DALLAS BUYERS CLUB
THE OSCAR-NOMINATED DALLAS BUYERS CLUB IS INSPIRED BY THE TRUE LIFE STORY OF A MAN FIGHTING FOR SURVIVAL WHEN GIVEN A DEATH SENTENCE UPON HIS AIDS DIAGNOSIS. TIM BAROS LOOKS AT THE BACKGROUND TO THE FILM
The story behind the one of this year’s hottest Oscar contenders
In the 1980s there was no hope for people with HIV. Ron Woodroof, a drug-taking, womanising, macho Texan cowboy and electrician (Matthew McConaughey), is told he has HIV, and has 30 days left to live. Woodroof, a straight man, can’t understand how he could have contracted HIV. But when he discovers that it’s not just gay men but also intravenous drug users who are getting the virus then he knows he’s in trouble and finds himself shunned and ostracised by friends and co-workers.
AZT, the one possible treatment, is only available as a drug trial, where just half the patients will receive the drug with the other half given nothing but a placebo. Refusing to accept this, Woodroof finds a way to get the real drug illegally
However, the AZT doesn’t seem to help and he gets sicker and sicker, until one day he collapses and ends up sharing a hospital room with the transgendered Rayon (Jared Leto), who is in the hospital for the same reason as Woodroof. At first the homophobic Woodroof wants nothing to do with Rayon but slowly warms to her. It’s when the hospital explains to him that they can’t give him AZT that he decides to take his health into his own hands.
Woodroof turns to the black market and realises he could start a business with Rayon by smuggling the medications into the US to sell to fellow Aids patients. And this operation becomes the Dallas Buyers Club.
Soon Ron and Rayon have customers lining up at their Dallas business, which they operate out of two motel rooms. In Rayon, Ron finds another person who is sort of an outcast, and, though they are polar opposites, it soon becomes a situation of them – the cowboy and the queen – against the world. Unfortunately, Woodroof’s business brings the unwanted attention of the FDA as he is selling drugs that are not permitted to be sold in the US but this does not stop him.
The real-life Woodroof was a crusader, a man who gave hope to many who had none. He organised and led an operation whose customer base was 99% gay men, in the Texas of the 1980s, undoubtedly one of the worst places to be homosexual or transsexual, let alone living with Aids. Woodroof would finally succumb to complications from Aids in September 1992, 2,557 days after his diagnosis.
It took 20 years for Dallas Buyers Club to make it to the big screen. A month before Woodroof passed away, screenwriter Craig Borten drove from Los Angeles to Dallas to meet him and to begin work on telling his story. Borten felt that the story of a homophobic cowboy who suddenly found himself on the front lines of the Aids pandemic was a profound and unique story.
The film went into development in 1997, with producer Robbie Brenner attached to it, but it didn’t get made. In 2000, Borten teamed up with screenwriter Melissa Wallack to rework the script and the movie then went into active development at a studio for nearly a decade.
In 2009, the rights went back to Borten and Wallack, and Brenner got back on board. Their first choice to play Woodroof was Matthew McConaughey. And McConaughey was up to the challenge.
“Ron was an American original. He shook the tree. He made noise. I said I want to get this made, get Ron’s story told,” McConaughey has said.
Once a director was chosen (Jean-Marc Vallée, the awardwinning director of Café de Flor and C.R.A.Z.Y.), it was a go. Production began in mid-2012, with Jared Leto coming on board as first choice for Rayon, and Jennifer Garner as Dr Eve Sacks, who had initially been told about the project by McConaughey. Principal photography began in New Orleans in mid-2012, with a 25-day shooting schedule.
McConaughey’s performance is what makes this movie stand out from all other films that have dealt with Aids. His performance is better and more realistic than Tom Hanks’ in the 1993 film Philadelphia; and while Hanks was given lots of makeup to look sick, McConaughey went through an amazing physical transformation to play the frail and dying man.
It’s McConaughey’s best performance in his career, and perhaps the best performance of the year. He shed nearly 50 pounds, and in one pivotal scene, dropped to 135 pounds to play the dying Woodroof lying emaciated on his hospital bed.
McConaughey also did a lot of research for the role, including reading Woodroof’s journals. “After listening to audiotapes and doing my research, I didn’t feel I needed any more information,” he has said. “Interviews with Ron were so helpful. In listening to Ron talk after seven years with HIV, I realised that a man speaks differently about himself and his legacy in retrospect than he does when he’s living it in progress,”
The actor eventually went to meet Ron’s
family. “That made a difference,” he said. “It was very informative. They are wonderful people who opened up the library of their house to me, lent me scrapbooks, other tapes, a couple of his diaries, and more.”
Like McConaughey, Leto also went through a physical transformation to play Rayon and by the time filming began had gotten down to a dangerous 116 pounds. In the film Leto completely nails the character of Rayon with charm, emotion, a touch of femininity, honesty and vulnerability.
“I did get in touch with my feminine side, because it’s a strong attribute of the character,” Leto has said. “In terms of emotions it was important for me to study as much as I could about what it meant to be a transsexual woman, to get at how you see things and what you want out of life.
“Rayon is a ray of light, no pun intended. She is someone who wants to be loved and wants to love others, someone who wants to take care of people with humour and kindness. She looks to be electrified. I think she’s a spirit of hope, joy and optimism.”
Dallas Buyers Club feels like a documentary, with a countdown on the screen showing how many days it has been since Ron’s diagnosis. And we see him surviving much longer than the 30 days his doctor initially gave him.
“The way I approached playing him is to never forget that he was a businessman first, a man doing what was necessary to survive,” McConaughey says. “Later on, he became a crusader for the cause, but almost without even knowing it. He helped save so many people, and whether he was doing it for all of us or doing it for selfish reasons, he did it.”
Dallas Buyer Club is an important movie that excellently captures an era when Aids was considered a death sentence, the feel, the clothing, the hostility, the fear, the desperation, and the smell of death. It deserves every award it is going to get.
In 1992, screenwriter Craig Borten asked Woodroof how he would feel about his story becoming a movie one day. Borten reports, “Ron said, ‘Man, I’d really like to have a film. I’d like people to have this information and I’d like people to be educated on what I had to learn by the seat of my pants about government, pharmaceutical agencies, Aids. I’d like to think it all meant something in the end.’”
“The real-life Woodroof was a crusader, a man who gave hope to many who had none”