 Bob Balaban, "Bernard and Doris" HBO film director: Mr. Media Interview, Part 1
from Mr. Media
February 10, 2008
No matter what role he’s in, Bob Balaban always makes an impression, from Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind to playing the President of NBC on “Seinfeld.” And the same is now true of his work as a director, which you’ll discover when Bernard and Doris, starring Susan Sarandon and Ralph Fiennes, debuts on HBO on February 9th. BOB BALABAN AUDIO! Click to open separate window ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PODCAST ON iTUNES. Subscribe to Mr. Media's RSS Feed. BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Tell us a little bit about Bernard and Doris. This is the story of Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress, and her butler, but maybe you can define it a little more. BOB BALABAN: Doris Duke, as some people may remember, was known most of her life as “the richest little girl in the world.” Her dad had hundreds of millions of dollars. She inherited a lot when it was a lot to have a hundred million dollars, and by the time she died in 1993, she had managed to amass $1.3 billion, which, in those days, was a lot of money. Now it’s pocket change. Doris was sort of famous for not ever finding a guy who would ever love her for herself. When you have that much money and you’re a lady, it’s not always the easiest thing. I suppose if you’re a man, it’s not all that easy anyway cause everybody wanted something from her. Later in her life in 1987, an Irish butler named Bernard Lafferty came to work for Doris Duke. He had worked for Elizabeth Taylor and Peggy Lee and was thrilled to come and work for this sort of famous, exotic creature, Doris Duke, who was known for being rather eccentric and generous in many ways, certainly with her foundation. And the two of them bonded. When Doris Duke died in 1993, she left this young, alcoholic, itinerant Irish butler guy, fairly uneducated, basically in charge of her $1.3 billion fortune. We made a movie, starring the brilliant Susan Sarandon and Ralph Fiennes, in which we imagined what might have transpired behind closed doors during the six years that Bernard came to work for Doris Duke that would enable this very unlikely fellow to get to that trusted point in Doris’ heart where she would entrust him with so much of her beloved fortune. We have made a story of how this relationship came to be. It’s kind of a quirky love story between two unlikely people. ANDELMAN: I’m very interested to know how you were sold on a biographical film in which, right up front as we watch it, we’re told, “Some of the following is based on fact.” I just love that. BALABAN: Well, thank you. First of all, the legal department of HBO was thrilled that I wanted to put that in the front of the movie. It helps, somebody thinks. But truthfully, they’re two real people, and we did attempt to, more or less in a broad sense, place these two characters in a real context. Doris Duke did have a house in New Jersey. Bernard did come to work for her. In a general sense, many of the things biographically that we say about the two of them are true based on my non-extensive knowledge of the two of them, which is mostly headlines in newspapers and public record. But this is an internal journey of an emotional relationship between two people, so we wanted to be very clear that, as we made that journey, this was something we posited. This was something we invented. Something did happen between the two of them, but we made it up as to what really happened. ANDELMAN: As I watched, I kept thinking of this line, and I think it’s from an Elvis Costello song – “Some of my lies are true.” BALABAN: I love that you thought of that. And that may very well be true in this case. ANDELMAN: Now, with something like this, I’m thinking that Doris Duke would be considered a public figure -- and so she would be in play -- but what about Lafferty? He was hired by a public figure. He never asked to be a public figure, and, of course, he’s passed away now. BALABAN: Yes, and he has no relatives. You’re talking about legal issues possibly with somebody who was a real character? ANDELMAN: A little bit, yeah. BALABAN: Basically, there’s nothing that we say about him that you wouldn’t have learned from going to the library and looking up a lot of newspaper headlines. And there’s also nothing libelous or scandalous about the way we present it. ANDELMAN: I have to say it’s a very entertaining film. BALABAN: I like that. You didn’t have to say that as you were saying that. ANDELMAN: I just gotta call it like I see it. It’s funny. It’s the kind of thing where, if my wife had described it to me Saturday and said okay, I want to go out and see this movie tonight, I would say, “Naah, isn’t there like a Jackie Chan comedy or something?” But I watched it, and I was very entertained. And I think one of the things that really struck me about it, your lead actors, of course, Susan Sarandon, Ralph Fiennes. Fiennes, this is not the guy from Schindler’s List. This is certainly not the guy from the Harry Potter movies. BALABAN: One of the things I love so much about Ralph in this movie is he’s utterly unexpected, does nothing in it that you’ve ever seen him do before, and manages to make the most complex character, who’s sort of simultaneously very, very creepy and sort of adorable and vulnerable and strange. I agree with you. I haven’t seen him do anything like this. I haven’t seen anybody really do anything like this. ANDELMAN: It was very interesting to see him, eyes down, for so much of the, at least for the first half of the movie. He’s in that butler, servant type of mode, and I just keep thinking, “Okay, when is he going to burst out?” And appropriately, he did not. That’s the whole thing. That’s what makes it such an amazing performance, I think. BALABAN: His character kind of blossoms. This is a journey that these two people make is basically a journey to opening up to each other, which did in our movie takes a couple of years for this to happen. Fortunately, the movie is only 106 minutes long so you won’t have to watch it for several years. But the journey that they make is not an Indiana Jones journey where they travel by bus, truck, and camel to get to an exotic location. The exotic location to which both characters are journeying is each other’s hearts. And it’s a twisted path, and it’s a difficult one, but it had to be very measured on both of the actors’ parts, for Susan as well. She just barely pays attention to this fellow for about the first 12 or 14 minutes of the movie so that when she finally looks at him, you realize that she’s had hundreds of servants in her long and exotic and rich life, but there’s something about this guy that is causing her to pay attention in a way that she hasn’t done before. And that’s the beginning of her journey. And in Ralph’s case, you point it out very accurately. He can barely look at the woman. When he starts being able to say a direct sentence to her and look her in the face, you can sense something flowing back and forth between the two of them because they’re great actors, and they’re very good at telling an emotional story. ANDELMAN: I think I read that Susan described the film also as a love story, which is certainly what I thought while I was watching it. But it’s not, in any way, a love story where these two fall in love, and they live happily ever after. It’s not so much a romantic love -- more of a devotional one. BALABAN: Yes. I would say, if we were playing at your local multiplex, it would say, “A different kind of love story, the love that dare not speak its name.” ANDELMAN: I don’t know if we should go that far! BALABAN: Well, we would if we wanted to get more people into the audience. ANDELMAN: At what point in the process did you sign on? I think I read it was before Susan and Ralph… BALABAN: I shuttle about between being an actor, a director, a writer, and a trash collector. My friend Ilene Maisel, who is an executive at New Line Cinema, a brilliant producer person in her own right, sent me the script. She knew the person who wrote it, I believe, had come across it, and just sent it. She was in London, and she said, I think you might find this thing interesting,” which I did. The script has gone through many incarnations since that point. We chose to make the movie on the East Coast so the movie can’t begin the way it used to begin, which is Bernard Lafferty arrived in a Tour of the Stars bus as they were saying, “… and on the left is where Doris Duke, the billionaire heiress, lives…” And we got to explain Doris’ background through the loudspeaker of the tour bus. We couldn’t do that cause we made the movie as if it were in her estate in New Jersey. I was, from the beginning, struck by the compelling nature of this needy, needy woman who could never find anybody to love her and this butler, who himself felt unworthy and unlovable, and yet their stations in life were so different. Sexually they were so different, and yet something happened between the two of them to drive them together. And I thought even if she had never been a real character, this would have been a very interesting story. I gave the movie to Susan Sarandon. She loved the idea of playing this kind of character. We discussed literally making sure that the movie we would eventually make was much more an internal journey and much more about an emotional ride between these two characters and therefore, focusing much more on the two of them and their path to, as you and I are talking about it, falling in a kind of love. And then we decided that Ralph Fiennes would be the only person we’d like to make the movie with, and Ralph felt the same way about us. I went around and found $500,000, and these two “A”-tier actors decided to make this very brave decision to come and be in a movie with nothing to support it except two wonderful performances. We had no money. We barely had a location. We couldn’t find shoes. And yet we had a very wonderful working experience making this thing. Maybe that’s why. It was so pared down. It was so essential about the two of them and their two characters. ANDELMAN: Let’s talk a little bit about the budget on the film. I want to point out that this was not commissioned by HBO. It was acquired by HBO after it had been made, right? BALABAN: HBO does that occasionally. Yes, we made an independent movie with Kevin Spacey’s company, Trigger Street Independent, that had raised $2 or $3 million to make a certain amount of $500,000 movies. This, they decided to make one of them. We were on our way to the Toronto Film Festival to look for a buyer at which point Colin Calendar from HBO saw the movie, loved it, said, “I’d love to take you off the market,” and we paused. We went, “Well, gee we could get bought up by Spinning Films Independent if we go to Toronto.” I sat down at that point and discussed this with Susan and Ralph and all of our people and said, “I think this is an opportunity to have two fantastic performances seen by a number of millions of people as opposed to in a little theater on the Upper East Side with 65 people a day seeing it for about three weeks. And we could also pay back the wonderful people who had come and helped us make this movie for no money. I thought that’s kind of a winning combination. Let’s do it,” and we did, and HBO bought it, and here we are. ANDELMAN: I think we need to talk more about that budget. It’s $500,000, I think you said. BALABAN: Yes. It ended up, if we were being exactly exact, a few dollars more but substantially less than a million. Click Here to Keep Reading! © 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
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