CHOKE - Behind The Scenes

"Choke"
BEHIND THE SCENES
by Tim Nasson
August 31, 2008

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CHOKING UP: ADAPTING CHUCK PALAHNIUK

“Everything we do is an attempt to fool people into loving us or wanting us, and so my characters are
really no different from ordinary people.” -- Chuck Palahniuk

Chuck Palahniuk’s fourth novel Choke is an amped-up, relentlessly satirical look at sex, work, identity and bottomless yearning in contemporary America. Much like his earlier novel, Fight Club, which sparked a cult phenomenon and became a critically acclaimed hit movie starring Brad Pitt, Choke is a story that blasts through one taboo after the next. It tackles bad parenting and degenerate sex, consumerism and addiction, Colonial history and holy relics, medical horrors and blatant con games, an adult sense of failure and the freaky transcendent power of love. Like its selfasphyxiating main character, the book was all about people getting stuck . . . and suddenly dislodged from the patterns of their pasts.

Most shied away from its tricky tone and uninhibited themes, but when executive producer Gary Ventimiglia showed filmmaking newcomer and actor Clark Gregg the manuscript for Choke, Gregg was driven to try to adapt the book. Not only that, he had his own daring and unlikely vision for the movie version of CHOKE: as a wicked, Palahniuk-style twist on that age-old heartwarming genre, the romantic comedy. “I had never read anything so painful and yet also so funny,” Gregg says of the novel. “I know Chuck is usually seen as this dark, nihilistic writer but I saw more than that in CHOKE. I felt the story was actually very hopeful and romantic, in its own perverse, post-modern way.”

He continues: “Palahniuk’s got so many clever, brilliant, satirical ideas and his finger on the pulse of what works and what doesn’t work in this country. For me, the book hit that chord where I thought ‘I have to make this; nobody’s going to let me do this but I’ve got to find a way.’” Best known for his work as an actor, theatre director and a founding member of New York’s Atlantic Theater Company, Gregg earlier made his screenwriting debut with the horror thriller WHAT LIES BENEATH, starring Harrison Ford. He has appeared in dozens of stage productions, films and, most recently, in the sitcom “The New Adventures of Old Christine” with Julia Louis- Dreyfus. But Gregg had never directed a feature film before and he knew he might be a little crazy to
attempt his first outing with such provocative material. He began by getting Palahniuk’s blessing. “Chuck was very patient because it took me a year and a half, two years maybe, and a couple of drafts before I could really get a handle on taking this surreal, satirical world from the page to the more three dimensional realm of a movie,” Gregg recalls.

“Fortunately, Chuck, like a lot of the smartest novelists I know, is really aware that for a movie adaptation to work, at a certain point, you’ve got to just put the book away. From the first time I spoke to him he told me ‘Don’t be too faithful, don’t stick to the book.’ I really had to do that because there is just so much brilliant stuff in Victor’s voice, I could have just basically made my own book on tape and it would never have worked. Whatever I understood about the book, I had to let it no longer be a book and become a screenplay.”

To accomplish that, Gregg followed the trail of his own emotional reaction to the novel. “My mother is not Ida and I never worked in a Colonial village, but there was something about the story that always felt painfully familiar,” he says. “Along with its themes of sexuality and obsession, I found it to be a really heartbreaking story about the way people recover from emotional trauma in their lives so that they can give and receive love.” He also hung on to Palahniuk’s mix-mastering of contrasting tones. “One of the things that constantly drew me to the material was how it managed to have scenes that I found hysterically funny in a black comedy vein and then, two minutes later, there would be a really heartbreaking exchange that felt like Chekhov. In retrospect, I didn’t realize how difficult a balancing act it would be to make it work on those trenchant dramatic levels and still have it be funny. It was a wonderful challenge.”

Early on during the development process, Beau Flynn and Tripp Vinson of Contrafilm, whose previous films include such box-office hits as THE GUARDIAN with Kevin Costner and Disney’s THE WILD, came on board with great enthusiasm – ready to do whatever it might take to bring this intimate and ambitious story to the screen. The two had been friends with Gregg for years, having first known him as an accomplished actor, and had watched his talents as a writer blossom. “We had felt for a long time that Clark was a director at heart and when he brought us CHOKE, we said we’re making this movie with you,” Flynn and Vinson recall. “We so believed in Clark and the movie that we weren’t going to let it go anywhere but forward.”

They knew there were going to be massive challenges involved in taking on Palahniuk’s work, especially on the heels of David Fincher’s nearly iconic adaptation of FIGHT CLUB, but the possibilities seemed to make the risk worth it. “I think the material hit very close to home with Clark because there’s a lot of Victor in him. In fact, there’s a lot of Victor in everyone. Once you boil down all of these wild experiences and comical situations in the novel, it really becomes a story about a mother and a son and a man falling in love and Clark understood that,” says Flynn.

Later, when the script was complete, Johnathan Dorfman and Temple Fennell of ATO Pictures joined the team and helped to put the financing together. ATO, which is run by Dorfman, Fennell and acclaimed singer/songwriter Dave Matthews, only take on films when all three of the company’s co-heads fall madly in love with a script – which is exactly what happened with CHOKE. “Temple, Dave and I each took home the script and the very next day we were all on the phone saying we’ve got to do this,” recalls Dorfman. “None of us had read the book. We all came to it fresh and thought it was extremely good.”

ATO was also willing to take a major gamble on a first-time director tackling high-risk material. “A lot of independent movies are about taking a bet on the director,” offers Dorfman. “We had already done one film with a first-time director on JOSHUA, which had turned out well and we liked that Clark was already a known writer, that he was an adult not a kid, and that he was extremely articulate and passionate about the project. He had a very full vision of how to approach this material early on, talking about how he was going to balance the comedy with the poignancy.”

Dorfman continues: “Most of all, we knew that this film ran the risk of trying to exist in the shadow of David Fincher’s style on FIGHT CLUB, and we were very pleased that Clark said, ‘No, I’m going to try something quite different.’ The film was a very intense crash course in filmmaking for him but he is very astute and we were right behind him the whole way.” Says Chuck Palahniuk: “Here is a spot-on, instant classic. Like THE GRADUATE or HAROLD & MAUDE, Clark Gregg's work is funny and tragic at the same time. I could not be happier with this film.”

GETTING CHOKED: THE CHARACTERS

“I really wanted to find a way to trick Victor into thinking he could be so much better than he ever imagined himself and find himself thrust into this legacy of goodness. He has to reinvent himself according to what other people want him to be.” -- Chuck Palahniuk

When it came time to cast CHOKE, the filmmakers knew everything would hinge on finding actors who could nail the right tone. They were helped tremendously by Mary Vernieu who joined CHOKE as an executive producer in the very early stages. Vernieu is a highly regarded casting director who has worked with such character-driven directors as Quentin Tarantino, David O. Russell and Darren Aranofsky. Ultimately, the casting was so successful that the film garnered the Ensemble Cast Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

The first thing the film needed was an actor who would be completely fearless in the role of the rather flagrantly flawed Victor Mancini. He had to be willing to be eccentric, neurotic, needy, lusty, manipulative and disillusioned. At the same time he also needed to be charming, funny, heartbreakingly vulnerable and able to fall headlong not only into unexpected love but into a radically different view of who he might be in life. In other words, he had to be a devilish soul with the potential for redemption. To fill this difficult bill, Clark Gregg right away thought of Sam Rockwell, with whom he had worked in a play many years ago. Rockwell has been acclaimed in a number of memorably unconventional roles, from an unhinged Chuck Barris in George Clooney’s CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND to the insane double-murderer “Wild Bill” Wharton in THE GREEN MILE to his recent roles in the horror-thriller JOSHUA, the revisionist Western THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD and the contemporary drama SNOW ANGELS.

“I think Sam’s one of the few people working in movies in America today who can blend fully committed drama with totally absurdist comedy,” says the director. “He always felt right to me because CHOKE takes so many stylistic chances and I needed someone like Sam who can take risks without the audience doubting his reality for a second. I knew from the beginning that he was the perfect person to play Victor.” Gregg continues: “And the bonus was his generosity of spirit and commitment. Nobody works harder than Sam. He was listening to the book on tape on an endless loop, over and over, throughout the entire production. Later when I watched dailies I realized that his ‘improves’ often contained his favorite lines from the novel.”

Palahniuk was equally pleased with the casting. “As soon as they said Sam Rockwell, it just seemed perfect because he is funny and he also has a fantastic vulnerable quality. Ever since THE GREEN MILE or CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND, I couldn’t think of anyone who would be better.” Rockwell responded to the script instantly. “I thought it was really unique among screenplays I’ve read and I also thought that Clark did a great job capturing that very specific and unusual Chuck Palahniuk tone, which is kind of like Ken Kesey meets John Irving,” says the actor. Most of all Rockwell couldn’t resist the idea of trying to embody Victor with all his massive foibles, rampant sex addiction and highly unlikely destiny as the messiah of a private mental hospital. He affectionately calls Victor “a highly dysfunctional Casanova.”

Rockwell continues: “I saw Victor as kind of an amalgam of all the great movie anti-heroes. I was thinking of Jack Nicholson in FIVE EASY PIECES, Paul Newman in COOL HAND LUKE and Albert Finney in TOM JONES -- and even John Travolta in SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER and Billy Bob Thornton in BAD SANTA. He’s just a fascinating guy and almost like a modern Hamlet with this whole weird Oedipal thing going on. He’s a real piece of work, but I like that his story is about a man trying somehow to become an adult and that it’s a love story, too – a love story that creeps up on you.”

To get deeper into the role, Rockwell confesses that he attended a number of real-life twelvestep sex addiction meetings. “I couldn’t really identify with some of the stuff that goes on with Victor at first,” he admits, “so I went to a few meetings and I watched a great documentary on sex addicts and read Chuck’s book over and over and then it all started to come together. Meanwhile, Clark was very specific about what he wanted and kept me on track with the character’s journey.” Rockwell also had to learn another rare art he never expected to take on: choking on demand. For Rockwell, the key to this unusual performance requirement was Victor’s underlying intent. “I think it’s a very interesting thing that he does, this choking,” he says. “By allowing himself to be totally humiliated and in danger and left drooling and crying, Victor provides people with a real service. He creates heroes out of ordinary people, he puts adventure back in their lives. And he gets a lot out of it, too, because he’s so lonely and screwed up and filled with self-loathing, his intense need to be held and cared for is partially fulfilled.” Rockwell used soft pieces of watermelon in place of such items as sushi for his choking scenes, but those on the set were still stunned by just how far he was willing to go. “Right from the very first choke, he just went for it,” recalls producer Johnathan Dorfrman of the dramatic asphyxiations. “We were all ready to do the Heimlich.”

Adds producer Beau Flynn: “Tripp and I kept trying to call ‘cut’ because we thought he was really choking. Sam is such a great actor and he committed to the role so much that as producers, you’re sitting there thinking ‘my lead actor is going to die.’ It was a real credit to Sam that he made us believe. He really took it right to the edge and you could see the exhaustion in his face at the end of those scenes. But we all understood that if those scenes didn’t feel absolutely real, the audience wouldn’t follow the rest of the story.” Far less taxing for Rockwell were his scenes with Anjelica Huston in the role of Victor’s highly complicated and less than forthcoming mother, Ida. “Anjelica is a monster talent,” Rockwell comments. “She’s got strength and vulnerability and she’s the real deal.”

Huston, an Academy Award winner for PRIZZI’S HONOR, has played a number of unusual mothers in acclaimed films, from John Cusack’s con-artist parent in THE GRIFTERS (for which she garnered an Oscar® nomination) to her recent turn as the mother (turned nun) of Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman in Wes Anderson’s THE DARJEELING LIMITED. But this role would be yet another twist on maternal love. Chuck Palahniuk describes Ida as “someone who has been so concerned with tearing things down, she never has had the power to actually create anything, to really even create herself” – and Clark Gregg knew that Huston would be unafraid to explore that with honesty. “Ida can be a bit of a monster, but Anjelica never shied away from those aspects of her character. She was very brave and she found this very strong center for Ida, which is her overwhelming love for her son, even when it’s expressed though the prism of her damage,” says Gregg. “She brought a tremendous intellectual rigor to the whole process, and ultimately made Ida a facet of the film’s core theme – that the damaged can also give and receive love – in a way that I hadn’t fully foreseen.”

Huston’s interest was initially piqued by her nephew. “I’d been a fan of FIGHT CLUB, but I hadn’t read a lot of Palahniuk’s work. My nephew saw that I had the script for CHOKE and said ‘oh, that’s a fantastic novel – are you going to do this?’ And then I read the script and I found it very offthe- wall and wild and also very amusing and when I read it again, I liked it better and better. And by the third go-round I thought: I obviously have to make this movie.”

Despite the tale’s dark and sometimes blasphemous themes, she saw eye-to-eye with Gregg’s approach to the film as a love story. She continues: “I think the entire story of CHOKE is very much about love, what you expect of love, the perversion of love and what love really is. There is a
tremendous amount of love between Victor and Ida as well but it’s not straight-forward at all and it’s
often pretty devious and warped. Yet, I think in the end Victor is able to understand life in a way he
might not have if he didn’t have this insane mother to deal with.”

By this point, Huston had also become completely taken with Ida. Once a fierce revolutionary whose mothering skills left something to be desired, she has now vanished into a haze of fantasydriven dementia. “Ida’s a combination of someone very tough and crafty with someone quite vulnerable and sensitive,” notes Huston. “She really called for quite a large range – and I like that. There was also a wonderful opportunity with this role to play Ida in both younger and older guises.” What really sealed the deal for Huston was that she immediately felt she was able to put her trust in Clark Gregg, despite this being his first outing as feature film director. “I found Clark to be very sensitive, perceptive and incredibly sure for a first-time director,” she says. “He gave us the safety net we needed.” Huston was equally excited to work with Sam Rockwell. “Sam reminds me of Humphrey Bogart, but in a modern way,” she says. “I think he’s a very inventive, energetic and interesting actor.”

Victor Mancini’s troubles with women start with his mother, but certainly don’t end there. While woman have long been a source of temptation not to mention obsession for Victor, he never thought he’d be the kind to fall in love, especially with his mother’s doctor. And yet that’s what seems to happen to him when he meets Dr. Paige Marshall, the physician who is ready to go to rather intimate lengths in her quest to save Ida Mancini from total decline.
To play Paige, once again the filmmakers needed to find someone who could ride a very fine line between funny and sincere, who could tell lies while exposing a certain amount of human truth – all in a demurely sexy way. The name that kept coming up for the role was Kelly Macdonald, the
Scottish actress who achieved recognition in Danny Boyle’s gritty comedic hit TRAINSPOTTING and has gone on to a number of acclaimed roles, recently garnering a Golden Globe nomination in the title role of HBO’s THE GIRL IN THE CAFÉ and starring as a savvy West Texas wife in the Coen Brothers’ Academy Award-winning adaptation of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN.

“I’ve been a huge fan of Kelly ever since TRAINSPOTTING,” says Gregg. “When we were getting close to production, she was already in the U.S. on a work visa to do NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and I thought she was just perfect for the role. Kelly has that volcanic reservoir of silent strength that a character like Victor needs to break free of his past. Her acting is invisible and the one thing the movie hinges on is the audience buying that Paige is not like other people in Victor’s world.”

For Macdonald, it was the film’s humor that grabbed her first and wouldn’t let go. “I was in hysterics reading the script,” she recalls. “I was staying with a friend while I was reading it and she kept coming into the room to ask ‘what is so funny?’ because she could hear me laughing through the walls. I really liked the humor and the quirkiness and especially the heart.”

Naturally, she was intrigued by Paige, the doctor with a dark secret with whom Victor starts a highly unconventional relationship. “Paige is a lot like Victor in that it’s hard for her to show her feelings and she has problems with intimacy, and they’re quite an odd match in so many ways, but that’s what so lovely about their love story,” she muses. “It’s completely unexpected, and they each kind of open up the other’s world view.” While Macdonald was thrilled to have a few scenes with her idol Anjelica Huston, most of her interaction in the film was one-on-one with Sam Rockwell, who credits Macdonald with making Paige a completely unique creation. “What I loved about Kelly’s performance is that she brought this very unexpected sweetness and warmth to the character. Paige is written as a very sharp, strong kind of women but Kelly brings her own irresistible earthy quality to it,” he says. Another actor who brought something new to his character was Brad William Henke, who has co-starred in such acclaimed indie films as YOU AND ME AND EVERYONE WE KNOW and NORTH COUNTRY. But the role of Denny – a chronic masturbator and two-bit Colonialist who discovers the life changing power of love – was like no other.

Clark Gregg always saw the character as a major catalyst. “Denny seems like he’s going to be this sort of chronically masturbating village idiot who’s just a sidekick for Victor to bounce his ideas off of, but he turns out to be the real trailblazer and quickly steps past Victor in his emotional development and makes it possible for Victor to move forward.” He continues: “I always knew I wanted Denny to be a big person, to be this sort of gentle giant who accompanies the much smaller Victor everywhere, because I just liked that visual image.

But with Brad, we also found someone who was able to form a real bond and truly keep up with Sam. He has tremendous sincerity and was able to capture the sort of half-full element of Denny.” Comments Johnathan Dorfman: “I thought Brad really stole the show. He brought something out from the character we hadn’t even seen was there before.” The ensemble was completed by a number of exceptional actors in supporting roles including Academy Award winner Joel Grey (Clark Gregg’s father-in-law) in the role of sex addict Phil, Heather Burns as the woman who hires Victor to violate her, Jonah Bobo as a young Victor on the run, Viola Harris as the accusatory dementia patient Eva, Bijou Phillips as Ursula the Colonial village Milk Maid, Matt Malloy as the detective who interrogates Victor after he’s arrested and Gillian Jacobs as Denny’s unexpectedly serious girlfriend, the stripper Cherry Daiquiri. “It was a real testament to Clark’s ability to work with actors that he was able to get such remarkable performances out of all these roles,” says Dorfman. “I think it’s really all these wonderful, eccentric characters that make the movie.”

Meanwhile Gregg himself took on the role of Lord High Charlie at the Colonial village where Victor works, which meant he most often found himself directing in a puffy Colonial costume. Admits Gregg: “It was kind of hard to get people to take me seriously when I was talking to them in knickers and a frilly shirt.”

CHOKING HAZARD: THE DESIGN OF THE FILM

“Even the most ordinary person might have a fantastically rich, private, secret life, and I find that concept really cheerful.” -- Chuck Palahniuk

In true indie fashion, CHOKE was shot in just 25 lightning-paced days, primarily in Essex County, New Jersey, which fortuitously contained all of the unusual elements needed for the story, including an abandoned mental hospital, a preserved Colonial village and a zoo, many of which the producers were able to wrangle for use without fees. They were even able to take advantage of the crew from HBO’s “The Sopranos” series, which had just shut down for good. “It was all very kismet,” says producer Tripp Vinson, “because we could not have afforded to create or even shoot at all these locations without this turn of luck.”

Despite the budgetary constraints and challenging locations, Clark Gregg made the most of all his creative resources, especially an artistic team headed by director of photography Tim Orr and production designer Roshelle Berliner. “Tim and Roshelle did a fantastic job of creating the very lush world of CHOKE on a very tough budget,” says Gregg. Orr shot the film in 16mm, but aimed to avoid the more typical dark and grainy look of an indie film – opting for a brighter, more fantastical realm for Victor and his cohorts. “Tim had a sensibility that really matched the film,” says Beau Flynn. “Clark didn’t want to make it gritty and muted – he wanted the look of the film to have color, energy and life, and Tim was able to find precisely the right balance in his work.”

Adds Gregg: “Tim was able to light the film in such a way that made it possible to move between extremes of tone. It’s buoyant one minute and more gritty the next as you move from laughter to heartbreak. He also works incredibly fast.” Meanwhile, Roshelle Berliner had her hands full with two tricky locations: Colonial Dunsboro, the simulated historic village where Victor is employed as an indentured servant; and St. Anthony’s, the sprawling private mental hospital where his mother Ida is being cared for with the money he earns by choking in restaurants. Palahniuk notes that he originally created the humorously intolerant world of Dunsboro based on experiences friends of his had working at Disneyland – where the employees must never break character -- inspiring a workplace in which insubordination can be punished by a day in the stocks.

To bring to life this amusement park-style view of history, Berliner had the luck to start with the now defunct colonial theme park in New Jersey, which until it closed in 2006, was a living museum replete with Colonial houses, general store and a stone grist mill. The village’s many preserved locations lent a perfect touch of authenticity to the antic moments that unfold there. “Roshelle did a great job taking the Colonial village’s practical locations and making it feel not only real and alive but also give it this kind of run-down feeling that was so important,” says Vinson. “She found a really nice tone.”

For St. Anthony’s Hospital, Berliner was able to start from another extraordinary base: the now abandoned Essex County Psychiatric Hospital in Cedar Grove, New Jersey, which had been built at the turn of the century (then known as the Essex County Asylum for the Insane) and became a populous, 350-acre mental institution replete with red-brick Victorian buildings, as well its own power house, laundromat and theatre in the 50s and 60s, before psychiatric treatment radically changed with the advent of pharmaceutical drugs. In 2007, with a new hospital opened up nearby, the facility closed for good and was slated to be torn down to put up condos.

The place turned out to be architecturally stunning, as well as dripping with an eerie, pungent sense of the past that added to the film’s intensity of atmosphere. So thick were the hallways with history that several crew members reported ghost sightings. The former patients had also left behind walls covered in curiously bright and cheery murals they had painted as therapy, which inspired Berliner to commission several more murals, some involving the worship of the unexpectedly messianic Victor.

Another favorite set became the eccentric rock house that Denny builds, stone by stone, on a vacant lot with his new girlfriend Cherry Daiquiri. “The rocks become a kind of symbol, of the extra weight we carry around – and Denny is the one who sees a way to turn those burdens into a tool, into something supportive,” says Gregg. “What we tried to show with the house he builds is that he never attempts to decide what it’s going to look like. He just lets it take its own shape.”

Shape was also on the mind of costume designer Catherine George, who despite this being a contemporary comedy had to delve into the intensive research of a period film. “The costume design for the Colonial village was especially important,” notes Vinson. “The costumes had to be true to the time period but they also had to reflect this kind of ramshackle theme park feeling. We didn’t want to hit people over the head with the comedy of it, but the costumes had to strike just the right tone.” Also helping to pull the entire fast-moving production together was executive producer and line producer Mike Ryan. Says Flynn: “Mike was the only person who came to us and said ‘I can pull this off for you.’ He said ‘it will be a battle and we’ll have to use a lot of young crew but I can do it.’ And he did it very, very well.”

The atmosphere of CHOKE began with the visuals but was further crafted in the film’s sound, including the score by composer Nathan Larson (the former lead guitarist of the influential band Shudder to Think) – who collaborated entirely by phone and e-mail with Clark Gregg from his private studio without ever meeting in person. Equally key is the film’s indie band-driven soundtrack featuring a song that was a particular coup for the filmmakers: “Reckoner” from one of todays most widely acclaimed and iconoclastic bands, Radiohead.

Chuck Palahniuk notes even while writing the novel he was listening intently to Radiohead; and later, independently, Clark Gregg turned to the band’s melodic sounds for inspiration while he was penning the adaptation of CHOKE and only later learned that Palahniuk had penned the novel while listening to the band’s “Creep.” So it was an exciting moment when, through a series of lucky connections, the filmmakers were able to get the band’s go-ahead to use their song. “We’re all huge Radiohead fans and we were very gratified that they were really, really into it,” says Dorfman of Radiohead, “and we were able to build quite a nice indie soundtrack around their participation.”

When Contrafilm and ATO Pictures joined forces on CHOKE with Clark Gregg, the producers had ambitiously stated they would begin production in July of 2007. Just a few months later, the film had already been accepted into Sundance and the filmmakers had to scramble to complete the movie in the nick of time. “We finished the film on a Thursday and showed the movie that Monday to a great response,” says Vinson. “It was all pretty amazing. It really felt like it was all meant to be.”

Throughout the production and right through to the end, Palahniuk remained a big supporter, spending time on the set and supporting the film at Sundance. “He was the nicest, sweetest man and his presence was very, very encouraging,” says Dorfman. For Clark Gregg, having Palahniuk around so much kept him constantly in mind of the inspiration for the film: his original gut reaction to the novel. Gregg concludes: “I feel like everybody in CHOKE, from Denny and Cherry Daiquiri to Ida and most primarily Victor are all people who are damaged, yet have a lot of love to give and are trying to figure out a way to do that – but definitely not in the usual ways.”