Going on two months ago, after I returned from Comic-Con, I did an interview with writer-director-actor Mike Binder. I’ve held off publishing to coincide with the DVD release of Reign Over Me (out today). I hadn’t seen Reign Over Me at the time of the interview which is a shame because I have a ton of questions about it. It’s one of the better films I’ve seen in 2007 (you can read Brad’s DVD review HERE and my external review HERE). It features a very strong performance by Adam Sandler, one I believe would have generated Oscar talk for the actor if his last name ended in “Hanks” as well as one of my favorite roles for Don Cheadle (which is saying something). It’s also one of the few movies this year that I think Brad, Laremy and I all agree to liking (again, that’s saying something).
You may not know Binder by name but you might recall him in small, effective roles like the ones in The Contender and one of the best scenes in Minority Report. I never much followed the guy’s career until he wrote and directed 2005’s Upside of Anger, a strong Joan Allen film that should have garnered the actress an Oscar nomination. The movie was well-received and did modest business.
His next film looked to set up a real career comeback for Ben Affleck on paper. Binder was coming off one of his best-reviewed efforts and Affleck was ditching the blockbuster circuit for strong character pieces. The movie, called Man About Town, didn’t pan out and pretty much went direct to DVD.
But there’s one Mike Binder film most of you probably haven’t heard of. It’s called The Search for John Gissing. The film was released this year, but is only available through Binder’s Freebird website. Yes, he is self-distributing the film. No studio distribution deal, just straight off of his website for purchase. This idea of self-distribution intrigued me so when one of his producing partners contacted me to see if I’d be interested in speaking with Mr. Binder about the film, I jumped at the chance.
Before I get into the interview, let me just say I enjoyed the movie. It reminded me a lot of The Out-of-Towners in a way. Binder plays an American arriving in London to complete a business merger and secure a new position at a London firm. Alan Rickman plays John Gissing, an employee of the firm who seems bent on making his life a living hell. Binder and Janeane Garafalo (who plays his wife) have good comedic chemistry and Alan Rickman kills as the conniving Gissing. The cast overall is game but Rickman really drives this thing and makes it work. The movie won’t blow your socks off, but it was definitely entertaining enough and I was left wondering why the movie took so long to get released. See, Binder made the film back in 2000 (yes, 2000) but it is only getting distributed this year.
Huh?
Exactly. So what the heck happened with this movie? Well, that was the very first question I opened him up with.
You shot this movie back in 2000 and it’s only really starting to get promoted [in the last few months] … what exactly happened with this movie?
Mike Binder (MB): Well, you know … it’s really a long story. What happened was … I made it after I made a couple of really small movies, very low budget and I had made my money back and a small profit on, you know? And then I put my own money and a some of my family and friends’ money into this thing, Search For John Gissing and we made it really cheap, a little over two and half million dollars. We took it out to the film festivals and the audiences loved it, we won the critics award at Sarasota but we couldn’t get anyone to buy it. And when we did get offers, the distribution company would say, “We guarantee we’ll put it into two theatres but we want to own all the rights to cable and foreign and we want to own it forever”. We were like, why would we do that. You know? Just to be in theatres? And I also thought, to me, the movie worked so well in some spots. Because I made it so cheap, there were some areas that I thought I could do better.
You were going to reshoot a lot of the movie, right?
MB: Yeah! Yeah, I was always going to reshoot it and I never got around to it and finally – like three summers ago I just wrote a whole new version of it called The Multinationals which [took] everything that worked, everything that was improvised that we liked, everything that didn’t work and fixing it and thought, I’m going to start over, you know? I’m going to try to get Gwenyth Paltrow to play …
Janeane Garafalo’s role?
MB: Yeah, and Johnny Cusack … I mean, I’m just throwing names out there. And you know, try to get Rickman to do it again.
Is he open to that?
MB: I don’t know, I hoping he is (laughs).
You know, it’s funny, I was watching the movie and all of a sudden there’s that scene where your character is talking about how was too young for vietnam and too old for Desert Storm and kind of … it was jarring because it through me out of the movie for a minute because whoa, this movie is pre-9/11 here so this release was a long time coming.
MB: Exactly. Exactly.
This [distribution] process that you’re going through right now, there must have been pressure. You said that you had your own money and other people that you knew, friends relatives … was there pressure?
MB: Yeah. Listen, here’s the thing. My whole career this is the biggest failure financially but at the same time it’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever done. It was a great time in my life. I had a very enjoyable shoot and I said to the people I owed money to “Look, I’m going to put it on a shelf, I’m going to redo it and I’m going to make the money back one day.”
Right.
MB: You know, nobody’s thrilled. But there were no big investors. Everyone that had a little bit of money in were okay with losing that kind of money.
So nobody was coming to break your arms
MB: (laughs) No, no … break my balls, maybe. Bust my balls, but not break my arms. So to me it was on the shelf. I was going to wait and figure out a way to get Multinationals going and we got so many e-mails and so many letters from fans of Rickman’s and Garafalo’s and people that just liked the movie and were like, “Where’s this damn movie?”. We put it in the Westwood Film Festival and it was packed. People flew in from all over the place. So I said, let’s figure out a way to just distribute it ourselves on one website. This way we don’t have to give up any rights, we don’t have to do anything with it because I really don’t want to do anything with it other than give it to the people who want it.
Then it became – this is why i said it’s a long story – the other side of it is, in the new world, I’d like to figure out a way, see if there’s a world where I’ll be able to make movies and then sell them [myself]. Movies are eventually going to be just downloaded off our televisions. It doesn’t matter if you go to Netflix or Amazon.com and if there’s truly a revenue stream that I can build a pipeline between making the movies and distributing them myself, maybe I can take Gissing to jam a little wire through the ground to just learn and just start. Does that make any sense?
Yeah, one of the things I was really interested in [for the interview] was this new concept of self-distribution and this looks to me the direction we’re headed for down the road.
MB: That’s what I think. In my dreamworld, I’m going to set up a system with a core of people that like my movies cheap with actors as partners, distribute it digitally to a thousand theatres, sell the foreign and know I’ve got a core group that will by it on home video that will pay for the costs and that’s what I’m hoping in five or ten years to have.
How is the process working for you right now?
MB: It’s been really wonderful. Right now, to be honest, we ordered a bunch of them from this place that used to only do porn DVDs and they wanted to go legitimate. They did a great job. I own my own editing room and I have facilities to do all my post stuff, all my opticals and titles and a guy who does all the mastering and commentary and everything and we ordered, you know, a few thousand of them and we built the Google checkout and we’re sending them all over the world and it’s working out. I think we’ve sold over a thousand so far which is not a lot, but you know what?
It’s better than the two theatres [distribution]
MB: It’s better than the two theatres.
What about cable channels. Do you see John Gissing showing up on HBO or Starz or one of these deals?
MB: Yeah. Yeah, if the right offer came in. Again, as long as they were renting it from me.
With the Multinationals, are you doing a straight remake or are you heading in different directions with the remake?
MB: It’s pretty much a straight remake, yeah. I’m trying to do a Blake Edwards meets Neil Simon meets A Fish Called Wanda kind of thing. It’s a comedy really from another era which doesn’t make it a bad thing, it just makes it a comedy from another era.
There’s a moment in the movie where it starts to veer towards the slapstick, the physical comedy and the screwball. We don’t see a lot of these days. Why do you think that is? We hardly get screwball comedies anymore.
MB: I don’t know. I don’t know. What we get instead are these kind of satirically goofball comedies. Well, satirically is the wrong word … snide kinda goofball comedies, a little too cool for school, kind of laughing at the world with actors playing characters but they’re not really in character. And I really miss the straight old fashioned … I wouldn’t call this screwball comedy but I would say it’s a cross between farce and screwball comedy. And what I really want to do with the remake is a true British-American fusion. The remake is more of an international comedy. I want to get a French actor and a German actor, there’s an oriental woman, a Pakistani character …
Hence, the title The Multinationals. I do hope you remake this film because I like the film and Allan Rickman, he’s great in it.
MB: I think he’s brilliant.
How was he to work with?
MB: So fantastic. He’s really an amazing actor. He’s really smart. He’s one of these guys when you first start to work with him you think, “Oh, this is going to be tough. He’s going to be grouchy and short and cankerous.” And then you realize that isn’t him at all. It’s his style to be so direct and focused and he comes to work everyday so prepared, so ready to give you so much. A guy like him, he’s such an artist that I really don’t know if he’d want to revisit the same thing again. But I’m going to find out, I’m going to ask him.
What about editing of the film? One of the things I really liked about the film is the way it was cut (the film uses a series of jump cuts to enhance the comedy). You mention on the commentary track that you were looking for an editor who would edit the film and not direct it, have you have bad experiences with editors and if you were keeping with that style in The Multinationals.
MB: Well I do plan on keeping that style and I hope to be using the same editor. His name is Roger Nygard who is also a film director. I don’t really remember saying that I was looking for an editor to edit and not direct but he came up with that style as I was shooting and he sent me a couple of scenes and asked me if I liked it at all and I told him I did and to do more of it and I’d think of a couple of scenes where we could do more with it. So yeah, I do like that. It moves it along, it tells the story quicker.
It also gives you a lot of freedom in terms of takes
MB: Yeah. Yeah.
What do you think you do better today as a director, writer or actor than when you originally worked on John Gissing?
MB: As a director I think I work with the actors better. Much better. In fact, I would say Gissing was really a turning point for me. Before then I was telling actors where to stand and what to say and try to get them to complete what I heard in my head. With Gissing I really just took so much input from Rickman and I let Janeane improvise so much and I improvised myself so much and we were off-book so much and I learned to just let the actors do their own thing. I’m not looking for them to do my thing, I’m looking for them to do their thing. And I think that’s the one thing I’ve become better at as an actor’s director.
I’v been around a long time now. I’ve made between 8-11 films as well as [the HBO show] Mind of the Married Man and I was lucky in the way – you would also say unlucky – in that I never really had a hit. Most people don’t really know who I am. I keep working and get better and better and better and I’m pretty experienced and I feel that sometimes. I think, “Wow, I’ve been doing this a pretty long time and I think I know what I’m doing.”. Believe me I wish that my film is a hit. I would rather have had a different route. But sometimes when you’re around a long time and you don’t get into that whole game with huge budgets and huge salaries … you don’t buy into the pressure of each time lighting the world on fire. Does that make sense?
Yeah, absolutely.
MB: I don’t work with a lot of pressure, you know? I don’t think, “Oh, this one has gotta work or I’m finished”. I just kind of get onto the next one.
But you’ve had, well not huge successes but you’ve had some critically acclaimed successes like The Upside of Anger which I really liked and this year you have Reign Over Me which was really well-received.
MB: Yeah, I’ve had some critical kind of stuff that worked. Believe me, you know, I keep thinking these things will help movies get made but I have right now something I believe could be the best movie I’ve ever made. It’s called Emperor of Michigan and I wanted to shoot it this fall. It’s basically The Upside of Anger but with men. It’s four grown brothers and their father. I got a great little cast put together and I was going to make it for $10 million dollars and I can’t raise the money. And it’s like wow, it’s just not getting any easier. And that’s the only thing that a hit does for you know?
I had a cast of actors involving Ryan Reynolds, Adam Brody, Justin Long and Jerry Ferrara. Kerri Russell had a role … there’s an upside and a downside to having a hit. When you have a hit, I think it – especially early on – it screws with you. And if you don’t, it’s harder to get work done but you really grow as an artist.
Just getting back to Gissing once more, you mentioned in one interview that part of the problem of getting a real distribution deal was the studios would tell you that they couldn’t afford to market this and they didn’t know if the critics were going to pick up the tab. That’s funny to me because I didn’t know they would actually admit that.
MB: No, no. Listen, that’s what bothered me. I told them, look it’s a tweener. It’s not an arthouse movie. It’s not a movie that’s going to be the critic’s darling. And it’s not a studio movie with a star in it. [They said] you put yourself in it. You should have had, you know, whoever the flavor of the month was at that time. The truth is, even back then, I kept this sheet of amazing review quotes. What are you doing? People love comedies but nobody [at the studios] fell in love with it. That’s the bottom line. That’s what you need. You need a distribution exec who falls in love with your picture.
With that, I thanked Mike for his time and wished him success with the distribution of The Search of John Gissing.
MB: Listen, I appreciate you, you know, doing anything on it. It’s tough doing it this way when the movie is old so I just kind of [contacted] sites that I know and like and said let’s see if anybody is interested in waving a little flag for us. It’s all good. I think it would be cool if even with a little success generates what you said, the future. You’ve got musicians now putting out their own albums, after all.
And that’s pretty much where the interview ended. Binder is an easy guy to root for. He comes across as a sort of blue-collar writer-director-actor without any real pretension. He’s directed a number of films in already and seems to just genuinely love the process. The best of luck to him in continuing to get the films he’s interested in made, tweeners and all.
