“I’m just asking you to acknowledge your responsibilities. Is that so bad? I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s unreasonable. And you know, another thing, and it’s that you thought you could just walk into my life, and turn it upside down, without a thought for anyone but yourself.”
It’s been 33 years since the release of “Fatal Attraction” (1987), and the scene that still intrigues me is when Alex Forrest follows Dan home as he is delivering his daughter the promised bunny pet she wants. The camera stands outside the window looking at the family scene. Mother and daughter are on the floor by a fireplace, and loving dad walks in with the rabbit in the cage. His daughter is delighted. Viewing this heartwarming scene stirs something inside Alex. She is disgusted by it and has to move away from it as fast as she can. She starts to have some involuntary reaction – the sight has triggered a long-compartmentalized memory from her childhood. She starts to gag as she stumbles away – and throws up in a bush. What prompted that response? Is she really a psychopath?
To this day, it’s Glenn Close’s powerhouse performance that draws you in. The film works because of its bold strokes and shock value. It’s an extremely well-made film. Its impact remains long after because of the depth in which the character of Alex was delineated – simultaneously alluring and repellent. In contrast, the character of Dan is shallow. We never fully understand his motives – the reasons why he puts his family in jeopardy. Perhaps he doesn’t understand it himself? He is the one who is reckless and has opened Pandora’s box – but it’s the disturbed who gets punished (in a temporarily satisfying denouement which solidified the film’s prominence). It has inspired countless imitators, yet the original is so compelling.
“You’re on your own for the night, that’s also obvious… we’re two adults,” Alex tells Dan after they’ve sheltered from the rain following a business meeting where they’ve been exchanging furtive glances. Dan’s married to Beth – who is extremely attractive and caring – and they have a six-year old daughter. Both of them are away for the weekend. Alex and Dan have a tempestuous weekend affair. When he tries to end it – as simply a casual affair, things begin to escalate. “I had a wonderful time last night. I’d like to see you again. Is that so terrible?” she questions. Her tactics become progressively aggressive – including throwing acid on the hood of his car. She will eventually assail the family. “You don’t give up do you,” Dan observes. “You don’t give up.”
Director Adrian Lynne – responsible for the original “Footloose” and “9 ½ weeks” – is quite clever. The opening shot – innocently panning across a New York skyline at dawn and then zooming into the apartment window of the Gallagher family in the midst of evening bliss – recalls similar seductive shots from the beginning of Hitchcock’s “Psycho” and Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby.” It infers a malevolent presence already at work. We are not going in through the door, but unseen through the window and entering their personal life – the sanctity of their home. It gives a voyeuristic vibe to the view – one that will continue throughout the film – as Alex takes over – and begins following Dan and then the family.
Working with cinematographer Howard Atherton, Lynne makes everyday things look so sensuous: cream cheese on the nose, water coming out of the sink. At the same time, they become entrapments – we should take heed at the way Alex violently closes the freight elevator’s gate before Dan engages in unsafe sex with her. “Have you ever done it in an elevator?” she daringly asks. The peeping tom quality of the camera work never holds back. It’s always panning across and zooming in. Like Alex, we become constant observers. Alex’s neighborhood is the meatpacking district in NYC – in sharp contrast with Dan’s warm home environments. Everyday sounds become irritating and startling stimuli – the sound of the phone, car honks. I particularly love Maurice Jarre’s wistful soundtrack.
There are astonishing scenes that will remain ingrained in your psyche. The sight of Alex by the foot of her bed turning on and off her night table light as Madame Bovary plays in the background is one of those. “I’m not going to be ignored, Dan,” she states. The screenplay by James Dearden is crisp and memorable.
Alex Forrest will remain one of the most misunderstood characters in cinema history.
Dan: “You’re so sad. You know that, Alex? Lonely and very sad.”
Alex: “Don’t you ever pity me, you smug bastard.”
Dan: “I’ll pity you… I’ll pity you. I’ll pity you because you’re sick.”
Alex: “Why? Because I won’t allow you to treat me like some slut you can just bang a couple of times and throw in the garbage?”
Love,
Roger
Available to stream on Sling, Tubi, DIRECTV and Starz via subscription, satellite provider, Amazon, and Hulu.Available to rent on Amazon Prime, Microsoft, YouTube, Google Play, iTunes, FandangoNOW, Apple TV, Redbox and AMC Theatres on Demand.
Screenplay by James Dearden. Based on the short film by James Dearden
Directed by Adrian Lyne
Starring Michael Douglas, Glenn Close and Anne Archer
119 minutes
Glenn Close on “Fatal Attraction”
I read the script in one sitting. When I finished, I think my body temperature had dropped. The story originally ended with Alex killing herself and Dan going to jail because his fingerprints were on the knife. The thing that put me off was the bunny-boiling aspect, but I couldn’t get the script out of my mind, and I called my agent and said, “Move ahead and see if I can audition.” Producer Sherry Lansing told me about five years ago that they were so convinced I was wrong for Alex that they didn’t even want to be in the room when I auditioned. They said, “Well, can she be sexy?” And I thought, “Well, you know, yes!” One is always looking to stretch yourself. And it was really the first time I’d had a part that started in one place and ended in a totally different place. It had a huge emotional arc to it and a lot of different shades. So it was wonderful to play. And Adrian was brilliant — just the most wonderful director. He really knew how to stage things, and he thought about it a lot. He was the first director I worked with that had a whole wall full of inspiration for Alex’s look. He really cared about every aspect of it. We had endless hair and makeup tests, just playing around, and I think it really paid off. It’s a tiny, tiny thing, but your upper lip has a little dip in it, in the middle, and when we filled that in with a faint liner and lip color, it just made a very sad mouth. It was very subtle, but you’d be surprised how long it takes to come up with little things like that. And I was losing weight and working out, and I was so strong and buff. I remember the day that Adrian said, “I think you’ve lost enough weight.” I think I was down to 118 pounds. And I thought, “Oh wow, that’s the first time anybody’s said, ‘You don’t need to lose any more weight!’”
…In approaching Alex, I just wanted to make sure that my character didn’t get trashed. I felt a lot of empathy for her. She was somebody who was basically out of control. She wasn’t an evil person. So when they told me they were going to reshoot the ending, I thought they were joking. I didn’t get it. At all. The new ending made her into kind of a psychopath. Somebody like Alex, especially if they were abused when they were little, they’re more self-destructive than destructive. I really rebelled against it. I said, “I can’t do that, that’s not who that character is.” I fought against it for two weeks. We had screaming fights. I was basically told that if I didn’t do it, they wouldn’t release the movie. I was beside myself because I really believed in the character I had created. And then a friend said, “You know, you’ve made your point, and now you have to be part of the team.” So reluctantly, I shot the new ending, which ended up to be the right thing to make it into a hit. Shakespeare and the Greeks weren’t wrong: Catharsis is important and the easiest way to get catharsis is to shed blood. We gave the audience the catharsis that it needed.” (ew.com)
Adrian Lyne on the Ending of “Fatal Attraction”
As Adrian Lyne recalls, he and all the key creative people were happy with the original ending of his 1987 adultery thriller “Fatal Attraction.” The unhinged other woman Alex (Glenn Close) had gotten the cruel, final word on trysting married man Dan (Michael Douglas) by committing suicide Madame Butterfly-style and making it appear he had murdered her. “Then I saw it with an audience,” Lyne says, “and the movie seemed to go flat.” Lyne returned to the drawing board and helped devise a more explosive final confrontation that emerged as one of the shrewdest and most successful ending switches in genre movie history. In the new version, Alex takes the fight to Dan and the wife (played by Anne Archer) in the pastoral quiet of their country home. What began as opera-inspired was now cinematically operatic, and audiences everywhere shrieked. Close and Douglas both went “balls out” in attacking their part, says Lyne. “She had come off movies where she was always this nice woman who stayed at home. Just a sweet soul, she was anything but this character. So that surprised people.” Lyne, who was nominated for a DGA Award for his work on the film, details here how he engineered the suspenseful conclusion, starting with the serenity of a nearly all-white bathroom environment and a husband and wife who believe they’re having a mellow night together. “When she smiles, and he smiles back, you think it’s going to be all right between this couple,” he says. “But in the back of your mind, you know it’s all going to go to ratshit.” (dga.org)
Michael Douglas on “Fatal Attraction”
On “Fatal Attraction,” “This is where I learned something about myself,” Douglas said. “First of all, why do I like to play these gray-area characters or these darker characters? And for some reason, audiences forgive me. We were watching the movie [at a test screening], and I had just cheated on [his screen wife, Anne Archer] and I’ve run over to make my bed look like I slept in it, and the audience clapped, and Sherry Lansing, the producer, said, ‘I can’t believe this — they’re forgiving you already.’” But Douglas was fine with taking the movie less dark when test audiences revolted against a ‘Madame Butterfly’ ending that had Glenn Close’s character setting up Douglas for her own suicide. The actor gave his own version of the tale recounted in Lansing’s new memoir, “Leading Lady: Sherry Lansing and the Making of a Hollywood Groundbreaker.” Close “did not want to change it at all: ‘You can’t make me. I’m not going to shoot this,’” she said, according to Douglas. “And I reached out and I basically said … ‘When you do a play and they take the play out of town and based on audience reaction … in doing it you find what works or what doesn’t for the whole experience of the play, and you do rewrites accordingly.’ Movies get criticized all the time for showing it to an audience and then changing the ending. Why not? So I said, ‘Glenn, no character is bigger than the whole piece. I understand for you individually as an actress that this is so rewarding, but you have to look at this whole picture together.’ And she was wonderful and she got it then and said, ‘Let’s go for it,’ and it made for a more entertaining ending and a more successful movie.” (hollywoodreporter.com)
About Director Adrian Lyne
…Lyne’s resume is peppered with movies that made headlines for various reasons, including “Indecent Proposal,” “Fatal Attraction,” “Lolita,” and “9½ Weeks.” “I remember thinking that ‘Fatal Attraction’ was a fabulous read. I was in France at the time, at our place in Provence, I sat down on some steps on a staircase in our hallway, and I just started to read it. It was a terrific page-turner; I couldn’t put the f****** thing down,” he recalled. “I remember going to tell my wife, she was asleep at the time, so I woke her up, and I said, ‘Do you know what? I think this is a huge movie. If I don’t screw it up.’ It really was a terrific script.” He didn’t screw it up. In 1987, “Fatal Attraction,” made for $14 million, went on to gross $320.15 million and the highest-grossing movie at the worldwide box office that year. It was also nominated for six Oscars. “I was fascinated by ‘9½ Weeks’ because it was so unusual. At the time, people told me that if I did that movie, it would kill my career, it was professional suicide, but I’ve always been attracted to things like that, movies that you don’t see every day, that are a little bit different. I love the idea of being able to do anything you wanted for ten weeks, being able to indulge your desires, it was fascinating to me.” However, there is one thing that has frustrated him over the years about some of his movies. “The thing is that people tend to remember the sex. In ‘Fatal Attraction,’ there’s a minute of Michael Douglas and Glenn Close having it away over a sink in the kitchen,” Lyne explained. “That’s what people tend to take away, even though it’s a tiny part of the movie. I’ve always liked relationship pieces; I’ve always liked the small picture over the big one.”
“A movie that I’ve just shot, ‘Deep Water,’ it’s a strange story based on the book by Patricia Highsmith, a marvelous writer who also did ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’ and ‘Strangers on a Train’ among other books. She had a kind of a bleak outlook on life. It’s interesting to me.” ‘Fatal Attraction,’ which will get a theatrical rerelease later in 2020, achieved more than just becoming a box office hit, it became a pop culture sensation and is even credited as the reason for the phrase “bunny boiler” entering our vernacular. “Did I expect that?” Lyne mused. “I didn’t really, no. It’s gratifying when that kind of thing happens, though.” Hitting the right notes of tension at precisely the right time was something the director spent a lot of time on. “I worked really hard on the last 20 minutes of the movie, to make it as exciting as possible,” he revealed. “That moment when Glenn Close appears in the mirror in the bathroom, it’s fun when people see that and jump out of their seats.” “I used to go to a movie theater in Westwood in Los Angeles and watch the audience from their point of view of the screen. I stand by the screen and watch them. It was marvelous. The manipulation is fun.” “I’ve always wanted to do, or I like doing movies, about you or me, where you can put your feet in the shoes of the actors, live through them vicariously. I think that if you can achieve that, you’ve got the audience, and they won’t have forgotten about your movie by the time they’ve left the theater and headed out for dinner,” added Lyne. “If you can make the audience recognize themselves in the characters in some way, that’s a big part of it. I don’t think there’s a formula. I’m not an intellectual by any standards, so I guess my instincts are fairly good.” (forbes.com) A few of Lyne’s other works include “Foxes” (1980), “Flashdance” (1983), Irene Cara: “Flashdance… What a Feeling” video short, “Michael Sembello: Maniac” (Video short), “Jacob’s Ladder” (1990), “Lolita” (1997), “Unfaithful” (2002) and most recently, “Deep Water” (2020).