The Michael Douglas Fan Page
ARTICLES & INTERVIEWS
A WHOLE NEW GAME MICHAEL DOUGLAS TEAMS UP WITH SEAN PENN FOR AN
ACTION-THRILLER
Stephen
Farber
New York
Times
September 11, 1997
`This is an interesting, sadistic place to put a movie star,'' the
director David Fincher said with a chuckle as he prepared for a scene that required his
leading man, Michael Douglas, to be doused with 1,000 gallons of water.
The scene, filmed last winter, is one of the climaxes of the suspense thriller "The
Game,'' which opens Friday. The teaming of Douglas and Fincher represented the uneasy, but
ultimately rewarding, coupling of old Hollywood and new.
The 52-year-old actor and the 34-year-old director brought vastly different levels of
experience to this venture. While Douglas has been making movies for more than 25 years,
"The Game'' is just Fincher's third film; it follows the box-office disappointment,
"Alien 3,'' (1992) and the surprise blockbuster, "Seven," two years ago.
"The Game" focuses on Nicholas Van Orton, a powerful, cold-hearted San Francisco
tycoon played by Douglas. For his 48th birthday, he receives an unusual present from his
younger brother, Conrad (Sean Penn). It is a game engineered by a company called Consumer
Recreation Services that offers a few mind-bending thrills for jaded businessmen. But as
Van Orton embarks on the adventure, it spins out of control, and he is soon running for
his life from conspirators who seem to want to destroy him.
In one of the movie's harrowing chase scenes, Douglas is riding in a taxi that hurtles
into San Francisco Bay. On this day last winter, a close-up of him struggling to escape
the flooded taxi was being filmed on a sound stage that housed a large tank. (The cab's
plunge into the water had already been filmed in San Francisco, without Douglas aboard.)
Douglas was hoisted into a small compartment that had been designed to resemble the back
seat of a taxi. As he opened the door to flee the submerged cab, the tank unleashed a
cascade of water, and he was completely drenched. He was, of course, only a few feet away
from an army of technicians, but the velocity of the rushing water was no illusion.
"It is a little scary," Douglas admitted as he emerged and headed back to his
trailer to change into a fresh suit for a second take. "It gets your adrenaline
going. But there isn't any real danger."
Douglas -- the producer of a number of movies, from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's
Nest" (1975) to this summer's "Face/Off" -- had inspected the tank as well
as the three cameras that Fincher had set up to capture the deluge. Fincher seemed to
welcome the star's input, and Douglas was not hesitant about offering an opinion.
Even though they come from different generations, the star and the director approached
"The Game" as a genuine collaboration. They eyed each other warily at first --
both were known to be obstinate and tough-minded -- but they quickly came to appreciate
each other's professionalism.
Perhaps they clicked because they both enjoy making movies with a cynical edge. In films
like "Wall Street," "The War of the Roses" and "Fatal
Attraction," Douglas has had great success playing flawed, even venal characters. And
Fincher's two previous features were notable not just for the dark lighting they favored,
but also for the dark vision of human nature underlying the images.
"I like to subvert expectations," Fincher said. "I hope `The Game' is
entertaining, but it's also a little prurient, a little sadistic, because you enjoy the
suffering and anxiety of the central character. You want to see him learn a lesson. And
nobody embraces that quite as eagerly as Michael Douglas."
Douglas agreed that he relished portraying characters who were n eurotically driven rather
than heroic.
"I like the danger and risk of characters who are not entirely attractive," he
said. "I played a lot of parts before `Wall Street,' which was my first chance to
play a more abrasive character. When you win an Oscar the first time you try that, it does
send a message. Those characters are fun to play, and the audiences enjoy them, too. A
`nice' character often seems boring.''
If Fincher admired his star's audacity, Douglas was impressed by the tenacity of his
director. "David is a stubborn guy," he said, "but it comes out of vision.
I loved the extent to which he would go to recreate the picture he had in his mind."
Nevertheless, Douglas wryly observed that Fincher could sometimes be overbearing.
"David is a total control freak," Douglas said. "If he sees anybody having
a conversation, he'll come over to find out what you're talking about. He wants to make
sure you're not talking about him, and he also wants to be sure he knows everything that's
going on."
Fincher said that one of the lures of being a movie director was the opportunity to
exercise authority. "When I was younger," he said, "I studied painting,
photography and sculpture, but movies incorporated everything I loved. And I also loved
the idea of being in control."
His father, a writer and bureau chief for Life magazine, awakened his interest in movies.
"My dad took me to all kinds of movies, from `Robin Hood' to `The Exterminating
Angel,' `' Fincher recalled. "He had enough working knowledge to spark my interest,
but he didn't really know how movies were made, so when I asked him exactly how they did
animated movies, he couldn't go beyond general answers.'' So Fincher began making his own
home movies and devouring all the information on film that he could.
One of his neighbors in Marin County, Calif., was one of the up-and-coming directors of
the 1970's. "We lived down the street from George Lucas at the time `American
Graffiti' came out,'' Fincher said. "I was 10 years old at the time, and I would see
him picking up his newspaper when I left for school. That made me think being a director
was a viable job.''
Click Here to read
more interviews and articles.