Director Martin Brest Revisits the Triumphs of ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ and ‘Midnight Run,’ and Reflects On His Post-‘Gigli’ Hollywood Exile (EXCLUSIVE)
Ascending the driveway of a sprawling home in the Hollywood Hills for a face-to-face interview with Martin Brest, the legendary — and legendarily reclusive — director of “Beverly Hills Cop” and “Midnight Run,” it was tough not to immediately think of Xanadu, the protective enclave Charles Foster Kane retired to at the end of “Citizen Kane.” It seems like a fitting place for a former prince of the movie business to spend exile. Upon arrival, I quickly discover that the impeccably manicured property doesn’t, in fact, belong to Brest but to an artist friend, as does the lumbering, pitch-black Saint Bernard watching benevolently over our poolside conversation about the filmmaker’s career. By all accounts (most of all his own), that career came to a fiery end because of “Gigli,” but Brest soon explains how he made peace with the cataclysmic flop — even if he still can’t bear to mention it by name.
“I had a good run, and I enjoyed success and freedom,” says the affable Brest. “I would’ve liked it to go on longer, but everybody likes everything to go on longer. But I feel very grateful for what I experienced.”
Popular on Variety
As a great admirer of Brest’s groundbreaking comic work, and later by his surprising but seamless transition into more dramatic fare, I’d begun reaching out to Brest in the spring of 2023 to see if he’d be interested in participating in a chat for one of three anniversaries for his films — 35th for “Midnight Run,” 25th for “Meet Joe Black” or 20th for “Gigli.” After some vetting — he had never before spoken publicly about what went wrong with the last of those movies — Brest agreed to sit down with Variety for an extended conversation about his work, and the stories that still burn inside him, whether or not there’s anyone in Hollywood willing to pick up a torch on his behalf.
You have avoided the public eye, but you did participate in a 2022 Los Angeles screenings of “Beverly Hills Cop” and “Midnight Run” with Paul Thomas Anderson. Were you reluctant to talk about your work?
Given the nature of the flameout that terminated my career, I just felt like it was better for my mood to just put all this behind me and let the movies speak for themselves.
When it comes to those movies, let’s start with your first film, “Going in Style.” I feel like it encapsulates many of the themes that show up in your later movies — it’s about mortality, legacy, getting older, being alone.
And the other thing, which I call the redemption of the asshole, which seems to be a universal theme that ran through a lot of my things.
Why does that redemption story resonate with you?
The redemption of the asshole probably started from when I was a kid watching “The Honeymooners.” I was a kid watching it in a household that was economically not that different than in the show. I felt like it was a show made for my neighborhood. And that character of Ralph Kramden really touched me, that angry soul whose spirit blossoms.
Many of your films include this element of a person who comes in and blows up somebody else’s world. Is that a throughline you’re conscious of?
In retrospect, I can see a connecting fiber. But in working on the scripts, I try to reduce everything — that’s why a lot of them are basically two handers. I find that to be a pure form where you deal with as many issues you choose, but in a very sort of micro scale.
You spent a short amount of time on “WarGames” before you did “Beverly Hills Cop.”
I spent more time on “WarGames” than “Beverly Hills Cop.” I was on “WarGames” for a year and a half, full-time. I’ve always been very monogamous about projects, which is why I didn’t do that many movies.
What did leaving that film early in your career teach you about navigating studio politics?
Just before production, this executive producer fellow who I won’t mention got involved with the movie because it was his company that had developed the script. He was a producer in television where the director is a bricklayer, essentially. My orientation was different. And I dealt with him head on — and I was fired three weeks into production. That was pretty gruesome because it was only my second movie. In the trades, it said something like that I was fired because I couldn’t make the tone light enough or something like that, and it was a delicious irony that my next movie was the biggest comedy ever in the history of cinema at that moment. But what it taught me was not about politics, but I literally had the experience of walking down the street in Beverly Hills, seeing somebody I knew coming down the street, and they crossed the street to avoid the uncomfortableness of having to meet me. So I realized then very clear lesson when they say you’re a bum, you’re not a bum. When they say you’re a hero, you’re not a hero. It’s all not to be paid attention to the low and the high.
There were a lot of stars attached to “Beverly Hills Cop” at various points in its development. Was Eddie Murphy involved when you started?
No, it was Stallone. I was fired off “WarGames,” and I went through a very dark personal period. I felt my nascent career was over. And Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer wanted me to do this movie starring Sylvester Stallone. For some reason, while no one else in the business would recognize me at all, they really pursued me. And I still turned it down, but because they really kept badgering me, I said, “I’m going to flip a coin.” I flipped the coin and it was heads and I was terrified, but I committed to doing it with Sylvester Stallone as the Axel character.
My conception of it at the time was to do something with Stallone that nobody had ever seen before. It had some comedic elements by virtue of the fish out of water, but he wrote this thing that was a straight-out action drama. That’s not what the studio really was looking to do, so he went off and he took that script and it became “Cobra.” So we wound up getting Eddie Murphy a few weeks before shooting. The nature of Eddie’s talent and the theme that I would like to bring up and the tone that I would love to make this movie about, it was perfect. And we restructured the whole story in a couple of weeks, and went into production with basically an outline, writing as we went.
How difficult was it to find the balance between the anarchic energy of Eddie and then the grounded, violent world around him?
It’s mostly intuitive. Just having a sense of what’s appropriate for the moment. “Beverly Hills Cop,” again, was not written as a comedy, so everything you see in the movie that’s funny was in the process of making the movie. But it’s my inclination, even in a dramatic situation, to have a little humor. Of course “Beverly Hills Cop” is a comedy, but the first time I heard somebody say it I was shocked, because I approach the dramatic moments and the comedic moments the same, which is looking for a certain truth that’s appropriate to the intention. “Scent of a Woman,” there were lots of intentional laughs in it, but you’d never think it was a comedy. They were a different kind of humorous laugh, which I love.
Was the film’s popularity something that you anticipated?
No. As a matter of fact, when we decided we wanted Eddie and we had to make our case in front of the powers at Paramount, there was some concern as to whether or not he could carry a movie on his own, because he had been, I put this in air quotes, “second banana.” For certain people, the idea of him being the lead was a leap for them. To me, it was clear as a bell. In fact, I told Walter Hill this, the scene in “48 Hrs.” where Eddie’s in the bar and he uses Nick Nolte’s badge, when the notion of getting Eddie for the movie came up, I said to Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, “Oh my God, we could have a full-length version of the bar scene.” We didn’t even know the movie we were making three weeks ahead of time. Once we had Eddie, it just changed what we could do tonally.
The chemistry between Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin in “Midnight Run” is just all-time for me. How difficult was it to find the right two people for those roles?
Dealing with someone you would consider a very intense, dramatic actor, to me, is a great opportunity to find humorful moments. The idea of De Niro in this role, it wasn’t really conceived for somebody like that. But Jack Rapke, my agent at the time, said, “What about De Niro?” and I thought, “If I could work with Robert De Niro, I’ll figure out the rest later on.” If you’re thinking about comedy with a capital K, you wouldn’t think of him. But again, the way I approach humorful situations, I saw him as being a perfect actor.
But once we had cast him, it was really hard to find somebody to complement him, and everybody wanted to play the part. It was a role that we needed people to read for it because it was really a question of micro-chemistry. Charles Grodin came in, and I remembered a scene in “Heaven Can Wait” where he just turned to another character, it was a deadpan reaction that knocked me off my chair. I remember thinking at the time, “He’s doing nothing. Why is that so genius and funny?” When he read with De Niro, everybody was intimidated by De Niro — and Grodin wasn’t at all.
I read that Yaphet Kotto, who appeared in the film, was concerned about you during production because you had lost so much weight. Was “Midnight Run” uniquely taxing?
I’ve always lost weight on movies because I got nervous and I stopped eating. I would just get so anxious, my appetite would get suppressed and I would get very thin. When I was finished my American Film Institute movie [“Hot Tomorrows”], I weighed 118 pounds. “Midnight Run” was very grueling. It shot for almost a hundred days, and it was six-day weeks with the seventh day, either a travel day or a travel and scouting day, because we were in 14 different cities, constantly moving. After we were finished, I actually had to go to the hospital.
Were you maybe telling yourself something that in both “Beverly Hills Cop” and “Midnight Run,” there are scenes featuring men talking about living unhealthy lives?
This is an example of the improv thing — when we were trying to cast the cops in “Beverly Hills Cop,” Judge Reinhold and John Ashton were doing improv and Judge said that thing about red meat. I already knew I was going to cast them, and I wrote it down. When we showed up to shoot that scene, I gave it to him, and he didn’t recognize it! That’s an example of just how anything that anybody says that has value gets grabbed onto and filed into its proper slot.
In “Scent of a Woman,” Chris O’Donnell is so slight as Charlie Simms until he needs to be big. What made him right for that role?
He had a sort of virgin purity to him, which seemed really appropriate — whether he was actually, I don’t know. But that was essential because the notion of the Pacino character being very abusive towards somebody like that seemed interesting, and saving somebody like that seemed very moving. The audience could see what Pacino saw in that character’s purity and lack of jadedness.
Was it the confrontation scene over the gun that he auditioned with?
No. That was a very dramatic shoot because it really required Chris to step up to the plate in a big way. We shot it and I wasn’t really happy with it, did five or six or seven takes. And they were really draining for him. I wasn’t really getting what I needed, and I thought, “This kid’s about to shatter. ” So I let him go back to the dressing room, and as he’s walking back, I put out a call on the walkie-talkie to come back. And when he did it, he went right over the cliff in the best way possible.
Now, what happened was the assistant cameraman fucked up the focus. What they used to do in those days was, if an assistant cameraman fucked up the focus a little bit and thought the take was going to be unusable, he would whack the focus really out so the whole thing just turned into a fog to show that he was declaring it unusable. He had done that while Chris was having the peak moment of the scene but he didn’t say anything, and Chris kept going. So the guy panicked and dialed the focus back in as good as he could. And so if you were to watch the dailies at the prime point of the scene, it’s totally unusable. I was so depressed for so long — I even had people contact the CIA. I said, “I know those motherfuckers have some technology to refocus something that’s out of focus.” But we were able to edit it so just as it started to get really bad we cut away, and just as it came back, we used it and it’s okay. But I’ll tell you that his best moment isn’t in there. Sorry, Chris.
What prompted you to pivot to “Scent of a Woman” after “Midnight Run”?
The reason I wanted to pursue this project in the first place was there’s an Italian movie called “Profumo di Donna” where Vittorio Gassman plays a blind army officer who intends on killing himself and has a young boy assigned to him to help him get from one city to another. That’s the only similarity. But the thing that I loved was the first time the kid met the Gassman character, the guy was so horrible, so abusive, so abrasive, so unsympathetic. But paradoxically, you felt you liked him, even though he gave you no reason to. When I found out the rights were available, Bo Goldman and I locked ourselves in a room for eight or nine months, and we were able to find the underpinnings of the character so that when it came time to shoot it, I understood every moment and all of its layers. I was able to interface with Al, plus Al takes everything to a new level. He would do things that surpassed my vision while being harmonious with my vision. It was a great experience.
You worked again with Bo Goldman on “Meet Joe Black.” What made that such a delicious story for you two to tell?
Even in my twenties when I did “Going in Style,” it seemed to me the biggest possible issue, mortality — what could be a bigger idea than that? So, it just seemed like an important thing to weave into movies. “Meet Joe Black” is based on “Death Takes a Holiday,” which I saw once when I was in my early twenties. I remember getting ready to go to school to cut my student film and I turned on the TV and I was sitting on the bed and I put one leg through my pants, and this movie was on, “Death Takes a Holiday.” And I watched the entire movie before I put the other leg in my pants — I mean, it really moved me. And it took me 20 years to figure out, if you’re going to make a movie about the personification of death, it’s such an outrageous and surreal notion that there has to be a reason for it.
How tough was it to figure out what the mechanics were going to be? The moment that Death communicates to Susan what he is, there’s no dialogue.
That was one of the reasons I wanted to do the movie. That scene, I consider the most accomplished I’ve ever been involved with, even though it’s just two people talking to each other, because there’s so many components in it, and it’s saying something that I would have an impossible time expressing to somebody. They’re just two people talking to each other at a party, but somehow by the end of the scene, you and the characters are in this other psychological space that’s so distant, and the music takes you to another place, and then you come back to the party, but nobody’s moved. I felt like if I had to rely on anything, any sort of visual, razzle dazzle, then I was cheating. It had to be accomplished with dialogue and the construction of what the characters understand is happening at any particular point.
You talk about razzle dazzle, but Brad Pitt has never been more beautiful than in that movie.
I can’t take credit for that.
Did you have any trepidations about Pitt’s ability to create that dichotomy between this incredibly charming alive person and then this other sort of icy slightly impenetrable character?
The character of death could have been an old person, a young person, anybody. But there was something really threatening about a good-looking young man that’s going to kill this older man. And Brad seemed like he was great for part of the role. And then when I saw him in “Kalifornia,” and I saw how intimidating he was and scary he was, and thought, he’s the guy.
He’s curious like a dog, but he can be completely formidable with Anthony Hopkins. Was there an on-set North star for helping him navigate how he communicates?
The script delineated all those goals for him. He found a way to do it, but they were tricky.
I remember one day I just started talking about this scene in a Laurel and Hardy movie where Laurel comes over to visit Mr. and Mrs. Hardy, and Laurel looks and waits for them to not be looking at him, and he takes an apple. And when they’re not looking, he takes a bite of the apple. And Mrs. Hardy says, “Is he eating that wax fruit again?” And he can’t swallow, and he starts to choke on it, and his eyes start to tear up. And then when we shot the peanut butter scene, I said, “That son of a bitch, look at that. He’s doing it.” It was his little surprise for me.
Was it always going to be a 2 hour and 50 minute movie?
Nobody wants to do that. Because I do movies so rarely, I just wanted to pack so much in. It’s not one of my more popular movies, but it’s a movie I’m very proud of, and it has very powerful advocates, and it has its detractors. People complain about its length. I think what they really are complaining about is its pace — not that it’s 3 hours — and that’s a legitimate complaint.
It explores the idea of what love is, but it doesn’t tell a love story. What were the ideas that you were interested in exploring?
When you deal with a character who’s death, if that’s your plot, what’s your theme? Death is a blank — it’s a non-existence. So, we eventually realized what’s quite obvious in retrospect, that the movie was to be about life and what life is, because it’s about to be taken away. And one of the major components of life is love. So what is love really? There’s father-daughter love, there’s romantic love. So, all those things were mandated by the plot.
I also re-watched “Gigli.”
Of all the movies that I’ve worked on, I know them inside and out. I don’t even know what that movie looks like, frankly, because of the manner in which it took shape. Even the name… I refer to it as ‘the G movie.’ Probably the less said about it the better.
What jumped out at me as I was watching is that it’s very much aiming for the energy of something like “Midnight Run.”
Well, the entire context of the film was upended so profoundly, the original intention was pretty much obliterated. I wonder if ever a movie had been changed that much… I’m sure it has in the history of Hollywood, but it was changed so radically. When it came to finishing that movie, I remember the composer came up with a piece of music and played it, and he looked at me for my reaction. I said, “I knew why this scene used to be in the movie and what its purpose was. I don’t have any idea why it’s in the movie now.” The themes of the movie were radically different. The plot was different. The purpose of the movie was different. But I can’t escape blame. [But] it’s so weird — I literally don’t remember the movie that was released, because I wasn’t underneath it in the way I was under the hood of all my other movies. So it’s really a bloody mess that deserved its excoriation.
Can you say any more about how the production deteriorated, or got away from you?
Extensive disagreements between the studio and myself got to the point where post-production was shut down for eight months while we battled it out. In the end I was left with two choices: quit or be complicit in the mangling of the movie. To my eternal regret I didn’t quit, so I bear responsibility for a ghastly cadaver of a movie. Once key scenes were cut it became like a joke with its punchline removed, endless contortions could never create the illusion that what remained was intended. Extensive reshooting and re-editing turned characters, scenes, story and tone upside down in the futile attempt to make the increasing mess resemble a movie. For the first time in my career I had become a true collaborator — not in the benign, creative sense, but rather that of one who, in violation of their true allegiances, cooperates with occupying forces. And for that kind of compromise, self-castigations far exceed any possible public ones.
Was there an impulse for you afterward to continue fighting and trying to make films?
Up until then, I enjoyed the ability to never have to do anything I didn’t want to do. I remember on “Beverly Hills Cop,” I had to do a freeze-frame at the end of the movie in exchange for keeping a scene in that the studio wanted me to take out — and that I thought was an insane compromise. But I can’t think of another example in my entire career of having to do anything that I didn’t want to do. So, once this happened, I thought I’ll never be invited back. Second, I would never be able to operate with the kind of control that a director, I feel, needs and deserves. So that felt like a clear signal it was time for me to back away.
I had a good run, and I enjoyed success and freedom, and that was fantastic. I would’ve liked it to go on longer, but everybody likes everything to go on longer. But I feel very grateful for what I experienced. So I just figured I’d put an end to all that movie stuff, but then a script burnt its way out of me that I felt very passionate about. But I couldn’t make any headway with it, so I reprimanded myself and said, “Don’t stick yourself out there again.” And then another project burned its way out of me I’m still very attached to. But I don’t foresee it having the possibility of getting made.
Given how much the economics of modern Hollywood have changed, did you think about making one of these projects in an alternative way?
I tried and I just wasn’t having any luck. I mean, I wrote one script and then I put that aside, and then I wrote another script that I have been burning for a few years to do, but I’ll just have to burn because nobody else seems to be wanting to burn along with me. It seems like a consistent theme that directors who are no longer in the business always have their pet project that they want to do. I guess that’s mine.
What have you been doing in the intervening years, when those stories aren’t burning their way out of you?
Like everybody else, probably, I wrote my COVID lockdown novel, a thing that is very personal and really is a structural experiment, but it was really about something very personal and not really for publication. And I’m enjoying living life. I enjoy using all the skills I developed to entertain other people, to entertain myself.
Do you feel more compelled to talk about your work?
No. There’s something slightly maudlin about talking about work that’s so old.
