AMERICAN HISTORY X

He clashed with Edward Norton, weaponised John Lennon lyrics and threatened to bribe projectionists...

The tempestuous shoot of Tony Kaye’s drama. Kerb your enthusiasm.

...now, 20 years after the release of brutal neo-nazi drama American History X, director Tony Kaye tells the full story of its bruising ride to the screen

Tony Kaye, 66, with a beard to shame Gandalf, is sitting in an east London pub, painting in a sketchbook. It’s a balmy sunny evening during this summer’s heatwave, and just four punters await the weekly open-mic music spot. After the opening act, Kaye is called to the stage and sits on a stool to sing a song or two of his own, backed by the resident band. “Los Angeles, you tore me to pieces,” he sings, proper pain in his voice. “Los Angeles, you broke my heart.” Afterwards, the modest audience applauds. “Thank you,” he says. “My name’s Tony Kaye, I’m a filmmaker. And I live in a place called Hollywood Jail. But I’m being released.”

Kaye had always wanted to make it in Hollywood. He began in advertising in 1979, and by the time he’d moved from London to Los Angeles in 1990, he was one of the industry’s most celebrated directors, and offers soon came in. He turned down some rubbish: Darkman II, Another 9½ Weeks. Then in 1995, Jerry Bruckheimer asked him to consider Con Air, and one of his assistants took Kaye to a meeting with Touchstone Pictures. “And I said,” says Kaye now, “the only way to make this movie is with real prisoners from Death Row.’ They said, ‘What about actors?’ And I said, ‘Oh, that’s absolutely ridiculous. It’s impossible.’ Because I felt the script was daft, but with real people on Death Row, it would bring a vitality, to the scenes. So I said, ‘You can’t do this with actors.’ Afterwards, Jerry’s assistant said to me, ‘Tony, what the fuck? Why don’t you play the game?’ I didn’t even know what he meant.” Kaye did not get the job. “Jerry called me in, and he said, ‘Look, if you don’t do your first movie with me, it’s gonna end in tears. Do you know that?’”

How prophetic that was. “I don’t think it’s ended,” Kaye says of his career today. “But it certainly came to a halt for a while. And there were tears.” IT’S BEEN 20 years since American History X was released in America, in October 1998. Kaye has made other films since, including 2006’s epic abortion documentary Lake Of Fire and 2011 Adrien Brody drama Detachment, but American History X still defines him. In simple terms, it did okay at the box office, got Edward Norton a Best Actor Oscar nomination, and has endured due to its dramatic whack, thrilling performances and sublime visuals (Kaye was also cinematographer). But nothing about the experience was simple.

Kaye was born into an Orthodox Jewish family. His father grew up in Gdansk, Poland, during the Nazi occupation, later telling his son how he was beaten up. “All these stories… I became aware of that terrible thing,” the director says. “So I felt, ‘That’s what I should be doing’ — if I was gonna make a movie, it should be about something like that.” When New Line sent him David Mckenna’s script for American History X, then, he was interested. Mckenna, wanting to write a nuanced racism drama, had created the smart, furious neo-nazi Derek Vinyard, drawn into racism by his father. Derek inspires his younger brother Danny to follow suit, but is later imprisoned for a horrific attack on an African-american man before emerging a changed man, turning his back on it all.

Kaye thought the screenplay was clichéd, but saw potential, and in August 1996 he signed up. “I wanted to make a film about Adolf Hitler,” he says now. “And this film gave me the opportunity to deal with Nazism in some kind of way. My agenda was, if I could make one person reconsider their politics or their hatred or their intolerance, that’s my job. In every scene I tried to reconfigure that.”

For Derek, New Line wanted Edward Norton, whose debut film, Primal Fear, had just been released. Kaye didn’t. In the script, he says, Derek was described as a ‘“thug god”, and Kaye couldn’t see past Norton’s privileged background and relatively slight frame. At a meeting involving producers and studio execs, Kaye said, “Look, he’s not right for the role.” Norton was also in the room. “And they’re all squirming around in their chairs. I said, ‘I want a thug god. He’s plainly not a thug god.’ Edward said, ‘Let’s go outside and talk for a minute.’”

Outside, Norton pledged to change his diet and spend months in the gym. “He said, ‘I can bulk up,’” remembers Kaye. “I said, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He said, ‘I can, I can get there.’” Unconvinced, Kaye managed to secure five weeks to find another lead. He tried Joaquin Phoenix, who turned it down. After not finding anybody suitable, he settled for Norton, who duly transformed himself into a monster, and Kaye ate his words, “shocked by what Edward did”.

And in Norton, Kaye found a key collaborator. They “had a completely shared vision” of what could be done with the script to make the film Kaye wanted it to be, he says. Originally, there was a drugs plot, a deal gone wrong, which Kaye excised, determined to make the film about “racism, hate and anger”. Also, Kaye was friendly with screenwriting guru Syd Field, who had read Mckenna’s script, thought it was good, but said they needed to find out why Derek emerges from prison a changed man. “Because the prison sequence was only one or two pages,” says Kaye. “Basically he went to prison and was raped by his own kind, by white people, and then came out a different guy. I came up with him meeting an African-american guy, Lamont, in jail, and they form a bond.” Norton then came up with the idea to have three scenes set in the prison’s laundry room, where Derek and Lamont would forge a relationship.

The Los Angeles shoot began in March 1997, Kaye leading a collaborative production with much improvisation. The shot of a traumatised Danny (Edward Furlong) falling to his knees after Derek delivers the harrowing, fatal kerb stomp took hours and maybe 50 takes, estimates Kaye, because he was shooting 400 frames per second. Some scenes took days to shoot. By the end of filming, there were 200 hours of footage in the can. “I think what Tony did with this material was absolutely brilliant,” Norton told the Detroit Free Press at the time. “The actual experience of making the film was one of the best I’ve ever had.” What happened next was less harmonious.

KAYE SOON DELIVERED a rough 96-minute cut, which went down well — at a screening, said New Line president of production Michael De Luca at the time, “People cried, it was so emotionally affecting.” The studio gave Kaye some notes, and a few months later he turned in a shorter, 87-minute cut. De Luca wasn’t keen in it; more notably, Norton didn’t like it. More notes followed, then New Line invited Norton into the editing room to oversee changes with an assistant editor; the actor, De Luca said, told him he wouldn’t promote the film if he wasn’t happy with the cut. An aggrieved Kaye let them get on with it before eventually looking at the work in progress, and punched his fist through a wall — “because of the crap that was going down,” he says now — breaking his hand. Nevertheless, in June 1998, New Line screened its cut, which, De Luca said, was even more enthusiastically received than Kaye’s original version, and at a tense meeting, the studio told Kaye this was the one they’d like to release. Kaye threatened to take his name off the film; De Luca walked out. He later apologised to Kaye, granting him another eight weeks to work on the film. But the damage was done — Kaye had already embarked on a revenge mission, funding full-page advertisements in the trade press,

For Derek, New Line wanted Edward Norton, whose debut film Primal Fear had just been released. Kaye didn’t.

cryptically attacking Norton and New Line via quotes from the likes of Lincoln and Einstein, and song lyrics such as John Lennon’s, “I’ll scratch your back and you knife mine.” Kaye tried to pull the ads, but it was too late.

In those next eight weeks, Kaye went to the Caribbean to meet a poet called Derek Walcott. “I was just reading a poem one day, in the toilet, and I thought, ‘Fuck, that’s good,’” Kaye says now. “So I thought” — he laughs at the memory — “‘I’ll go and work with him.’ That was the rarefied atmosphere I was living in at the time that had been given to me by grace of God and by the advertising world. Because they had embraced me, rained millions and millions of pounds, shillings, dollars and shekels upon me, and said, ‘You’re the king, you can do whatever you want.’”

There in the Caribbean, he and Walcott focused on radically reinventing the film, working on new scenes and voiceover. And on 28 July he went back to New Line to ask for more time. He was frightened about doing so, and brought with him a rabbi, a Catholic priest and a Tibetan monk. “The idea was good, to go in with spiritual people, to increase the level of decorum in the room,” says Kaye. “But the reason I was doing it was not for enlightenment, really; it was for fucking stupidity.” De Luca later said Kaye’s ideas were vague, that he couldn’t tell them how much more time he’d need. New Line decided to release the cut they already had. It would premiere at the Toronto Film Festival mere weeks later.

Kaye, who was reading Chinese military strategy book The Art Of War, told people he’d bribe projectionists to destroy prints of the film, and hire security guards to obstruct audiences from seeing it. New Line’s cut was around 20 minutes longer than Kaye’s original edit, and by all accounts, length and some structure aside, wasn’t hugely different. Still, at the time, Kaye called it an embarrassment. The film wasn’t exploring racism as deeply as he wanted it to, and as it stood, he felt, it all but celebrated a neo-nazi. But his main beef was, he says now, that his “collaboration was abused”, and that he didn’t get to complete the film as he saw it: “I hadn’t finished. And they said, ‘You have finished.’”

He explains now that he wanted to increase the role of Danny’s African-american school principal, to give more depth to the relationship between Danny and Derek’s mother Doris (Beverly D’angelo) and her Jewish partner Murray (Elliott Gould), and to deal with the fact that he thought Derek’s release after just three years was “insane. Here’s a guy that savagely murders an African-american guy, in the most heinous manner, and he gets out of jail after three years! It’s a cartoon. A Hollywood cartoon.” And he would put the kerb stomp, which comes halfway through the film, at the end. “That was the ending I wanted,” he says. “To not show how heinous the act was until the end. To send people home knowing what a bad guy this guy was.”

In August 1998, Kaye went to Toronto in an attempt to get the premiere cancelled, determined to do more work on it. And, after days of talks between the festival (who said they “support filmmakers’ artistic vision”) and New Line, the screening was pulled. Kaye ramped up his trade-press ad campaign; one of the ads asked his cast to skip the ADR (dialogue re-recording) and voiceover sessions they’d been asked to do. Furlong and D’angelo, supportive of Kaye, did skip the sessions in protest, initially; during promotion, D’angelo said she believed Kaye was being “victimised by his innocence”, that he couldn’t understand why anybody would want to release a film they were not all completely happy with.

Kaye told the Directors Guild Of America he wanted his name removed from the film. He said he should be credited as Humpty Dumpty. At least that made him laugh, he said at the time, also explaining that “Humpty Dumpty is a metaphor for the fall of man and subsequent events”. The DGA refused, as a rule stipulated a director could not have his name removed if they’d publicly badmouthed a film. To get around that, Kaye considered changing his name by deed poll to Humpty Dumpty. And, he told the LA Times, he might “hire someone to wear a Humpty Dumpty outfit, walk around New Line’s plaza and sit on their little wall and occasionally fall off”.

KAYE ENDED UP filing a $200 million lawsuit against New Line and the DGA, asserting that they had violated his First Amendment rights. The film was released, grossed $24 million (from a $20 million budget) and bagged Norton the Best Actor nomination. An exhausted Kaye dropped the lawsuit, went bankrupt, and got “Idiot” tattooed on his arm. Film projects came and went, with just Lake Of Fire and Detachment

getting finished and released. Last August, when the tiki torch parade marched through Charlottesville, resulting in the murder of Heather Heyer, Kaye immediately wrote a treatment for ‘American History X 2’. It concerned different characters, chiefly a black male journalist dating a white female reporter at Charlottesville, ending in the man getting killed. Kaye planned, though, to end the film with real footage from the events, and when he heard that Spike Lee had done just that for Blackkklansman,

he dropped the whole project.

Back in August 1998, he’d started filming himself and his various confrontations, for a documentary about it all called ‘Humpty Dumpty’. He’s still editing it, although it’s now called

The Hell Of Compromise. “It’s very embarrassing,” revisiting the footage. “But I don’t care about that. I’ve just gotta go forward with it and try to learn something from it.” He screened some of it at an open-mic night in a north London basement this July, a week after his musical performance across town, to a room of 20 oblivious people who’d come to watch comedy and magic acts. “I’m gonna introduce you to this complete fucking idiot from 20 years ago,” he said at the start. With his guitar, he sang a song, also called ‘The Hell Of Compromise’, while a laptop beside him played footage of his 1998 self crying and ranting. Afterwards, Empire leaves the venue with him. “I feel like Robert De Niro at the end of Raging Bull,” he says.

He’s currently attached to a few films, including 1970s New York crime drama Honorable Men, and a sequel to upcoming Val Kilmer comedy 1st Born called 2nd Born, for which he plans to cast a robot in the lead. As for American History X, despite its troubled creation, he speaks of it with more warmth than ever. “I must give credit to the writer,” he says of Mckenna. “The script was a lot better than I ever thought it was. I always thought that it was a terrible script, and that I saved it. Because I was all about me. Which was a problem. The script was a very flawed masterpiece.”

Norton, he says, played Derek “magnificently”, despite the bad blood that still remains. “All the things I felt were wrong with Edward, he took on board and tried to give me what I was looking for. I have a slight resentment for the guy. Although I should have bigger resentment for myself. But I’m selfloathing enough as it is,” he laughs. “I blame myself for not having the skill to get what I wanted. But the thing is, in the end, the movie worked. In the end, American History X is a very good film. The stars lined up: Michael De Luca, Edward Norton, David Mckenna and Tony Kaye made that film. I’m very proud of that work. That was me firing on all cylinders, giving everything that I had.”

Last year, in an interview with The AV Club, Beverly D’angelo was asked if she’d wished any project she’d worked on had “hit harder”, and she instantly rhapsodised about American History X. “I wish that Tony Kaye had been allowed and had been welcomed into the Hollywood filmmaking industry in a way that was equal to his incredible talent and gifts,” she said, mentioning that she later worked on two other unreleased films with him. “Because he’s a brilliant, brilliant, very deep guy and has a skill set that’s beyond and has a genius, and there should be a place for him.” There may still be.

AMERICAN HISTORY X IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DOWNLOAD

Kaye told people he’d bribe projectionists to destroy prints of the film, and hire security guards to obstruct audiences from seeing it.