LOS ANGELES, Sept 3 — Books about the unsavory alliance between the Boston mobster James (Whitey) Bulger and a corrupt FBI, including the best-selling “Black Mass,” serve up one horrific detail after another: a man stabbed 38 times with an ice pick, drive-by machine gun shootings, a young woman who is strangled with bare hands, the digging up of rotting corpses.
But when Scott Cooper decided to make “Black Mass” into a movie, he had the murderous Bulger’s humanity on his mind. As in, was there any?
“I didn’t want to make a film about criminals who happen to have a human side,” Cooper said. “I wanted to make a film about humans who just happen to be criminals.”
The resulting film is about to leap into Hollywood’s annual awards race.
Tomorrow, “Black Mass,” directed by Cooper with an unrecognizable Johnny Depp playing Bulger, and Joel Edgerton, Benedict Cumberbatch and Julianne Nicholson in major roles, will make its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. Screenings at festivals in Telluride, Colorado, and Toronto are expected to follow, and Warner Bros. will then release “Black Mass” in domestic theatres on September 18.
Although “Black Mass” is only Cooper’s third film as a director — after growing up in Virginia, he began his career as an actor — he knows this terrain, both as a winner and as a loser. His first film, “Crazy Heart,” a hard-edged country-music romance that he wrote and directed, won Oscars in 2010 for Jeff Bridges (best actor) and Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett (best song).
But his second film, the extra-bleak “Out of the Furnace,” starring Christian Bale and Casey Affleck as brothers in a crime-infested Pennsylvania factory town, collapsed on the early awards circuit in 2014.
“It’s only in retrospect that you can say, ‘OK, that was maybe too much for the audience,’” said Cooper, 45. He was sitting in his spare writing room in this city’s Brentwood district, where he has been working on a script for what might be his next movie, a western set in 1892, with Bale in line to star.
The lesson from “Out of the Furnace” was to find the humanity, and without it, “Black Mass,” which has no hero but plenty of complicated players, might have been impossible. By design, Cooper said, “Black Mass” is more “accessible,” even though it focuses on a real-life killer whose methods were brutal in the extreme.
Indicted for 19 killings, Bulger, who turns 86 today, was sentenced in 2013 to two consecutive life prison terms for crimes, violent and otherwise, during his reign over various rackets in South Boston, mostly in the 1970s and ‘80s. His brother, William, played by Cumberbatch, was for years president of the Massachusetts Senate. A neighborhood friend, John Connolly, played by Edgerton, was an FBI agent who used Bulger as an informant but turned a blind eye to his crimes, and ultimately went to prison for it.
As portrayed in the film, Bulger — finally captured in 2011 in Santa Monica, California, after 16 years on the run — was capable of coolly strangling a friend’s stepdaughter (played by Juno Temple) with his bare hands. A few hours later, after eating a steak dinner, he aggressively caresses the face of his FBI handler’s horrified wife, played by Nicholson. “He face molests her,” Cooper said.
Viewers may sense something real in Nicholson’s aversion to Depp’s touch. Cooper said he had not entirely told her what to expect from the scene. “She was unaware — I don’t typically rehearse much,” he said.
Yet Cooper, working with a script whose credited writers are Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth, was determined to portray Bulger as something more than a sociopath. Otherwise, he said, “it was hard to find an emotional core to the movie.”
Part of the solution was leaving out some of the gruesomeness. There is no ice pick scene, for instance. Cooper also focused on what he called “the almost doomed love story” between Bulger and Connolly, who met as children. “I wanted to see a tender side to their relationship,” he said.
This Whitey Bulger is interested in steak seasonings, lets his mother cheat at cards and mostly interacts with Connolly more as an overpowering older brother than as a homicidal maniac.
The most significant humanizing detail, Cooper came to believe, was Bulger’s loss of a 6-year-old young son to Reye’s syndrome in 1973.
“Having seen my parents lose a child at a young age, I know how terrible that can be,” Cooper said. (Cooper’s older sister died from a rare form of meningitis when she was 7.) Reliving trauma of that sort through Bulger’s eyes, Depp found the heart of a reflexive killer. “He underwent a transformation I hadn’t seen,” Cooper said.
Physically, Depp ages into the gaunt, balding man who was 81 when arrested in 2011. Emotionally, he is scarred by the death of a son whom he had been sweetly coaching through basic life lessons, including his core belief: The only real crime is getting caught.
Much of “Black Mass” is shot in close-up. Actors, including Depp, sometimes stare into a 75mm lens, creating what Cooper said he hoped would be a sense of “claustrophobia” for viewers. (Certain shots were designed to look like surveillance photos.) For two hours, the audience will be trapped with a character whose movements are both economical and deadly, “much like a cobra,” he said.
Cooper said he deeply admired Martin Scorsese, who directed “The Departed,” a highly fictionalised telling of the Bulger story that won Oscars for best picture, director, adapted screenplay and film editing in 2007. But he admitted to no particular trepidation in following that film.
Occasionally more intimidating, he said, were the pressures of shooting in Boston, where Bulger associates still live. On the advice of a longtime mentor, Robert Duvall, Cooper asked some of those neighbourhood figures to make appearances in “Black Mass.” A few were willing, he said, but others turned cold.
“Whitey Bulger was very good to this neighbourhood,” he recalls their saying. “No, I have no interest.” — The New York Times
