DVD of the Week: Che: Criterion Collection

Che (2008) began as a personal project for actor Benicio del Toro around the time he was making Traffic (2000) with Steven Soderbergh. Originally, he planned on making the film about iconic revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara with Terrence Malick and its focus was to be on the disastrous Bolivian campaign in 1967. Malick eventually dropped out to go off and make The New World (2005). Soderbergh helped out Del Toro by agreeing to direct and in the process expanded the film’s scope by depicting Che’s role in the Cuban Revolution as a way of explaining his motivations for going to Bolivia.

Amazingly, Soderbergh raised the $58 million budget entirely outside of North America which allowed him much more creative freedom. The result was a four and half hour epic that refused to champion or demonize Che and instead opted to objectively depict his rise in Cuba and his fall in Bolivia. This approach ultimately doomed Che’s chances in North America where, despite breaking the film up into two more digestible parts, it received limited distribution. Predictably, it divided critics and was criminally ignored by all of the major award ceremonies – rather fitting for a film about someone who refused to rest on his laurels, always hungry to get back to the jungle and get back to work.

I think that the key to understanding Del Toro and Soderbergh’s take on Che comes from an interview with director where he said, “clearly this is a guy whose priority is going into the jungle and starting a revolution. That is the most important thing in his life … If you take away all the words and just look at what he did, the guy kept going back into the jungle.” Del Toro and Soderbergh were faced with the daunting task of making a film about an iconic historic figure, someone whose image has graced countless t-shirts and posters. Che is an extremely polarizing figure and so it makes sense that they would step back and take a more objective look at the man. Then, it would be up to the audience to decide how they felt about him.

Those looking for a crowd-pleasing underdog story a la Erin Brockovich (2000) will be disappointed by Che. The famous Argentinean is not as easy to like as the scrappy Brockovich. As depicted in Che, he’s a much more complex individual. He cares about the cause and those that fight with him but does not feel the need to show a lot of emotion. When he’s in the jungle it is all about the task at hand and living in the moment. Che never loses sight of what his objective is and his conviction never wavers, not even in the face of death. He’s like a Method actor that stays in character on and off-camera during a shoot.

Part One juxtaposes Che’s efforts to remove Batista from power in Cuba in 1958 with him addressing the United Nations in 1964 and in doing so we see Che in his element, putting into practice guerrilla warfare tactics, and we see Che the superstar espousing his beliefs to the media in New York City and the international community at large. At first, the Bolivia campaign as depicted in Part Two starts off well enough with Che sneaking into the country and meeting with his fellow revolutionaries. We see them get supplies and train in preparation for the task at hand. However, the country’s Communist party refuses to support an armed struggle, especially one led by a foreigner. The support of the peasants, so crucial in Cuba, is lacking in Bolivia, making food hard to come by. A feeling of dread creeps in as government troops gradually close in on Che, cutting off any avenue of escape.

Soderbergh maintains an objective stance by refusing to show any close-ups of Che. We always see him from a certain distance and often grouped with others. During the battle at El Uvero on May 28, 1957, Soderbergh conveys the noisy, chaotic nature of combat as men are seemingly wounded at random but there is never any confusion visually about what is going on. Twice during the battle, he takes us out of it by having a voiceover by Che where he espouses his philosophy of guerrilla warfare. With a widescreen aspect ratio, Soderbergh opens things up in Part One and this is particularly evident during the battle scenes. In Part Two, this all changes, as the smooth camerawork is replaced with hand-held cameras and a more standard aspect ratio which creates a claustrophobic feel and look. The long takes and deliberately slow pace may frustrate some expecting a more traditional biopic but I found it a welcome change from the cookie cutter mentality of most Hollywood depictions of history.

During the Cuban campaign it is evident that Che is very much a man of the people, whether it is making contact with and befriending peasants that he comes across in the jungle or treating a wounded comrade. However, Che eschews character development in favor of showing the nuts and bolts of a revolution. As Che says at one point, “A real revolutionary goes where he’s needed. It may not be directly in combat. Sometimes it’s about doing other tasks … finding food, dressing wounds, carrying comrades for miles … and then, taking care of them until they can take care of themselves.” The film takes this philosophy to heart by showing the day-to-day activities of Che and his fellow revolutionaries. We see him dressing wounds, the wounded being carried through the jungle and strategizing with his men and Fidel Castro (Demian Bichir).

Benicio del Toro effortlessly becomes Che and tones down his tendency to sometimes resort to Brando-esque acting tics (see The Way of the Gun) and plays the iconic revolutionary as a man confident of his own convictions. He conveys Che’s sharp intellect with his eyes and also does an excellent job with the physical aspects like his recurring asthma that constantly plagued him. Del Toro provides us insight into the man’s character through attitude, behavior and the way he acts towards others.

Che is ultimately a study in contrasts. What worked in Cuba did not work in Bolivia. Soderbergh’s film illustrates the differences. In Cuba, the revolutionaries were able to get the trust and support of the peasants while in Bolivia they feared the rebels. It must also be said that Castro played a key role in the success of the Cuban revolution and his absence in Bolivia, the galvanizing effect he had, is sorely missed. With Che, Soderbergh has created an unusual biopic that does its best to not try and manipulate you into feeling one way or another about the revolutionary. Instead, it shows two very different examples of the man’s philosophies put into practice and how they played out – one a success and the other a failure. Che was a polarizing historical figure long before this film came along and will continue to be long afterwards.

Special Features:

The first disc includes an audio commentary for Part One by Jon Lee Anderson, chief consultant on Che and author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life. He starts off by calling Che a “hippie rebel,” and a product of the 1960s. He talks about the corruption and decadence of Cuba under Batista and how this provoked men like Che and Fidel Castro to start a revolution. Anderson provides extensive historical background to what we are watching which fills in a lot of gaps and often explains what is being shown, putting it into context.

Also included is a theatrical trailer.

The second disc sees Anderson return for an audio commentary for Part Two. He explains Che’s fascination with Bolivia at an early age and why he chose that country to start a revolution. He talks about the political conditions in Bolivia that made it ripe for a revolution. Like he did with Part One, Anderson provides the backstory and elaborates in detail on what we are watching.

The third and final disc starts off with “Making Che,” a 50-minute documentary that takes a look at how the film came together. It started with producer Laura Bickford and her interested in Jon Lee Anderson’s book. She got Benicio del Toro involved and they spent years doing research and deciding what part of his life to depict. The film’s screenwriters talk about the challenge of condensing so many events into one film and so Soderbergh decided to split it up into two films. The director explains his depiction of Che, including the omission of the man’s more questionable actions, and his approach to the film. This is an excellent, in-depth look.

There are ten deleted scenes from Part One with optional commentary by Soderbergh. He puts this footage in context and explains why it was cut. These scenes provide some insight into Che and it’s nice to be able to see them.

Also included are four deleted scenes from Part Two with optional commentary by Soderbergh. Much of this footage illustrates Che’s philosophy of guerrilla warfare.

“End of a Revolution” is a 1968 documentary about the aftermath of Che’s failed revolution in Bolivia, the origins of it and a look at the forces that prevented it. The featurette begins with stills of Che’s dead body and a journalist describing the scene, his voice full of emotion. The doc does a nice job of profiling Bolivia and its people; for example, we see the brutal living and working conditions of the tin miners.

“Interviews from Cuba” features interviews with participants and historians of the Cuban Revolution conducted by producer Laura Bickford and actor Benicio del Toro. The participants talk about how they met Che and their impressions of him. They also discuss their views on the revolution. The historians talk about the key influences on the revolution and take us through significant moments of it.

Finally, there is “Che and the Digital Cinema Revolution!” Soderbergh’s film was the first feature to use the Red digital camera because of its quality and versatility in the terrain he would be shooting in. He did not have a lot of time to shoot Che and needed a camera that would allow him to shoot fast and not require a lot of artificial light. The cameras almost weren’t ready for the start of principal photography but Soderbergh stuck to his guns was able to get them just in time. This doc does a nice job taking a look at the challenges of using the Red camera and how it was the ideal technology for this particular film.

Traffic

NOTE: This article first appeared over the Film for the Soul blog for the very ambitious and awesome Counting Down the Zeroes series.

By the time Steven Soderbergh made Traffic (2000), he was at the zenith of his powers and popularity having just come off the crowd pleaser, yet socially conscious Erin Brockovich (2000), with an even more powerful critique on a problem that plagues the United States – the war on drugs. He depicts it on a macro and micro level with a masterful command of craft that also manages to balance his artsy sensibilities with his mainstream ones. Soderbergh does it in a way that isn’t preachy, making a film that simultaneously entertains and has something to say.

Traffic is comprised of three storylines. The first one starts off in Mexico with two police officers, Javier Rodriguez (Benicio Del Toro) and his partner Manolo (Jacob Vargas) as they deal with the drug cartels and their corrupt superiors who are in league with them. The next story takes place in Ohio and Washington, D.C. as Judge Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas) has been appointed the new drug czar for the United States while his daughter Caroline (Erika Christensen) freebases drugs with her boyfriend Seth (Topher Grace). Caroline and Seth are two cocky, intelligent teenagers who do drugs because it feels good and, for them, it is a rebellious act. After all, they are over-privileged spoiled brats. The last story takes place in San Diego as two undercover DEA agents Montel Gordon (Don Cheadle) and Ray Castro (Luis Guzman) arrest a middleman Eduardo Ruiz (Miguel Ferrer) of a drug cartel in the hopes that he’ll testify against his boss Carlos Ayala (Steven Bauer). When he is subsequently arrested, his wife Helen (Catherine Zeta-Jones) goes from being a naive, affluent housewife to a savvy powerbroker who takes control of and learns how to deal with her tough, Mexican counterparts and in doing so because an equal to her husband, ruthless in her methods to protect her family.

The opening scene of the film not only introduces us to one of the film’s main characters, Javier, but also provides us with a glimpse into how law enforcement works in Mexico. Javier and Manolo bust a truck full of drugs only to have it and their prisoners taken away by a General Salazar (a wonderfully eccentric Tomas Milian) who, as we find out later, is working for a rival drug cartel. Judge Wakefield has a very black and white view of dealing with the drug problem because he is so far removed from it, but by the film’s end he will have intimate knowledge of its devastating effects. With the casting of Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman, one wonders if Soderbergh was a big fan of Boogie Nights (1997) as he teams up two of its stars. On their way to meet with Ferrer they bicker like old friends who have been partners for some time – Cheadle even warns Guzman not to tell a joke as it will blow their cover. And wouldn’t you know it, when they have a sit-down with Ferrer, Guzman tells a joke. It’s a nice touch that lightens the mood for a moment.

Steven Soderbergh had been interested in making a film about the drug wars for some time but didn’t want to make one about addicts. Producer Laura Bickford acquired the rights to the United Kingdom mini-series Traffik and liked its structure. Soderbergh had seen it in 1990. He and Bickford started looking for a screenwriter and read a script by Stephen Gaghan entitled Havoc about upper-class white kids in Palisades High School doing drugs and involved with gangs. Soderbergh approached Gaghan to work on his film, however, he was already working for producer/director Ed Zwick. Bickford and Soderbergh approached Zwick who agreed to merge the two projects and come aboard as a producer.

Traffic was originally going to be made at 20th Century Fox but it was put into turnaround unless actor Harrison Ford agreed to star. When the actor showed interest in the film this in turn renewed the studio's interest. Fox CEO Bill Mechanic championed the film but he left by the time the first draft was finished and this caused the project to go into turnaround. Mechanic also wanted to make some changes to the script but Soderbergh disagreed and decided to take the film to the other major studios. They turned Soderbergh and his producers down because studio executives were scared of a three-hour film about drugs, according to Gaghan. USA Films wanted to do it from the first time Soderbergh approached them. They provided the filmmakers with $46 million budget, a considerable increase from the $25 million that Fox offered.

Soderbergh had "conceptual discussions" with Gaghan while he was shooting The Limey in October 1998 and they finished the outline before he went off to shoot Erin Brockovich. After Soderbergh was finished with that film, Gaghan had written a first draft in six weeks that was 165 pages long. After the film was greenlit, Soderbergh and Gaghan met two separate times for three days working all day reformatting the script. The draft they shot with had 163 pages with 135 speaking parts and featured seven cities. The film shortens the storyline of the original mini-series – a major character arc, that of a farmer, is taken out, and the Pakistani plotline is replaced with one set in Mexico.

Harrison Ford was initially considered for the role of Judge Robert Wakefield in January 2000 but would have had to take a significant cut in his usual $20 million salary. Ford met with Soderbergh to flesh out the character and Gaghan agreed to rework the role, adding several scenes that ended up in the finished film. On February 20, Ford turned down the role and the filmmakers brought it back to Michael Douglas who had turned down an earlier draft. He liked Ford's changes and agreed to star which helped greenlight the project. Gaghan believes that Ford turned down the role because he wanted to "reconnect with his action fans.”

After Fox dropped the film and USA Films was interested, Soderbergh paid for pre-production with his own money. USA Films agreed to give him final cut on Traffic and when any Mexican characters spoke to each other, it would be in Spanish. However, this meant that almost all of Benicio del Toro's dialogue would be subtitled. Once the studio realized this they suggested that his scenes be shot in both English and Spanish. Del Toro was worried that some other actor would be brought in and re-record his dialogue in English after working hard to master Mexican inflections and improve his Spanish vocabulary. Del Toro remembers, "Can you imagine? You do the whole movie, bust your butt to get it as realistic as possible, and someone dubs your voice? I said, 'No way. Over my dead body.' Steven was like, 'Don't worry. It's not gonna happen.'" The director fought for subtitles for the Mexico scenes arguing that if the characters did not speak Spanish, the film would have no integrity and would not as convincingly portray what he described as the "impenetrability of another culture.”

The filmmakers went to the DEA and U.S. Customs early on with the screenplay and told them that they were trying to present as detailed and accurate a picture of the current drug war as possible. The DEA and Customs pointed out inaccuracies in the script and gave them access but didn’t try to influence the content of the script. Soderbergh cites the influence of the films of Richard Lester and Jean-Luc Godard and he spent a lot of time analyzing The Battle of Algiers (1966) and Z (1969), which, according to the director, had the feeling that the footage was caught and not staged. He was also inspired by Alan J. Pakula’s film All the President’s Men (1976) because he admired its ability to tackle serious issues while also being entertaining. In the opening credits of his film, Soderbergh tried to replicate the typeface from All the President's Men and also the placement on-screen – bottom left-hand corner. Analyzing this film helped the director deal with the large cast and working in many different locations for Traffic.

Half of the first day's footage came out overexposed and unusable. Before the financiers or studio bosses knew about the problem, Soderbergh was already doing reshoots. The insurers made him agree that any further lensing mishaps resulting in additional shooting would come out of the director's own pocket. Soderbergh shot in cities on a 54-day schedule and came in $2 million under budget. The director operated the camera himself in an effort to "get as close to the movie as I can," and to eliminate the distance between the actors and himself. Soderbergh drew inspiration from the cinema verite style of Ken Loach’s films, studying the framing of scenes, the distance of the camera to the actors, lens length, and the tightness of eyelines depending on the position of a character. Soderbergh remembers, "I noticed that there's a space that's inviolate, that if you get within something, you cross the edge into a more theatrical aesthetic as opposed to a documentary aesthetic.” Most of the day was spent shooting because a lot of the film was shot with available light.

Soderbergh gives each storyline its own unique look so that it is easier to keep track of where we are and shows the distinction between the borders within the drug war as the film frequently jumps back and forth from each story. The Mexican one has a yellow, sunburnt look, the D.C. story adopts a cold, gun metal blue look and the San Diego one is the most realistic looking with no filters. The director utilizes extensive hand-held camerawork that not only gives this epic film a more intimate feel (because he can get right in there with the actors) but also gives certain scenes a sense of tension and urgency. It also gives the film a feeling of authenticity, a realness that comes from docudramas, like The Battle of Algiers.

For the hand-held camera footage, Soderbergh used Millennium XLs that were smaller and lighter than previous cameras and allowed him to go anywhere with it. In order to tell the three stories apart, he adopted a distinctive look for each. For Robert Wakefield's story, Soderbergh used tungsten film with no filter for a cold, monochrome blue feel. For Helena Ayala's story, Soderbergh used diffusion filters, flashing the film, overexposing it for a warmer feel. For Javier's story, the director used tobacco filters and a 45-degree shutter angle whenever possible to produce a strobe-like sharp feel. Then, he took the entire film through an Ektachrome step which increased the contrast and grain significantly He wanted to have different looks for each story because the audience had to keep track of many characters and absorb a lot of information and he did not want them to have to figure out which story they were watching.

Each story illustrates the futility of trying to win this so-called war on drugs. The Mexico story shows how an honest lawman like Javier walks a dangerous line where he tries to make a difference while avoiding angering his corrupt superiors who would kill him if he doesn’t do what he’s told. The D.C. story shows how deeply drugs have infiltrated our society when an affluent politician’s daughter becomes a drug addict, going to the poor slums to get high. How can he win the war on drugs when he can’t even keep his own daughter away from it? The San Diego storyline shows how those at the top of the drug food chain are untouchable because they have the money to maintain a respectable façade and can afford the best lawyers money can buy to make any charges brought against them go away.

Traffic was very well-received by film critics. Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and wrote, "The movie is powerful precisely because it doesn't preach. It is so restrained that at one moment—the judge's final speech—I wanted one more sentence, making a point, but the movie lets us supply that thought for ourselves.” The New York Times’ Stephen Holden wrote, "Traffic is an utterly gripping, edge-of-your-seat thriller. Or rather it is several interwoven thrillers, each with its own tense rhythm and explosive payoff.” In his review for the New York Observer, Andrew Sarris wrote, "Traffic marks him definitively as an enormous talent, one who never lets us guess what he's going to do next. The promise of Sex, Lies, and Videotape has been fulfilled.”

Entertainment Weekly gave the film an "A" rating and praised Benicio Del Toro's performance, calling it, "haunting in his understatement, becomes the film's quietly awakening moral center.” The Washington Post’s Desson Howe wrote, "Soderbergh and screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, who based this on a British television miniseries of the same name, have created an often exhilarating, soup-to-nuts exposé of the world's most lucrative trade.” In his review for Rolling Stone, Peter Travers wrote, " The hand-held camerawork – Soderbergh himself did the holding - provides a documentary feel that rivets attention.” However, Time magazine’s Richard Schickel wrote, "there is a possibly predictable downside to this multiplicity of story lines: they keep interrupting one another. Just as you get interested in one, Stephen Gaghan's script, inspired by a British mini-series, jerks you away to another.”

While it’s true that Traffic doesn’t really say anything new about the war on drugs, it does reinforce how prevalent drugs are in our society and show how clueless our government is in their attempts to stop it. The problem is that the infrastructure that is in place is dysfunctional so that even when honest men like Javier or Wakefield come along with the best of intentions, they become ensnared in bureaucratic red tape. Traffic seems to suggest that the best that these men can do is make a difference in their own small pocket of the world, whether it is Javier brokering a deal so that his town gets baseball field and the ability to play games at night, or Wakefield finally making a personal connection with his daughter in a meaningful way. The drug problem will never go away no matter how much money and manpower our government throws at it.

The Way of the Gun

“People are welcome to hate my film . . . It was never meant to be pleasant. It was never meant to be fun.” – Writer/director Christopher McQuarrie

The Way of the Gun (2000) is a film made out of anger and frustration. After winning an Academy Award for his screenplay for The Usual Suspects (1994), Christopher McQuarrie should have been able to parlay that success into a dream project of his choosing and yet he couldn’t even get arrested while Bryan Singer went on to his own success with the X-Men films. It was actor Benicio del Toro who came to McQuarrie and suggested he write and direct a crime film. The reasoning was that a studio hoping for another potential Usual Suspects would bankroll it. Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened but McQuarrie made it on his own terms. The result? A nihilistic action film cum neo-western that is unashamedly at odds with itself. The Way of the Gun straddles the line between the independent and studio worlds. It is easily the best post-modern crime film following in the wake of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994).

The prologue plays out like a preview trailer for the film and features a then-relatively unknown Sarah Silverman as the ultimate foul-mouthed girlfriend with a big mouth and who unleashes a profanity-laced tirade on the film’s protagonists that it would have made Richard Pryor blush. Even though it has nothing to do with the rest of the film, its purpose is to set the tone and establish the two protagonists, Parker (Ryan Phillippe) and Longbaugh (Benicio del Toro), as atypical in that they provoke a fight for no reason, and to let us know that this isn’t going to be your typical action film.

As Parker’s opening monologue states, they live on the margins of society and who “stepped off the path and went looking for the fortune that we knew was looking for us.” He and Longbaugh eke out a minimalist existence with no possessions or creature comforts because, according to Parker, “need is the ultimate monkey.” To get by they sell their blood and sperm, the latter in a very funny scene where the two men are subjected to a series of questions only to give very unconventional answers reminiscent of the clever dialogue in a Tarantino but without the obvious and often jarring popular culture references.

While cooling their heels at the clinic, they catch wind of a woman (Juliette Lewis) being paid one million dollars to have a baby for a rich couple (Scott Wilson and Kristin Lehman) who can’t be bothered to conceive one themselves. So, Parker and Longbaugh decide to kidnap the woman for money in a very unconventional way as they have to get past her two very determined bodyguards (Nicky Katt and Taye Diggs). This results in a shoot-out (in which innocent bystanders are killed in the crossfire) and an unusual car chase that has to be one of the slowest ever put on film.

When the bodyguards fail to protect the pregnant woman, the husband brings in a veteran professional, Joe Sarno (James Caan) and his partner (Geoffrey Lewis) who is introduced playing a bizarre version of Russian roulette (the reasons for which are never explained and left for us to ponder). Caan’s introduction establishes Sarno as the kind of confident criminal that populates Michael Mann’s films – the kind that are ultra-efficient and no-nonsense. You get the feeling that the two bodyguards consider him an over-the-hill geezer who’s out of touch, but Sarno sets them straight: “The only thing you can assume about a broken down old man is that he’s a survivor.”

The Way of the Gun has the requisite action sequences but the way that they are depicted constantly subvert genre conventions. There are no likable characters unless you count James Caan’s quietly confident “adjudicator,” who follows his own personal moral code. As McQuarrie said in an interview, he wasn’t interested in making a film that “you can follow characters who don’t go out of their way to ingratiate themselves to you, who aren’t traditionally sympathetic.” The two protagonists are amoral mercenaries who kidnap a pregnant woman for money. They are, in turn, pursued by two henchmen who are secretly plotting against their employer who has paid the pregnant woman to give him and his self-absorbed trophy wife her baby once it’s born. The employer’s son is a disgraced doctor.

McQuarrie takes the time to reveal the motivation for most of the major players involved. They are complex reasons in comparison to Parker and Longbaugh’s who are just in it for the money until Parker spends too much time with the mother and starts to develop traces of a conscience, conflicting his motivations. And yet whenever this happens, something occurs that snaps him back to the goal at hand: the money.

This film doesn’t care if you like it or not. What spawned such a confrontational attitude in McQuarrie? And what separates The Way of the Gun from other, “talky, violent guys ‘n’ guns” films popular in the 1990s? The answer lies with the aftermath of 1996 Academy Awards. After winning an Oscar, McQuarrie naively thought that he would be able to write his own ticket and “then you slowly start to realize no one in Hollywood is interested in making your film, they’re interested in making their films.” He spent years as a script doctor while trying to get financing together for an epic biopic of Alexander the Great for Warner Brothers. He realized that he had to make a film that was commercially successful if he was going to be treated seriously by Hollywood.

McQuarrie approached 20th Century Fox and told them he would be willing to write and direct a film for any budget that they would be willing to give him so long as he had complete creative control. He remembers that the studio told him “to get fucked. No money. No control. No nothing.” What the studios really wanted was for him to write another Usual Suspects. Angry and frustrated, McQuarrie met Benicio del Toro and producer Ken Kokin (who had also worked on The Usual Suspects) for coffee and the actor convinced the writer to write a crime film on his own terms because he would face the least amount of interference from the studio. However, McQuarrie did not want to be typecast as “a crime guy” but realized that he had nothing to lose. He was, as he puts it, “unemployable and ready to make trouble,” which sounds like the perfect ingredients for a down ‘n’ dirty crime film.

McQuarrie begrudgingly started to write a screenplay and the first thing he did was to write a list of every taboo and “everything I knew a cowardly executive would refuse to accept from a ‘sympathetic’ leading man.” Not surprisingly, he said, “This movie was written from a place of real anger.” The idea for the film came from two sources: Del Toro telling McQuarrie that he had never seen a really interesting kidnapping film and the screenwriter’s wife telling him about an article she had read about an executive with a young wife who hired a surrogate mother so that she could have a child. They even hired bodyguards for the surrogate mother and as soon as McQuarrie heard “bodyguards,” the film came to him. He drew inspiration from films like Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), and The Magnificent Seven (1960) because “the camera remains as far back from the action as possible and just captures the drama.”

McQuarrie wrote the first draft in five days. The first ten pages were a prologue, a trailer to another film with Parker and Longbaugh that was to be shot as “slick and hip as possible. Guy Ritchie and Michael Bay but with horrible, unspeakable acts of violence and degradation,” McQuarrie remembers. He realized that this was too extreme and cut it during pre-production. He and Del Toro gave the screenplay to several high-profile actors at the time, all of whom turned them down. Because of the lack of sympathetic characters, McQuarrie didn’t even bother to show the script to any Hollywood studios. Instead, he went to five independent companies and only Artisan Entertainment agreed to make the film.

Artisan resisted the casting of Del Toro because he had an independent film/art house film reputation. The studio wanted Phillippe who had just come off of Cruel Intentions (1999). The young actor wanted to change the direction of his career and, according to McQuarrie, “was besieged with choice offers, and we didn’t want him, but he would not take no for an answer.” The filmmaker met with actor and liked his enthusiasm for the script. Juliette Lewis was McQuarrie’s first choice for Robin, the surrogate mother and wanted her character to tweak the stereotypical view of women in crime films: “The woman is essential to the story and no one wants her around. Everyone wants to be rid of her. She is the complication. She is the conflict.”

The Way of the Gun is the complete antithesis to the crowd-pleasing Usual Suspects with its realistic depiction of violence and how it affects those who inflict it and those who it is inflicted on. In many respects, the film pays homage to the gritty crime films of Sam Peckinpah, like The Getaway (1972) and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), especially in the climactic shoot-out in a Mexican brothel but eschewing a flashy, slow-motion bloodbath for a gun battle reminiscent of the bank heist shoot-out in Heat (1995). There’s no stylish editing or jerky, hand-held camerawork. We always know who is where and what is happening. McQuarrie’s film is similar to Peckinpah’s in the types of characters that populate its world and the lack of judgment placed on them. One could easily see Sarno fitting seamlessly into one of Peckinpah’s films. On the surface, McQuarrie’s film appears to be aping Tarantino’s glib, pop culture-saturated dialogue and flashy violence but The Way of the Gun goes deeper, exploring the professional code between criminals like Del Toro and Caan, as well as showing how painful and messy violence really is in a climactic shoot-out that features a graphic childbirth.

Not surprisingly, The Way of the Gun received mixed reviews. Film critic Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, "McQuarrie pulls, pummels and pushes us, makes his characters jump through hoops, and at the end produces carloads of 'bag men' who have no other function than to pop up and be shot at. . .Enough, already.” In his review for the New York Times, Elvis Mitchell wrote, "It's a song you've heard before, but each chord is hit with extraordinary concentration." Andy Seiler praised James Caan's performance in his review for USA Today, "To hear Caan menacingly intone 'I can promise you a day of reckoning you will not live long enough to never forget' is to remember why this man is a star." In his review for the Village Voice, J. Hoberman wrote, "Phillippe talks like Brando; Del Toro apes the body language. Nevertheless, James Caan steals the movie as a veteran tough guy, rotating his torso around some unseen truss.”

The film ends on an ambiguous downer – do they die? What happens to the girl’s baby? The answers to these questions are left up to the individual to figure out. McQuarrie isn’t going to provide any easy answers and he’s not going to hold your hand. Why should he? The entire film was an exercise at subverting expectations and genre conventions. Thankfully, McQuarrie doesn’t compromise his intentions one iota – the benefit of making the film independently. He wanted to make a film that was “difficult to watch. I wanted to make a film about violence and criminals that had to be endured rather than something that entertained without consequence.” Whether you like The Way of the Gun or not, there’s no question that he succeeded in what he wanted to do.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

After more than twenty years of failed attempts and missed opportunities, Terry Gilliam did what many thought impossible — he transformed Hunter S. Thompson's classic novel, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, into the cinematic equivalent of a sledgehammer whacked across your frontal lobes. Thompson's book had finally been fully realized and brought to the big screen in all of its demented glory. It’s hard to believe that it has been 10 years since the film crashed and burned in theaters but it has gone on to develop a devoted cult film following that quote from its numerous memorable scenes.

Gilliam's film faithfully adapts journalist Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo's (Benicio Del Toro) trip to Las Vegas to cover the 1971 Mint 400 motorcycle race for Sports Illustrated magazine. However, the competition is merely an excuse for the duo to abuse their expense account and indulge in a galaxy of drugs. What was initially a simple journey to cover a motorcycle race mutates into a bizarre search for the American Dream.

THE BOOK

"As true gonzo journalism, this doesn't work at all, and even if it did, I couldn't possibly admit it. Only a goddamn lunatic would write a thing like this and claim it was true." – Hunter S. Thompson

Originally, Thompson was assigned to write captions for a photo-essay on the Mint 400 off-road motorcycle race in Las Vegas for Sports Illustrated magazine. Along for the ride was his attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta whom he had met through a mutual friend. Thompson remembers, "I dragged Oscar away while he was working on the 'Biltmore Seven' trial because we couldn't talk in that war zone. So I said, 'Let's get the hell out of town!'" At some point, the editor for Rolling Stone magazine heard that Thompson was in Vegas and asked him to also cover the National District Attorneys Association's Third Annual Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs which was being held at Caesar's Palace.

When Sports Illustrated rejected his work Thompson took the Rolling Stone gig. It was at this point that he began to put his weird journey on paper. Truth was truly stranger than fiction as Thompson remembers one incident with his wild attorney: "He would do things like drop me off at the airport in my rental car, and then two months later I'd get a bill for three weeks that he used the car. He'd forget to take it back." Acosta had inspired Thompson to take his writing to a new level: "gonzo journalism," where the journalist participates in the story he is writing about. Taking refuge in a Ramada Inn in Arcadia, California, Thompson wrote relentlessly, frequenting a 24-hour coffee shop and breaking only for the odd swim in the pool. By the time he had returned home to Aspen, Colorado, the writer had a first draft done. In his basement, Thompson blasted the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" while he "anguished over five or six drafts until I got it right."

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was first published in Rolling Stone magazine in 1971. Thompson invented the Raoul Duke moniker because he was worried that his debauched misadventures depicted in the book might ruin his chances of acquiring press credentials from the White House so that he could cover the 1972 Presidential campaign — hence the Duke byline. Thompson got his credentials and allowed the book publishers to use his real name when the story was released in book form in 1972.

Thompson's book tapped into the cultural zeitgeist at just the right moment by connecting with a disillusioned generation who watched the hopeful 1960s transform into the dark and turbulent 1970s. Terry Gilliam sees Fear and Loathing as "a book about loss: the Sixties didn't pay off the way Hunter obviously had hoped they would."

WHERE THE BUFFALO ROAM

Many filmmakers over the years had tried to make films out of Hunter S. Thompson's books but the first completed effort did not surface until 1980 with Where The Buffalo Roam. The writer's agent called him one day and told him that movie producer Thom Mount wanted to buy the rights to "The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat," a eulogy for Oscar Acosta, for $100,000. Thompson's expectations weren't that high. "So to me it was just another option job. Then all of a sudden there was some moment of terrible horror when I realized they were going to make the movie."

Paramount released the film, Art Linson directed it, Neil Young did the music, and John Kaye wrote the screenplay. Kaye talked to Thompson before writing the script but the final product was not what the writer had envisioned. "Yeah, he seemed to understand a lot more than what came through in the script. I was very disappointed in the script. It sucks—a bad, dumb, low-level, low-rent script."

Art Linson's film liberally mixed Thompson's real life with his books and starred Bill Murray and Peter Boyle as Thompson and Oscar Acosta, respectively. Thompson even served as a consultant on the film but this did little to translate the author's warped vision to the big screen. While watching Buffalo Roam, it becomes readily evident that, despite Murray's inspired performance, director Linson had no idea what Thompson's books were trying to say. The film seems more like a collection of rather tame highlights from the man's work.

Buffalo Roam was panned by critics and a commercial disaster at the box office. The studio quickly pulled it from distribution and Thompson hated the movie, infamously threatening to cause Murray bodily harm if the two ever crossed paths again. After the movie's dismal reception, no other adaptations were completed. Many attempts to get a Fear and Loathing Las Vegas film going were launched by the likes of Martin Scorsese and Jack Nicholson but nothing ever materialized. It took actor Johnny Depp and his friendship with Hunter S. Thompson to get any kind of serious attempt at an adaptation even possible.

HUNTER MEETS THE REPO MAN

"I've been dealing with these yo-yos buying options on things for years. Options have been essentially paying the rent." – Hunter S. Thompson

Rhino Films was the latest in a long line of people trying to bring Hunter S. Thompson's vision to the big screen. Head of Production (and one of the film's producers) Stephen Nemeth originally wanted Lee Tamahori (Once Were Warriors and Mulholland Falls) to direct. However, Tamahori wasn't going to be available until after the January 1997 start date. Rhino asked Thompson for an extension on the movie rights but the author and his lawyers said no. As Thompson later remarked in an interview, "they just kept asking for more [time]. I got kind of agitated about it, because I thought they were trying to put off doing it. So I began to charge them more...I wanted to see the movie done, once it got started." Rhino countered by green-lighting the film and hiring Alex Cox to direct. According to Nemeth, Cox could "do it for a price, could do it quickly, and could get this movie going in four months." Judging by his past efforts, films like Repo Man (1983) and Straight to Hell (1987), Cox was no stranger to the same kind of Gonzo sensibilities evident in Thompson's books.

Cox started writing the screenplay with Tod Davies, a UCLA Hunter S. Thompson scholar. Depp and Del Toro committed to the film at this point. However, during pre-production Cox and another of the film's producers, Laila Nabulsi (and an ex-flame of Thompson's) had "creative differences" and she forced Rhino to choose between her and the filmmaker. Despite having no background in movies, Nabulsi did have an arrangement with Thompson to produce the movie.

The fatal blow came when Cox encountered Thompson with his own ideas of adapting the Fear and Loathing into a film. Johnny Depp remembers that "Alex had some dream that he could make Thompson's work better. He was wrong. He had this idea about animation in the film.” Cox and Davies, met Thompson at his home and it was at this point that Cox expressed his desire to incorporate animation into the movie. Thompson took offense to his book being reduced to a cartoon and promptly kicked Cox and Davies out of his home. When all the dust settled, Rhino sided with Nabulsi, fired Cox, and paid him $60,000 in script fees.

ENTER TERRY GILLIAM

"I want it to be seen as one of the great movies of all time, and one of the most hated movies of all time." – Terry Gilliam

The studio approached Terry Gilliam's agent. There was an air of desperation because the option on the book was about to expire and Rhino had another project they wanted to start in 1998. Hunter S. Thompson granted the studio an extension for the rights but they didn't have a definite deal with Gilliam. Thompson would only grant another extension if Gilliam was given a concrete deal. However, Rhino did not want to commit to Gilliam in case he didn't work out (like Cox). They threatened to make the film with Cox and without Depp or Del Toro if the two actors didn't like the possibility of Gilliam being ousted. Nabulsi told them about Rhino's plans and Gilliam and Depp were furious. Universal stepped in to distribute the movie and Depp and Gilliam were paid half a million dollars each. Ironically, Gilliam ended up making Fear and Loathing without a firm deal in place.

Terry Gilliam seemed like the perfect choice to direct an adaptation of Fear and Loathing. The theme of insanity had always figured into his films but has since taken a more prominent role with his previous couple of projects. Fear and Loathing completes an informal trilogy based on madness that includes The Fisher King (1991) and Twelve Monkeys (1995).

When Gilliam had first read Fear and Loathing back in 1971, he "immediately identified with what Hunter was saying. I'd left the States to move here for the very same reasons that Fear and Loathing was written—that feeling the ideals of the '60s had died and that it was all fucked. I was so angry I was going to start throwing bombs. So when I read the book it was like, 'Jesus! He's got it! That's exactly how the fuck I feel!'" Gilliam enjoyed the book but didn't think about it for years afterwards.

Ralph Steadman, who illustrated the book, was a good friend of Gilliam and began to bug him over the years to do a film version of Fear and Loathing. In 1989, Gilliam remembers a "script turned up which briefly got me excited about the book again, but I was busy with another project and I ultimately decided that the script didn't capture the story properly."

Gilliam and his friend, Toni Grisoni, were originally working on a project about Theseus and the Minotaur. Grisoni read in a magazine that Alex Cox was set to direct Fear and Loathing. Grisoni called up Cox (they knew each other) and expressed an interest in adapting the book into a film. Cox said that he was doing it himself and that was that.

In April 1997, Cox was out and Gilliam got the call from Laila Nabulsi to direct. Gilliam said in an interview, "she sent me a script, and it reminded me of how funny and good the book was. I didn't really care for the script, but it inspired me to go back and read the book again.” Gilliam scrapped Cox and Davies' screenplay and asked Grisoni to help him write their own. Together they hammered out a screenplay in only ten days at Gilliam's home in London, England in May of 1997. As Grisoni remembers, "I'd sit at the keyboard, and we'd talk and talk and I'd keep typing.” Gilliam felt that the structure of the film should be organized much in the same way as the book:

We start out at full speed and it's WOOOO! The drug kicks in and you're on speed! Whoah! You get the buzz—it's crazy, it's outrageous, the carpet's moving and everybody's laughing and having a great time. But then, ever so slowly, the walls start closing in and it's like you're never going to get out of this fucking place. It's an ugly nightmare and there's no escape. And then they get out into the desert and it's light again. But it's a really rough ride for a lot of people to climb inside that head.

Gilliam also felt that the more surreal parts of the book could be transferred onto film if done right. For example, the imaginary bats that Duke sees on the highway at the beginning of the book was one such passage the director felt could be translated into visual terms.

Right at the start I thought, 'Well, we can't show them in the sky, we can only show them inside Duke's eyeball. So in the film we push in really tight on one of his eyes, where you can see these reflections of bats flapping around. We then cut to a wide shot that shows Duke waving his arms at nothing. I wanted to some how convey that this was an internal problem.

When Gilliam first joined the production there wasn't even a set budget. "I went out there and said all right, to start with just double it, whatever the budget is, seven and a half? I want $15-million, whatever it is just double it. And at the same time we're running around doing location scouts, discovering we can't use this, which we thought we could use, and we're trying to invent everything at the same time. I've never done a film like that, but on the other hand that was part of the fun of this one."

From there, the pace never slackened as Gilliam and company shot Fear and Loathing on location in a fast 56 days on a lean budget (by Hollywood standards) of $18.5 million. "One of the reasons I made this film,” Gilliam remembers, “was to push myself and see if I could still work the way I used to: fast, furiously and cheaply."

THE LOOK

Visually, Fear and Loathing is a masterpiece with a whacked out kaleidoscope of colors and insanely inventive camera angles and perspectives that make you feel like you're actually on drugs. Each drug consumed by Duke and Dr. Gonzo had its corresponding cinematic look to simulate its effects on the characters' perception. As the film's cinematographer, Nicola Pecorini points out, the effect of ether was done with "loose depth of field; everything becomes non-defined,” while the effects of amyl nitrate were done so that the "perception of light gets very uneven, light levels increase and decrease during the shots."

The look of Fear and Loathing was not inspired by Ralph Steadman's famous artwork that accompanied Thompson's words. Robert Yarber, an artist who paints pictures of people inside hotel rooms using fluorescent colors, influenced the look of the movie. His paintings captured the hallucinatory feel that the filmmakers were looking for: "the paintings use all kinds of neon colors, and the light sources don't necessarily make sense," Pecorini said in an interview in American Cinematographer magazine. As Gilliam remembers, "people inside hotel rooms in really fluorescent colors. His work is very strange and extraordinary and the colors he uses are extremely vibrant. We used him as a guide while mixing our palette of deeply disturbing fluorescent colors." This is evident in the scenes set in hotel rooms that each has their own garish Las Vegas decor that Duke and Dr. Gonzo subsequently transform into a twisted disaster area.

DEPP BECOMES DUKE

Actor Johnny Depp first met Thompson in Aspen, Colorado just before New Year's Eve, 1995. Depp left that initial meeting wondering why Fear and Loathing had not been made into a film. The actor subsequently invited Thompson to do a one-night gig at Depp's nightclub, The Viper Room on September 29, 1996 with the intention of asking the writer about doing a film version of his book. The opportunity never materialized but the two began corresponding via faxes.

Early one day, Thompson called Depp on the phone and asked him if he would consider playing Raoul Duke if a film was ever made of Fear and Loathing. "Without hesitation, I said, 'You bet!'" Depp recalls. By the Spring of 1997, Depp had moved into the basement of Owl Farm, Thompson's home in Aspen in order to do proper research for the role.

Depp was given complete access to every memento the writer saved from his 1971 trip to Las Vegas. "We went through the manuscript and the notes. There's notes on napkins and everything. He saved it all." The actor read through the writer's notebooks (which included an unpublished chapter entitled, "The Coconut Scene," which Gilliam placed in the film) only to realize that "the freakiest thing was that it was all real, that the reality was as insane as the book."

Thompson was disappointed that the film's costume designer wanted Depp to wear "bizarre Hawaiian zoot suits, and shit like that." The writer let Depp rummage through his wardrobe at the time of the book: Hawaiian shirts, a patchwork jacket, a safari hat, and a silver medallion given to him by Acosta. Thompson graciously allowed Depp to wear it all in the film. Gilliam remembers that the actor would "come back from Hunter's house with shirts and bags that Hunter had taken on the trip. In fact, Johnny drove the original Red Shark—the 1971 Chevrolet convertible in the film—down to Vegas from Hunter's house in Colorado."

All of these items only enhance Depp's performance. In the film, he has literally transformed into Duke/Thompson, complete with the man's unusual bow-legged walk, sweeping arm movements, mumbling speech pattern, and the trademark Dunhill cigarettes in a holder between clenched teeth. It's an incredible performance that transcends simple mimicry.

Depp's research culminated after a week when Thompson shaved almost all of the actor's hair for the film and entrusted him with the very car he used in the trip. The actor soon became Thompson's roadie and in charge of security for The Proud Highway (a collection of Thompson's letters) book tour.

If anything, the concern was that Depp would get too into the role and never emerge intact afterwards. While making the film, the actor received a phone call from Bill Murray who had also spent a lot of time with Thompson while researching for his role in Where the Buffalo Roam. Murray had had a very hard time shaking Thompson's distinctive persona after filming ended. When the comedian returned to Saturday Night Live for the fifth season, "he had virtually become Hunter Thompson, complete with long black cigarette holder, dark glasses, and nasty habits." Murray warned Depp to "be careful or you'll find yourself ten years from now still doing him...Make sure you're next role is some drastically different guy." Depp seemed to heed Murray's advice and went off to do The Astronaut's Wife (1999), a lackluster rip-off of Rosemary's Baby (1968), where he played an astronaut who is possessed by an alien entity.

THE PROBLEMS

"I don't think it was a well-organized film. Its birth was not easy. Certain people didn't...I'm not going to name names but it was a strange film, like one leg was shorter than the other. There was all sorts of chaos." – Terry Gilliam

One of the biggest obstacles Gilliam faced while shooting Fear and Loathing was working in the casinos in Las Vegas. He was only give six tables to put extras around and "the only time they'd give us was between two and six in the morning. And they insisted that the extras did real gambling!" In order to alleviate this problem, Gilliam decided to shoot the exterior shots of the Bazooka Casino in front of the Stardust hotel/casino with the interiors built and filmed on a Warner-Hollywood soundstage. That way, the director could exert more control over his surroundings instead of relying on the casinos that weren't always that co-operative.

Gilliam couldn't even afford the music rights to the Rolling Stones song, "Sympathy For The Devil," which is featured so prominently in the book. The price tag for the song was $300,000 (one third of the soundtrack budget) so they decided to use "Jumpin' Jack Flash" instead.

Another problem was Thompson himself. Gilliam decided to have the writer make a small cameo in the film but feared having him on the set because of the potential chaos the man could create. "Hunter is an uncontrollable force—he is chaos, you can't predict what he'll do next. So me, Johnny and his girlfriend were like three sheepdogs, herding Hunter into position."

To make matters worse, Gilliam faced another battle after Fear and Loathing was made. The Writer's Guild of America wanted to give sole writing credit to Alex Cox and Tod Davies even though Gilliam and Toni Grisoni had written their own script. According to WGA rules, if you're a writer-director, you have to produce more than 50% of the script, while other writers involved only have to produce 30%. However, as Gilliam pointed out, "there have been at least five previous attempts at adapting the book, and they all come from the book. They all use the same scenes." The WGA determined that Gilliam and Grisoni had not written the film. To add insult to injury, Gilliam wasn't even allowed to know who the arbiters were that made the decision or see their reports.

Universal brought in their lawyers and Gilliam and Grisoni had to write a 25-page document to prove that they had written more than 60% of the film. By early May 1998, the WGA revised its decision and gave writing credit to Gilliam and Grisoni first and then Cox and Davies second. This hardly satisfied Gilliam who burned his WGA card in protest.

THE AFTERMATH

"I always get very tense in those (test screenings), because I'm ready to fight. I know the pressure from the studios is, 'somebody didn't like that, change it!'" – Terry Gilliam

Fear and Loathing debuted at the Cannes Film Festival and Gilliam said, "I'm curious about the reaction...If I'm going to be disappointed, it's because it doesn't make any waves, that people are not outraged."

To say that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas received a mixed reaction from audiences and critics alike is a gross understatement. In the New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote, "Even the most precise cinematic realizations of Mr. Thompson's images (and of Ralph Steadman's cartoon drawings for the book) don't begin to match the surreal ferocity of the author's language." Stephen Hunter, in his review for the Washington Post, wrote, "It tells no story at all. Little episodes of no particular import come and go...But the movie is too grotesque to be entered emotionally." Mike Clark, of USA Today, found the film, "simply unwatchable." Perhaps Gilliam and company made too faithful an adaptation that only really appeals to devotees of the book. Or, as Gilliam suggests, people were scared off because they had to think about what they were watching. "You've got to work out what it's told you, and that's not what America's about. They want their morality clear.”

Gilliam found that the American press refused to "even talk about Fear and Loathing. They won't say, 'Ban the film'—they're too liberal for that—so instead they seem to have adopted this attitude of, Oh, maybe if we don't talk about it, it'll go away. That's modern America all over.” And judging by Fear and Loathing's quick demise at the box office and subsequent disappearance from theaters, this strategy worked. While most critics praised Depp and Del Toro's performance, most found Gilliam's film to be a muddled mess with no coherent structure: just one long debauched road trip.

Regardless of what the critics thought, Gilliam hoped that one person would at least appreciate his efforts: Hunter S. Thompson. "Yeah, I liked it. It's not my show, but I appreciated it. Depp did a hell of a job. His narration is what really held the film together, I think. If you hadn't had that, it would have just been a series of wild scenes,” Thompson said in an interview.

Gilliam remembers Hunter's reaction to the film when he saw at the premiere: "He was making all this fucking noise! Apparently it all came flooding back to him, he was reliving the whole trip! He was yelling out and jumping on his seat like it was a rollercoaster, ducking and diving, shouting "SHIT! LOOK OUT! GODDAM BATS!”

I think that this is indeed some kind of genius film, but in a really demented way that I would have a hard time verbalizing to someone who didn't tap into what Gilliam is trying to do. I can see why Fear and Loathing received a critical shellacking from all the usual pundits (Ebert et al.). It's a very odd film — a 128-minute acid trip from beginning to end with no respite, no rest stops, and no objective distance from which to view the whole insane picture safely. You are plunged headlong into this weird, wild world along with the characters.

Fear and Loathing contains many funny moments, bits of dialogue, and visual zingers as Duke and Dr. Gonzo make their way through the surreal landscape that is Las Vegas. The humor in this film is simultaneously disturbing and hilarious — a pitch-black satire of American culture and excess. Around the 3/4-way mark, Fear and Loathing veers off into some really dark territory as the horror that accompanies chemical dependency rears its ugly head. I was worried that this element would be lost in the transfer from book to film and that it was going to be simply a "straight" comedy. Thankfully, the darker edge of the book has been retained and reinforced in spades.

The heart of darkness in Fear and Loathing is a scene that takes place in the North Star Coffee Lounge between Duke, Dr. Gonzo and a waitress whom the attorney threatens. As Gilliam observes, "this is two guys who have gone beyond the pale, this is unforgivable—that scene, it's ugly. My approach, rather than to throw it out, was to make that scene the low point." This is the kind of film that people will either really love or hate — there is no middle ground. Gilliam's film is going to be one of those movies that's destined to become an instant cult item. As Hunter S. Thompson puts it in the book, "there he goes, one of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind, never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, too rare to die." Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is pure Gonzo filmmaking for people who like weird, challenging films.