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November, 21st 2004
BY LOLA OGUNNAIKE
On the surface it seemed like a pretty good gig: Four months of filming at a luxury resort in the Bahamas. Salma Hayek in various states of undress. Pierce Brosnan, Woody Harrelson and Don Cheadle at your command, not to mention a gaggle of supermodels.
But for director Brett Ratner, shooting After the Sunset, a romantic comedy-heist movie currently in theaters, was far from a stroll on the beach. ''Each time I make a movie,'' he said, ``it only gets scarier and scarier.''
In the eight years that he has been in the film business, Ratner, 35, has directed six movies, most notably the blockbuster Rush Hour series starring comedian Chris Tucker and martial arts maestro Jackie Chan.
After the thudding receptions given The Family Man (2000), a romantic comedy starring Nicolas Cage, and Red Dragon (2002), the prequel to The Silence of the Lambs, he has returned to the sort of fare he knows best.
The film centers around Max (Brosnan) and Lola (Hayek), a crime duo who fancy diamonds and each other. After narrowly pulling off a daring mission, they retire to a life of lobster dinners, fruity cocktails and lovely sunsets. Harrelson plays a frustrated FBI agent hot on their trail.
Reviews have not been favorable. ''You'd have to search high and low to find screen lovers with less romantic chemistry than Pierce Brosnan and Salma Hayek,'' Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times, adding that the plot ``feels like a retread of a retread.''
Over a recent dinner, Ratner said he had struggled to find the film's tone. ''If you go too far in the comedy direction, people don't believe it,'' he said. ``If you go too far in the romance direction, it becomes overly sentimental. Usually I decide the tone early and everything just falls into place. Basically, I created this movie in the editing room.''
As a child extra on the set of Brian DePalma's Scarface, Ratner had an epiphany. ''That's when I first decided that this is what I wanted to do,'' he said. ''I didn't want to be Al Pacino. I wanted to be Brian DePalma, the guy telling Al Pacino what to do.'' Because he loved Raging Bull, he made up his mind to attend director Martin Scorsese's alma mater, New York University, though he said he barely made it in.
After noticing Tucker, then a little-known comedian, at a Def Comedy Jam audition, Ratner cast him in a Heavy D video. ''I paid him $500 and let him keep the wardrobe,'' Ratner said. Tucker would return the favor when he recommended that Ratner, 26 at the time, direct Money Talks, in which he starred with Charlie Sheen.
Rush Hour soon followed. The film cost $32 million to make and grossed $247 million worldwide, making Ratner and Tucker men to watch.
Ratner is scheduled to begin shooting Rush Hour 3 in June.
He had hoped that a bedeviled Superman project would be his next film, but after six months of bickering with producer Jon Peters, he resigned from the film in March 2003. ''The script that I was going to do was so expensive,'' he said. ``Usually Superman starts with him landing on earth. We were going back into the history of Krypton and the civil war that took place on the planet.''
To hear Ratner tell it, he has more than enough work to keep him busy. In addition to Rush Hour 3, he will be working on Josiah's Canon, about a robber who plans to break into a series of Swiss banks, and Bringing Down the House, based on the true story of a band of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who took casinos in Las Vegas for millions.
If he wasn't a director, Ratner said he would surely be taking orders at McDonald's. ''There's no way I could do anything else,'' he said. ``I don't know how to do anything else.''
SFEC Note: Brett Ratner has been a regular speaker at the Sports, Film & Entertainment Conference and a supporter of SFEC.
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