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Paramount Pictures recently announced a reissue campaign for some of the most iconic films in their back catalog, a venture which they’ve entitled “Paramount Presents.” The first batch of remastered and bonus-laded reissues emerged last week — Fatal Attraction, King Creole, and To Catch a Thief — and to help kick things off right, the studio enlisted the director of the first film on that list, Adrian Lyne, to do a round of press. As such, Decider took advantage of the opportunity to chat with Lyne, quizzing him Fatal Attraction and Flashdance, getting anecdotes about a few other items on his filmography, including Jacob’s Ladder and Lolita, and discovering which Jeff Bridges film he almost directed.
DECIDER: I’ve been a fan of your work for quite some time, so it’s nice to finally be able to discuss it with you, thanks to the Blu-ray reissue of Fatal Attraction.
ADRIAN LYNE: Well, thank you! Thanks so much. I mean, it’s a long, long while ago…
It is, but it’s a film that – having just gotten the chance to revisit – I’m pleased to say still holds up.
[Laughs.] Okay! Well, it was fun getting a chance to work on the sound and the color and stuff like that [for the reissue]. I hadn’t seen it for a long while, but I think it helped it, the work I did.
Well, to start with the origin story, how did you find your way onto the film in the first place?
I was in France. I lived in France for awhile, and I got sent the script, and I sat down on some stairs in the house quite late at night. My wife was in bed, in fact. But I read it, and it’s a marvelous page-turner, and I thought that if I did the movie equivalent of a page-turner, then maybe they would come. And I went straight in to my wife and said, “This is a marvelous story, and if I don’t screw it up, it has a real shot at being a big movie!” I felt it quite early, really.
I hadn’t known until recently that Nicholas Meyer had a hand in adapting the script.
Yes, he did! Not for a long while. He did a rewrite on it. But it was based on a short film that James Dearden had made a long time earlier, so mostly it was James, I have to say, that did the work on it.
I’ve read that there was uncertainty from producers about casting Glenn Close in the role of Alex Forrest.
Yeah, there was a lot of doubt about whether she was right, because she had done things like [The World According to] Garp and that Larry Kasdan movie… Oh, what’s it called? The Big Chill! But she always used to play nice people, stay-at-home people, so it was a new way of looking at her. And I was a little reluctant! But then she came in and read, and so often actresses won’t read. They won’t go through that. But I think it’s important. Otherwise, you’re just making kind of an educated guess without seeing what they’re like with the other actor. And she was just wonderful when I worked with [her and Michael Douglas] together and put them on tape, so I understood that they would be very interesting together. The chemistry was terrific.
Do you recall who else was contemplated or was in contention for the role?
Well, I was thinking about Debra Winger. I don’t think she wanted to do it, as far as I remember. I talked to a lot of people. But I finally met Glenn, and I was really glad that she did it, obviously. And I thought it was interesting that he was married to Anne Archer, you know? Who was very attractive. I thought it was important that he wouldn’t be married to somebody who was kind of plain and therefore you would understand why he had gone off with Alex. I thought it was interesting, just the arbitrary nature of infidelity. Having a nice family, a nice kid, and being happy, and having absolutely no reason to have an affair… I thought it was much more interesting to go that way than to have a bad marriage.
The film ended up being one of the defining roles of Michael Douglas’s career during the ’80s. That, and Wall Street.
Yeah, he’d done Romancing the Stone before that, which was a comedy, but I don’t think I’d seen him in any dramas that I’d thought really worked. [Hesitates.] Well, actually, he’d done a movie called Running that I remember before that. But what helped me was that I worked with him as a producer. He was a producer on a movie that I’d worked on called Starman, which eventually got made by John Carpenter. There’d been all sorts of directors attached to it. So I got to know him quite well, and one day when I worked with him I remember thinking, “This is a charming, funny guy,” but I’d never really seen it on film. So I think that helped me, that I knew him fairly well.
I didn’t realize you’d been attached to Starman at one point. I love that film.
Yes, I was. I worked for six months on it. I really wanted to do it! They eventually made what I guess was a comedy, which I sort of thought was… I mean, it was a good movie, but I didn’t really want to do that with it. I just thought the idea of somebody learning how to be human was such an interesting idea. A fabulous idea.
I have to ask you about the ending of Fatal Attraction and the switching-up of the way things wrapped up for Alex.
Well, I mean, people always like to think, “Oh, they’re trying to sneak an extra buck out of it, having a sensational ending,” or whatever. But when we previewed the film, it just sort of went flat over the last quarter of an hour. So we just looked around for something that was more dramatic, really. And I’m sure there was something better than what we found, but I know that even though the other ending was sort of truer to Madame Butterfly than the other ending, it still felt flat. So we just wanted it to work better dramatically. That’s all. It wasn’t a financial thing, as people kept saying. We just wanted the movie to be good, really.
I know you’re on a tight schedule, but I wanted to at least ask you about a couple of other films, starting with Flashdance. It’s a film that’s of its time in many ways, but it’s also rather timeless.
Well, you know, it was a film that was kind of a fairy tale, really. I read the script a couple of times and thought it was kind of silly, and I didn’t want to do it. I turned it down, actually. A couple of times! And then I met with a lady called Dawn Steele, who was at Paramount and who was really passionate about it, and I just thought that maybe I could do something with the dances to make them interesting. But, you know ,in the end, people wrote to me and stuff, and they said that they’d found it uplifting, and it’d helped them to follow their dream and that sort of thing, which…kind of sounds a bit naive! But in the end… I mean, nobody thought the film was going to be successful. I remember at Paramount I couldn’t get anyone on the phone, including the producers! Everybody thought the film was going to go down the toilet. And happily it didn’t, you know? It just sort of stuck around forever, all through the summer. It was just lucky, really.
I talked to Jennifer Beals a couple of years ago, and she said that when they did a screening of the film at the Cinematheque in 2013, what shocked her was how sexual the film was at almost any moment.
[Laughs.] Oh, yeah?
She said, “Even in the most banal moments, it still oozes sexuality.”
I hope that’s good!
I think so. She said you knew how to bring the visceral sexuality to everything .
Oh, okay, then. [Laughs.] Yeah, she didn’t do a lot of her dancing, so I chose a French girl – Marine Jahan – who was kind of erotic, the way she danced, so I think that helped a lot, the physicality. But Jennifer Beals looked marvelous. I mean, she was very young, and she looked staggeringly beautiful, really. It was wonderful to photograph her.
Did you remember that she locked herself in the bathroom at the first screening?
She did? No, I don’t remember that. That’s funny! But I do remember where the screening was at. It was a preview at the Village, which is an enormous theater that’s almost impossible to fill. It sat 1,500 people or something. I remember that people were a bit mystified by it. And I remember hearing Giorgio Moroder, who did the music and who didn’t know I was there, saying, “Yes, but is it any good?” [Laughs.] But people were enthusiastic about it. It was a film that caught people’s imagination. It’s funny: in New York, they would gather in Times Square when they showed it, and there were people in the aisles dancing!
I guess having people dancing in the aisles takes away a little bit of the sting of Giorgio Moroder’s comment.
Well, it did! It really did. And I remember the first time someone said, “You do know, don’t you, that they’re all wearing their t-shirts hanging off one shoulder?” And I hadn’t really noticed it. And then I went out in New York and walked up and down the street, and they actually were! So that was fun, the whole clothes aspect of it.
Having gotten the “last question” warning, I have to at least ask you about Jacob’s Ladder, but before doing that, I was just curious: are you familiar with a podcast called How Did This Get Made?
No, I’m not!
Well, there’s a recurring theme within their show, which involves watching movies that aren’t necessarily great, and contemplating whether or not some of them might involve a Jacob’s Ladder scenario.
[Bursts out laughing.] That’s funny! What’s it called, the podcast?
How Did This Get Made?
Okay, I’ll look for that!
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Adrian Lyne
Well, I like that best. And I also like Lolita. I worked really hard on Lolita. I loved the novel, and I knew that everybody would dump on me because of [Stanley] Kubrick’s Lolita. I mean, he’s a brilliant man, but his movie really was nothing about the novel. It was nothing to do with the novel! I just wanted to do a movie that reflected the novel, and I’m proud of it. That, and Jacob’s Ladder, are the best, I think.
Jacob’s Ladder certainly has a fascinating look to it, one that’s still disconcerting even now.
And what’s interesting is that there’s no digital stuff at all. Literally none. It was all, like, shooting in low frame and then getting people to move around so that it became kind of a blur. I sort of based it a bit on Francis Bacon’s pictures, where they’re sort of distorted and blurred, and you can’t quite understand what’s going on. I always think that if the audience can’t see something properly and has to put their own imagination into it, it’s more frightening.
Will Harris (@NonStopPop) has a longstanding history of doing long-form interviews with random pop culture figures for the A.V. Club, Vulture, and a variety of other outlets, including Variety. He’s currently working on a book with David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker. (And don’t call him Shirley.)
