Confess, Fletch
Legendary British impresario JEREMY THOMAS reflects on the great directors of his storied career
GREG MOTTOLA’S ADAPTATION of Gregory Mcdonald’s novel is the first film to feature roguish reporter (retired) Irwin M. Fletcher since the one-two Chevy Chase punch of the ’80s. This time he’s played, winningly, by Jon Hamm, in a fun Boston-set caper that deserves to find a second audience.
CONFESSARE, FLETCH
The film begins like the book, with Fletch arriving in Boston from Italy, and entering a rental apartment to find a dead woman on the floor, and him firmly in the frame for her murder. But after the policeman in charge of the investigation — Roy Wood Jr’s Inspector Monroe — shows up, Mottola flashes back to Fletch’s time in Rome, a suggestion of Hamm chum and fellow Fletch fan Neil Gaiman. “In the book, all the Italy information is told through dialogue,” says Mottola. “Jon and I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could trick Miramax into letting us go to Italy for a couple of days?’ They did not want us to do that. We whittled it down to one day, with one day of second unit, and did it really fast.”
NAME CHECK
That Roman holiday allows Mottola to introduce Fletch by name in an unusually playful way, as he hooks up with Italian countess Angela de Grassi (Lorenza Izzo), and she cries out his nickname at the height of passion. “I think everyone’s a little scared of sex scenes these days,” laughs Mottola. “But we were trying to think about how to hear the name ‘Fletch’ for the first time. That was actually something that was in Zev Borow’s first script. We ended up going back to the book, and I did a new draft, but I cherry-picked all this stuff, and that was pretty much my favourite thing.”
CHAOS ENGINE
“The Chevy version is, basically everyone is a straight man to Chevy,” explains Mottola. But he upends that notion for a riotous scene in which Fletch grills scatty neighbour Eve (Annie Mumolo) for information while she unleashes chaos in her kitchen. By the end, there’s blood and dog piss everywhere, things are on fire, and Fletch is scrambling to make sense of a wild stream of consciousness. “Jon’s job was mainly reaction shots and trying to weasel some information out of her,” laughs Mottola. “Annie, God bless her, is an agent of chaos. It was very sweet because occasionally he would have to say to her, ‘No, you’re supposed to be over there when you say that line!’”
MEET MIKEY MIKE
While this version of Fletch doesn’t share Chase’s proclivity for prosthetic disguises, he does frequently adopt fake identities to charm and con pretty much anyone he needs to. “He has no ethical problem with that,” notes Mottola. “That’s why his editor was mad at him
all the time. He kept getting receipts from Tom Savini.” Here, if you can’t keep track of the frequent aliases, don’t worry — neither can Fletch. In one scene, having told two street artists that his name is Mike Wahlberg — ‘Mikey Mike’, a lovely nod to Boston hero Mark — Fletch then forgets himself: “Wait, what did I say?” “One of the things I loved about Chevy’s version is Chevy would walk into a room and confuse people so much that they wouldn’t know what was going on,” laughs Mottola. “We didn’t steal Chevy’s joke of saying his name is Ted Nugent or Don Corleone, but the Mikey Mike thing was meant to be very silly. We wanted to keep a little bit of that, and to make sure that Jon’s character was flawed, that he’s not as smart as he thinks he is.”
MAD MAN
Looking to extricate himself from his predicament, Fletch turns to a former colleague, Frank, a persnickety and sweary character played by Hamm’s old Mad Men chum, John Slattery. But there’s not an ounce of Don Draper and
Roger Sterling in their playful banter. “As a longtime Mad Men fan, I was excited about watching them together, and they immediately started abusing each other verbally,” says Mottola. “It felt very good.” So good, in fact, that Mottola is currently at work on the screenplay to a sequel, based on the novel Fletch’s Fortune, and he’s trying to work Frank into the action. “The character is not in the book, but it’s about a journalism convention, so why wouldn’t he be in the movie?”
LAST SALUTE TO THE COMMODORE
Perhaps the film’s funniest scene comes when Fletch, while attempting to board a boat that doesn’t quite belong to him, deflects the unwanted attentions of a nosey commodore by launching into an extended improvised riff, during which he claims that an old friend of the commodore’s is dead; shredded by a boat propeller. “It was just like sauce,” deadpans Fletch, to the old man’s horror. “That was a Jon ad-lib,” recalls Mottola. “Fletch mostly punches up. He’s kind of being insulting here. It’s borderline. [The commodore] is not a monstrous old WASP-Y guy, but you know, he’s had a nice long life of privilege. You can mess with them a little bit.” Not to mention that the old guy later gets shot in the frantic fracas that marks the film’s finale. Just what, you may be forgiven for wondering, does Greg Mottola have against commodores?
FLETCH WINS
At last, Fletch unmasks the murderer — Kyle Maclachlan’s cash-strapped art dealer, Ronald Horan. Only, in a confrontation on Horan’s boat, Fletch’s grand theories about the crime, and about Angela’s participation in it, are shown to be completely, catastrophically, comically wrong. “Jon and I are both friends with Bill Hader,” says Mottola, who directed Hader in Superbad and Paul, “and we gave Bill the script. He said we should just lean into that, have him fully, 100 per cent certain of his theory, and then just faceplant in that scene. It helps to have really brilliant comedy friends.”
CONFESS, FLETCH IS OUT NOW ON DIGITAL
JEREMY THOMAS IS the ne plus ultra of old-school indie producers: the guy who’ll somehow find the cash and ride the storms to make “original films”, he says; “unusual, but very long-lasting”, as new 4K restorations of both The Last Emperor and Naked Lunch testify. Across his astonishing career, the British producer (son of Ralph Thomas, director of many ’50s and ’60s comedies; and nephew of Gerald, producer of the Carry On movies) has worked with some of the greatest directors of all time. Here, he reflects upon those relationships.
JERZY SKOLIMOWSKI
The Shout (1978)
Essential Killing (2010)
EO (2022)
“Jerzy showed me a new side of filmmaking: stylistically unconventional and avantgarde. He taught me a lot about going off-piste and being brave — brave enough to throw out a score by important people, though I won’t mention the names. I was a neophyte, still in my twenties, so it was a learning process. A very enjoyable one.”
NICOLAS ROEG
Bad Timing (1980)
Eureka (1982) Insignificance (1985)
“Nic Roeg is important to me. He was already a legend as a famed DOP when I first started in the business. I remember seeing Performance [Roeg’s 1970 debut as director] at its first showing in Leicester Square. It blew me away.
Nic was an incredible director, and Bad Timing is a magnificent work. But people here in England don’t know him. It’s outrageous! We had the greatest director, but he wasn’t even talked about until he appeared in the obituaries. It’s amazing that our film culture is so narrow that that could happen.”
BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI
The Last Emperor (1987)
The Sheltering Sky (1990)
Little Buddha (1993) Stealing Beauty (1995)
The Dreamers (2003)
“I might never have made
The Last Emperor if I’d had the understanding I have now. But I was in absolute awe and adoration of Bertolucci’s cinema. We had to get permission to shoot in the Forbidden City in China. We went to the British embassy and they wanted nothing to do with us! Bernardo was a Marxist, so the ambassador was very frightened of us. In the end, we got permission from China based on Bernardo’s cultural achievements. We had such a journey together.”
DAVID CRONENBERG
Naked Lunch (1991)
Crash (1996)
A Dangerous Method (2011)
“When I look at some of these films that I managed to pull off, I think, ‘How the fuck did I do it? How did I manage to get somebody to put up ten million bucks to make Naked Lunch?
It’s so extreme!’ But nobody complained. Then when we did Crash, nobody complained…
Except in England. It’s still banned in London, you know. I had no idea it was gonna press all these buttons; J.G. Ballard is one of the greatest English writers! It’s insane. But working with Cronenberg was wonderful. He’s completely unique. Like all the directors I’ve made more than one film with, he makes films that have a proper subtext, provide proper mental stimulation for the audience, have a challenging subject. That’s what independent cinema is meant to be.”
TERRY GILLIAM
Tideland (2005)
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018)
“I’ve known Terry since the early days. He sent me this book Tideland [by Mitch Cullen], I liked it — very bizarre — and I bought the option. On reflection, I understand why it was not successful [it concerns a child left
alone in rural Texas with her dead, decomposing father, played by Jeff Bridges]. It’s a tough subject. The sort of film that needs reappraisal. But I’m happy I did it. And then I helped Terry on Don Quixote, by managing to somehow get the rights back from the insurance claim on his first attempt. He’s my friend. Often the people I work with are my friends. I’d work with Terry again.”
TAKASHI MIIKE
13 Assassins (2010) Hara-kiri: Death Of A Samurai (2011)
Blade Of The Immortal (2017) First Love (2019)
“My Japanese venture began when I worked with Nagisa Oshima [on Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence],
so I knew a lot about Japanese cinema. I thought Miike’s
Ichi The Killer and Audition
were major works. I first met with him in Venice to discuss a screenplay I’d written, and he said, ‘I can’t do this. I’m not that man. But I’ve got this.’ And it was 13 Assassins. Incredible. My favourite film I’ve done with him. I’ve still got a couple more I’d like to do with him. But he gets booked ahead. He’s very busy. You can’t compare him to a Western filmmaker. He does anything. Everything. TV, children’s films, kabuki plays, features — I think he’s done 120 films now. It’s unbelievable.”
BEN WHEATLEY
High Rise (2015)
“I’d lost my way while trying to adapt High Rise [written by J.G. Ballard in 1975]. I’d been hammering away at it since 2005, trying to set it in a slight near-future, which was too expensive. Then my son, who’s an agent, said to me, ‘Ben Wheatley is really interested in High Rise.’ So we met and he said, ‘I want to set it in the ’70s, and Amy [Jump] and I want to write the script… In fact, here is the script.’ [Laughs] So I said, ‘Okay.’ He’s an original talent. Ben’s very knowledgeable about cinema — like Edgar Wright, and Ari Aster who I recently met with.
To me that is so important. Great filmmaking doesn’t only involve the skill of the camera and editing skills, it involves more: deep knowledge about the subject. That’s what connects all these directors: they’re all very cine-literate. And they’re all natural-born filmmakers.”
THE LAST EMPEROR IS OUT NOW; NAKED LUNCH IS OUT ON APRIL 17 ON 4K BLU-RAY