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It is 5 p.m., but Robert Longo is
far from finished work. He has stepped outside a Toronto film-production
building for a brief respite from the stale air of an editing suite, where
he is cutting and mixing the sound track for his debut effort as a feature
film director. The movie is the science fiction thriller Johnny Mnemonic,
starring Keanu Reeves. It has to be ready by November, and there are still
the verdicts of the studio bosses and preview audiences to be accounted for.
A great deal is riding on
Johnny Mnemonic. With a budget of $32 million, much of it devoted to
elaborate special effects, it is the most expensive Canadian film ever made.
It may also be the hardest work the driven Longo — one of the superstars of
the 1980s New York City art scene — has ever undertaken, even more demanding
than his monumental drawings, complex gallery installations or vast
sculptures. “About three-quarters of the way through shooting, I had this
feeling that I hadn’t had since I was 15 that was like waking up in the
morning and not wanting to go to school,” Longo, 40, admits as rush-hour
traffic roars east, deserting downtown. “The life that I’ve built for myself
over the past 20 years is as an artist, which has some structure to it. But
it wasn’t an everyday job. This is an everyday job. And I was prepared for
that, but its taken its toll on my family and my life [he is married to
German actor Barbara Sukowa, and they have three sons]. I gained about 60
pounds making the movie, and I had a baby that was born during the year in
Toronto, and I hardly saw the kid.”
The movie’s three-month shoot,
which began in Toronto and ended in Montreal in April, was one third longer
than the average domestic production. And the major backers, TriStar in the
United States and Alliance Releasing in Canada, have taken a big gamble in
hiring New York-based Longo, whose previous film experience was limited to
short experimental art movies, videos for bands including R.E.M. and New
Order, and two episodes of the HBO horror series Tales from the Crypt.
But Longo says directing the movie — the first film adaptation of a
“cyberpunk” work by Vancouver author William Gibson — was a natural
progression for him. “I’ve never viewed being an artist as being someone
locked in a studio, painting my neuroses,” says the burly Longo, who wears
his long hair in a ponytail and tends to dress entirely in black. “My work
has always been media-based, and making movies is part of the investigation.
It’s important the artist functions outside of a studio. Artists are the
last people left who can tell the truth. Nobody’s sponsoring us.”
True to his work ethic, and to
his habit of constantly juggling several projects at once, Longo was keen to
get back to painting and drawing while still at work on Johnny Mnemonic.
In the spring, as principal photography was wrapping up, he rented space in
a Toronto industrial neighborhood and started work on 13 huge
abstract-expressionist canvases, which he calls Johnny Paintings. Then, once
he began editing the movie, he created a series of sketches that he refers
to as the Mnemonic Drawings. The paintings are now on display at the
Genereux-Grunwald Gallery in Toronto’s west end until Oct. 1. And getting to
show them was a coup for gallery owners Linda Genereux and Fela Grunwald.
Longo first visited their establishment to look at an exhibition of
contemporary furniture that might serve as set decoration in the movie, and
then offered to mount his work there. His Johnny Paintings, which sell for
between $13,000 and $110,000, represent a rare excursion into nonfigurative
work. And he is surprisingly blunt in his assessment of them. “I’d say 80
percent are pretty successful paintings. The other ones are there to keep
the 80 percent legitimate.”
Longo is similarly upbeat about
Johnny Mnemonic, although he concedes that it was “weird doing art by
committee. Someone told me they didn’t realize how Machiavellian I was. I
figure there are 160,000 pictures — individual frames — in a 90-minute
movie, so I’m trying to figure out how many of them I can actually have
control over. For whatever criticism I have about this system to make the
movie, it’s also important to understand that I appreciate them giving me
the opportunity. When I look at the movie, I realize how much control I did
have. There are a lot of people with a lot of money in this movie, and they
deserve their voice. They’ve taken a degree of risk, and I appreciate that.”
Johnny Mnemonic is the
futuristic tale of a data courier (Reeves), a kind of binary mule who is
transporting purloined computer code in chips inside his skull. The
information that he carries in his head is valuable to a range of bad guys,
including a messianic monstrosity played by hulking blond action-movie
stalwart Dolph Lundgren. And Johnny’s mission is complicated by a personal
quirk: he has no memory of his childhood or adolescence. All that
nonessential data was cleared out of Johnny’s head in order to increase his
computer-code storage capacity, to make him a more efficient courier.
Almost all of Gibson’s novels,
including Neuromancer and Count Zero, had already been
optioned for film by the time the producers obtained the rights to Johnny
Mnemonic. It was Gibson’s first published short story, appearing in
1981. In the late 1980s, the author and Longo became friends, and the two
began planning a movie version. Recalls Gibson: “For a while we were
thinking of doing it as a small art film, for maybe $1 or $2 million. We
went around to people in Hollywood with that figure and they just laughed.
One guy was so amused by the idea that we thought we could do it that
cheaply that he was almost ready to give us the money just to see what we
came up with.” In the end, TriStar and Alliance teamed up as producers. They
decided to go with Longo as director largely because of the partnership that
he and Gibson had forged during five years of trying to get the picture
made, and because of Alliance producer Don Carmody’s admiration of Longo’s
artwork.
During the filming, it was
rumored that relations had soured between the producers and director, and
that the project had fallen behind schedule. But key players — Longo and
Carmody included — dismiss that muttering as wishful thinking. “The shoot
was incredibly pleasant,” Longo says. “I never had any problems with actors,
and that was one of my biggest fears. I think people want to believe that
there are problems with this film. The movie has a lot of pressure on it
because Keanu’s become a superstar [with the success of Speed].”
Carmody was on the set daily
throughout principal photography and is supervising postproduction. He says
that Longo’s work has been “just incredible. When he started working on
this, he wasn’t a complete neophyte, but about as close as you can get.
Action pictures like this one are the toughest genre to direct. There were
no guarantees in his contract. We could easily have fired him at any time.
At first, you could see the actors particularly were wary. But he talked
Keanu into taking some incredible risks.” The production is under budget
and, according to Carmody, “only a couple of weeks behind schedule, but
nothing serious.” Any fights that occurred, he says, were good-natured
disagreements. “I’m already talking to him about working on another picture,
and there are other producers discussing future projects with him as well.”
Longo says the only difficult
aspect of making the picture has been looking at its images over and over
again through the process of editing and postproduction. He’s used to
working a set of imagery in his painting or sculpture, then moving on once
he feels the exploration is complete. “I keep seeing mistakes I made, and
there’s no way I can get ‘em back. I can’t walk up to the screen with a
pencil and, like, fix the lighting on Keanu’s ear.”
As a visual artist, Longo is
known for the drama, aggression and scale of his work. Born to an
Italian-American family in Brooklyn in 1953, he did not decide on a career
in art until he was 20. Yet within a decade he was reaping the whirlwind of
fame and money in the unprecedented art boom of the 1980s. Longo’s best
known work is perhaps his series of huge charcoal and graphite drawings, Men
in the Cities, which he produced from 1978 to 1981. The pieces depict
archetypal Eighties urban achievers — men in suits and women in cocktail
dresses — straining in atavistic struggle with a variety of foes: greed,
aspiration, ambition and each other.
Many still refer to Longo as part
of a triumvirate of Eighties New York art-stars along with David Salle and
Julian Schnabel. Eminent U.S. critic Robert Hughes once denounced Longo as
an emblem of everything that was wrong with American art during the past
decade: “an oversize mélange of technical sophistication and sentimental
blatancy, with more wallop than resonance.” And Longo’s current foray into
filmmaking has been dismissed by some as just another careerist leap. But he
has always worked to express himself in several realms at once. He has also
been a musician in rock bands and directed plays and opera while working in
a variety of artistic media.
Directing movies may prove a
career salvation of sorts for Longo. As the 1980s ended, his efforts to
engage both collectors and audiences stalled. Staff members at his New York
dealer, Metro Pictures, say his art — which once fetched as much as $270,000
per work — dropped to more realistic amounts, along with everyone else’s.
Notes Longo: “When I did this big retrospective of my work in [at the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art], that’s when it hit the brick wall. In
1990, I left New York and moved to Paris. The reason I left was because I
was being blamed for the Eighties art world.” After two years, Longo
returned to New York revitalized. “I had readjusted myself quite a bit, and
the world that had helped build me, once it knocked me down, couldn’t hurt
me anymore.”
Now, with Johnny Mnemonic,
Longo is downloading a new set of skills and hoping to quash charges that he
is a facile dilettante. “It was a great learning experience,” he says of the
filming. “I will most definitely make other movies, now that I know how to
do it.”
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