‘THIS IS NOT THE KIND OF FILM THAT HOLLYWOOD MAKES ANY MORE’
SIZE MATTERS John Lee Hancock and his cast tell TF why The Little Things is a suspenser that measures up.
THE LITTLE THINGS places a trio of Oscarwinning actors into a thrillingly old-school serial-killer movie set in ’90s Los Angeles. Total Film rounds up writer-director John Lee Hancock and stars Denzel Washington, Rami Malek and Jared Leto to ask if storytelling, suspense and stupendous acting can rescue Hollywood from the superheroes…
There’s a scene in The Little Things where Denzel Washington’s cop, Joe ‘Deke’ Deacon, visits the house of deliveryman Albert Sparma, played by a near-unrecognisable Jared Leto. A lead has established Sparma as a possible person of interest in the grisly killings that are terrifying LA County, and Deke, who’s working the case with Rami Malek’s cop Jim Baxter, wants to get a look at Sparma’s vintage Chevy Nova.
It’s nighttime, and Sparma catches Deke circling his vehicle and squinting through the windows. Deke says he’s interested in buying the car: “How’s the trunk space?” Few words are exchanged but the silences speak volumes as the two men size each other up. You might say this sequence is the equivalent of the coffee scene in Michael Mann’s Heat
– the first electrifying meet of protagonist and antagonist, both played by Oscar winners, in a large-scale crime thriller.
“Some of the most fun scenes to write are the ones that have very little dialogue, because you’re putting the burden on the actor, and they know exactly what’s at stake,” says writer/ director John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side, The Founder). “It was the very first time they were on camera together. We kept them apart. I mean, they both were like, ‘No, I’ll see him on the set, in character.’ And they’re smelling each other. They brought their A-game. It was a very exciting night, I have to say.”
“It was spooky,” laughs Washington. “Listen, Jared is good. Very good, and very thorough. He and I didn’t talk much and stayed in character. We left each other alone. When we finally got together, it was eerie because we still didn’t know much about the other person.”
Leto’s mouth widens into a thoughtful smile. He might be sitting next to a potted plant in a white, airy room during our Zoom call, but there’s something of Hannibal Lecter standing stock still in the middle of his gothic cell to his preternatural stillness. “Every moment I had with Denzel was magical, but that scene in particular was highly charged,” he recalls. “I’m very excited for people to see The Little Things. It’s this classic American crime thriller that really takes you to this place.” His smile widens, showing teeth. “I think people will have a lot of fun with Albert.”
Out of the PAST
John Lee Hancock wrote The Little Things in the early ’90s, a time when buddy cop movies were rife and serial killer movies were very much in vogue. The Silence Of The Lambs had been a huge commercial and critical success in 1991 before cleaning up at the Oscars in March 1992, and movies like Copycat, Kalifornia, Seven and Kiss The Girls would follow (Washington actually appeared in two entries to the sub-genre in the late ’90s, Fallen and The Bone Collector).
“I wrote it in 1992 or 1993,” recalls Hancock, who prepped by spending three weeks with homicide detective Stanley White, eating at Denny’s at three in the morning, chasing a stolen car for five hours and even attending a murder scene, followed by the autopsy. “It was a blind picture deal with Warner Bros and Steven Spielberg. Steven was doing Schindler’s List, and felt like he didn’t want to live in that dark place for another movie. Clint [Eastwood, who directed Hancock’s first screenplay, A Perfect World] was involved for a minute. Warren Beatty was attached to it for a year. Danny DeVito, who was directing a lot back then, was attached…”
Then, in 2000, Hancock made his directorial debut with The Rookie. It was produced by Mark Johnson, who’d produced A Perfect World plus other quality pictures Good Morning, Vietnam, Rain Man, Bugsy and Donnie Brasco, and Johnson suggested that Hancock should himself direct The Little Things. “I kept going back to him and saying, ‘Let’s make it’, but it was too dark, Hancock was not in the right place,” remembers Johnson.
‘JOHN LEE HANCOCK AS A WRITER AND DIRECTOR HAS A SINGULARITY OF VISION’
RAMI MALEK
The director nods. “I had small children at the time, and said, ‘I don’t think I can live in that dark world for two years, waking up at 4:30 every morning to face that.’ And then my kids went off to college, and Mark asked again. I reread it and said, ‘Sure, let’s try.’”
‘Try’ being the operative word, because an awful lot had changed in the movie business since the early ’90s. Back then, mid-budget, adult-orientated, star-powered studio movies were the order of the day, with The Fugitive, The Firm, Sleepless In Seattle, Mrs. Doubtfire, Indecent Proposal, In The Line Of Fire and
A Few Good Men appearing in the Top 10 box-office hits of 1993. Now the majority of multiplexes are showcases for superheroes and special effects.
“This is not the kind of film that Hollywood makes anymore,” acknowledges Johnson, whose task of raising the funds was made more difficult still by the decision to keep the action set in 1990, meaning The Little Things is not just a crime movie but a period crime movie. “Warner Bros used to make a lot of crime-thriller detective movies, but not really any more. Quite honestly, the reason it’s a big studio film is Denzel Washington, Rami Malek and Jared Leto, otherwise it would have been an indie. It’s a dream cast. At the end of the trailer, the names come up: ‘Academy Award winner Denzel Washington, Academy Award winner Rami Malek, Academy Award winner Jared Leto’. It’s pretty impressive.”
“John Lee fashioned a good script, and good scripts are hard to come by,” says Washington, insisting it really was that easy. And when the double Oscar-winner signed on, Malek followed.
“Denzel, for me, has always been in a class of his own,” explains the star of Mr. Robot and Bohemian Rhapsody. “I grew up with Malcolm X being one of my favourite movies. This guy is Hollywood royalty. And the script was one of those page-turners. John Lee Hancock as a writer and director has a singularity of vision.”
Leto shared Malek’s adulation of Washington but needed a little more persuading. “Denzel’s always been one of my favourites – the guy’s never been bad in anything – but when I first read it I actually didn’t think it was right for me,” he says. “I’d spent enough time on the dark side already. But as I talked to John Lee about the character and the film, I just thought there was an opportunity here to do something that I hadn’t done before, and to really dive deep into the transformation and build a character that was a lot of fun to inhabit.”
Finding a KILLER
All three of the leads conducted detailed research, with Washington saying he does “whatever it takes” and Malek pointing out that on-set police advisers Tim Marcia and Mitzi Roberts “were really helpful in getting me to understand the psychology of someone who is so driven to close a case…” He grins. “I did actually draw some parallels in terms of the commitment and being so consumed.”
But it was Leto who dug deepest, researching serial killers and listening to audio of interrogations and speaking to experts in criminology and to the FBI to get into the right headspace. Whether or not Sparma is the man that Baxter and Deke are looking for remains ambiguous for much of the running time, but he’s certainly a wrong ’un, fixated on true-crime horrors and revelling in playing cat and mouse with the detectives he’s seen on TV. Leto constructed the character from the ground up.
“I wanted to push things as far as possible and to really explore the edges,” he says, leaning forward. “There was a walk and a talk. I did different eyes – contacts – and nose and teeth. A lot of prosthetics. You can discover a character not only from the inside-out but the outside-in. Maybe if you put on a little weight it can change the way that you move. I’ve had it happen that I put on so much weight for a film [playing John Lennon’s killer Mark David Chapman in Chapter 27] that it actually changed the way that I laughed. That time is exciting. You try a lot of different things, you make a lot of mistakes, you rein it back in. At one point for Albert I had maybe 50 different wigs. I was gonna wear this crazy wig and I looked like Annie from the musical, with the curly red hair.”
Shooting in LA between September and December 2019, Hancock worked hard to not just crank back the clock by 30 years – production designer Michael
Corenblith switched out cars, street signs and road markings, and brought in pagers, fax machines and word processors – but to show sides of LA not seen on our screens before. It helped that Hancock’s team of creatives is a well-oiled machine, working with him again and again (this is DoP John Schwartzman’s sixth film with the director, here shooting in digital but painting gritty visuals that belong in the ’90s). The challenges were vast.
“It’s really problematic because LA is the most photographed city in the world and there isn’t a corner of it you haven’t seen in some bad television show,” explains Johnson.
“There are parts of LA in the movie that I haven’t seen before,” says Washington, a long-time resident who’s graced our screens for more than 40 years. “It was cool. Location is a character. It’s one thing to read the script, it’s another to go to these locations and see the filmmaker putting it together. We went from Ventura to Alhambra, Whittier, Santa Clarita and Skid Row. I was reminded how big LA is, and how culturally and geographically diverse.”
“It’s a serial-killer genre movie but it has aspects of LA noir,” notes Hancock, who also explains that maintaining the ’90s setting played into the film’s themes. “There was no CCTV where they could look at places and see if somebody had shown up there or not. There were no cell phones. These cops had to work so hard, and carried quarters around for payphones. That put a burden on Joe Deacon and Jim Baxter that I liked a lot, because it leads to that obsession.”
As with FBI profiler Will Graham in Manhunter and Robert Graysmith and the team of cops tracking the killer in Zodiac, Deke and Baxter are consumed with finding their man. Deke, when we meet him, is working in Kern County, a two-and-a-half hour drive from LA up Interstate 5. An instinctive cop, he took wing from the City of Angels because a past case hollowed him out, but is now drawn inexorably back in, his trauma and guilt roiling in his belly. “He ran from it or hid from it or tried to reinvent himself,” nods Washington. Baxter, meanwhile, is younger, a family man and more inclined to follow forensics than his gut, but, as Malek says, “There is an absolute recognition that things could go down the wrong path for him. It is an ever-present concern and worry of his.”
One step AHEAD
One of the joys of The Little Things, though, is that there’s no predicting where it’s headed. Tropes acts as decoys. Expectations are subverted.
“When I wrote this, there were a lot of movies where cops were chasing a killer,” says Hancock. “And I found the first two acts, usually, very entertaining – there were lots of clues, and they kept you guessing. And then the third act would come around, and the identity of the killer would be clear. The cop would
‘I WANTED TO PUSH THINGS AS FAR AS POSSIBLE, AND TO REALLY EXPLORE THE EDGES’ JARED LETO
chase the killer, and they would have some kind of action set-piece, and then the cop would dispatch the killer in some morbid fashion.” He sighs. “I always felt like the third acts weren’t as good as the first two. So I wanted to do something that felt a little like a genre movie upfront, but wasn’t. Halfway through, you start to realise that we have something else up our sleeve…”
Might these satisfying surprises, added to The Little Thing’s intelligent splicing of propulsive, suspenseful plotting and compelling character study, result in Oscar nominations? Variety has it earmarked as a contender, and its cast couldn’t be more heavyweight.
“I’d like to think so,” says Hancock. “I think it’s a very good movie. I’m very proud of it. So, yes, I’d like think that some of the technical people involved with the crew would get some notice, you know? And when I watch the performances of these three guys…” He sucks in a breath to show his appreciation.
The three guys in question won’t be drawn. “I think people are eager to return to films like this, but beyond that,
I couldn’t tell you,” Malek shrugs. He laughs at the suggestion that he and his fellow actors might have revelled in all belonging to the exclusive Oscarwinning actor club on set. “I think there was an acknowledgment, a kind of tip of the hat, and that was that. We were there to conduct business.”
Leto’s having none of it when asked if the thought of a second Oscar has floated across his mind. “Absolutely not! Not for a single second. I never thought that I would win any awards, ever. It was never on my radar and it’s definitely not now. I mean, I don’t know what’s more unlikely, to win one or to win two? It’s not on my list.”
Washington is far too been-theredone-that to buy into the hype, saying, “It’s about doing the work, not patting each other on the back.” But he does rate the film and the performances. “Man, it’s a good movie, and I’m glad to be a part of it. You know what was fascinating? There are a series of scenes where Rami is interviewing Jared, so I’m sitting in that quiet room watching them through the one-way mirror. But it was really like, ‘Where’s my popcorn?’ because I’m watching these two young actors really go at it, and it was fascinating to watch, different styles of working, and how they approach their character. Great performances.”
The biggest question, though, is whether a throwback drama like this can still be a hit. When serial killer films were big in the late ’80s and ’90s, they came at a time when the grisly phenomenon was, for want of a better word, fresh: the ’70s had begun with the charging of cult leader Charles Manson and three of his followers, and had continued with the Zodiac Killer, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, David Berkowitz (aka Son of Sam) and the Hillside Strangler (actually attributed to cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono) making grim headlines. The ’80s gave America Jeffrey Dahmer, Aileen Wuornos, Henry Lucas and Richard Ramirez (aka the Night Stalker), to name but a few. It’s no surprise, then, that a sub-genre that had been around since Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1927) and Fritz Lang’s M (1931) boomed. Will there be the same interest today? David Fincher’s series Mindhunter, outstanding though it is, didn’t do gangbusters for Netflix.
“Can The Little Things be a hit along the lines of Doctor Strange?” muses Johnson. “No. But can it do well with a discerning audience? Absolutely.
I think this film can do very well and an audience will really be engaged.”
Judging by the popularity of truecrime docs such as Making A Murderer, Conversations With A Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, The Ripper and Netflix’s Night Stalker: The Hunt For A Serial Killer, the public’s bloodlust is far from sated. “I think in some ways, having all that knowledge about serial killers just makes you better armed to watch the movie,” suggests Hancock. “Because you think you know what you’re going to get, and then it’s not quite that way. There’s a question that hangs over the head of Jared Leto, and it’s a movie that’s more about obsession. I’d like to think it could be a hit, especially when you’ve got actors of this calibre that mean something.”
Having Washington, Malek and Leto lock horns is no little thing, and nor is this movie. It’s time to embrace your dark side.
“I WANTED TO DO SOMETHING THAT FELT A LITTLE LIKE A GENRE MOVIE UPFRONT, BUT WASN’T…”
JOHN LEE HANCOCK