“It’s a punk Marvel movie.” So says director Tony Kaye about his latest film, The Trainer, one of the more intriguing films to world premiere this year at the Rome Film Festival (October 16-27).
The Trainer centres on Jack Flex, a penniless fitness expert who takes a maniacal swing at fame and fortune by trying to sell the Heavy Hat, an obviously dangerous fitness gadget, on his mum’s favourite home shopping channel.
Flex is played by Vito Schnabel who also produced and co-wrote the film. An art dealer as well as a filmmaker, Schnabel made a brief appearance aged 11 in his father Julian Schnabel’s Oscar-nominated Before Night Falls and also recently appeared in Ryan Murphy’s series Feud: Capote and the Swans, directed by Gus Van Sant.
Having earned a reputation as a maverick and highly creative commercials director in Britain and the US, Kaye directed the Oscar-nominated American History X in 1996 – but famously got into a high-profile dispute with New Line and star Edward Norton about the final cut of the film. (“I was, it has to be said, a spectacular pain in the ass,” he reflected, a few years later.) He has since made Oscar-nominated documentary Lake Of Fire (2006) and feature Detachment (2011) starring Adrien Brody as well as directing music videos for acts including Johnny Cash, The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Roger Waters.
Out of the box
Given this reputation, one can understand that Vito Schnabel might be nervous to work with Kaye. Not so, says Schnabel: “I represent artists and I love artists. People had told me that Tony was eccentric, he was out of the box or could be difficult… But I trusted Tony, and I felt like I had known him for a long time. He felt familial and familiar. I have the utmost respect for this man. And there is nothing crazy [about him]. Does he think differently than others? Yes, but that’s what we want.”
Sporting a huge flowing grey beard, Kaye is now 72 and looks rather like a guru; indeed he appears briefly in the middle of The Trainer as a guru, dispensing life advice to Jack Flex.
In the middle of our interview, reflecting on his early career in Hollywood, Kaye reads out a poem he has written, which includes the lines: ”I left your shores of Blighty. I never took it lightly. I planned to be a big success, but I ran into a buzzsaw called my ego and caused a massive mess.”
The poem goes on to praise his experience of working with Schnabel on the film: ”He saved me with his acting shots. He saved me with his story. He saved me with his heavy hat. He saved me with his understanding and deep finesse.”
Kaye says he now has an obsession with acting and creating unusual characters who are “singularly focussed beings, determined to achieve something, slammed up against the powers that be, the forces that wreak warfare, and havoc upon any soul trying to break from what is termed good taste.”
He has coined his own methodology for working with actors, which he dubs the Melody Spotty Grass Acting Technique.
“It is where you bend down, and listen to grass grow. You imagine shapes, and colours, and hear music in your mind’s eye. You stop. You think. You empty your brain of everything and react to the other actors, you do whatever it is you want. We dwell upon that system for a while, that chaos, that mayhem, then you move forward with a precise structure, and control. Then you edit from the results.”
He says his technique was honed from working with Marlon Brando on his infamous 2001 acting workshop Lying for A Living. “It goes totally against the Moscow Art Theatre…I set out here to question Method Acting…the Melody Spotty Grass Acting Technique sets out to question all forms of intellectualism within acting.”
LA fairy tale
For his part, Schnabel says The Trainer is a love story, a parody and an LA fairy tale. It’s also semi-autobiographical. It is about “perseverance and believing in yourself and in one’s dream, and no matter what…When I was a kid, I was really worried about how I was going to make it in the world…Tony gave me a shot at doing something that I didn’t know I was able to do.”
Schnabel started putting pen to paper on The Trainer ten years ago, eventually teaming with actor/comedian/musician Jeff Solomon to co-write the script and then raising money for it. “I had a few people who got more and more attached to it and engaged and involved. And they stuck around. We did it totally independently,” says Schnabel. The long list of high-profile executive producers on the film – 17 in total from the worlds of art, finance, film and tech – hints at how the movie was financed. International rights are currently being negotiated.
Connections also played a part in attracting the film’s cast, which includes Julia Fox, Steven Van Zandt, Beverly D’Angelo, Bella Thorne, Gina Gershon, Stephen Dorff, Lenny Kravitz, Paris Hilton and John McEnroe. There are also many cameo clips featuring the likes of Snoop Dogg to artist Ai Weiwei.
“I have a beautiful history with Julia, we both grew up in the city,” says Schnabel. “And Lenny’s been there since day one…and McEnroe, I happen to know [him] a little bit. He had an art gallery so he’s in the art world, so he showed up. Once you start, it’s like a snowball effect…and people gravitate towards Tony. They want to work with him.”
Sharing control
Early on, Schnabel and Kaye agreed a deal to have 50-50 creative control on the movie – if Kaye or Schnabel wasn’t happy, The Trainer wouldn’t be released. Schnabel says he was warned this was “a big fucking mistake.” But, he believes, it worked. “It was in good faith. It was just the nature of what we were doing together - I felt like that’s the way it had to be done….I wasn’t worried, actually, I felt so lucky to have met this man, and I still do.”
Kaye was aiming for a frenetic, colourful energy. “My whole thing was it [also] had to play for a 14 year old kid on a bus, hanging on a bus rail, watching it on his or her phone,” he explains. Schnabel adds: “We spoke a lot about the freneticism of this character. He never stops moving…he’s in this desperate mode of survival to make this thing happen, which he wants so badly. And Tony captured the energy of that.”
So, what’s next for the two of them? Schnabel is speaking from Greece where he is five weeks into a shoot of a film, starring again alongside Julia Fox. Kaye, meanwhile, is making Humpty Dumpty X, about what he went through making American History X.
After this interview, Kaye gets back in touch a few days after the film’s premiere in Rome. “The premiere was quite amazing,” he says. “It was an extraordinary journey that we took here – Roman folk are warm, emotional, and love the cinema.”
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