We had a chance to chat this week with director Ruben Fleischer about his new movie Gangster Squad, which opens today. Here's what the filmmaker had to say about bringing his (loosely based on fact) story of the LAPD's secret efforts to take down crime kingpin Mickey Cohen to the screen. (Beware of spoilers ahead.)
IGN: Can you tell me a little bit about how World War II maybe defined the hero of the piece or the other characters?
Ruben Fleischer: Sure, yeah. Americans went through the Depression and World War II and suffered some pretty hard times. After that, the culture changed. They fought for good, and there was this real pride in America. The economy was booming, the country was coming back to life. There were new model cars for the first time in ten years. There were incredible fashions and music. It was just a very exciting time in our country. And when our lead character John O’Mara comes back to LA, he’d seen the city taken over by gangsters in his absence while he was off at war. He says in the opening that he doesn’t even recognize his own city because it’s so filled with corruption. So he fights the moral fight against gangsters in order to make his city safe for families, including his own.
IGN: Films like The Untouchables or My Daughter Clementine played fast and loose with the facts, but it was for the sake of entertainment. Can you talk a bit about the ground rules you set for this?
Fleischer: Yeah, there’s really no bones about the fact that this is a fictionalized retelling of the past. We say “inspired by” at the beginning of our movies instead of “based on” just because we like to acknowledge the fact that it was inspired, but this isn’t a documentary. This is an entertaining Hollywood action movie. True, we had to heighten a lot of the reality that happened to make it work for the action/gangster genre, so a lot of the car chases and shootouts and explosions and fistfights are definitely embellished. But we don’t really have any issue with that. The real-life Mickey Cohen went to jail for tax evasion, and in our movie he goes to jail for murder. Certainly the Gangster Squad would not have had minority members at the time either. So we make it pretty clear I think that this is a Hollywood version of the story.
IGN: Can you talk about trying to recapture the look and mystique of Los Angeles at that time?
Fleischer: That was one of my favorite parts of the whole thing, getting to bring back the glamor and glory of Los Angeles in the late ‘40s. Many of those buildings aren’t around anymore, so we had to look pretty hard throughout the city to find locations that were pretty accurate. Then through digital effects we were able to fix anything that wasn’t right. For example, if we had an awesome art deco building and then across the street from it was a McDonald’s, we could easily paint out anything that wasn’t true to the time and make it look close to how it looked in the ‘40s. In terms of production, the interior design, costume design, the cars, the music all help bring it back to the ‘40s and inform the viewer’s perception of the period.
IGN: You really put together a great cast, and there’s a good chemistry between everybody. But it also seemed very period accurate. I’m thinking particularly of Josh’s casting -- not a lot of actors these days seem like the kind of guys that would have been around back then, but he has that man’s man kind of thing. Can you talk about trying to get the right people for this group?
Fleischer: I’m glad you feel that way about Josh, because I feel exactly the same way. I feel like I could have stepped off the screen of any classic film noir movie. He just looks the part. He’s tough, he’s American, but he’s also got a deep inner life to him. You get a sense of his bearing and the way he interacts with people. He doesn’t say a lot, but he’s got things going on. Then with Sean, you can’t ask for a better gangster. He’s one of the most scary but entertaining people on screen. We wanted Mickey to really have a gravitas, and I think Sean’s about as heavyweight an actor as you could hope to cast. I feel so lucky with everything. Audiences can’t get enough of Ryan Gosling, and he’s amazing and just so fun. Whereas Josh, who plays a hardboiled cop, I feel like Ryan made a really interesting choice in terms of playing against hype. As far as our supporting ensemble in the squad, I don’t think you could ask for better than Giovanni Ribisi, Anthony Mackie, Robert Patrick and Michael Pena. They’re four of the most interesting and talented actors. They’re all just excellent.
IGN: One of the interesting things about that relationship between Josh and Ryan’s characters was it sort of reminded me of a western in that regard. He was Wyatt Earp and Ryan was more of Doc Holliday, the sort of morally dubious one who is still the conscience of the duo. How much did you look at the film as a film noir or as a western? To me it seemed a little bit more like a western.
Fleischer: Yeah, I’m glad that you’re aware of that. Even the cowboy in our movie was Max Kennard, played by Robert Patrick. I think this is as close to The Magnificent Seven as it is The Untouchables. It’s really modeled on that format of getting the team together and taking down the bad guys. The knife-throwing Anthony Mackie was definitely inspired by James Coburn. There’s a lot of western in terms of the shootouts, the stitching of it all. It was definitely a big inspiration.
IGN: Talk about the courtship of Sean Penn to play this role. That could not have been an easy task to say, “Hey, I want to get one of the world’s greatest actors to be in my film.” I’m sure every director goes through that thing. Can you talk about how you did ultimately convince him to take on the role of Mickey Cohen?
Fleischer: Yeah, it was challenging. I’m a young director who’s made a zombie comedy and a bank heist dark comedy, and I certainly wasn’t the most obvious person to direct Gangster Squad. But when I met with Sean, I just shared with him my passion for the time period, for Los Angeles and for the opportunity for him to bring Mickey -- who, in real life, is a notorious, charismatic, funny, crass guy. I think Sean just saw my passion for it and was willing to take a chance, and I’m really grateful that he did.
IGN: Can you talk about the prosthetic makeup on his character? Was that to show off his boxing past and the overall battle-scarred nature of this guy?
Fleischer: That’s exactly right. I mean the real Mickey Cohen was kind of short, fat and bald. De Niro was pretty bald and fat for Capone in The Untouchables, and since no one really knows who Mickey Cohen is or what he looked like, we didn’t feel an incredible responsibility to represent him photographically. So Sean, I think, there were aspects of Mickey that he really responded to and connected with, and Mickey fought 150 amateur fights in his career. That’s kind of how he got into the underworld, through boxing. He wasn’t the world’s greatest boxer, but he was really tough, so became kind of a heavyweight in the criminal underworld. So that was an aspect of Mickey that Sean got excited about and started focusing on. So the prosthetics are intended to be cartilage that was damaged from years of fighting, and his brow is obviously kind of bashed up. It’s meant to acknowledge his boxing past.
Gangster Squad is now in theaters.
Source : ign[dot]com
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