THE LONG ROAD BACK
Stephen Gaghan, one-time Hollywood wunderkind, battles his way into the movie game again after years of frustration
Maybe it was the time he hurled a script at the Warner Bros. production president, frustrated by the studio notes.
It might have been the interview in which he upset “Syriana” collaborators Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney by breaking an edit-room code of silence and revealing he’d ceded post-production control to them on his 2005 movie.
Or it could have been when he entertained shady Albanian financiers because he’d run out of options to fund a movie.
For the one-time screenwriting wunderkind Stephen Gaghan — he won an Oscar for “Traffic” in the year of his first feature credit — there have been so many colorful stops on the Hollywood road even he has lost count. Few personalities in the modern era have clashed with the entertainment power structure so epically or stuck to their guns so obdurately.
So when Gaghan’s new movie “Gold,” a dramatization of the 1990s-era Bre-X mining scandal, opens this month, it won’t only provide a chance to see Matthew McConaughey as a paunchy, balding treasure-hunter from Reno. (That’s just a bonus.) The movie will mark a pointed retort to a whatever-happened-to question about a man who stirred significant buzz and garnered an Oscar nomination 11 years ago — and hasn’t been heard from since.
“Gold” is a rare piece for Gaghan, a movie he directed but didn’t (at least according to official credits) write. But its story of Kenny Wells (McConaughey), a streetwise
hustler who persuaded an urbane mining veteran (Edgar Ramirez) to team up in search of gold in the Indonesian mountains, tells an incredibly personal story just the same. It’s about a man, idealistic and headstrong, intent on pursuing a dream within a system that he fiercely believes (sometimes correctly) is aligned against him.
If every creative work is a reflection of its artist’s psyche, “Gold” is a detailed map of Gaghan’s soul, a parable for its director’s long and benighted Hollywood struggle.
“It was my wife who said to me, ‘Steve, this is so personal. Here’s a lunatic who couldn’t get the result he wanted and so just did it over and over until he could,’ ” Gaghan said. “And she’s right. That is me — ‘Oh, there’s a wall, I’ll bang my head against it, oh, there’s a wall, let me bang my head against it.’ ”
Gaghan is talking at his home in Pacific Palisades on a recent Friday. He’s just finished breakfast with wife Minnie Mortimer and their toddler son Johnny, the youngest of Gaghan’s four children. (Two are from a previous partner.)
Still boyish-looking at 51, Gaghan has a manner that might be described as “patrician surfer” — well-coiffed longish hair, magazine-thin, barefoot but fashionable-casual in a dark shirt and shorts. During the conversation, he continually moves around his deck, shifting positions on a couch and at one point sitting on the floor.
It is a few days after the election, and Gaghan, intellectual and hyper-verbal, is still exercised about it, lamenting the failure of the Democratic establishment to foresee the result. “My mother [in Kentucky] is a conservative, and every single person in her social circle was voting for Trump. You didn’t need advanced metrics — you just needed to talk to them.”
“Passionate” would be one word to describe Gaghan’s politics — he was so worked up on election night he couldn’t finish an editing session and paid a few thousand of his own dollars to complete it under calmer circumstances. That zealotry also infuses his attitude toward his films, which he tends to believe benefit from as much complexity and ambiguity as possible.
Even many serious filmmakers, after all, will occasionally give in on these scores when studios are involved. Others will simply turn to the independent world or to upscale television. But Gaghan is an anomaly: a personal filmmaker who has stayed firmly in the studio system. It’s led to a lot of frustration, a lot of skirmishes — and, ultimately, a lot of inactivity.
“He was doing his Terrence Malick there for a while, wasn’t he?” observed McConaughey.
Success with ‘Syriana’
It was hard to be more on top of the world than Gaghan was after “Syriana.” Spending many years as an acclaimed writer with just one modest directorial effort (2002’s psychological thriller “Abandon”), the scribe had successfully made the transition to big-time filmmaker.
His movie that December, an involved story about the fight for oil resources, had grossed $50 million and drew warm reviews. Oscar voters nominated Gaghan for screenplay and gave Clooney the supporting actor prize.
During the 1990s Gaghan was battling profound drug and alcohol addiction, which he opened up about shortly after the release of “Traffic,” the script of which he based in part on his own experiences. (Those around him, it should be said, emphasize he has long left that life behind. To this day he is practically religious in seeking out support-group meetings, whether at home or in places as far-flung as Thailand.) With “Syriana,” the triumph was complete.
But all was far from paradise. The film had gone through many iterations in the editing room, as Gaghan struggled to make sense of its many twisting strands. Worried personally and concerned about placating a nervous Warner Bros., Clooney and Soderbergh, who were producing, stepped in.
The pair was fine with staying anonymous and letting Gaghan take the credit, but the director didn’t hold his tongue in several interviews and said he’d been cut out of the edit room. Clooney and Soderbergh were fuming, according to the person.
The unwinding had begun. Gaghan’s projects with Clooney and Soderbergh, who at the time ran the hot production company Section Eight, soon dried up. (Neither Clooney nor Soderbergh would comment for this article.)
Gaghan set out to develop “Blink,” an unlikely candidate for a feature, one that would turn into fictional narrative a nonfiction bestseller by Malcolm Gladwell about the value of quick decisionmaking, with Leonardo DiCaprio. But months soon turned into years for the independent project as it sought financing, the filmmaker struggling to find a compelling narrative and persuade others to make it with him.
Working with Warner Bros. also wasn’t as easy an option. The development process on “Syriana” had been difficult. At one point, Kevin McCormick, who ran production for the studio, was giving notes on the script. Gaghan saw them as too many and too misguided. He let his feelings be known.
“In this one meeting I just hit the wall and said, ‘I can’t take it anymore,’ and threw the script at Kevin. And I yelled, ‘Then you… write it.’ ” And I was standing outside with all the trees and I thought, ‘Now I’m all alone.’ And I heard that voice in my head that said, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I thought the movie was done. I thought I was done.”
He wasn’t. The studio and Gaghan would see through “Syriana” together, then go on to try to make “Dead Spy Running,” a proposed “Bourne-ian” spy franchise. Gaghan was first attached to write for director McG; as the months and then years went on and the rewritten drafts piled up, he became more invested and was onboard to direct.
But Gaghan and the studio didn’t see eye-to-eye on the film, in part because studios favor clearcut franchise heroes and Gaghan prefers ambiguous stories about human subtleties. Eventually McCormick called him and said the studio was going to replace him. Studio firings happen every week. But it sat particularly badly with Gaghan.
“I had done 10 or 15 unpaid rewrites. And they just said, ‘We’re moving in another direction.’ And I thought, ‘I don’t understand how people decide to make movies.’ ” (McCormick did not return a call to his production office.)
He has sporadically turned to independent productions, writing a script about a crime underworld, “Candy Store,” with his friend Shannon Burke. There weren’t a ton of funding options, and at one point he found himself with investors of uncertain provenance.
“We tried to find these Albanian gangsters to bridge the American [indie] financing. I remember sitting in a meeting with one. He had some kind of squirrel on his head. He asked who the girl [lead actress] was.” Gaghan told him the name. “‘She’s a whore,’ ” he said. “I realized he meant it as a compliment! I went home that day thinking, ‘This isn’t really working.’ ”
Meanwhile, funds were draining out of his bank account. The director is, self-confessedly, prone to living above his means. He and Mortimer, a fashion designer, decided to downsize — the Hollywood version, anyway. The couple sold their Brentwood home, listing it for nearly $5 million in 2014, and moved to a rental in Pacific Palisades, though it should be noted that it is a rental with stunning views above the beach.
Gaghan took writing jobs to pay the bills. Most prominent among them was “After Earth.” Will Smith had called him in to do rewrites on the 2013 dystopian epic. Gaghan flew to the Philadelphia set, wrote for weeks — then ran into the wall of M. Night Shyamalan, another bullish auteur who Gaghan said “didn’t keep a single one of my changes.”
When “Gold” came around, Gaghan was itching to get back, itching to be heard. The project focused on Wells, the son of a local businessman who wanted to be seen as more than just the smalltimer he feared he was becoming, and that leads him to get in over his head.
Gaghan felt a kinship with “Gold’s” protagonist. Like Wells, he is from a blue-collar place and climbed the social ladder, in his case by marrying into Mortimer’s family (she is descended from the family that ran Standard Oil) and remaking himself as a kind of member of a Hollywood gentry. He also was dead set on a kind of autonomous fighting of corporate dominance, just as Wells did against the big mining companies and Wall Street that would take his fortune.
“There’s success, and there’s moral validity,” said Teddy Schwarzman, a producer on the film and the principal at financing company Black Bear Pictures. “Kenny Wells didn’t care about the money — he wanted to prove that he could do it. And that’s Stephen. He’s had success, but he’s had this inexplicable drought, and I think what he really wants is to prove them all wrong.”
Perfect versus good f ilms
The sun was intensifying above Gaghan’s deck. The director is an unlikely picture of domestic repose these days. His is a house where a volume of “My Struggle” sits next to a child’s sink kick-stand. He said until “Gold” he was “home every night for [his two youngest children’s] bedtimes, and that wasn’t always on purpose.”
Gaghan uncrossed his legs and shuffled his position once more, describing his discomfort within the system.
When he first was being considered for the “Gold” job, he traveled to Austin, Texas, to meet with McConaughey. The star had a question for him: Why on Earth hadn’t he made a movie for a decade?
“I said, ‘Because I didn’t want to make a bad movie. And I still feel that way,” Gaghan recalled.
But in Hollywood the perfect is often the enemy of the good, and a few minutes later Gaghan expresses uncertainty about whether waiting for the right set of creative circumstances was worth it.
“In hindsight I made some wrong decisions. If I could say anything to anyone coming up I’d say, ‘Make the movies.’ You have a chance, someone is willing to back you, make the movie. You’ll be so much more accomplished than where I am right now.”
Was he bullheaded and unrealistic? Or a bulwark of storytelling purity in an industry that seems to value it less by the minute?
It’s tempting to read Gaghan’s extreme persistence as another facet to the personality that drove him to addiction; obsession with the high of a drug or with personal ambition aren’t really that far apart. Gaghan says he was simply born with an innate drive to push through, no matter who’s pushing back.
“It’s kind of a true-believer thing. People are saying no and you’re like, ‘Don’t you see?’ And they’re like, ‘I don’t see,’ for whatever system of reasons. And it becomes really painful, and at times it’s made me really angry. So angry it’s like you’re going to have an aneurysm. But who do you take your complaint to? This whole thing is a giant luxury.”