Duty of care
THE UPSIDE I Bryan Cranston and Kevin Hart are the ideal odd couple in a remake of Intouchables.
The second biggest film of all time in its native France (taking $427m at the global box office), you could argue that 2011 comedy drama Intouchables didn’t really need a Hollywood remake. It’s a case the film’s director Neil Burger (Limitless, Divergent) himself was prepared to make. “The producers came to me,” he tells Teasers. “And I said, ‘No, why would I do that?’ I never value that sort of remake.”
But a year later, Burger found himself behind the camera directing Bryan Cranston, Kevin Hart and Nicole Kidman in The Upside. So what changed? “I saw something in it that I thought was resonant and even important to make, culturally and politically,” explains the director, who was impressed by John Hartmere’s page-one script rewrite. “The movie was suddenly about these small acts of kindness and compassion and respect that bridged the gap between these two men.”
The two men in question are Dell (Hart), a jobseeker with a criminal past, and Phillip (Cranston), an obscenely wealthy but depressed quadriplegic. Against the wishes of his personal assistant Yvonne (Kidman), Phillip hires the wildly inexperienced and unqualified Dell to be his full-time carer, a decision that drastically changes their lives for the better.
With a self-confessed goal to “outdo” the French original, Burger dug back into the biographies of the real men upon which Intouchables/The Upside is based to more fully flesh out their lives; shifted the action to a Park Avenue pad in his beloved New York (an apartment based on the infamous home of John D. Rockefeller); and, most radical of all, cast shrill-voiced funnyman Kevin Hart in his first no-bones dramatic role.
“I was worried about it initially, because I didn’t know him,” admits Burger. “But he wanted to take that leap to play a real person, and not to play a cartoon character. There’s something really surprising about his performance. It’s kind of a revelation, actually.”