s split from Ant-Man – a test to Marvel’s geek-plated resolve – but the MCU crisis was insect-sized compared to the heavy load of ill fortune lumped on Jane Got A Gun.
The Natalie Portman-starring siege western harboured great promise until day one of shooting, when director Lynne Ramsay didn’t turn up for work: locked and loaded, with no one to shoot the damn thing. Then, like a game of Buckaroo! at its fraught climax, things got messier.
Whether you read the ensuing story as a tale of a free-radical indie director oppressed, reckless misbehaviour, mere rotten luck or a resolute producer’s show-must-go-on heroism, it’s easy to see why JGAG first got attention. The script by Brian Duffield ( Insurgent) ranked highly on the Black List of top unproduced screenplays, and Ramsay’s attachment made it more exciting still. True Grit aside, westerns remain a tricky sell for audiences, but the surprise employment of a visionary Scottish filmmaker behind the camera upped the intrigue for indie movie-watchers.
After the scuffed lyricism and art-pic smarts of her first two features, Ratcatcher (1999) and Morvern Callar (2002), Ramsay took nine years to make her third film, the devastating We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011) – so she’s no bash-’em-out hack for hire. The prospect of arthouse royalty on genre turf tantalised. Add the May 2012 casting of Portman, a star packing popular appeal and critical kudos, and a picture of great promise emerged: a western loaded with depth, style and crossover clout. And a Ramsay film without the nine-year wait.
The plot showed promise, too. The heroine is Portman’s homesteader Jane Hammond, whose outlaw husband returns home one day peppered with bullets after a run-in with a criminal gang. When the group track him down, intent on turning his near-death experience into a total-death one for him and his family, Jane turns to a gun-slinging ex-lover for help in the looming turf war.
Jane and gain
The phrase “bidding war” got bandied about when the agency CAA shopped JGAG around Cannes for financial help. The budget fell under $20m, so it had indie-wood integrity: Scott Steindorff’s Scott Pictures stepped in to handle financing.
Portman’s co-stars made the investment look a savvy one. Michael Fassbender signed to play her sharp-shooting ex in August 2012, a fine prospect: the man from Shame in a Shane- alike setting. Fresh from acclaim in Aussie psycho-noir Animal Kingdom (and, at the time, soon to be seen in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty), Joel Edgerton was cast as the lead criminal. Back-up came from Rodrigo Santoro, he of gold-undies infamy in the 300 films.
And then the musical chairs started, as JGAG underwent development delays. Time travel not being available to resolve scheduling conflicts, Fassbender’s X-Men: Days Of Future Past ties forced him to drop out. The shift wasn’t too calamitous: Edgerton moved to the hero/ex role and Jude Law looked like canny casting in Edgerton’s villainous chaps, going by his Nightcrawler- ish bad ’un in Sam Mendes’ Road To Perdition.
After delays, Monday 18 March 2013 was finally set for the start of shooting in Santa Fe. Then
calamity really struck: after nine months of development, and purportedly heated negotiations with Steindorff, Ramsay left the project the weekend before shooting. At 5.30am, the leads were on set – with no one to direct them.
How the west was saved
Whatever Ramsay’s reasons were, Steindorff moved fast on damage control, keeping litigator Marty Singer close to hand. “I have millions of dollars invested, we’re ready to shoot, we have a great script, crew and cast,” he told entertainment portal Deadline.
“I’m shocked and so disappointed someone would do this to 150 crew members who devoted so much time, energy, commitment and loyalty to a project, and then have the director not show up,” Steindorff protested. “It is insane somebody would do this to other people. I feel more for the crew and their families, but we are keeping the show going on, directors are flying in, and a replacement is imminent.”
Make that very imminent. Two days after Ramsay departed, a replacement was named. Gavin O’Connor had directed Edgerton in cage-fighting dust-up Warrior; his other features included Pride And Glory, Miracle and
Tumbleweeds. O’Connor drew further acclaim as an exec-producer of spouses’n’spies TV sizzler
The Americans (he also helmed the pilot), so he brought a nose for grit and character. He also brought in Anthony Tambakis, Warrior’s co-writer, for a script polish.
Somehow, Steindorff had pulled off a coup: he’d got a rickety wagon of a film on trail after an unprecedented blow. True, there were casualties. JGAG swiftly became Jude Law-less: the star walked because he’d wanted to work with Ramsay. But the cloud had a silver lining, of the Oscar-nominated Silver Linings Playbook kind: Bradley Cooper replaced Law, bringing with him the right kind of indie/populist hybrid clout.
Rounding out a quality cast was Noah Emmerich, playing the husband turned into a human sieve by gunmen. Having worked for O’Connor in four films, as well as in The
Americans, he treated the film’s troubles with sanguine confidence: “It’s a great cast, good script and beautiful story, and Gavin and Anthony made the script significantly better. Inside the bubble, it feels like we’re just making a great Gavin O’Connor movie. Outside, there’s all this chaos and people are talking, and the cast is changing and there is a high-wire act to keep it together. For us, from action to cut it feels not only normal, but really special.”
Morale even held up when another curveball hit: within a month, Cooper flew the coop following scheduling conflicts with David O’Russell’s dramedy American Hustle, a conflict exacerbated by the Boston bombing tragedy. “There was concern [ when he left],” says Emmerich, “but also a sense of, we got through the director-not-showing-up crisis. We can handle the recasting of an actor.”
If the list of rumoured replacements ( Jake Gyllenhaal, Tom Hiddleston, Joseph GordonLevitt, Tobey Maguire) suggested no one had lost their nerve, so did the final choice. Embracing his dark side, Ewan McGregor stepped into Cooper’s boots. Meanwhile, deals were made off-set. After JGAG’s backers offered a good deal, Relativity Media and The Weinstein Company acquired the property for distribution. Gradually, a film that seemed to be haemorrhaging talent cauterised some of the wounds. “Now, we all think, we’re in good hands,” Emmerich commented. “Gavin O’Connor’s hands. I’ve seen him do this before, he just makes it work.”
Jane and pain
Further off-set, gossip sprayed like squibs in a Peckinpah stand-off. Rumours began that the backers were about to sue Ramsay for the return of a purported $750,000 in fees. A “civil complaint” included allegations that Ramsay “failed to provide the writing and directing services” contracted for, causing an “unreasonably delayed completion of a final budget for the Picture, and of the Picture itself”.
The charges claimed Ramsay was “repeatedly under the influence of alcohol, abusive to members of the cast and crew and generally disruptive”. And, allegedly: “[ She] failed to adhere to proper safety protocol for handling weapons on set when she pointed a prop gun directly at a camera and, in turn, at the camera crew before first taking proper precautions.”
‘There’s all this chaos and a high-wire act to keep it together. But from action to cut it feels really special’ Noah Emmerich
Ramsay’s representatives replied swiftly. “Lynne Ramsay has not been served with this lawsuit,” The Hollywood Reporter was told, “and, when she is, she will respond in court and not in the media. That said, the allegations as recently reported are simply false. Lynne looks forward to presenting the truth about this situation in the proper forum.”
Outside that forum, press opinion differed. Sources told the Hollywood Reporter that Ramsay left because she was waiting to receive an approved schedule, script and budget as the shoot was about to start. Others claim that Ramsay wanted to maintain final cut in the event that these problems pushed her over-budget. The Los Angeles Times referred to contract disputes; The Telegraph, meanwhile, mentioned sources who claimed Ramsay had “personal issues” in London.
In the dust-storm, the truth looked blurry. Was Ramsay difficult, or a filmmaker with a vision sticking hard to her guns? Certainly her reputation for integrity goes before her: she left a proposed adaptation of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones because, reportedly, producers wanted the film to be more faithful to the book. (Peter Jackson’s adap followed.) Smartly, Portman’s slant on Ramsay’s departure favoured diplomacy. “I’m as mystified as I think everyone was, and it was pretty devastating,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “I mean, maybe she’ll [ Ramsay] speak to it one day. I don’t know. I got there one week before we were supposed to start, in Santa Fe, and it seemed like there had been stuff going on that I had sort of been sheltered from. It was really, really difficult, and we were lucky that Gavin [ O’Connor] came on so quickly. She [ Ramsay] didn’t come on [ set]. I saw her the week before, but on the first day, no. I can only imagine something very difficult was going on for her, and it was devastating.”
Loaded weapon
Then, incredibly, the fog cleared. In March 2014, Screen Daily was told by the parties involved, “Jane Got A Gun Production LLC and Lynne Ramsay announce the pending civil action and all other disputes between the parties associated with Jane Got A Gun motion picture have been resolved privately and to their mutual satisfaction.”
Whether money was involved is unknown. Either way, the big question changed: from will this film survive, to will this film actually be good? People are rooting for JGAG; after all, even getting this far is impressive. After a postponed release, the first images emerged last year, and it finally opened in the US – to mixed reviews and disappointing numbers – in January. A UK release is earmarked for spring.
Edgerton was always confident that JGAG had a fighting chance. “What is going to be hopefully the most fantastic conclusion to the whole stumbling, falling, riding itself process of making that movie, is that I think it’s gonna be fantastic,” he told the movie website Collider. “We forged a great movie out of fire… It was a difficult situation, but the result of all those difficulties and hardships along the way has been remarkable… I’m really, really proud of it, and I needed to be proud of it, because we worked so hard to keep that thing from falling over.”
Or, if you run with Emmerich’s comparison, keep it from sinking: “I keep telling people, ‘Remember Titanic?’” he says. “Everybody said, ‘It’s over, the tank’s not working, the budget’s booming, who cares about a boat that sinks…’ And it became the most successful movie ever made. My mantra is, ‘Remember
Titanic.’ We’re much more on the radar because all that has happened. Otherwise, we’d be a smallish independent movie.”
Jane finally has her gun. And, as the dust settles, we can’t wait to see how she uses it.
Jane Got A Gun opens 22 April.