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— by Corey Moss
PARK CITY, Utah — Adrien Brody might never top smooching Halle Berry on his way to picking up a leading actor Oscar, but there's a lot more charm where that came from.
Witness this scene from the Sundance Film Festival: Brody and Keira Knightley, in town to promote "The Jacket," had just cozied up to an outdoor fireplace when asked what attracted them to the thriller.
"Keira attracted me," Brody answered without hesitation, flashing a smile at his co-star.
"Nice, nice, that was nicely done," the British actress responded. "I wasn't actually attached [to the movie] when he read the script, but anyway, cheers!"
As convenient as it would be to credit Knightley, the truth is there were more complex reasons Brody signed on for "The Jacket."
"I like that it's without any real genre," Brody said. "It's very much like life, because there is a lot of different emotional levels, a lot of different scenarios. It's partially a love story, it's partially an intense psychological thriller, it's very frightening."
In "The Jacket," Brody plays a Gulf War veteran suffering from fits of amnesia who lands in a mental institute after being accused of murder. At the asylum, an experimental doctor repeatedly pumps him with drugs, restrains him in a straightjacket and locks him in a morgue drawer, an excruciating exercise that eventually leads to Brody being able to see the future.
"I have friends that have served in Iraq, I have a friend who has been injured and released ... so I feel a personal connection to that," Brody said. "I was also drawn to the fact that this is a guy who really is not bound by his past, basically, because he has no recollection of his past. And he's not really defined by his ethnicity or his race or his beliefs, so there is a real free, open space for me to inhabit, and that is rare for an actor.
"And by being this blank slate, I am almost playing the everyman," he continued. "And by playing the everyman who is kind of the victim of a number of systems that are far more powerful than the individual, which we all understand and we are also conscious of — the power of the government and the power of the armed forces and the law and the judicial system — there is a sense of helplessness, and I wanted to embody that."
Knightley, who plays Brody's love interest in the future and the one person who can save his life, also saw a role she could sink her teeth into, and more importantly, one that was different than her "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl," "King Arthur" and "Bend It Like Beckham" characters.
"As an actor, you want to keep changing as much as possible from role to role," she explained. "With a lot of Brits working in America you do get typecast very easily into one specific thing, which for me is the damsel in distress, kind of English feisty vibe, which is great, but I don't really want to do that for my whole career."
Knightley was also interested in working with director John Maybury, a fellow Brit with several indie films to his credit. The feeling, however, wasn't mutual.
"The director didn't want me," Knightley recalled. "I met him in London for a meeting. I flew back from Ireland. I'd been doing 'King Arthur.' I had food poisoning and he turned around to me and said, 'You are completely wrong for this part and I don't know if you can act and I don't know if I want you in my movie.' ... And I went, 'Fair enough, can I read?' And he went, 'Yeah, right.' And I did and then he offered me the part after that, so it turned out all right."
It's fitting that Maybury gave Knightley a chance, since it was a similar gesture that brought the director to the film. Before "The Jacket," Maybury was struggling to develop a couple of projects on his own and was about to "jack it all and go back to being all artsy." Then he received a call from director/producer/indie film pioneer Steven Soderbergh ("Ocean's Twelve," "Traffic"), who was approaching directors "on the fringes of cinema" with scripts he wanted to produce.
"He wanted to kind of bring us inside the studio system to give us access to stars, but also, at the same time, try and protect us from the system and the stars," Maybury said. "I had had several dozen scripts sent to me from America, and most of them, by like page five, I had thrown them across the room in horror, which meant I was broke but I also didn't embarrass myself as a filmmaker. This one I actually read from cover to cover, which was a good sign."
Maybury then met with screenwriter Massy Tadjedin and changed some of the elements, such as making the central character a Gulf War soldier as opposed to a Vietnam veteran.
"It was also very testosterone-heavy, so I changed some of those male characters to female characters, hence Jennifer [Jason Leigh, who plays a nurse,] gets to be in the movie," Maybury said. "I wanted to de-cliché the movie and try to give it a bit more depth and a bit more relevance to now."
Since Warner Independent Pictures was already attached, Maybury never had to pitch the film's complicated premise, which he still struggles to explain. "I always hated the idea that it was a time traveling movie, because it's not that at all," he said. "It's more about sort of psychological states and drugs."
Brody can certainly attest to "The Jacket" being about psychological states, as he found himself going a little mad during filming, especially when wearing the jacket in the drawer.
"It was at times very painful and stressful emotionally," the actor recalled. "I spent some time in a sensory deprivation tank before going into that whole sequence and what's interesting in doing that is when you deprive yourself of sound, gravity, light ... you start to disconnect from your physical being, which is what my character really ends up doing [when he] potentially witnesses his future. So it was really kind of an interesting, slightly maddening process. And we shot it in a real mental institution, so there was that energy present. It was intense."
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Photo: Warner Independent Pictures
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