Like his emotionally explosive films (The Notebook and John Q among them), Nick Cassavetes's mere appearance demands attention. The 47-year-old writer-director stands well over six feet tall, and his young face and silver hair contrast with the elaborate tattoos on his neck and arms. Sitting down in a conference room at the Four Seasons hotel downtown, he begins to doodle shapes and names on a notepad.
"Oh, this is my phone list. I have to call people back," he explains.
Indeed, Cassavetes is a busy man these days: he's currently promoting January's new Alpha Dog, a biopic of Jesse James Hollywood, the youngest fugitive ever to appear on the FBI's 10-most-wanted list (names and locations were changed due to an ongoing lawsuit ). A jarring look at Southern Californian twentysomethings with too much money and not enough parental guidance, Dog stars The Girl Next Door's Emile Hirsch as a 20-year-old drug dealer who kidnaps the teenage brother of an addict who owes him money.
"He made a very, very bad decision. He hadn't watched enough CSI," Cassavetes says of Hirsch's Johnny Truelove, for whom the basis was Mr. Hollywood. The story begins with a lengthy study of Truelove's hard-partying crew, which includes Justin Timberlake as a loopy pot smoker. The intense second half examines the group's infighting over whether they should return the kidnapped kid (Anton Yelchin), with Truelove growing desperate as the bullets start flying.
"I'm not looking for shock value. The story in itself is plenty of shock value. As a filmmaker, you kind of inherently know what the audience wants to see, you know how they want it to resolve. They want the bad guy to get theirs, and the good guy to be okay, and everybody having their own point of view and having lots of motivating actions. But that pesky little thing called the truth keeps popping up."
The peskiness, in this case, comes when events force Truelove to flee to South America to escape arrest. As in Cassavetes's other films, the father figure, Sonny Truelove (Bruce Willis), does what he must to keep his son safe, allegedly orchestrating Johnny's getaway. "At the end of the day, there's a kind of a jailhouse nobility in that," Cassavetes says. "I'd do the same damn thing. I don't care what my kid does, I'm gonna take care of him. Right is right and wrong is wrong, and I believe in that - except when it comes to my kid."
Such vibrant characters invest a documentary-like quality in Alpha Dog. Peppered with the unique dialect of rich white kids pretending they're rap thugs, Dog's script reflects painstaking research into the Jesse Hollywood case; Cassavetes interviewed nearly all the participants. Once shooting began, the actors too had to understand intimately the look of Hollywood's posse. With Cassavetes joining them to keep morale high, the performers suffered through eight weeks of early morning "ghetto workouts," as he calls them. "What [that] accomplished is, when we moved onto set, we moved on as a unit. Everybody knew everybody, everybody trusted everybody," he says.
Cassavetes' penchant for preparation differs from his father's tendency toward raw, avant-garde filmmaking. The late John Cassavetes was known for directing improvisational, critically-acclaimed indies like Faces and A Woman Under the Influence (and for his acting roles in The Dirty Dozen and Rosemary's Baby); his directorial efforts had a much narrower focus than the ensemble pieces of his son.
"I don't think of my old man as a filmmaker, I think of him as my dad. Of the experiences we had, very few times were talking about film," he says. "Clearly, my old man was a groundbreaking filmmaker. I'm nowhere near him. I don't aspire to be like him, because I'm having a hard [enough] time being like myself."
But despite the mainstream sensibilities of Nick Cassavetes, Alpha Dog shuns the preachiness of comparable works. "Films with strong social messages are full of crap," the director asserts. He does aim to convey an implicit lesson about the perils of youth culture today, though.
"Kids have their own kind of way of dealing with situations. In life you need both a forward gear and a reverse gear, and if you just keep going forward and forward, you're going to get yourself in a lot of trouble"
