Hey, folks, welcome to a bonus interview for the episode on The Brave. The day that we put The Brave out, I got contacted by Charles Evans Junior. He was one of the producers of the film. Wanted to come on the air and talk a little bit about his experience working on The Brave. So sat down with them two
days after that recorded this interview. I'll have this available for folks to listen to here, or I'll go ahead and cut this back into the episode as well, so people have a full experience of listening about The Brave. Thanks so much, and I hope you enjoyed this bonus interview. So I've been doing a little digging. It looks like you were kind of destined for show business. I didn't realize that you had a famous family.
I do everybody in my family or filmmakers, my mom, my dad, my cousins, my uncle and uncle being the most known of them, Robert Evans.
Were you interested in that as a child or were you just like, no, no, I'm going to do my own thing.
Well, it's the only thing I ever thought of doing, so yeah, and mostly because my mom let me spend time with her while she was editing her documentaries and all and on sixteen millimeter film, and she do it in the like all night long, and it was our thing, and it was very special and subversive because I could stay away from school the next day and it was kind of great. Yeah, that's all I ever thought of doing.
Did you go to school for it?
Undergrad short story writing, Berkeley grad a USC film school. After I graduated, I got several writing jobs, low budget, kind of made. I was determined to write a serial killer script kind of in the early nineties, just after I finished film school and made my short film that won a bunch of rewards, and so ended up getting a couple of writing jobs. I don't even remember the name of the company. This was a low budget movie for it was going to be sowd in twenty six
days and called Bungalow nine. I'm sure it wasn't probably ever made. But and then what adaptation for my uncle at Paramount A project called this since that Paul Gallo ended up rewriting and I don't think was made. I'm not sure. I don't think it was made. And then I had to take care of my drug addiction at the time, so I had to just focus on that for a little bit. Worked at Disney as a development executive. I went to work from a friend of mine as
a director, Randall Kleiser, and tried to get people. He was at the time doing Honey, I blew up the Kid and a Touchdown, And when I left his company to start my own, he was signed up to do a right to life thriller. So that seemed like a big success. And then we found out that the fellow who sold the project and got financing for a tailor hacker draft kind of scavenged his own story from the sixties and it was based on something else. So it
just all fell apart. But I started my company in ninety two and then The Brave was one of my first projects.
So how did that come to you?
Touchstone had a in house competition with their executives. They gave them each a fund of money to do with what they would like to do and kind of let the cream rise to the top sort of idea, and my company got two of those projects. One of them was a documentary on comedy classes where people took a comedy class for the first time and performed a stand
up for the first time. At the end of it, and it was pretty funny, and it turned out a little too like raunchy and dark for Touchstone but at the time and so that wasn't released, but at least it got done. And the other one was The Brave, and we had an opportunity with all of the kind of enthusiasm for Paul mccutton's script that was generated. We were kind of the devil whispering and the fellow's ear who controlled the project, a fellow named Disease. We were saying,
you've got to direct this. It'scott it's your project, this is your chance, and you know, Updrour directors were really pushing for it, and he took meetings with them, and you know, it was like Jody Foster and Oliver Stone and it was kind of one of those leaving Las Vegas paradigm story where you say, what's kind of happen and it's so bleak you can't believe that it's going to happen, and the surprise is is that it does.
And I guess sort of the model of it, a homeless man who lives in a dump with his wife and kid is offered more money than he's ever seen in his life to die a week later in the snuff film and he takes it and it's and it's about his last week on Earth before going through with the deal, and it was it was a dark story.
The scene that really shocked everyone in the beginning is the snuff filmmaker walking around the lead subject talking to him about how he will be carved up and how, you know, kind of like the mechanics of the snuff film that will be happening at the end of the week and the kind of theater of the mind stuff that is left a lot of people shaken, and I think was a hook to some people to have this hanging over the narrative that follow and Ausis decided I
need to you know. I came to him and offered like four shooting days with a crew with a budget like seventy five grand or something to make a like like show what you can do with this, you know material. And at the time, we had Benicio del Toro cast, we were cast crewed, located and it was like five days away from shooting when he didn't show up to work on a Monday, and we heard that he was last seen fleeing his home before it exploded in flames, and the bodies of his daughter and wife were found
bleudgeend inside and he was missing. And so everybody touched and you know, graciously or courageously stepped away and said let's see something else. And we thought this would just go nowhere. And it was a terrible, horrific thing that happened. And then Johnny Call he had read the script, he responded strongly to it and said he was determined to
make the film and to can with us. And and you know, meeting a bunch of different prospective financiers, he wanted to you know, direct, and he said he would star, and that was the lure for them, because he would forego his acting these so he could star, so he could direct. I mean, and Jeremy Thomas, like, I didn't know how, you know, brilliant a filmmaker he was, and you know who he was until we met with him, and he was listed as a critical elementor I forget
the phrase that financiers use that essential element. That's it. And we got financing like five million dollars to make this movie and went from there. And Johnny really wanted the look and feel of a mere costa Rica that
he had grown so close with and Arizona Dreams. And so we got the production designer and DP brought that film, Vilco Fhelock, and I forget the production designer's name at this moment, but both brilliant, brilliant men and who had a really tight relationship with Johnny and we're going to have his back through this whole thing. And I think
technically they did what no one bargained for. Was Marlon Brando, this rogue menace force that called halfway through production the last two days, we're going to be the snuff film per seen. And he said, Johnny, I hear you gave away my part? Said what you you know you that that role is mine? This not filmmaker. You know I have to play this role. And well, we don't have any money for it. You know, we passed it already, and if we let this actor go, you know, you'd
have to be paid Scales. I'll work for Scale. So we're starting to think, okay, well, you know, Marlon Brando working for Scale. This is pretty exciting and he brings something great to the table, and he essentially was a roadblock to momentum. He refused to say the lines on the page. He wouldn't two script days on this set and this downtown La you know it snuff Filmmaker's layer turned into eleven days. He never read the lines that set up the entire narrative that follows. So it was
it was awful, and he said, doesn't cut together. I'll read it a script and I'll read anything you'd like. Just let's let's do this. He's riffing on the nobility of death and playing a harmonica and you know, doing all kinds of shit in his wheelchair that you know that he wrote into the script himself, and you know, he made a character, but it had like nothing to
do with the movie that followed. Really. Jeremy Thomas tells us that we got into the can Film Festival without anybody seeing the movie, and based on Jeremy's relationship with that festival, which had been long lasting, and you know, he's one of the handful of in people there that have that kind of had that kind of cachet, and
so we realized this isn't working. You know this, he tried to cut around it, and you know it was mystifying and moody but cryptic, and suddenly you were wondering what the hell's going on, and he said he we re rented the space, got Vilco and the production designer on a plane coming back, and as they were in the air, Marlon on a phone call says to Johnny, it's not that I won't say those words, Johnny, I
can't say those words. I can't help you. So Johnny has a decision to make that It didn't really seem like he thought about it too hard, but he decided he didn't want to be the first director in film history to fire, recast, and reshoot Marlon Brando, and we rolled with it, and at that point we had gone over so Johnny was personally financing the overages, and you know,
it was very much his story to tell. And what resulted is one of the threw stuff off of the tracks early on in the story, and we don't know really exactly what's going on. I think what happened in Can was he got really his first bad reviews, really ever, and they were some mean reviews and they are too harsh.
But I have a feeling that the fact that the Film Critics screening, the screening for the Film Critics, which is at seven am, after many of them had been out very late, and the film broke during that projection, and for seventeen minutes they had to sit around and wait till the splicer was found, put together and rethread, you know, and get it going again. And I have a feeling that contributed to the meanness or the edge
in the reviews. So as a result, it was distributed everywhere but in America, which Johnny owned those rights personally himself to distribute it, and he never chose to let it be seen. You know. All he had to do was to call that guy back and shoot that one five page scene with him in the location that was already reset and ready to go, and he chose not to do that breaks my heart.
Yeah, it really sounds like he chose Marlon Brando or for the film itself, or.
Thought it would work. I don't know, he didn't I guess fight for the Maybe he thought it was going to work. I guess.
I have to say, what was the period of time, And you don't have to be exact, but like after the whole incident with disease versus Johnny Depp calling, what was that period of time?
I don't remember exactly, but it was less than a year. It was maybe like half the year, it was like six months or something. I think really unfortunate missed opportunity was a pitch from a fellow named Bill Caine, a Jesuit priest who was a brilliant playwright, and I think he was doing stuff at Touchtoone at the time. He heard the story, read the script, and came back with his own approach to the story that was a direct
christ allegory. It was so it was so moving. I remember crying a lot, you know, during the pitch, even on the phone. And Sahni at that time had questioned himself with Danny and never got to hear any of these great ideas. One of them is so unfortunate, but because it never was embraced, but was to open the film with him learning with our lead learning that he has terminal cancer before he's offered all of this money, so he knows he's going to die anyway, and so
all of that is taken off the table. That why would you want to kill yourself? Stuff is you know, a non issue, and Shahnny never got to hear that idea, and I think it would have helped our connection with the lead character.
Where did you guys shoot all this, like where are these locations?
At Randsburg, California an abandoned mine that it was so surreally perfect that we went on a three week location scout. Our location scout was so dedicated. He was out every day for something like I don't know, one hundred and twenty days or something and came back only on the
day that his wife was delivering it. And the last location that we looked at we were looking at all of these dumps and re processing places in you know, Arizona, Texas in kind of very arid environments, and the last place we found was a place in Randsburg, and it like everybody knew right away it was it was it.
What was kind of your experience working on this? It sounds pretty stressful.
The stressful part was completion. Bond was bitch. I have a feeling it always is, but maybe people are used to that. Those hurdles and we had, you know, what we thought was a start date and then people have dedicated their schedules to the project and the who withhold that document for as long as they can and you have to spend like a lot of your own money, like to keep it afloat, you know, until they're a criteria or fulfilled. And that was very stressful, you know,
threading that needle. And then after that things went really, really pretty smoothly. A signing star I thought was Iggy Pop's score. Peter Gabriel courted Johnny very hard wrote one of what for me is one of the best scores ever, original scores and lastentation of Christ, and Johnny turned that down in favor for Iggy, in deference to Iggy, and he turned in something that was They spent a lot of time on it. They budgeted a lot of time and came up with something moving and unexpected in an
original sound and really impressed me. He channeled sort of that last temptation of Christ's world music sound and quite beautiful. You know, I have nothing but like admiring things to say about Johnny. He paid dearly for this project. He worked hard, more days on this than any other one in his life, I imagine, because you know, the free production and the production and the post and the can and all that, and you know he's usually he can go in and out of a project quicker than that.
Yeah, finally interesting. I was talking on the episode about the interviews that I saw from con where he was just saying how difficult the shoot was and how tough it is being a director. Did that come through on the set?
He had this this thing where he wouldn't write shot lists before the day shoot day, and he would I think he made it a little harder on himself than it had to be. But we had a lot of time scheduled. It was like, I think it was like a forty day shoot and it was I think we could. We had a lot of time to create a really vivid world in that in that environment, on that location, and things went surprisingly smoothly, and there's such good vibes
with Bilko and Craik. We called him and you know with Philko and Craika, he's so comfortable and they had a lot of fun. It was, I thought, really smooth. It might have been really stressful or hard for him in ways that I didn't see, but filled with admiration for.
His Ultimately, how does this project affect you?
It was incredible education And you know, it's sort of been around films forever but as far as I can remember, but you know, first person having the opportunity to sort of walk on the red carpet, you know, with a film that you've had a lot to do with getting made, and it was a great thrill and something that I think is an incentive to try to relive education and moving on to other projects that you love.
Do you think is there a chance that the film could ever come out in the US?
I mean, if Johnny ever changed his mind, I think he would. I don't foresee that happening. An academic exercise would be to cut out the Marlin shots and cut in the casting shots of this guy who read for it. And I never did that, but you know, and I got the footage and all, but like that, that could be a very telling exercise, you know, and how strong the film could be without the Marlin intrusion. I've just come to learn recently. He's done this with a lot
of other projects. See that was his sickness, and he like fucked up every project that he got involved with for a long period of time. And unfortunately, like Johnny was a casualty of that. But he wanted me to not intervene with Marlon, and he asked me to to let it go, and I was deferential to him, or that he had paid a great price to tell his story.
Well, I would love sometime if we could talk about the Aviator. That sounds like a fascinating story as well. If you were up for it, I.
Think I'd rather let me all think about it.
Okay, thank you so much for your time tonight, pleasure Man.
Jesus was way cool. Everybody liked Jesus. Everybody wanted to hang out with him. Anything he wanted to do he did. He turned water into wine, and if he wanted to, he could have turned wheat into marijuana, or sugar into cocaine, or vitamin pills into ampheticins. He walked on the water.
And swam on the land.
He would tell these stories and people would listen. He was really cool. If you were blind or lame, you just went to Jesus and he would put his hands on you and you would be healed. That's so cool. He could have played guitar better than Hendricks. He could have told the future. He could have baked the most delicious cake of the world. He could have scored more.
Goals than Huyne Redsfield.
He could have danced better than Barishnikov. Jesus could have been funnier than any comedian.
You could think of.
Jesus was way cool. He told people to eat his body and drink his blood. That's so cool. Jesus was so cool. But then some people got jealous of how clear he was, so they killed him. But then he rose from the dead. He rose from the dead, danced around, and went up to Heaven. I mean, that's so cool. Jesus was way cool. No wonder there are so many Christians