Devotees of Tom Clancy’s 1991 novel
“The Sum of All Fears” will wonder about the villains.
Did a quest for political correctness cause filmmaker Phil
Alden Robinson (and his screenwriter collaborators) to change
the book’s heavies – Palestinian, Eurotrash and
Native-American terrorists out to use a long-lost nuke to
precipitate a Russian-American war – to a like-minded
secret society of port-swilling Nazis?
“The popular misconception was that it was done out of
political correctness or a desire not to offend anybody,”
says Robinson, the writer-director behind such decidedly non-Clancy
fare as “Field of Dreams” and “Sneakers.”
“I can’t speak for anybody else, but I can tell
you that didn’t enter into my calculations.”
He then launches into his reasoned defense, designed to mollify
the most obsessive armchair geopolitician. “Clancy had
the advantage of an 850-page book in which to describe who
these people are, how they became radicalized, why they came
together,” he says. “I had less than two hours of
screen time … . I needed a shorthand version of the villain,
and I couldn’t use just Palestinian terrorists any more
than Clancy could … . There’s no way Palestinian
terrorists [working alone] could have gotten Russian fighters
to attack an American aircraft carrier.”
Distilling Clancy’s fifth Jack Ryan adventure –
the fourth to hit movie screens – wasn’t the only
challenge Robinson tackled. Two-time franchise star Harrison
Ford dropped out of the series, only to be replaced by the
much-younger Ben Affleck; as a result, “Sum” had
to be re-tooled around a greenhorn Ryan just starting out
as a CIA analyst. And the Sept. 11 terror attacks drew a laser
sight on the film’s subject matter.
We caught up with Robinson as he was laying in the final sound
mix for “Sum.” Here’s what he had to say about
capturing the essence of Clancy’s tome, the impact of
real-life terror on the project, and the surprising restraint
one can show when depicting a nuclear blast.
How
did you even begin to wrap your head around adapting this
book?
Well, several really good screenwriters got on this long before
I was hired to direct it. Paul Attanasio and Dan Pyne are
the writers of the script. You probably ought to talk to them,
too; they’re really smart guys. But here’s the main
problem: Clancy writes this 800-odd page book that is filled
with wonderful detail – but it’s also filled with
something he’s very good at, which is that he interweaves
things. He doesn’t just throw things into the mix; he
weaves them together. Which means that it’s very hard
to pull things out and still have the remaining pieces make
sense. It’s what makes the book so readable, but it’s
what makes it so hard to adapt.
Our process was to say, “Look, if we were to pull 700
pages of material out, the 100 pages that remain wouldn’t
make any sense.” Therefore, the approach was, “Let’s
go back to basics and define: Exactly what is this book? What
is the heart of the book? What does the book mean?” And
then to make a movie about that. And try to be true to the
broad strokes while taking great liberties with the finer
details.
So in this case, what is the book? It’s a cautionary
tale about nuclear terrorism. Well, that’s what the movie’s
about. It’s a book that shows how the mechanics of government
and military decision-making can lead you towards war because
fear drives them. And that’s what the movie does.
In the book, a bomb lost in the Arab-Israeli war of 1973 falls
into the hands of terrorists who use it to fashion a new device
with which they’re going to blow up a major American
sporting event – and do it in such a way as to make the
Americans think the Russians attacked, and so these two countries
will go to war. And that’s what the story of the movie
is. In the book, Jack Ryan has to race against time to get
the information to convince these two superpowers not to fight
each other – and that’s what the movie does.
So we’re very, very faithful to the broad strokes –
but we’ve had to invent thousands of new details in order
to be faithful to the broad strokes.
You
bring this up at an interesting time for film adaptation.
It’s an issue everyone’s been debating a little
more than usual in the wake of “Harry Potter” and
“Lord of the Rings.” One film took a very literal
approach to adaptation, and the other did what you just did
– on a very epic scale, sort of boiled the book down.
You know, I think you have to approach this on a case-by-case
basis. There are films – and “The Godfather”’s
a great example – where the nature of book allows for
a much more faithful adaptation in terms of the details. Some
books, you just can’t do that.
My most successful experience with adaptations was “Field
of Dreams.” We took pretty big liberties with the book
– but I think they were so carefully chosen, and so correctly
chosen, that you can love the movie even if you love the book.
It was very faithful to the book in terms of what it delivered.
And that’s our goal here.
I’ll tell you an interesting thing: A lot of people were
very skeptical going in to see the movie, saying, “Oh,
I hear you changed so much.” We’ve tested this film
extensively, and what we’ve discovered is that people
who’ve read the book score the movie even higher than
people who haven’t read the book.
Really.
And even though they recognize that we’ve changed things,
they appreciate the fact that this really feels like a Tom
Clancy book. We’ve started over with many details, but
we interweave them – we try to interweave them the way
he does.
One
of the fascinating things about the story is that, in most
of these kinds of movies, the heroes are trying to head off
an apocalypse. But this movie just kind of depicts the apocalypse
– and the heroes have to deal with what happens afterward.
As far as I know, I can’t recall any film like it –
that’s not to say it hasn’t been done.
And you know, my first instinct when I first read it was,
“Ooh, do we have to have the bomb go off?” And then
I realized if we don’t, then we have to have that horrible
scene of “Jack, you’ve got 10 seconds! Pick one!”
“I don’t know, which is it – the red wire or
the green wire?” “Five seconds, Jack – pick
one!” And he picks one and he holds his breath and it
happens to be the right one.
[laughs]
Right.
That hasn’t been a good scene since Dick Lester did it
20 years ago. It’s cliché-ridden and it’s
boring – and also it sends the audience out of the theater
foolishly secure in their belief that a hero will arrive at
the last moment to defuse a disaster. And as we know all too
well now, that doesn’t always happen.
One
of the other things that struck me about this film was that,
thanks to advances in CGI, we can now stage our apocalypses
with greater fervor than ever before. But this movie shows
the very worst of it offscreen.
Yes.
You
see shock waves –
That’s right.
–
and that approach extends to the intro and ending of the film
– where the opening mobilization and ending montage of
violence are sort of staged silently, with music dominating
the soundtrack.
Yep. I set a goal – and everybody agreed – that
we were not going to make the violence attractive; that we
didn’t want this to be the kind of movie that gets its
rocks off through violence. And we didn’t want people
going, “Oh, man – that was so cool!” Because
you can spend a lot of time making an atomic explosion look
really cool, and we have the technology to do it, and I just
didn’t want to do that.
I knew what I didn’t want before I knew what I wanted.
I knew I didn’t want to have a shot of the stadium and
this bright, white, blinding flash.
Yeah,
I noticed that wasn’t there. That struck me as a conscious
choice.
Very, very consciously chosen, and for a lot of reasons, one
of which is: It’s kind of a dishonest choice because
the only people who could see that would be dead before they
knew what they were seeing. The second is: I’m more interested
in seeing characters that we’ve gotten to know, and how
they’re affected by it.
But the third reason is: We did a lot of research. We watched
a lot of footage of atomic tests. And the most striking thing
to me was never the blast itself – it was the shock wave
hitting things miles away. And in these atomic tests, the
government would set up little houses or cars a mile or two
away, or a stand of trees – and when you saw the effect
of the shock wave on distant objects, it’s enormous.
Then you really felt the power of the blast.
We looked at a lot of footage from Hiroshima, and ground zero
didn’t move me as much as the shots taken a few miles
away of buildings that had burned from the heat. To me, the
most telling feature of how powerful this event is happens
farther away. That’s when you really sense, “Oh,
my God. That’s incredibly powerful.”
You
weren’t only stuck with the challenges of compressing
the story in terms of narrative – you also had a casting
issue. This sort of became a de facto prequel to the Harrison
Ford films.
Well, um, the writers and I all felt that this is not actually
a prequel, and it’s not part four of an old series –
it’s part one of a new series. We actually decided to
not even try to fit this into the previous films because to
do that would do damage to the movie. If you’re going
to have a 28-year-old Jack Ryan, you’re going to have
to set this movie in the ‘70s if it’s going to fit
the other films – and who wants to do that? So we just
said, “We’ll do what the Bond films did – we’ll
do what this series did after Alec Baldwin left and was replaced
by Harrison – just start over and don’t even refer
to the old ones.”
And I think in that way we wind up being truer to the character.
The Jack Ryan that we all fell in love with in “Hunt
for Red October” was this anonymous analyst who was plucked
from the obscurity of his desk job and thrust into very dangerous
physical situations because of his expertise in one particular
area, and he has to rise to the occasion. There’s a moment
in “Red October” where Alec Baldwin’s dangling
from the helicopter banging up against the conning tower of
a submarine in a storm and he says, “I should have written
a memo.” That’s the character that I think is the
most interesting Jack Ryan, and that’s the one that we
tried to get back to.
And
now we have the sort-of-interesting possibility of seeing
Ben Affleck play the president of the United States.
I’m hoping not. I’m hoping not. I’m hoping
Jack Ryan continues to be an analyst for the CIA. My personal
view as a moviegoer is that the higher up the character rises
in the bureaucracy, the less interesting he becomes.
Now,
of course I have to ask you the question that everyone’s
going to be asking you in the coming weeks – about the
impact of Sept. 11 on the movie.
Mm.
Now
did that happen while you were still shooting?
No. Actually, I had just finished my first cut and we were
mixing sound – I was doing a temporary sound mix so I
could show the film to the studios.
Was the
release delayed at all because of Sept. 11?
No. I came on the movie in September 2000, and I was told then
that this would be a summer 2002 release. So it didn’t
delay us at all.
What
was your reaction to Sept. 11, given the subject matter you
were working with?
You may not believe me, but I swear it’s true –
I did not think about the movie at all, and we never had any
discussions about how this affects the movie. The only time
I had to talk about how this affects the movie was when journalists
called me. And they would say to me that first week, “Well,
how will this affect your movie?” And I said, “Well,
who cares? This horrible event just happened to us, and I’m
not really thinking right now about how this affects the movie.
The country is in great jeopardy, and it’s a great tragedy
– thousands of people have been killed.”
I remember Associated Press had an article I read online that
said, “Weekend box office may suffer.” And I remember
thinking, “How dare they use the word ‘suffer’
as it relates to the box office!” And this was less than
a week after the Twin Towers had been knocked down and all
these people killed – and who cares about the impact
on a movie?
Were
you asked to make any cuts to the movie as a result?
No. The one thing that we did – we had not finished the
CGI, and there’s a shot of Baltimore in the distance
… . There’s a couple of shots of Baltimore in the
distance with smoke and flames and whatnot, and we all just
said, “Let’s make sure in these few shots that we
don’t have any buildings there that look like the Twin
Towers.” And there weren’t any in the drawings –
but it was just sort of a cautionary thing: “Let’s
just make sure we don’t err on that side.”
Many
of the changes in your “Sum” adaptation were smaller
details – if I’m not mistaken, the bomb was carried
in a TV communications van in the book, and it’s disguised
as a cigarette machine in the movie. What drives the changes
of smaller details like that? Are those just to pump up every
blessed moment of the drama?
A lot of it is just to simplify. In other words, if you’re
going to have the TV van – and I think there was a version
where we did that, but we found that it required a TV crew
… . You know, we wanted something that one guy could
do, and we wanted something that was visually kind of cool.
And for anybody who ever accused the movies of glamorizing
smoking, we thought this might, um, end that debate.
[laughs]
Yeah, I guess this is the ultimate “Just Say No”
ad.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, between the cigarette machine and the
lighter in Dressler’s car, I think that we’ve made
smoking pretty unglamorous.
[laughs]
Now, about some of the unconventional choices that were made
… . Liev Schreiber.
Yeah.
Not
who I would have pictured as [Clancy’s lethal covert
operative] Mr. Clark.
You know, hats off to Mindy Marin, our casting director. She
brought him in. I wouldn’t have thought of him at the
time because I was familiar with some of his stage work and
some of his film work. But now … . I would consider him
for any role in any movie that I ever do. I think the guy
is one of the great actors of our time. He can play pretty
much anything. I think he’s staggering in the role because
he brings an intense intelligence to it that makes him really
dangerous.
That’s
one of the things you have to be sure to get in there about
Clark. He’s mean, but he’s also extremely cool.
Really, really cool. And Liev brought something else to the
role, and I don’t think it’s necessarily in the
books – which is a weariness of the life choice. The
first time we meet him, Cabot says to him, “Are you still
loving your desk job?” and he says, “Yes.”
This is a guy who doesn’t want to do that any more because
he realized that he was dying inside – that every person
he killed killed a part of him, and that he just didn’t
want to do it any more. And the look on his face when he has
to do this again just says it all. This is a guy who’s
great at it, and he knows that they need him, and he knows
it’s his duty. But damn – he just wants to put that
behind him. And I think that’s a really interesting character.
The
other unconventional element of the film is you.
[laughs] Well, duh.
I mean,
surveying your career, I think I can see how “Sneakers”
kind of leads to “Band of Brothers” kind of leads
to this, in terms of escalating tension in your work. But
I think a lot of people are going to say, “The guy who
directed ‘Field of Dreams’ directed ‘Sum of
All Fears’?”
Yeah.
Was
that a conscious choice on your part, or – ?
Well, I like never repeating myself. And there’s a lot
of elements in this film that I think are not so anomalous.
I mean, as with all the films I’ve done, it’s about
a guy who has to grow up. And there’s an intelligence
to the screenplay and a sense of humor and a humanity about
it that really appealed to me. This is a very tense movie,
but it’s also very life-affirming, and it’s a very
positive film at the end. And that appealed to me.
If
this does well enough to merit another sequel, will you direct
it?
I doubt it. I mean, as I say, I don’t like to repeat
myself. I’ve learned never to say never, but I feel like
I’ve done this and I’ve learned a lot from doing
it, and I’m very proud of it. I’m not sure doing
another one would feed my soul as much as doing something
else would.
Did
you see yourself protecting the screenplay in this case, even
though it wasn’t your screenplay?
Oh, sure. Sure. Here’s what happens: Once you get into
pre-production – and certainly more so in production
– there are these enormous pressures on you the director
to make certain decisions that will affect the screenplay.
Every department on the movie wants you to make decisions
that will either make their job easier or flashier, or they’ll
emphasize things that they want to get out of it. And every
decision you make affects the script, and directing is ultimately
the act of making decisions, and you make a thousand decisions
a day – and many of them are made while you’re fatigued,
or while you’re rushed, or while there’s pressure
on you – “We have to know this right now” –
and you just try to do the best you can.
And I think as long as you have a strong and clear sense of
what the screenplay is, and you base these decisions on what
the screenplay is trying to do, then you’re OK. It’s
when you start to shoot from the hip and think, “Well,
I’m an auteur, so I can just make this up as I go along”
that the screenplay starts getting misshapen, and the movie
winds up being a mess.
If the screenplay works, it’s your best friend. Any time
a question comes up you don’t know the answer to, you
just think, “Well, how will this affect what the screenplay’s
already doing? Will it enhance it, or will it hurt it, or
will it change it somehow?”
In
terms of protecting the screenplay, was the decision to not
show some of the worst parts of the nuclear attack a conscious
choice from the very beginning? Was that in the script you
got?
It was not in the script I got – but I worked with Dan
Pyne pretty extensively, and it was a decision that we both
agreed with. And then you’re meeting with the cinematographer
and the art department and the visual-effects people –
and if they didn’t already agree with that, they had
to be brought into line and saying, “This is the direction
we’re going.”
I’ll
bet you got some resistance from the effects guys who were
probably looking forward to blowing things up.
Yeah, well, it wasn’t real resistance – their first
instinct would have been, “Yeah! We can show this, we
can show that!” And I said, “Let’s try this”
– and ultimately, what we did was harder, and therefore
a greater challenge for them. And they’re very proud
of the three scenes with the shock wave. I mean, that took
months and months and months, and huge numbers of people working
on that.
Do
you see yourself as an auteur or a journeyman? How do you
see yourself as a director?
Well, I don’t believe in the word “auteur”
– just because I think no one person is the author of
the movie. It’s the most collaborative medium ever invented,
and I think that we directors should be very, very, very satisfied
and proud of the title “director.” I don’t
think we need “a film by” or “auteur”
in addition to that. I really see myself as a storyteller
– and with the exception of this film, I’ve always
directed what I’ve written, and I’ve always directed,
really, to protect the writing. I just see directing as the
extension of writing. 
