A love story just waiting, and waiting, to be told
Many movies have long and tortured histories - but few are quite as lengthy or painful as She's So Lovely. Two directors died before it could be made, another could not secure financial backing. It took more than 20 years to get this film to the screen, with the director son of the director-screenwriter father using the star his father originally intended.
She's So Lovely - originally entitled She's De Lovely until the Cole Porter estate requested a name change - was a script written by the late John Cassavetes towards the end of the 1970s.
He was going to direct it and called young and rising actor Sean Penn up at his Los Angeles home in the early 80s to read for the main part of the loopy Eddie Quinn. 'He liked me and I liked him,' says Penn of the legendary actor-director, who made Woman under the Influence, Minnie and Moskovitz and Husbands.
But Cassavetes was dying of cirrhosis and asked Hal Ashby to direct instead. Ashby developed cancer during pre-production and, by 1989, both were dead. Penn, nursing ambitions of a directing career that would come to fruition with The Indian Runner in 1991 and The Crossing Guard in 1995, decided to take over She's So Lovely himself: in black and white.
Needless to say, nobody was willing to cough up the cash to the unpredictable actor who, at this stage in his career, was more notorious for fisticuffs and a mad marriage to Madonna than his prowess behind the camera.
But time changes all things. Cassavetes' son, Nick, made his own successful transition from acting to directing with Unhook the Stars in 1995 (featuring his mother, Gena Rowlands), and quickly turned his attention to the script of She's So Lovely.
'The first time I really became aware of this material was when Sean first started going up to my father's house and they were planning on doing it,' recalls Nick Cassavetes. 'Sean has been very interested in this project for a long time: it means a lot to him. We made minor adjustments to the script, the rest is what you see.' The director adds: 'The first film was for my mother. This one is for my father.' If She's So Lovely already sounds Hollywood-incestuous, it only gets worse. Because, when Penn agreed to star in the film for Cassavetes junior, he decided there was only one woman to play his on-screen wife, Maureen Quinn - Penn's wife in real life, Robin Wright-Penn.
To make it even more of a family affair, Cassavetes then hired his mother for a minor role. To complete the picture, a relative outsider, John Travolta (a self-confessed Cassavetes 'addict'), persuaded indie producer Miramax to get involved, to the tune of US$16 million (HK$125 million).
The expensive gamble paid off - Cassavetes scripts, after all, are legendarily non-linear, and his work is somewhat dated now - with Penn taking the Best Actor award at this year's Cannes Film Festival for his performance.
Featuring some familiar characters for Cassavetes fans, She's So Lovely is really about obsessive love. The Quinns are desperately passionate, frequently drunk, definitely unstable, about to have a baby, and Eddie (Penn) has a tendency to disappear for days on end.
Through a convoluted sequence of events, Eddie winds up in a mental ward while Maureen (Wright-Penn) rebuilds her life with middle-class Joey (Travolta). When Eddie emerges from hospital 10 years later, their love remains unaltered.
Travolta says that, for a Cassavetes script, it is more structured, while retaining the man's eccentricity. 'And it is very seductive to have Sean call you and say: 'Robin and I want you to be in this, we can't live without you.' I love that. I'm easily seduced.' Even Nick Cassavetes admits that his father's work was sometimes difficult, saying: 'John sometimes wrote things I couldn't understand, that most people wouldn't understand. But he understood. And the job of the director is being able to understand the material - so that when your actors and your crew ask questions you can reply intelligently - so I made some minor adjustments, but adjustments that any director would make on any script.' Penn, who is now appearing in three movies in Hong Kong (She's So Lovely, The Game and Oliver Stone's U-Turn ), collaborated with Cassevetes junior on the script he once planned to direct.
'The way that Nick and I approach things similarly as directors is to take a gut-level response. You start learning what your movie is as you cast the movie.
'You try not to get too in love with it until you have the money to do it, it would break your heart. So I can't tell you whether I ever had an accomplished vision of this movie as a director: it was a lengthy transition period, but it was more exhilarating to see this movie get made than it would have been to direct it.
'I'm glad Nick did it. I have a feeling he did a better job [than I would have].' It is strange to see the Penns playing a volatile couple on-screen, as their relationship - they have two children, Dylan, five, and Hopper, three, and married last year after a very public separation - is notoriously fraught off-screen. Cassavetes puts it diplomatically: 'The beginning and end of every day is how Sean and Robin are getting along.' Penn, now 36, and Wright-Penn, 31, met in 1990 on the set of State of Grace. 'Marriage ain't easy,' remarks Penn, in his most public statement on the subject. 'But it's great most of the time. I love Robin. I've always loved her.' Wright-Penn, most famous for her work in The Princess Bride and Forrest Gump, says: 'If you're talking about love, it never dies. I don't think that spirit in your heart ever wavers.' Penn adds: 'I've always thought that Robin is the most beautiful actress on the planet. So it was exciting to work with her, it was exciting to see her be so good, and it was exciting to be surprised by her. I want to work with her again.' It is unlikely to be on a blockbuster, as Wright-Penn rarely accepts roles, 'trying to balance art with raising a family and a husband who does the same thing'.
Penn comments: 'You can't get paid US$20 million for the kind of movies I want to make. I keep reading scripts hoping that I can do it and realising that I can't.' She's So Lovely wasn't just a family affair, it was a happy family affair, say the principals - adding that they would like to work together again. 'What we should remember at the end of the day is that love is beautiful, no matter how tragic it is, and that life is beautiful,' says Cassavetes. 'That's what my father was all about.' She's So Lovely opens in Hong Kong on December 11.
