Clark Gregg
Interview By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com
“I’m the kind of person who’s drawn to those kind of dirty jokes that can clear a room. And I thought, ‘Oh God, this is the cinematic equivalent of one of my favorite ultra-foul jokes.”
We’re talking with Clark Gregg about Choke, the dark comedy he wrote and directed based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk, and he’s explaining why he thought he would never be allowed to make the movie. Despite appearing to appeal to only a limited number of people, though, Gregg assures us that its themes have wide appeal.
“The kind of emotional trauma of trying to grow up, being focused too much on sex versus intimacy — I’m not ashamed to say, I think it’s something a lot of people are going to relate to,” he says.
Of course, the movie’s also about a colonial theme park employee who goes to sex addict meetings and has devised a money-making scheme that involves pretending to choke in crowded restaurants.
Gregg had his doubts about whether he would ever direct a film that went beyond the tricky subject matter of Choke. For one thing, over the past few years, he seems to have found his footing in Hollywood as a character actor. He’s nabbed steady work as government agents (Iron Man, The West Wing) and pompous jerks (In Good Company, The Air I Breathe), and in 2006, even found a stable gig as Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s ex-husband on The New Adventures of Old Christine.
During his time off, though, Gregg was itching to get behind the camera. He’d already had a taste of behind-the-scenes work when, in 2000, he landed a screenplay and story credit for the blockbuster What Lies Beneath; he would later do occasional uncredited script doctoring for a number of different studios. And he had directing experience, too, at least on stage: drama school at NYU led to an artistic director gig at
When he decided to write and direct his own feature film, Gregg optioned Choke after becoming a fan of cult novelist Palahniuk (Fight Club). And then he re-optioned it, again and again, as the years went by and little progress was made.
“It was really this thing, that people kind of chuckled at me,” Gregg says. “My friends would go, ‘what are you doing?’ And I’d be saying, ‘Well, I’m still working on this thing Choke,’ and they’d give me a look: aw, you sad bastard. ‘That won’t get made. You know that, right?’
“I didn’t disagree with them. It seemed ludicrous. And, I’m not a very cosmic thinker, but when I read it, (a) it was funny as shit, and (b) it was like nothing I’d ever seen before.”
Above anyone else, Gregg credits author Palahniuk for allowing him to buck expectations and actually get the movie made.
“He kept letting me re-option the rights every year, because I kind of had to feed my family — I could only write when I wasn’t doing other jobs. It took five years before it really started to get rolling,” Gregg says. “And then when the time came to make the movie, he made real, giant financial concessions that allowed the movie to be made period, but also to be made in what I felt was the only successful way to be made without being meddled with, which was tiny, for no money, guerilla filmmaking, in a steaming mental hospital in New Jersey. It wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t done that. And you know, it’s easy to talk the talk. But when push comes to shove, especially in Hollywood, ‘As long as it doesn’t cost me any money’ is usually the mantra. He
It also helped that Palahniuk was so unobtrusive during Gregg’s long adaptation process. “I had one phone call with him right after I got the option,” Gregg says. “I said, ‘You might want to end this really quickly, because I feel like the engine underneath this thing is like a punk romantic comedy. And he was like, ‘Oh, thank God. You got it! Go write. Don’t be too faithful.’
“I didn’t buy that. I thought it was just good manners — or some Jedi mind test. And you know, I had no desire not to be faithful. I kind of signed up because I thought the book would make a great movie, you know? So I spent about a year and a half being super-faithful, and trying not to screw up a book I loved.”
But Gregg discovered that didn’t really work. “You just can’t create anything worth a shit from a point of view of trying not to screw it up,” he says. “You’re essentially turning something, in terms of physics, from one state to another. To exist as a solid, it just doesn’t get to be a gas anymore. It can’t be a book. So I struggled for a while and had a really faithful adaptation that was just kind of stinky. And it wasn’t until I kind of hit the end of my rope, into a depression, really, and threw it in my drawer, and kind of just started to channel it as though it was a dream I had, and what did I remember from it. And it started to filter in a little bit.”
He did that by re-focusing the script on Victor Mancini, the aforementioned sex-addicted, historical re-enacting protagonist. “You have to strategize. Of all the brilliant, funny stuff in the book, what’s the core of it you have to focus
With the script tightened, the next step was finding his main character. That turned out to be easy when Sam Rockwell signed on.
“I’d done a play with Sam years ago, and he’d been amazing even then,” Gregg says, also noting 2002′s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind as one of the actor’s best performances. “But you know, he’d then spent fifteen years in Hollywood and New York doing movies, and I thought, Oh, God knows what I’m going to come up against here.”
In a strange way, Rockwell turned out to “kind of be Chuck’s alter-ego,” according to Gregg. “He’s seen as this wild man lunatic, because he just disappears into these roles. But he couldn’t be more gentle. And he was the one leading the way: nobody could complain about the fact that they didn’t have a trailer, or that their dressing room was a padded room in a mental hospital that was moldy, because Sam wasn’t complaining and he was working harder than anybody.
“He walked around the whole time with a cassette walkman. And it was on all the time. And I didn’t even want to know — I thought I was going to take the headphones and it was going to go, ‘Kill Clark. Kill Clark. Kill Clark, dumbass!’ Luckily, it wasn’t. It was Chuck Palahniuk reading the book on tape. Later, when I was cutting scenes together, the improvs I’d let him do, I realized he was putting in his favorite lines from the book — the ones I had cut from the book but he still really wanted in. And I used a lot of them.”
With Rockwell on board, Gregg managed to land Angelica Huston in the pivotal role of Victor’s mother. “Angelica Huston was kind of wary, and then when Sam
“There was a rehearsal we did in L.A., and we did Ms. Huston’s scenes first, to get her work done and excuse her and not keep her waiting, out of respect for her legend status. And we were like, ‘Well thanks so much, that was amazing!’ And she said, ‘No, what do you mean, we’re mixing it up, I’m not going anywhere!’ So she stayed and read all the hookers and the sex addicts and all the little parts for another couple of hours. Then we knew she was part of the gang.”
After a one-month shoot, post-production, and a successful run at Sundance where the film was picked up by Fox Searchlight, Gregg now sits in a press interview not as an actor but finally as a filmmaker. We ask him if he notices the difference.
“Very much so. If you’re an actor, all they really talk to you is about your role. A little bit about what you thought of the piece. [As a director,] you know, people actually engage you about every level of the subject matter, about the adaptation, everything. The whole movie’s in. The entire canon of Chuck Palahniuk’s works is in.”
Speaking of which, would he want to take on another Palahniuk novel as his next project? Gregg’s coy about specifics but seems to consider it a distinct possibility. “When I was in New York with [Chuck] last week I learned that one or two of his books might be coming available, so I’m in discussions to see if I can’t tie up another one.”
Gregg hasn’t come close to abandoning his acting, though. He continues to be committed to his role on New Christine, and hopes to be invited back for Iron Man 2: “I really hope so. I was on a plane with Robert
Plus, he couldn’t resist casting himself in a minor role in Choke.
“I did not plan on playing a role in the movie,” he promises, “because I wanted to masquerade as though my narcissism knew some bounds. But it doesn’t.”
The role? “Lord High Charlie,” the boss of the colonial theme park at which Victor works. “When it came time to cast somebody else — the kind of jackass failed drama major who runs the colonial theme park, who even in the lunch line is speaking, ‘Wouldst thou pass me the Salisbury steak?’ — my casting director and pal Mary Vernieu, who casts me in a lot of those jackass roles, she was like, ‘You know you’re going to play it. And I’m not letting you offer it to anybody else, so just bite the bullet.’
“I happily went along with it. Because everybody who’s a character actor and plays those kinds of roles should have the Lord High Somebody in your resume. You’ve just got to have that.” ❏
Check out our review of Choke.
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