Secondtime Director

Hollywood loved Tim McCanlies' script for 'Secondhand Lions,' but nobody wanted to do it right -- and then he brought it home to Texas

by Chris Garcia
American-Statesman Film Writer

September 11 , 2003

© 2003 www.austin360.com . All rights Reserved.

Be sure to read the excellent original article.

What does a Hollywood director look like these days? We have a stereotypical idea: male, 30 to 40-ish, T-shirt, trendy sneakers, tumbled bed-head, neglected facial hair that can injure those who seek physical intimacy. Even Robert Altman, at 78, sports a goatee, and Steven Spielberg, in 30 years behind the lens, has failed to shake a perpetual nerdy adolescence — Bill Gates with a camera.

Tim McCanlies, then, does not look like a Hollywood director. Stout like a Teddy bear, a neat shirt tucked into clean jeans and altogether tidier than Austin's twin big-shot directors (Hi, Richard; Hi, Robert), who generally look like they've returned from a day at the lake, McCanlies blends effortlessly into his environment. He's the regular guy, unconsciously anti-glamour, a fifth-generation Texan who speaks plainly and is quick with a warm smile. He looks like he has oatmeal, fried eggs and coffee for breakfast and works eight to five at the neighborhood hardware store.

McCanlies, 50, doesn't even stand out on his own movie set. Last November in Pflugerville, shooting the coming-of-age dramedy "Secondhand Lions," McCanlies wore pretty much what he always wears. He was upstaged in the set-visitor's pastime of Who's-that? by generic crew members.

McCanlies isn't playing that game. Though his vaulting imagination says otherwise, he's not a kid anymore. He's here to write and direct films, to make the art that calls out to him to be made. He lives in his Los Angeles condo only when he must, preferring the cows and quietude of his High Lonesome Ranch, 355 verdant acres in southeastern Bastrop County, where he likes to unpack his fantasies and turn them into screenplays. Some of those include "Secondhand Lions," "Dancer, Texas Pop. 81" — both of which he also directed — the acclaimed animated tale "The Iron Giant" and the upcoming Jackie Chan vehicle "Around the World in 80 Days," which co-stars Owen Wilson, Luke Wilson and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

But it is "Lions" that could make or sprain McCanlies, whose 24-year journey in filmmaking has been spiked with fanfare and frustration. His second directorial effort — whose $30 million budget is more than 10 times that of 1998's "Dancer, Texas" — arrives in theaters Sept. 19 swathed in positive buzz. This is partly because the screenplay coursed through Hollywood for 10 years, earning legendary status. It was coveted by almost every studio and declared by online reviewers one of the three best unproduced scripts in Hollywood.

Still, McCanlies remains pragmatic. He knows the system can be cruel and capricious. He predicts the film will be "a modest hit and a big home-video success."

"I don't know what's going to happen," McCanlies says, lunching at an Austin cafe. "I think the movie works. It's not like I'm going to get a lot of bad reviews. They'll run from B-minus to, I hope, A-plus. The question is at the box office. It could make $20 million or $200 million. I don't know. None of us knows. That's what's so weird."

Shot last year in Austin, Pflugerville and Coupland, "Secondhand Lions" returns McCanlies to his Texas roots and the sort of story that's always touched his heart. "Dancer, Texas" was a sunny snapshot of a West Texas hamlet and four high school pals who yearn to escape it for the wider world. "Lions" is also set in rural Texas and chronicles the sentimental education of a boy (Haley Joel Osment) by his ornery and possibly heroic great-uncles (Robert Duvall and Michael Caine).

"It's what I know," McCanlies says. "I love Jane Austen but I don't know if I could pull off her dialogue. I love the Texas vernacular. There's a kind of elevated use of language, a more colorful language. And there's a humor Texans have that I love, a sort of outrageous, eccentric behavior that's reined in with a straight face, very wry. It's my sensibility."

His thematic preoccupations — life lessons, moral codes and doing the right thing — were informed by John Ford movies and heart-on-sleeve dramas such as "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Stand By Me." His filmmaking "gods" are Pixar ("Toy Story," "Finding Nemo") and Hayao Miyazaki (animé features like "Spirited Away"), both trafficking in archetypes of friendship, loyalty and family — warm-fuzzy stuff.

Picking up life experience

Born in Great Falls, Mont., McCanlies was an Air Force brat with literary dreams. He read Hardy Boys and science fiction and in second grade started writing his own novels. "I was trying to figure out the whole storytelling process," he recalls.

In 1968, his family settled in Bryan, where McCanlies was a "long-haired hippie" and editor of his high school's underground newspaper, The Issue. He joined other social outcasts in the school drama program and eventually acted in, wrote and directed for a local repertory company and summer stock.

After a year in the radio-television-film department at the University of Texas, McCanlies earned a theater degree from Texas A&M. He made an award-winning short film called "Nicole et Claude" as a graduate film student at Southern Methodist University. In Dallas he worked as a police officer not only to pay the bills, but to fortify his writing with some Hemingwayesque life experience.

"There were no wars in Spain, so I thought being a cop would be cool," he says. "And it was. You're 21, they give you a gun and a car and you get to drive as fast as you want."

He polished the craft of narrative in his florid police reports and boned up on moviemaking by shooting a few training films for the department.

McCanlies moved to Los Angeles in 1979 to write screenplays, a naif with "no idea what I was getting into." For five years he took screenwriting courses, wrote unread volumes and slipped scripts onto the desks of directors like Sydney Pollack.

One of his scripts, a "Beverly Hills Cop"-like caper titled "Louisiana Run," loosely based on his police experience, landed him a two-year writing deal at Disney. The pay was as paltry as the artistic dividends. When he refused to write a sequel for "Ernest Goes to Camp" on moral grounds - he thought the Ernest movies were cruel and sadistic - Disney sent him home for two months. That's when McCanlies wrote "Dancer, Texas" and honed his talent for feel-good, character-building movies.

Movie buzz but no movie

Though it swirls with humor, animal high jinks, swashbuckling adventure and fantastical flashbacks that point to a whopping mystery, "Secondhand Lions" marinates in McCanlies' pet themes of virtue and honor as it tells the story of how two cranky old Texans are softened by the unwanted arrival of a wide-eyed boy.

After nurturing the story for two years, McCanlies wrote the script in six weeks in 1992.

"I had the idea for these two characters, who were like Indiana Jones in their youth," he recalls. "But now they're angry old men who can't do the things they used to. Then I wondered what would happen if suddenly a kid had to stay with them and they had to put up with him and what could he learn? What is it that men have to teach a boy? That's when I got to the heart of what the story's about."

Hollywood adored the script, but didn't quite know what to do with its old-fashioned flavor.

"Every young executive had enormous respect for the screenplay and loved it," says the film's producer, David Kirschner. "But I don't think anybody was willing to risk his job by making it. It's not a cool, hot, sexy movie. It's a funny, touching movie."

Throughout the '90s, McCanlies optioned the script at four different studios. At one point, Warner Bros. "literally wanted to turn it into 'Grumpy Old Men 3,' " he says.

Each week for 10 years, he would get a half dozen inquiries about the script. It landed him great writing jobs, including that for "Iron Giant."

"My reputation sort of rested on the script," he says.

After he directed "Dancer, Texas," McCanlies decided he was going to direct "Lions" or no one was. It was his baby and he wanted it done right. Too many times bad productions had ruined perfectly good scripts, such as the one he wrote for "Dennis the Menace Strikes Again."

"Even though they followed the script religiously, they cast it wrong and made all the wrong decisions," McCanlies sighs.

The "Lions" cast could tell that the screenplay was in McCanlies' blood, boosting their confidence in the tyro director.

"The more time he has with the script, the clearer idea he has of it," Osment said on the film's set last November. "Tim went into this knowing exactly what he wants from every single scene. You can ask him about your character or what's happening in a scene and he knows just what's going on because this world of 'Secondhand Lions' has been in his head for a decade."

A large part of the screenplay's reputation was based on its powerful surprise ending, which Duvall called the best ending he's ever read and left Kirschner "weeping uncontrollably."

But the ending didn't test well during a battery of "opinion-maker" screenings. What worked beautifully on the page lost viewers who thought the epilogue dragged and was implausible.

The world's greatest ending was scrapped. In May, McCanlies had to leave post-production in L.A. and return to Texas for a one-day reshoot that cost $600,000. ("One-third of what 'Dancer, Texas' cost," he says.)

McCanlies shrugs, "If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. I could feel the momentum seeping away during test screenings. As a filmmaker you know the film so well, then you watch it with an audience and you really feel what's going on around you and what's working and what's not." (He promises the original ending will be on the DVD.)

Back home again

Now that he's sat in the director's chair, which can be something of a hot seat, McCanlies has a new appreciation for the measured solitude of writing, which he does in the 1,000-square-foot, bookshelf-lined office he recently added to his house.

"Writing is very idyllic in that you get up in the morning and toddle upstairs and you write four hours and then you're out at the pool," he says. "Directing, you're on the set at 5 a.m. and you work 20 hours."

McCanlies is an apt pupil on the set, absorbing lessons from his cinematographer and others. "I'm not God's gift to directing, I'm a writer who directs in self-defense. I'm like Preston Sturges in that way. I'm more of a writer than a director. I'm a serviceable director and I think I'm getting better," he says.

"(Tim) is very much a presence on the set," Caine said last November. "He's full of ideas, but he's also very receptive to your ideas."

After a whirlwind of publicity for the movie, McCanlies will settle back at the ranch, where he keeps watch over 50 cows and shoots the occasional javelina, a vicious feral hog that roams the land. (A pack of them almost killed his dog.) The former cop is still a volunteer fireman serving the String Prairie, Rosanky and Pine Valley communities. He sometimes wears overalls.

But this country boy has some big city worries. Even though "Secondhand Lions" is in the can, the concerns have only begun. You can see McCanlies worry as he tries to camouflage it in laugh-streaked nonchalance.

"If the movie makes $20 million it will be hard for me to direct next time," he says. "If it does $60 million I'll be able to set up my next project without too much hassle. If it does $100 million, anybody in town will do anything with me I want."

He fidgets, shrugs, rubs his hands together in an anxious flutter.

"Whether I work again or the phone rings off the hook depends on what happens when the film opens next week," he says. "My life is hanging in the balance."

McCanlies may not look like a Hollywood director, but he sure is starting to sound like one.