About the Production
Producer Lauren Shuler Donner was instrumental in helping John Constantine make his transition to the big screen from the pages of the DC Comics/Vertigo “Hellblazer” series of graphic novels. Shuler Donner, whose credits during her more than 20 years in the industry include the beloved Free Willy films, You’ve Got Mail and the international box-office phenomenon X-Men and X2, was captivated by the character’s extraordinary circumstances and distinct attitude. She saw the property’s dramatic potential as a feature film. “It was immensely appealing,” she says. “Intelligent, thrilling, a good story with an anti-hero at its core; the kind of movie in which the completely unexpected happens.”
After successfully pitching the project to Warner Bros. Pictures, for which she has produced a number of high-profile films including the Oliver Stone drama Any Given Sunday and the critically acclaimed romantic comedy Dave, Shuler Donner focused on developing a script for Constantine with screenwriter Kevin Brodbin (The Mindhunters) and producer Michael Uslan. Uslan, with partner Benjamin Melniker, also a producer on Constantine, have a long-standing collaborative association with premiere genre publisher DC Comics through which they previously helped bring the blockbuster Batman film franchise to life.
Brodbin, a huge fan of the source material (Vertigo’s longest-running monthly series with over 200 issues and 15 graphic novels published) had long harbored a desire to write a script for the character and took the adaptation very seriously, emphasizing that, “the most important thing was to be true to Constantine’s voice” – an essential point on which the filmmakers agreed, as did screenwriter Frank Cappello, who later joined the project and likewise drew heavily upon the character’s origins for guidance.
Based on the originality of the developing concept Shuler Donner presented, producer/writer Akiva Goldsman next joined the Constantine filmmaking team. A successful producer, Goldsman is equally renowned for his screenplays, among them The Client and A Beautiful Mind, which earned numerous honors including an Oscar, a Golden Globe Award and a BAFTA nomination, so it’s no surprise that it takes a strong story to capture his attention. “It’s impossible for me to work on something unless it’s fun as well as creatively and imaginatively engaging,” he admits. “Constantine presents an idea I’ve always found compelling and have wrestled with in my own work – that of the world behind the world, what might exist beyond what we can see.”
John Constantine’s identity and his attitude are inseparable from his situation; as the circumstances of his life compel him, he forges ahead with a single focus. “What I love about this character is that there’s an inevitability to his failure and yet he’s willing to keep pushing and trying to figure out another way,” says Lorenzo di Bonaventura, for whom Constantine marks his debut as an independent producer following an impressive tenure as head of production at Warner Bros. Pictures. “It’s not the kind of indomitable spirit that usually connotes a heroic venture; it’s the indomitable spirit of a man who knows he’s not going to win but plays as hard as he can anyway.”
“This is a man who walks both sides, light and dark,” Shuler Donner describes the complex title character. “He’s not evil; the life he took, after all, was his own. But he’s not all good either. Deep inside, I think he’s just a guy who’s had a very hard life and yet he’s smart enough to have a sense of humor about it, which is one of the reasons we wanted Keanu Reeves because we knew he could pull that off. He can strike those balances and give us the sense of depth that defines Constantine.”
“He’s fighting the system,” adds Erwin Stoff, Constantine producer and Reeves’ longtime professional collaborator. “John Constantine clearly doesn’t want to go to hell but he believes it’s his actions that should decide his fate, not someone’s technical reading of the rules. He’s a guy who, above all, cannot tolerate unfairness and hypocrisy and it’s the unfairness and hypocrisy he observed early in his life as well as his current situation that has hardened him to the degree that he is.”
Stoff felt so strongly about the Constantine script that he forwarded it to Reeves while the actor was in Sydney on production for The Matrix Revolutions and his instincts proved correct. “He fell in love with the character,” Stoff recalls. “He liked that fact that even though this had the potential to be a great, fun, epic-scale movie with amazing effects, at its center was a story about a man’s struggle with hypocrisy, with good and evil, and with what’s wrong in the world.”
Adds Melniker, “This is a unique individual who defies description. There’s an enduring mystery about him. It’s not commonplace; it’s not likely that people will say, ‘I’ve seen this before.’”
Uslan, whose youthful passion for comic books led to an early job writing for genre fanzines and a lifetime of avid collecting, believes that familiarity with the graphic novels is not a prerequisite to enjoying the screen story or appreciating the punch of Constantine’s personality for the first time. Having watched the character evolve for years in print he feels the film captures its essence in ways that count the most: namely, “mood, attitude and point of view. One of the great things about this story and these characters is that there is absolutely no black or white. As we learn to our horror, everything in life is gray. No matter how human someone appears there might be demons lurking within. When someone taps you on the shoulder you never know quite what you’re going to see when you turn around.”
Francis Lawrence, known for his award-winning direction on videos for some of the most dynamic acts in the music industry, has developed an expertise for recognizing the vital elements of a story and gauging their visceral impact. A film noir devotee, he says, “it was the character of John Constantine, the anti-hero, and the tone of the story, that attracted me immediately. The world he inhabits is unique and the story moves into places that were entirely unexpected.”
Intrigued, Lawrence researched the source material extensively, developed original sketches and ideas for the project and threw his hat into the ring as the production team was considering directors. He hit them like a bolt of lightning.
“If I could create one lie that I could tell for the rest of my career, I would say that it was entirely my decision to hire Francis,” Goldsman candidly confesses. “This guy is the real thing – he’s so good he’s scary.”
Contrary to the producers’ expectations, considering Lawrence’s background, he did not approach the material from a visual perspective. “His talent with visuals was certainly apparent but when we had our first meeting he talked for two hours about the script and the characters and never once mentioned the look,” recalls di Bonaventura. “Usually, when directors are making the transition from the video or commercial world they lean heavily on the visuals because it’s what they’ve been doing, so this was already staggeringly different than anything I had experienced in more than 13 years at the studio. More than anything, we were impressed with his ability to analyze the fundamentals of a scene.”
When it came to the imagery itself, Lawrence was more than prepared. “Francis arrived at our meeting with his drawings. In this business, of course, that means instead of coming in with your resume, in a suit and tie, you arrive in flip-flops with your 25 sketches of hell,” Goldsman remembers. “I was immediately taken by his idea that heaven and hell coexist with our world, and that when you pass from this spot in our world you should be in this exact same room in hell. He was very specific about the geography. It was a brilliant idea, it gave the unimaginable a new imagining and completely captured what the movie was about.”
Lawrence sought to present the landscape of the underworld in a new way. “I thought about the ways in which I’d seen it depicted in art, in the paintings of Bruegel and Bosch, or so often in an abstract way, like a black oily void. The images were nothing you could relate to. I wanted to give it a recognizable structure. So when Constantine is in Angela’s apartment and he momentarily crosses over into hell, it’s the hell version of her apartment that he’s in; when he goes out into the street it’s the hell version of Los Angeles. That makes it an environment that people can easily imagine touching and seeing.”
He went on to provide detailed descriptions of the various demons and spirits that inhabit the story and offered casting choices that proved right on the mark. “What was interesting,” says Stoff, “is that a tremendous number of the ideas Francis proposed in his very first meeting came to fruition.”
The director’s willingness to imagine things in a fresh way was the perfect approach for a story in which nothing is clearly black or white and the characters are anything but conventional: a hardened police detective looking for hope in the paranormal; an angel representing God on Earth while promoting a personal agenda; a priest unable to perform exorcisms; an entrepreneur who runs a nightclub for both sides….and in the middle of it all, a hero who doesn’t want to be a hero. As screenwriter Frank Cappello describes, “Here’s a guy who has his problems with God. Loathes the devil. He fights the most hideous demons and yet he cannot escape his own bad habits, like smoking, which is literally killing him. Ultimately he’s a man trying to save himself, not the world.”
“This is a movie where not everything is neatly explained,” says Goldsman. “The attempt was not to create full comprehension in the mind of the audience but to give them an experience.” Equally important, adds di Bonaventura, is that, “it doesn’t preach or try to convince you of anything. It allows you to have a simple entertainment on one level and then, perhaps, an intellectual, emotional or philosophic conversation. Let us scare you first, and you can consider the more profound questions later.”
Constantine (2005)
Directed by: Francis Lawrence
Starring: Keanu Reeves, Rachel Weisz, Max Baker, Djimon Hounsou, Tilda Swinton, Peter Stormare, Shia LaBeouf, Gavin Rossdale, Suzanne Whang, Francis Guinan, April Grace
Screenplay by: Kevin Brodbin, Mark Bomback, Frank Cappello
Production Design by: Naomi Shohan
Cinematography by: Philippe Rousselot
Film Editing by: Wayne Wahrman
Costume Design by: Louise Frogley
Set Decoration by: Douglas A. Mowat
Art Direction by: David Lazan
Music by: Klaus Badelt, Brian Tyler
MPAA Rating: R for violence and demonic images.
Distributed by: Warner Bros. Pictures
Release Date: February 18, 2005
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