An Academy Award® winner for The Silence of the Lambs, Anthony Hopkins is one of the greatest actors of our time. Nominated for the Oscar® for his performances in Nixon, The Remains of the Day and Amistad, he is the recipient of more than 25 acting awards for his work on stage, on television and in films, and he has been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. Hopkins's range is enormous–everything from Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen, Dickens, Tolstoy, Pinter, Schaffer and Mamet on stage and television, to productions by Merchant/Ivory, Oliver Stone, David Lynch, Richard Attenborough and Steven Spielberg, to name but a few, on the big screen. Hopkins is the first to admit it: he's a film star who loves to work.
"But I've become more choosy as of late," he says. "Yet as soon as I read this script I knew I had to do it. It's very good, very fine, a very romantic film. I think audiences are going to be entranced by it. It's a real up lifter. It's going to leave you with a wonderful feeling. And it's a gorgeous, sumptuous production. I'm a big movie fan. And this is a real movie-movie."
For the coveted role of Parrish's daughter Susan, a hardworking physician, Brest cast newcomer Claire Forlani. The beautiful young actress who has been making a name for herself in independent features has appeared in Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat and also played Sean Connery’s daughter in the action adventure, The Rock, co-starring Nicolas Cage and Ed Harris.
Marcia Gay Harden, well-known to film audiences for her performances in The First Wives Club and The Spitfire Grill, was cast as Allison, Parrish's older daughter. A Tony Award nominee, Drama Desk and Theater World Award winner for her unforgettable performance on Broadway in Tony Kushner's Angels in America, Ms. Harden recently appeared opposite Robin Williams in Flubber and co-starred with Michael Keaton and Andy Garcia in Desperate Measures. Jeffrey Tambor and Jake Weber complete the principal cast. Tambor, co-star and four- time Emmy Award-nominee for his role in HBO's award-winning series The Larry Sanders Show, plays Allison's loving husband Quince, who is unsinkably loyal to his wife and his father-in-law.
Young stage actor Jake Weber is Drew, Susan's ambitious fiancé. Known for his work off-Broadway in plays by John Patrick Shanley, Weber has appeared at the New York Shakespeare Festival and on Broadway. His film credits include The Pelican Brief, Dangerous Beauty and Amistad, with Anthony Hopkins.
The creative team Brest assembled to film Meet Joe Black includes some of the most accomplished and talented artists working in films today. The production designer, who created the massive Parrish mansion and offices, is Dante Ferretti, a five-time Academy Award®-nominee for his production designs of Interview with the Vampire, The Age of Innocence, Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Kundun.
Director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki, an Academy Award®-nominee for his work on The Little Princess, has also photographed Like Water for Chocolate, The Birdcage and Great Expectations.
Composer Thomas Newman, who previously worked with Brest on Scent of A Woman,
has been nominated for Academy Awards® for his music in Little Women, The Shawshank Redemption and Unstrung Heroes.
Costume designers are Aude Bronson-Howard, who worked with Brest on Scent of A Woman and whose credits include Looking for Richard and Romeo Is Bleeding, and David C. Robinson. Robinson co-designed Donnie Brasco with Ms. Bronson-Howard, and created the costumes for I Shot Andy Warhol.
The editors are Joe Hutshing and Michael Tronick. Hutshing has won two Academy Awards® for his work on JFK and Born on the Fourth of July, and was nominated for Jerry Maguire. Brest previously worked with Tronick on Scent of a Woman and Midnight Run.
Executive producer Ronald L. Schwary, rejoins Brest after serving in that capacity on Scent of A Woman. He has also produced films for Robert Redford (Ordinary People) and for Sydney Pollack (Tootsie, Havana, Sabrina).
Principal photography for Meet Joe Black got underway on June 11, 1997 inside a coffee shop on New York's Upper West Side at Broadway and 103rd Street. Here Brest filmed the scene in which Dr. Susan Parrish, played by Claire Forlani, has a chance encounter with a charming young man, played by Brad Pitt, who sets off unexpected sparks. The coffee shop interior completed, filming then shifted downtown to Lexington Avenue and 23rd Street where the unit cordoned-off a four square block area. Shooting on Saturday and Sunday to keep from contributing to New York's already-congested weekday traffic, the unit rehearsed and then filmed a complicated sequence involving a stunt, that had to be meticulously timed, in which Susan and the young man walk out of not only the coffee shop but also, it would appear, each others' lives.
Pitt's first scene as Joe Black involved the character's first time ever encounter with peanut butter and was filmed inside a kitchen in the Cartier Mansion off Fifth Avenue, after which the unit moved to Fifth Avenue's Metropolitan Club.
Filming continued around the city and included
such locations as Fifth Avenue in Midtown and Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side.
Later, the cast and crew took up residence inside a former National Guard Armory in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, which the filmmakers had reconverted into a vast sound stage. The armory's gigantic drill floor (150 by 270 by 80 feet--larger than a football field) provided Dante Ferretti with the necessary space in which to construct the first and second stories of the Parrish’s Fifth Avenue triplex penthouse apartment. (The third story, which contains a full-size, functional, heated swimming pool had to wait to be built until the scenes on the bedroom floor of the penthouse were completed and the set struck to make room for the pool’s construction.)
Ferretti's designs and their execution are magnificent and unprecedented in terms of scale and opulence for sets built on a New York City sound stage. They are also pre-eminently suitable as the home of one of the world's wealthiest and most powerful men. It’s not only the outsize dimensions of these breathtaking sets and their elegant furnishings that command attention, however; the magic also resides in the details.
Everywhere finely wrought particulars dazzle the eye: beautiful parquet floors with intricate inlaid borders; carved moldings on door frames and on the walls of each and every room, and brilliantly rendered copies on the walls of master paintings found not in museums but rather in private collections; rare antique furniture, silverware, porcelain china, and objets d'art; and bowers of fresh flowers in gorgeous vases everywhere provided daily by the set dressing department. These details attested to the painstaking effort that went, not merely into the design and creation of the penthouse sets, but into every single aspect of filming.
Beyond their beauty and tastefulness, the sets also serve the function of revealing Bill Parrish’s character–the breadth of his taste, his temperament, the complexity of his character, the richness of his values and humanity, all qualities that intrigue Joe Black. Production designer Ferretti, who in addition to his film work has designed sets for the world's greatest opera houses, says of his creations, "Marty and I talked very carefully over every aspect of the set. Before we started working we went to see every penthouse apartment we could get into in New York, visiting the Cartier Mansion and the home of Lady Fairfax in the Pierre Hotel. We even went to see Donald Trump's apartment in the Trump Tower. I took ideas from everywhere and blended them like a cook.
"The pleasure of working with Marty was that he gave me the freedom to do what I felt was necessary. He trusted me, so that when we began building the sets and I told him that we needed to use real materials or else the sets might look fake, he agreed and gave me carte blanche."
But talks between Brest and Ferretti went beyond the physical details of the set.
"We talked a long time about Bill Parrish's character. We knew that we had to show his vast wealth not only in terms of size–nothing could be garish–but in the way he lived. We decided to make him a serious art collector, European art, Cezanne, Matisse, Balthus for the New York penthouse, and the Hudson River School for his country estate. For his office in midtown, we decided on contemporary American and Pop art–Jim Dine, Robert Rauschenberg, Kandinsky. Marty and Emmanuel Lubezki, the cinematographer, wanted a warm, romantic, emotional atmosphere in all the sets but especially for the penthouse, because it's the emotion in the story that counts more than anything. So we used here what you call colonial colors, a subdued palette, old-fashioned grays, blues, tans. We painted the walls and then we waxed them so the colors would resonate on film. We didn't want it to be gloomy. After all, Parrish is in a form of hell–purgatory–when Joe appears.
He knows what's happening even if no one else does. The atmosphere must remain bright, rich, warm and comforting."
Brest filmed scenes in every room of the magnificent set: in Parrish's imposing two-story wood and glass-paneled library, in the elegantly appointed living room, in the upstairs hallways and bedroom, and in the salon
The centerpiece of filming, however, were the three semi-formal family dinners, the first of which is stopped in its tracks when Joe Black appears. Brest directed the dinner scene over a period of days, eliciting the ensemble nuances of a family who have known each other all their lives–and the sudden shock of having a mysterious stranger thrust into their midst. This startling appearance gives the sequence a suspenseful edge and Brad Pitt used the cast’s myriad reactions–confusion, discomfort, bemusement, and surprise–as a way of getting to the truth of the situation.
"I'm playing someone who represents Death," the actor says. "But how do you play such a character? You can't do research. So you're thrown back onto your resources. You watch everyone else and play off their feelings. The fact that we were such a tight-knit group worked to my advantage. Everyone gave me something great to play off."
Claire Forlani was also pleased at the sense of ensemble that Brest and her co-stars generated on the set.
"At first I was thrilled when I got the role, then I was terrified. It's intimidating playing opposite Brad and Anthony Hopkins," Forlani says. "Brad's a big film star and has so much experience, and Tony, you know, he's more than just an actor's actor. He's a great star who's played so many great roles that I felt out of my depth. I mean, I have so much to learn."
But Hopkins found the youth of his co-stars attractive and inspiring.
"It's just great working with these younger actors. I just love it. I've worked with Brad before on Legends of the Fall, and we get on very well. He has a great sense of humor, he's lighthearted and I like working with him. I'm sure he takes it all seriously, but he's very friendly, very generous, so it makes doing the scene a pleasure.
"What was difficult for me was the situation of my character, the older daughter who's been fighting all her life for her father's attention and love, seeing that most of it goes to her younger sister.
It's difficult to play because you have to get in touch with painful feelings in your own life that aren't always pleasant to experience
The saving grace was Jeffrey Tambor's character, Quince, my husband in the film. We had chemistry, ka-bang, from the first. He's a wonderful, spicy kind of actor, it's like acting with a giant brilliant Teddy bear. He helped me express some of the family nuances that are written so beautifully in the script."
Following Brooklyn, the unit moved to Warwick Neck, Rhode Island, on Narragansett Bay halfway between Providence and Newport, to shoot the film's opening and its climactic sequence, Bill Parrish's 65th birthday celebration on the grounds of his country estate.
Brest and Ferretti searched far and wide before settling on the Aldrich Mansion, a 75-acre estate, to serve as the Parrish country manor. The mansion was the former home of U. S. Senator Nelson W. Aldrich. Commissioned in 1896, it took a collection of European artisans sixteen years to construct, replete with Italian marble fireplaces, sphinx sculptures and a grand entrance staircase. In 1939, Aldrich's widow bequeathed the mansion and its grounds to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence, and since then it has served as a seminary and home to Catholic high school students.
The mansion's main attraction to the filmmakers was its grounds, especially a rolling lawn that sweeps down to the sea and provides beautiful views of the water, a prime requisite for the story.
The mansion is a superb example of the French pavilion style and resembles the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's home in Paris. It also contains elements of Versailles. But it was its situation by the sea and the rolling lawn that clinched it for us," Ferretti says. "It made a suitable backyard for one of the richest men in the world and a perfect place for his daughter to throw the party of a lifetime."
Even though the grounds were precisely what Brest and Ferretti were looking for, considerable renovation and landscaping were undertaken by the art department and construction crew before the house and its surrounding area were ready for the cameras.
"It was necessary to build everything Marty and Dante needed," says executive producer Ron Schwary. "First of all we resodded the lawn so it was lush, green, inviting. Then we oversaw construction of a huge staircase that led from the back of the mansion down the length of the lawn to the sea. Dante decorated the staircase with lattice work and lighted globes. And we also built a bandstand large enough to seat a society orchestra, a dance floor inside a pavilion, and fountains spurting water."
The globes on the staircase are one of my favorite effects," Ferretti says. "They give off a radiance, a soft, celestial light, just as we wanted because the party is like a vision of heaven.
And of course at the climax of the birthday celebration there's an explosion of fireworks, and that adds to the color and excitement."
The party scene took six weeks to film; the sequence with fireworks alone lasted a week. Created and executed by Ron Smith and Pyrospectaculars, experts in the field, the fireworks had to be carefully coordinated for each shot. In the end, the fireworks spectacle provided a pleasant distraction for residents, crew, and the 600 extras who worked nightly while the long party sequence was being filmed. Most of the extras were locals, thrilled to be appearing in a movie with Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins.
For the party scene, Aude Bronson-Howard and David C. Robinson, designed more than 100 dresses for individual extras to wear. Then every night assistant directors placed these extras at strategic points in the action, a way of effectively controlling what Brest's cameras recorded.
"Marty really takes his time with wardrobe," Bronson-Howard says. "I think he managed to look at each and every extra at least once during filming."
"It goes without saying how much attention he lavished on clothing for the principals," David Robinson adds. "He truly understands how clothing reflects character."
Brad Pitt’s clothing is a case in point. Brest wanted a distinct look for Pitt’s two personas: the nameless young man Susan Parrish meets in the coffee shop; and the similar looking but very different Joe Black. Explains Bronson-Howard: "Marty wanted slouchy, wrinkled clothing for the young man while Joe Black had to look sharp and sleek. Joe's clothes are all straight lines."
Another character whose look required particular refining was Parrish's daughter, Susan. Notes Robinson: "Claire Forlani's look is more natural. For one thing, she has a job, she goes to work. She's a doctor and dresses casually. But she's also a beautiful young woman who looks great in what she wears. We dressed her to capture a distinctive look of youth, simplicity, sincerity and class that's essential to the character."
For the big party scene, the filmmakers searched for authentic designer dresses but couldn’t find the perfect touch for the two contrasting Parrish sisters. Ultimately, they designed their own creations–a simple evening dress with spaghetti straps for Susan Parrish that was made of hand-beaded grey lace; and for Allison, a flowing satin gown in a vibrant shade of emerald green.
Surprisingly, the one character whose clothing offered a unique challenge was Bill Parrish. "The choices were obvious. We used a lot of suits in a distinguished Savile Row style and tweed jackets for the more relaxed scenes," Bronson-Howard says. "But when we started shooting, something extraordinary occurred. Once Anthony was in character, he altered his posture. He swayed his back to become Parrish and his clothing no longer fit. It was as if he had become Bill Parrish. We had to alter everything."
Filming completed in Rhode Island, the unit returned to the Park Slope armory for two scenes in the penthouse pool. Ferretti's opulent set became a fitting backdrop for a smoldering seduction scene between Joe and Susan.
The penthouse overlooks Central Park so we decorated the pool room with allegorical murals depicting the park," Ferretti says. "We based our paintings on real murals made by a Spanish painter, Jose Maria Serte who in the 30s and 40s created murals for Rockefeller Center and the United Nations."
The love scenes concluded, the unit bid goodbye to Brooklyn and moved to Teaneck, New Jersey, for the scenes deep within Parrish Communications. The sequence in which Joe visits Susan at New York Hospital and encounters the terribly ill Jamaican patient, who thinks she recognizes who Joe Black really is, was filmed in New York City's Bellevue Hospital. With the completion of the scene in which the Jamaican woman privately pleads with Joe to end her misery and take her to that "other place." Filming wrapped on November 12, 1997.
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