Tales From Development Hell (39 page)

As rewriting continued, so did the search for someone to fill Lara’s boots. Despite earlier negotiations with Angelina Jolie, an edition of
Entertainment Weekly
dated 2 March 2000 quoted Simon West as saying that he was looking for an unknown actress to play what he described as the “James Bond of archaeology”, for a June start date. “To some, she’s the perfect woman, though others would say she’s a total male fabrication of what a woman should be,” he added. “We don’t want to ram a Hollywood star into this thing, because Lara is visually [known].”

West did not reveal how he planned to raise the money for a globe-trotting action movie with expensive set pieces, however, and the following day,
Variety
reported that Jolie — who was just two weeks away from winning an Academy Award for
Girl, Interrupted
— was in “final negotations” to play Lara Croft.
Tomb Raider
fans were divided on Jolie’s casting: some celebrated the idea of an actress as intrinsically sexy and cool as Jolie playing Lara; others were concerned that her off-screen activities — she sported numerous tattoos (including a large one bearing her then-husband Billy Bob Thornton’s name), and had admitted a proclivity for self-harm and knife wounds inflicted during sex — did not sit well with a game enjoyed by millions of pre-adolescent boys.
²

“It was always Angelina,” West later admitted to
Empire.
“I mean, Lara sleeps with knives and doesn’t take shit from anybody. That’s A. J. down to a
tee.” Nevertheless, it took some time for West to convince Jolie that the role fit her like a tank top and a pair of hot pants. “At first I thought
Tomb Raider
was a really bad idea,” she told
Empire.
“Like most people I thought, ‘Well, this is going to be silly and campy, and only based on that little outfit and the body.’ But then Simon and I talked about her, about her relationship with her father, and she became kind of beautiful to me.”

Certainly, one element of the
Tomb Raider
deal which may have helped swing the newly-minted Academy Award-winner into the film was the opportunity to work with her father, fellow Oscar-winner Jon Voight, from whom she had been estranged for many years. “It’s taken us a long time to figure out if we could do a project together, for many different reasons,” she said, “and it’s very special. It’s also very scary, because our relationship is very, very similar to these two people, [in that] through my whole life, I’ve followed in his footsteps. And he’s somebody who searches the world for information, different religions, different places, different myths.”

West went a step further than casting Voight as Lara’s explorer father, as de Souza explains: “One of the things that gave him leverage was she wanted to work with her father, so he said, ‘I’ll put your father in the movie, and I’ll let you write your own scenes with your father.’ So she and her father wrote those scenes they were in together. It shows how stupid everybody is because nowhere in the source material does it say the father’s dead,” he adds. “So if they want the father in the movie, let him be alive in the movie. They could have had a scene like in
The Mask of Zorro,
where the father dies in the daughter’s arms. Instead, they get the father in the movie the hardest way possible, with all these dream sequences and flashbacks.”

Despite de Souza’s reservations, regular Ain’t It Cool script reviewer ‘Moriarty’ was impressed by the shooting draft, not least the thematic resonance Massett and Zinman had been aiming for. “This script is first and foremost about Lara coming to some sense of peace with the loss of her father,” wrote Moriarty. “This entire adventure serves only to take Lara to the next step, to get her over this particular pain. Loss informs her every choice in the movie, and it’s one of the things that elevates the material, that gives it some heft and resonance.” As Massett explained, “It was always our intention for Lara to have a connection to the past, to the present, and to how those worlds collided and what that meant. The Triangle of Light held the theme to understand God, or man’s duty to understand the nature of Nature itself. That was the theme that came through.” Moriarty also approved of the script’s “nimble wit”, which included a sight gag where Lara, considering the
options for her next mission, opens a file containing pictures of Egypt: “Right away, she tosses it aside, a welcome sight for anyone who’s seen the Indy films and the new
Mummy.”
As for the supporting characters, he thought the Q-like Bryce was an interesting foil for the heroine, noted the effective “sexual energy” between Lara and Alex Marrs, and highlighted her “antagonistic sparring” with the Illuminati villain Manfred Powell.

“I was surprised by how much I invested in Lara and her father by the end of the film,” he added. “There’s difficult choices that she makes that mark her as a hero of real conscience and strength, rather than just a babe in shorts who’s good at killing thugs. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t some talky chick flick by any stretch of the imagination. There’s several great action set pieces... [and] each of them defines Lara or her relationships with Bryce, Powell, Marrs, and even her father. None of them are just action for the sake of it, and that’s what intrigues me most about this film... These set pieces are all built on clever ideas, smart in both text and subtext. Lara’s got a touch of angst in the film, as befits a story driven by the memory of her dead father, but she also loves what she does. She’s not Batman... She seems to attack situations with two hands, digging in, drunk on raw experience. Jolie’s got the exact right edge to play the role as written. There’s something in Lara that seems almost out of control, and that makes her dangerous, and that makes her even more interesting.”

Moriarty also admitted to being “unexpectedly moved” by the finale, in which the heroes and villains vie for The Power of God in The Tomb of Ten Thousand Shadows. “The choices faced in this scene make the whole film pay off... There’s a reason they didn’t just pour a pair of tits into the lead role of this film. Jolie’s got to go through some pretty harrowing beats to get to her final destination... The Lara Croft that comes out the other side is both tougher than she’s ever been, and finally able to embrace some sort of life away from danger and death.”

This shooting draft — credited to Massett, Zinman, Laeta Kalogridis and West himself — was dated 28 July 2000, just three days before production officially commenced at Britain’s Pinewood Studios, before setting off for such diverse locations as Cambodia and Iceland. “Originally, I wrote the idea to be in China, and I was going to use the Terracotta Army as an opposing force,” West commented later. “But it was not possible to organise getting to China in time. And also, when I thought about it, I realised that the Great Wall would only give me one big element, and I needed so much more for that sequence. So I started looking around to other places, because the
alternative was to build the Great Wall in Scotland, and the prospect of shooting in Scotland in winter didn’t appeal to me that much, and I didn’t think it was going to look that warm and ‘Chinese-y!’ So I looked around the world for other great settings and I happened to come across Cambodia.”

As filming continued, numerous cuts made to the budget and schedule meant that there would be fewer pieces to the plot puzzle. As Zinman explained, “We wrote a script that was just huge, and it needed to be scaled back. They had to omit a few costly scenes.” Thus, he added, “In the shooting draft it’s only two pieces of the triangle, [which is] symbolically less satisfying, because it’s only two, not three. But of course, we only have 120 minutes and only have however many millions of dollars.” Further cuts were made for budgetary reasons, including what would appear to be a crucial flashback in which Lord Croft (Jon Voight) explains the mythology, mysticism and might of the ‘Triangle of Light’ to seven year-old Lara, illustrated by cutaways of the action he narrates.

“Long, long ago, a meteor crashed to Earth,” he explains. “An ancient people excavated the meteor, and found, buried at its core, a mysterious, crystallised metal. They worshipped the metal for its magical powers, forging it into a sacred shape — a perfect triangle. They engraved upon it an emblem of its great power,” he goes on, referring to the ‘all-seeing eye’. “The mysterious Triangle induced great insights in its guardians, great knowledge in mathematics and science. They called themselves ‘The People of the Light’. But others heard of the power of the Triangle and wanted it for themselves. A great war raged, and finally their beautiful Spiral City suffered under a terrible siege. As fire engulfed their homes, the sun appeared to go out. It was a total eclipse. Believing the end of the world to be upon them, their High Priest prayed desperately to the heavens — ‘Let my enemies be vanquished.’ And with the words still on his lips, his prayers were answered in a horrific instant!

“The High Priest knew that this power should not be held by any man,” he continues. “A power that could explode the human mind. The power of God. He ordered the Triangle cut into two smaller, right-angled triangles. One half was to stay at the Temple, while the other half was to be hidden at the end of the earth to prevent the Triangle’s strange power from being used to change the fate of Humankind. In defiance of the High Priest, the craftsmen who had cut the Triangle in half secretly made a highly advanced clock to serve as a guide to find the hidden piece, and preserve the Triangle’s awesome powers for future generations of their kind. They called
themselves ‘The Illuminati’. They all realised that the exact alignment of the planets necessary to activate the Triangle would not be due for another 5,000 years. But eventually, after many centuries, the People of the Light, the craftsmen, and their incredible Spiral City, and of course, their secret clock, disappeared, evaporating from the pages of history.”

With this sequence cut, says de Souza, the search for the Triangle becomes meaningless, since “it was never clear what it could do. It just said [it had] ‘the power of a God’, or ‘power over time and space’, but what does that mean, really? Stephen Hawking has that, and he doesn’t even get out of his wheelchair!” De Souza also felt that the villains were “campy and arch,” likening the tone to the ill-fated big-screen adaptation of classic 1960s television caper
The Avengers.
In addition, he says, “When I was on the picture they were saying, ‘We want to get out of England by the end of the first act; we’ve got to be out of England by page thirty.’ So I said ‘OK.’ And this one here it’s barely ninety minutes long, but I think it really is like forty minutes before she leaves her house.” Only three elements of de Souza’s script survived to the shooting script: Lara’s fight against her household cybernetic opponent, her acrobatic gun battle with the invaders of Croft Hall, and the Ray Harryhausen homage in which the statues coming to life. This was not deemed sufficient for the Writers Guild of America to award de Souza a screen credit; instead, Werb, Colleary and Sara B. Cooper share story credit, with Massett, Zinman and West himself receiving credit for the screenplay. Screenwriters commonly fight for credit on a film, often claiming the best ideas as their own; in this case, de Souza says,
“all
the writers, who maybe under normal circumstances would say, ‘That son of a bitch rewrote me and changed me,’ were united in their dismay of this script, that had not been
written
so much as
un
written.”

As if the development had not been hellish enough, problems plagued the production, with the
Sunday Express
breaking the news on 8 October 2000 that raw footage from the film had been stolen during a daring raid worthy of Lara herself. “Burglars escaped with a rucksack containing sensitive video tapes and a wallet during a burglary at the home of director Simon West,” the tabloid reported, quoting West as saying he was woken by an intruder breaking the front door of his £1.1 million three-bedroomed home in Notting Hill, London. “I was in bed at home when I heard a huge crash downstairs at about 2am,” he said. “I got up and went down but they just ran out. I didn’t see them — just the front door swinging. I must have missed them by a split second. They snatched my bag, which had two or
three tapes including all the film so far — literally about half the film. It was everything we’ve done in the last two months.” Two months later, the film made headlines again when Angelina Jolie injured her ankle on location, causing a week’s delay, and adding $1 million to the already bloated budget, now edging towards $100 million.

Worse was to come, as one of West’s assistants filed a lawsuit against Paramount, the director, and Bobby Klein, reportedly a former “psychologist specialising in stress management” who acts as West’s manager (and received a screen credit as co-producer of the
Tomb Raider
film). Klein had hired Dana Robinson, a twenty-five year-old agent’s assistant for Creative Artists Agency, but after quitting her job and relocating to London to work on the production, she became uncomfortable with Klein’s sexual advances and other inappropriate behaviour. In a twenty-three-page complaint filed by her lawyers against Klein, West and Paramount, Robinson claimed emotional distress, sexual harassment and wrongful dismissal, since — she alleged — her complaints led to her being given the sack. Attorneys representing Paramount and West counter-claimed that she was dismissed after three months for poor work performance, while West has said that lawsuits like this come with the territory. “I’ve learned that when you get into this position in the entertainment industry, you get targeted,” he told
Premiere.
“It’s just one of those unfortunate things that when people don’t work out, they look for someone to blame.” Nevertheless, says de Souza, “I do not think there is parking space on the Paramount lot for Simon West.”

In addition to such problems, de Souza alleges that West went “many, many millions over budget and two months over schedule, so the minute he turned in his interminable 130-minute cut, Paramount showed him the door. They didn’t even let him in the editing room.” Whether or not this is true — West was later invited back to direct minor reshoots in London, and provides director’s commentary for the DVD — Paramount brought in Stuart Baird, a veteran trouble-shooting editor with credits as diverse as
Superman, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
and
Mission: Impossible 2,
to re-cut the entire movie. “Stuart Baird has an executive producer credit on the movie,” notes de Souza, “but all he did was re-cut the movie down to eighty-eight minutes (plus generous head and tail credits).” The studio also rejected the original music score by Michael Kamen (The
X-Men),
commissioning
Pitch Black
composer Graeme Revell to produce a new soundtrack — sixty minutes of music — in the space of ten days. “The only way I could write so much music in ten days was to weight the approach in favour of electronics
rather than orchestra,” Revell told
Dreamwatch
magazine. “But this was as much a creative decision as anything because the style of the film does not support a big bombastic orchestral score.” So rushed were the final stages of post-production, that several major effects shots appeared incomplete by the time the film hit theatres. Finally, says de Souza, “They released it and crossed their fingers.”