By Antony Teofilo
October 18, 2004
Think about your family, make a movie with Robin Williams. If only it were that simple, but that’s close to what happened to Omar Naim, writer/director of THE FINAL CUT. And he got the idea for his first feature where many of us tend to get our best: in the bathroom.
“I was helping a friend shoot a movie in Boston, and I was sitting on the floor of a public restroom. I had been thinking about my family. They live in Lebanon. And I was thinking, maybe I should just shoot a twenty hour
interview with each of them, that way, if anything happened to them, I would still be able to have them in my life. But then I realized that wouldn’t really be them, that would just be my idea of who they were. The idea about the chip came later, and I actually let it marinate about a year, because I thought surely someone else must have already made this movie.”
But no one had. So Naim took two months off from his job as a producer’s assistant, and wrote the script. How did he get by while putting his dream down on paper? “My parents, and my wife, supported me. They all believed in the idea enough that they helped out while I was writing.” After finishing the script, Naim got wind of The Equinox Project, France’s answer to The Sundance Institute. From there, things happened rather quickly. Before he knew it, he had a full blown film production on his hands with an all-star cast and a dream technical team (including master cinematographer Tak Fujimoto).
THE FINAL CUT focuses on an invention called the Zoe chip, a memory recorder implanted at birth that records everything the implantee sees. Having such a device, which doesn’t seem far off considering how voyeuristic our society has become, raises many pertinent questions. Privacy issues are highly affected in Naim’s unique little universe, because those implanted with the Zoe chip aren’t made aware of it until their twenty first birthday, so everyone they talk to is seen and heard without their knowledge.
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Enter Alan Hackman, a ‘cutter’, the guy who takes all the footage recorded by the chip and cuts it together for a ‘rememory’, a sort of video memorial that‘s projected at the person‘s funeral. Played by Robin Williams, Hackman is a moral vacuum, a man best known for his ability to take a real jerk and turn him into a saint by excluding an individual’s more sordid events from his rememory. Williams was absent on the day interviews were conducted (he and Christopher Reeve were close friends) but Naim had a lot to say about working with him. “I was terrified, because he's so frenetic, and this role is so withdrawn. I called Gus Van Sant, and he told me 'You're going to be spoiled after working with Robin Williams'. He's the best he'd ever worked with, because he's so flexible."
Williams did bring new things to the creative process, though. Given his status as a top drawer celebrity, one might expect that he came into the project with a lot of expectations. Not so, says Naim. "I had to realize that his mouth is an instrument. At the beginning, I was hesitant to let him adlib. I wanted to stick closely to the script. But I came to realize that Robin knew Alan Hackman better than I did. It was a two way street. After awhile, he brought some nice surprises to the role, and made it a little more darkly humorous than I thought it could be. When he was on camera, he was Alan, but when the cameras were turned off, he switched back to being Robin.
Newcomer Tom Bishop (Hasan) attests to Williams' down-to-earthiness: "We did a full day of shooting with just me. Robin stood off camera, in costume, reading lines with me for the entire day. Twelve hours he did that. He could easily have just have had a stand-in read the lines to me, but he spent the whole day. Being a rookie...Williams was great to learn from. He let everyone know they were important. He knew everyone on set by their first name.”
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Don’t expect to see Williams act out in the flick, though. The role of Alan Hackman sees him draw even further inward than any of his previous loner roles (like INSOMNIA or ONE HOUR PHOTO), constricting himself to almost no movement, and sparing facial expressions. This is a man attempting to distance himself from his former flailings.
It must be intimidating to be a first time director in today’s Hollywood, “To tell you the truth, I don’t actually feel like I’m in the business. When I was just getting started, I read everything I could about independent film, all the books everyone reads, like Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes. My biggest influences are the guys who broke just as I was finishing film school…Linklater, Tarantino, and Smith. I actually love to watch the Evening With Kevin Smith DVD’s, and listening to the stories about Superman not getting made. I took hope from the fact that on their way up, no two of those guys had the same experience.”
For you aspiring filmmakers out there, Omar Naim does have a piece of advice he’d like to pass on for aspiring filmmakers: “I knew I had to hire good people, and I was able to. I wrote out a ten page manual for the crew, which described how I wanted the production to be structured, with guidelines for how they were going to interact. It was a good idea, because people knew what was expected of them. After that, it was very enjoyable to work with the crew. It was kind of like being in Parliament Funkadelic. They were all there because the loved the material, not just for the payday.”
Naim does interesting things with the near-future setting of the story, with very few hints that we’re looking at a possible future. The prevailing culture of the world is obsessed with nostalgia, and the many aspects of conflict within society are plausible, if a little extreme. And it avoids the ‘Paycheck Syndrome’, in that the cerebral subjects examined here never play second fiddle to a suspenseful epic chase sequence ripe with explosions. The focus here is on character and story, which may be a direct result of the fact that the movie was financed by European dough. There is no hint of studio tampering here. THE FINAL CUT is a brave first effort from a new director who obviously had a lot of freedom to make the movie he wanted to make.
THE FINAL CUT opened in theaters October 15th.
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