Interview: 'The Big Bang' Director Tony Krantz

How did you come on board this project? Were you producer first?
I developed the script from scratch with the writer, and I paid for the development of the script. So I was the producer, the financier, and the director. Ultimately we got a financier to finance the movie, but I took the risk to develop the script from an idea the writer and I had. It was his notion to do a noir film that was a tribute to the classic 40s and 50s noir movies and we both, oddly, as a piece of synchronicity – I had been watching Charlie Rose where a particle physicist was on the air and he had been reading a National Geographic where there was a cover story on the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. And we both turned to each other, on the same day, and said: "Is there anyway we can incorporate the world of particle physics into this detective story?"

How much of the geeky physics stuff was in the script and how much did you come up with visually?
It was all there, as we developed it. What's interesting about the movie, which a lot of people haven't necessarily seen, is the entire movie is a metaphor for particle physics. Particle physics is about this duality theory – that everything is a wave and a particle at the same time; that all matter is really two different things. A noir movie is about two different things – shadow and light. And the story that we're telling is really two different stories – the detective looking for a missing woman and a billionaire (Sam Elliott) looking for a missing sub-atomic particle and you realize they are part of the same story, two sides of the same coin. The movie itself, the structure itself, is a giant metaphor for life itself – that we are all a wave and a particle, two different things at the same time.

Did you try to convey this metaphor visually too?
In a way, certainly, yes. It's very hard to approach that visually, comprehensively. The movie is very colorful and each scene – there's a red scene, a purple scene, etc. – which is an homage to the film noirs, which were in black-and-white and very stark. And I did the same thing by creating one or two colors and limiting those to specific scenes. There are also scenes in the movie in which the laws of physics seem to be bent. You see a spotlight hit a stripper in a strip club and you see the leading edge of that spotlight, which suggests that the film is moving at the speed of light, since you never see the leading edge of a beam of light; it's just on. Because light travels at the speed of light. There are other moments when Anton, this giant massive boxer, is literally bending light around his body, which is a reference to how light bends when it reaches a black hole. So we did things visually that were part of these ideas of particle physics, and for people who look deeply into the movie.

Was it hard to figure out when to throw that stuff in and when to hold back?
Making a movie is like cooking a meal – you put a little salt in, a little pepper, you taste it, and you decide you need a little more of this or that. Ultimately, the great chefs don't measure exactly a tablespoon of chicken broth; they season it to taste. The interesting thing about the moviemaking business is it's a purely subjective business – you give the same script to a hundred different directors and you'd get a hundred different movies. So this was our interpretation of what it is, we seasoned it to taste, we used our instinct in terms of going to far or not going far enough. I'm very pleased with the result, because I feel like people will find a movie that is unusual, which doesn't happen that much this day and age. It's very expensive to make movies and market movies and every now and then an odd one sneaks through. And it's no question The Big Bang is an unusal movie.

Kiss Me Deadly seemed to be a huge influence on this movie. Were there any other film noirs specifically that you were calling back to?
Not really. You mentioned one. Erik Jendresen, our writer, is an aficionado of Marlowe and Chandler and, you know, there were pieces of that. The classic noir idea of an idea walks into a detective office and wants him to find a missing girl is literally the cliché of clichés in dozens and dozens of movies. And to do that in this movie was an homage to the genre and a wink to the genre, and have everything that you think is happening not be what's happening, we take the classic ideas of noir and riff on them. That's what we wanted to do with this movie – pay homage to the classics but bring it into a contemporary setting.

Can you talk about getting Johnny Marr to do the score?
Well, he's the greatest. He's the co-leader of The Smiths with Morrissey. And I had a relationship with him dating back 20 years because my roommate in Los Angeles was the manager of The Smiths, The Simple Minds, and UB40, all at the same time. And Johnny came on a trip to LA and stayed with us and I developed a relationship with Johnny at that time. Cut to 20 years later and I'm listening to his solo record, "Boomslang," in my car, and I'm thinking to myself, "This is the perfect sound for The Big Bang." So I contacted him and he told me that a movie I had produced, Mulholland Drive, was his favorite movie he'd ever seen. And I pointed to a song called "The Last Ride," from "Boomslang," and I told him that's what I wanted to do in the chase sequence. It was an odd meeting where somebody so specifically came in with a person who had never done a score before, and literally that's what we did and that's the music that appears in the final chase sequence of the movie. I think Johnny's a genius and there's going to be a soundtrack released to the movie. He's a pleasure and a brilliant musician.

Can you talk about assembling the cast? It's a wonderful who's-who of character actors.
We had a great casting director named Jerry Barton who was willing to go for it with actors in every slot that were punching above the weight of the budget that we had for the movie. Ultimately actors are going to commit based on the script, and the script we had was (and is) a tremendously original and exciting kind of project for people. So actors were attracted to it. And as I started talking to them about different aspects of the movie and what we were up to, you know, actors are purely artists and they sensed that we were doing a movie that was different from traditional movies and they jumped in. We were incredibly fortunate to get people like Snoop Dogg and James Van Der Beek and Bill Duke and Rebecca Mader and Autumn Reeser in smaller parts in the movie and to get people like Delroy Lindo and Sam Elliott and Antonio Banderas in the movie, it was really a function of perseverance, a great script, and actors who saw an opportunity.

It must have been great, too, because a lot of these guys are real weirdos and they must have brought a lot to the movie as well.
Definitely! William Fichtner is a classic case of that. We worked long and hard to tailor the script to Bill's vision of the character. On the set he would add some extraordinary idiosyncrasies to this character who is a street-smart, psychopathic cop, and bring him to life. He's an incredible actor. Watching some of these actors watch these actors on the set work was really a privilege.

What was working with Sam Elliott like?
Sam plays a billionaire, pot-smoking hippie, and who has a brainstorm while surfing off of Tahiti, to look for the Higgs boson particle, which is the fundamental building block that brings matter to energy. And if you think of the idea of bringing matter to energy, it's the core of all life. So Sam was turned on by this character, and we envisioned the character as having long hair, so Sam sat in a barber's chair for 8 hours while he had hair extensions put in. And every time he did a take, with this long, blonde hair and this deep gravelly voice, and I thought that I was watching the Allman Brothers, you know, this great rock band lay down a track. And it was Sam Elliott laying down a take. I remember we were shooting outside Spokane, Washington, and it was freezing, and the set that we had was with a metal floor and Sam thought that his character would be barefoot. So he said, "I'm going to do this scene barefoot." It was a great idea and it added to the performance from Sam's perspective but about 45 minutes into it, he regretted having the idea because he was standing on this freezing floor. But it shows you what actors do – we never had a shot of his feet. It was all about what Sam felt about was important to the character and it informed his performance.

Was there ever a time when, and this goes from the look of the characters to the look of the film, when you said, "Eh, let's pull that back a little bit"?
It's a good question because the movie is extreme, it's definitely pushed to 11. We storyboarded the movie ahead of time, so this is all pre-planned before you shoot the movie. And the storyboard artist I used is this great guy named J. Todd Anderson, who the Coen Brothers have used, so we sat around and over four weeks storyboarded the movie completely. So once you complete the visual template for the movie and your art direction and wardrobe and lighting are consistent with a vision laid out in pre-production, in for a penny, in for a pound, you just go for it. Because if you start to second-guess yourself in that moment then you throw the baby out with the bathwater and all that planning and artistry gets thrown out, because that kind of fear-based thinking isn't going to lead to the best results.

It's interesting your movie is coming out alongside Terrence Malick's Tree of Life. There seems to be a lot of fascination at the moment with this idea about the formation of life in the universe. Why do you think that is?
I think it's coincidental. You could make some statement that we live in a world of existential crisis and all of us are looking for meaning and purpose and love and all of those types of things. I don't think that's linked to things of this era – it's been that way in Shakespeare's era and in Jesus' era and Buddha's era. I think that's nothing new. Every now and then, like Terrence Malick's movie and like this one, come through and break through and in spite of the forces arrayed against movies that deal with reality. But we got lucky and it's through a terrific script and hard work that we got this to happen.