production notes

Clifford Irving is a charming husband, an affectionate friend and a very smart and talented writer. Clifford Irving is also a philanderer, a betrayer and outright lying fraud. He’s a character full of charisma and playful mischief but winds up trapped in a increasingly dark, thick web of his own making. So who could play such a character?

It wasn’t long before the filmmakers turned to the idea of Richard Gere, who recently won acclaim for his razzle-dazzle performance as smooth-talking, tap-dancing, Jazz Age attorney Billy Flynn in CHICAGO, a performance which earned him widespread accolades and a Golden Globe. “I’ve always wanted to work with Richard and he was a perfect fit for this character,” says Lasse Hallström. Continues Leslie Holleran: “Clifford Irving is the consummate seducer. He’s the kind of person who walks into the room and charms everyone. So, in a sense he’s an actor, and I think Richard really understood this completely. He knew who this character was and it was as though he was channeling him.”

Gere found himself wrapped up in the story from the get-go. “It was one of those rare scripts where you go, ‘wow that’s really interesting and fresh.’ I was intrigued by the idea that this story was about being a fake on all kinds of levels – a personal level, a psychological level, a political level. Also, I thought the script really captured the schizophrenia of that time in America, and the coming together of all these elements of that period – the New York publishing industry and Watergate and Nixon and Vietnam and Pop Art – in a wonderful way that just called out to be made,” he says.

Once Gere committed to playing Clifford Irving, he jumped in at a sprint, even changing his physical appearance for the role. “Richard completely and utterly threw himself into the role and made it is his own,” says producer Josh Maurer. “It was an extraordinary thing to watch an actor of Richard’s stature take on and completely become this very different character.”

Mark Gordon adds: “Richard brought an enormous amount to the table and I think will surprise people because they’ve never seen him do a role like this before. Clifford is an incredibly charming guy, but not in the way we think of Richard being charming. He’s funny and outrageous.”

In approaching the role, Gere made the decision not to meet with the real Clifford Irving – especially because the film isn’t a biopic but a playfully fictional account of Clifford’s hoax. To put it succinctly, Gere worries that Clifford Irving, hoaxster that he has been know to be, could get in the way of finding the truth of the role. “I didn’t want to meet him,” he admits. “I was kind of afraid, actually. I had a strong idea of how I wanted to do this and I didn’t want to be overly influenced by his point of view on what happened. I didn’t want any constraints at all. I wanted to let my imagination go while I was doing it, and that’s what I hooking into.”

Gere found that he could relate in some ways to Irving’s predicament at the outset of the story, as a man in search of great material. “As a writer, he’s always waiting for that next deal, so he has the same insecurity that an actor does where you do a project but you never know if there’s ever going to be another one,” he explains.

But what fascinated Gere most was how carried away Irving became once he decided to pretend to know Howard Hughes. “The idea started out maybe as a comment on fame, as a kind of Pop Art, as a pointed game, but the more people buy into it the more real it becomes to Clifford. Psychologically, he crosses the line,” says Gere. “Howard Hughes was the perfect subject, too, because he was so deeply mysterious. People made up all kinds of stories about him as this mad mystic or conspirator – some crazy, some perhaps true. There was a romance around all of this that Clifford Irving really keyed into.”

Gere also believes that Irving came within an inch of pulling the whole incredible scam off. “If Howard Hughes himself hadn’t spoke up, it probably would have happened. Everyone wanted it to happen. Everyone wanted it to be true because it was such great a story and they could see dollar signs,” he observes. “If you see some of the forgeries Clifford gave to McGraw-Hill, they’re just really amateur jobs, but people wanted to believe and Clifford must have felt as if he and Dick Suskind and his wife were under some kind of magical spell where they could not be disbelieved.”

Ultimately that spell would be broken, however, and although there were a lot of fun and high energy scenes for Gere, they would becoming increasingly dark and intense. “There was a lot of fairly deep, creative work on this film. There were also lot of improvised scenes where Alfred Molina and I would fly into some very spontaneous territory,” he notes. “The great thing is that Lasse creates an environment which is especially good for actors. He gives you the space to try new things and go fearlessly in different directions. But at the same time, you know he’s absolutely in control.”

The story of Clifford Irving hinged not only on casting the lead role but equally on casting on the people who became Irving’s partners in crime – his best friend Dick Suskind and his wife, Edith. The role of Dick Suskind was particularly complex, as he becomes not only Clifford’s loyal buddy but increasingly his only link to moral conscience, not to mention his panic attack-prone worry. To get inside Dick’s layers, Lasse Hallström turned to a consistently award-winning star of stage and screen with whom he had worked on CHOCOLAT: Alfred Molina.

“We love and adore Alfred, who is so funny and talented,” notes Leslie Holleran. “He winds up with these great, funny moments as Dick, because he is so perfect as the unwilling, begrudging participant.”

Molina was excited to work with Hallström again, especially on such an utterly opposite project. “It’s always nice to go back to work again with a director with whom you’ve had a good experience,” he says. “You can work more intimately and constructively, I think. And Lasse always gives you the freedom to be as inventive as you can.”

With the character of Dick Suskind, Molina knew that freedom to be inventive would be vital. “It was really important to capture that kind of friendship that Clifford and Dick had – they were very close friends who shared a lot of secrets together,” notes Molina. “And the question for Dick is how far are you willing to go when your friend is in trouble and needs you.? What turns out as a prank turns into something meaningful between them as friends.”

As in many male friendships, Molina sensed a bit of envy mixed with admiration in Dick’s view of Clifford – and is this that leads Dick down a criminal path he would never have ventured into on his own, leaving him on the verge of a heart attack at times. “I think Dick sees Cliff as the kind of man he would, perhaps, like to be,” says Molina. “He sees elements of Cliff that are very attractive, especially his intellectual bravery, his recklessness and his artistry. Comparatively, Dick feels very mundane – he’s a researcher who writes educational books and doesn’t have the same creative freedom that Cliff enjoys. He’s bound by the conventions most of us are: marriage, kids, his job. And so he sees this adventure as a way to get a taste of Cliff’s more exciting world.”

Fortunately, Molina and Gere proved to have a remarkably natural, humor-filled rapport with one another and an equal commitment to creating an authentic male friendship on screen. “Alfred and Richard both really invested their performances with the affection and caring that comes with real friendship. It was thrilling to watch that,” says Josh Maurer. Adds Marks Gordon: “In the film, the relationship between Cliff and Dick is very comical. Dick is the poor bastard who goes along with Cliff and gets pulled deeper and deeper into this mess of lies. One is sort of the king, the other his minion, but they are always very funny and interesting together.”

Says Molina of his collaboration with Gere: “We had a wonderful time working together. We discovered a mutual enjoyment in playing around with the script and trying to always keep things fresh. There was a certain amount of tomfoolery naturally involved with us – and that was good for the movie.”

Another essential relationship for Clifford Irving is that with his idealistic artist wife who, despite her awareness of Clifford’s constant infidelities, risks her own future to help his scheme. Irving’s real wife, Edith, was a Swedish citizen of German background so Lasse Hallström knew he needed an actress who could not only embody Edith’s complicated dilemma but also her Swedish- German accent. He found what he was looking for in one of today’s most sought-after screen actresses: Marcia Gay Harden, who won an Oscar® playing Lee Krassner, Jackson Pollack’s artist wife in POLLACK, and garnered an Academy Award® nomination for her work in Clint Eastwood’s MYSTIC RIVER.

Harden found the script provocative and the role unlike any she has done before. “What people will risk is shocking, what people will sacrifice for a moment of glory is fascinating to me,” she says. “And the character of Edith is so colorful, I thought it would be kind of a far step away for me to try to enter her. That’s always an exciting for an actor to do.”

The actress was quite moved by Edith’s plight. “I think she is such a sad character because she wants so much for her husband just to love her, to admire her painting, to commit to her, and he is unable to do that. In every way he is a cheater and yet, in every way she loves him so much,” she observes. “And both she and Dick do things they would never normally do for this man. Edith thinks that if she helps him, he’ll think she’s ballsy and brave and tough and love her for that. But in the end, she did more jail time than he did.” Yet she also found the story increasingly funny. “I thought the script had humor in it but there was even more on the set,” she says. “Lasse’s vision of thing always finds unexpected humor.”

When it came to Edith’s accent, Harden had a little bit of a head start. “I’d lived in Germany before so I knew a bit of the accent,” she says, “but Edith is Swiss-German and had also lived in Spain and London, so she had a mishmash of sounds in her accent. I had a videotape of her so I knew her accent was really quite strong and very pronounced and rather big. I worked with a great dialogue coach in New York, Sam Scwhatt, and we found a way to use traces of that.”

Harden was especially excited to join with Gere and Molina in creating this unlikely criminal trio. “Alfred Molina as Dick just breaks your heart,” she says. “You laugh at him and yet you love him. And Richard is the mastermind. Both of these boys are full of laughter and love of their craft and respect for the creative energy it takes to enter characters like these. It was serious work, but we had a lot of fun.”