Wild Things
Director John McNaughton
Wild Things (1998) comes on like the kind of B-movie — the key B's being breasts, bullets, and betrayal — that fills the wee hours of cable television. But from the lively opening credits shot in the Everglades — an alligator peeks out from the murky water under the garish title to leer at the camera — it's clear that this particular erotic thriller prizes sleaze and tongue-in-cheek humor equally.
"What's motivating these characters is sort of their reptilian brain," says director John McNaughton in Los Angeles about the bottom-feeders who populate Wild Things. "It's the very primitive instincts, which is why I started in the swamp where life itself started."
In a Florida community that encompasses both swamp trash and yacht club culture, a well-liked high school guidance counselor (Matt Dillon) is accused of rape by two very different teenage girls.
The nubile, restless daughter (Denise Richards) of a wealthy and sexually voracious widow (Theresa Russell) seems to have little in common with a whip-smart and angry social outcast (Neve Campbell), but a relentless and deadpan sex crimes cop (Kevin Bacon) senses something's not quite right in the whole scenario.
"One of the things that's going on in this picture is misdirection," McNaughton explains, "you want the audience to think it's a certain kind of movie and then have it not be. It sort of starts out like it's going to be some dumb teen story and it starts to turn inside out."
"In almost in every scene, everybody's lying to each other," he continues, "they're pretending to be one thing while they're really manipulating on a lower level. There's a master plan operating here, but any given point along the way, it's who knows what? And who's playing who and in what way?"
Confounding expectations and messing with convention have been hallmarks of John McNaughton's career, from the supremely chilling Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986), to the filmed version of Eric Bogosian's scathing monologue Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll (1991), to the bizarre love triangle of the quirky Mad Dog and Glory (1993).
The script for Wild Things, written by Stephen Peters, had gone through many permutations by the time shooting started, but the common thread in all the drafts was the use of secrets. Throughout the film, secrets explode like landmines, drastically altering not just the film's storyline, but the audience's perception of previous events.
The two weeks of rehearsal McNaughton conducted with the ten principals (including Robert Wagner, Carrie Snodgress, Daphne Rubin-Vega and Jeff Perry) involved close examination of the labyrinthine plot.
"I always like to have the writer in rehearsals," he says, "and in this case the writer was the answer man. So okay, we go, 'I'm playing this in this particular scene, I'm saying this but what I'm really trying to accomplish is something else entirely. Now what specifically is the plot and why specifically am I doing this?' We had to go through that as a group, so we all understood together, what was playing on the surface but what was really going on beneath the surface."
"Once we had all that stuff straightened out," continues McNaughton, "on the last day of rehearsal it was like, 'Okay, now we all understand this together, now forget all of it and just play the page, play it straight.' Because if you start to try and double-play, you'll trip."
Another challenge for John McNaughton became finding just the right tone for a movie that whole-heartedly embraces the "reptilian brain" of its characters — and features a racy menage a trois sex scene — but was being released by a major Hollywood studio.
"It's very lurid," he readily admits, "and part of the material that we worked with was American trash culture — which I'm a big fan of — and had it been played completely straight, it could have been quite trashy."
He tried to find the right mix in the editing room, balancing what he would need to get an R rating from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) while not disemboweling the film's wilder elements.
"It was like, this much tells the story," he said, "this much is just like bare flesh for the prurient interest, that goes. With the MPAA, my philosophy's always been well, if you can take it out and the story's still completely clear, then it's okay, unless I'm really trying to make a point with some sort of excessiveness. But for the most part, if it's sexual or violent or something and you can pull it and the story's still clearly told, then you probably don't need it."
"I was very fortunate this time, the MPAA left me alone," he adds with a laugh, "I guess they felt sorry for me after all the beatings I took."
John McNaughton's first film, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, was a low-budget horror film funded by a video distributor that languished for three years before being shown in theaters in part because of a ratings battle with the MPAA.
In the fact-based Henry, McNaughton straightforwardly portrayed a killer who was undisturbed by the restrictions of conscience. He didn't resort to slasher-movie conventions, but the tone of the movie got under the skin of viewers.
After one of the most heated battles in recent years, the makers of Henry released the film unrated instead of accepting the MPAA's X. The film went on to build a sizable cult audience due in large part to this notoriety. The response to Wild Things, made almost a decade after Henry, was quite different, because McNaughton knew just what he was up against. [The unrated version of Wild Things would become an influential DVD: its success paved the way for unrated DVDs of films like American Pie and King Arthur, which let audiences see all the naughty bits excised for the benefit of the MPAA.]
"It's funny, but before shooting," McNaughton says, "it was 'More breasts, more breasts, more, more, more!' and actually, in earlier cuts, it was 'Less, less, less!' when they start to get nervous that maybe they're going to offend somebody."
"I'm not pointing a finger at a particular studio," he adds, "because I have to say this was the best experience I've had dealing with a studio [Columbia Pictures/Mandalay Entertainment] in my career. It's just the way it pretty much always is."
But when he was discussing another true crime film, Normal Life (1996), John McNaughton became visibly frustrated and angry. The film, which stars Ashley Judd and Luke Perry as a couple who turn to bank robbing with tragic consequences, was to be distributed by Fine Line Features, the specialty division of New Line Cinema. According to McNaughton, Fine Line decided to bypas theaters and send the movie straight to video. Another battle ensued, and this time McNaughton enlisted the press and the powerful William Morris Agency, who represented the director and his two stars.
"Had they said simply it was a business decision," says McNaughton, he might have understood. "They told me that the picture wasn't good. It would be to the benefit all of our careers to not release the picture. And I had to take exception with that point."
Eventually, Normal Life was released for a token run in New York and Chicago before hitting the video shelves, and this was just another in a series of disheartening occurrences in McNaughton's filmmaking career.
"It was just such a frustrating experience to work so hard for close to a year," he explains, "and have it just dismissed. I dealt with two companies that went bankrupt before my films were released. This time [with Wild Things] I said I want to spend a lot of money and I want the film to be seen. I don't want them to be able to get rid of it because they'll have too much invested."
Upcoming for John McNaughton is a return to low-budget independence: a documentary, Condo Painting, shot on digital video. This profile of painter George Condo features the last movie appearances of Beat icons William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.
"Before I became a director," said the 48-year-old Chicago-born filmmaker, "I was out doing many, many things including digging holes in the street, and working with traveling carnivals and tending bar, and I like to think that I paint from life. Other filmmakers — especially very young directors — get in and it's very referential, it's movies about movies."
But John McNaughton isn't averse to using an audience's movie-going expectations to his advantage. In the case of Wild Things, it was casting one of his Mad Dog and Glory stars, a name that makes audiences not only chuckle when it appears in the credits, but anticipate his eventual appearance.
"One of the great things about that is up to that point, people are afraid to laugh," he says, "and once Bill Murray's little head pops up there, it's a green light."
The realization hits, John McNaughton explains, that "there is comedy and humor in this piece. It's not big and broad and obvious, but it's all over the place. And it's okay to laugh."
© 1998, Serena Donadoni. All rights reserved.