Q&A with Director and Cast Members of The Jacket

By Jeff Hanson
Originally published on Friday, January 28, 2005, in the 2005 Sundance Film Festival Daily Insider.

The Jacket is more than just a psychological thriller with flashy, pyrotechnic-like effects and white-knuckle moments in tight, confined spaces. It’s a spellbinding story of a man’s search for self from director John Maybury (Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon). The film looks into the fractured mind of returning war veteran Jack Starks (Adrien Brody) who escapes a near-death experience in Iraq, only to be stricken with amnesia and later pegged for a murder he didn’t commit. After being sentenced to an insane asylum, his prescribed therapy from an experimental him on a trippy ride of self-discovery, sensual awareness, and good old fashioned hallucination. With the help of a woman he has strangely known
before (Keira Knightley), Starks tries to put the pieces of his fractured life back together. After a recent screening, John Maybury and members of the cast, including Adrien Brody, Keira Knightley, Daniel Craig, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Laura Marano, and Mackenzie Phillips, answered questions from the audience.

Jeff Hanson: You apparently believe that ambiguity is the soul of art. Would you expand on that?

John Maybury: I think what was interesting to me, was that this was an enormous challenge. The screenwriter, Massy Tadjedin, produced an extraordinarily sophisticated, complex piece of writing from a premise that was essentially nonsense. And she gave it a resonance and a depth. She gave these characters, which were so brilliantly portrayed by my actors, reality and space. And these characters are like all of us — unresolved, ambiguous. None of us knows the answers to our life. What I liked about this film is on one hand it is a kind of popcorn movie, you have big handfuls of popcorn, you drink your cola, you smoke a joint, it’s like a roller coaster ride.

But at the same time, it offers viewers intellectual challenges and it rewards repeated viewings. It’s very simple and it’s very complex. What became very disturbing to me while we were filming, and then later in postproduction, was that what seemed like a kind of subversive psychological thriller turned into a metaphor for Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. It wasn’t intentional on anyone’s part, but somehow the world around us started to outdo our special effects.

Jeff Hanson: What is the significance of the blue beads and the patient we see at the hospital?

JM: They were tied to Starks’ rucksack and obviously you’re meant to think that the stranger has stolen them with the rucksack. Just to wind you up as an audience I gave them to Daniel’s character in the movie, too, for no other reason than that it doesn’t mean anything.

Jeff Hanson: How did the production style, being such a large process, change your creative process as a director?

JM: It kind of didn’t, actually. I had the same production designer I’ve worked with for 20 odd years. There’s an intimacy to this that’s different from the Super8 and video work I did 20 years ago. Some people got paid very well — I didn’t. The great thing about this was, despite the grand names that are on the film, it actually is an independent film. And all the people who worked on the film worked against enormous pressures, and rising to the occasion out of commitment to the project, for the cast and myself. And out of a commitment for filmmaking.

Jeff Hanson: Did you shoot any other endings?

JM: Several.

Will they be released?

JM: I’m sure there’ll be appalling DVD extras.

Jeff Hanson: This is a question for Adrien Brody. What was your reaction when you first read the script? Were you able to wrap your brain around the whole thing the first time through?

Adrien Brody: It’s difficult to comprehend a script of this nature. First of all, it’s not linear. It’s a structured story, but it’s difficult to comprehend anything on the page before it reaches John Maybury’s hands. A lot of the stuff that my character experiences in The Jacket is very internal. I was unable to know what I was capable of delivering on [any given] day because it was based on what level of the truth I could connect to emotionally in that moment. And I didn’t have the luxury of all the CG that we see later. But it’s a very compelling story. It’s a wonderful, contemporary, “everyman” character and that’s really rare for an actor.

Jeff Hanson: How did Adrien and Keira prepare for their roles?

Keira Knightley: John got me a really great dialogue coach named Judy Adams and I worked with Judy for about a month before we started. Then he gave us lots of music. We watched lots of films, and we talked through various emotions and all that kind of thing. Oh, and I watched Edie Sedgwick in Ciao! Manhattan on a loop — and Marlene Dietrich.

AB: Obviously, there were a number of things that were necessary to prepare me for understanding someone under those conditions. The
most exciting and interesting part of the preparation was that production managed to find me a sensory deprivation chamber in Glasgow, which I subjected myself to for hours on end. A normal session is 15-30 minutes to help you relax and unwind from the outside world. If you stay there long enough, you don’t need drugs. You’re in a kind of body temperature saline solution, so you’re no longer affected by gravity and in silence for the most part and in complete darkness.

I became very cognizant of the lack of connection to my physical body, experiencing more of an awareness of space around me while completely
leaving behind the physical being. I also had the opportunity to work with William Hurt prior to this. I talked to him extensively about the research he had done in Altered States. But it was a very exciting process. I also have a friend who was a G.I. injured in Iraq, so I have a personal connection to this. I felt very connected and very moved to have the opportunity to have a greater understanding of the people who are, in a sense, victims of these systems.