I was expecting the iron shutters to come down instantly at the first mention
of Emilio Estevez’s Brat Pack past, but there isn’t a flicker of anguish in
those emerald eyes. After a decade in the wilderness, the 44-year-old son of
Martin Sheen is grateful for any attention he can get.
There is no shortage of attention in Venice, where Bobby, his labour of
love about the murder of Senator Robert Kennedy, won the longest standing
ovation (seven minutes plus) in the festival’s 63-year history. Harvey
Weinstein was so moved that he folded Estevez into his ample breast and
said: “Emilio, you’re back in the game.” This vote of confidence clearly
meant as much to the actor-director as the presence of his astonishing cast:
Anthony Hopkins, Sharon Stone, Laurence Fishburne, Helen Hunt, Lindsay
Lohan, William H. Macy, Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher, Freddy Rodríguez and
Dad, to name but a few.
Two days later, I’ve been granted an exclusive audience with Estevez at the
Hotel Cipriani, a bijoux island on the lagoon designed to make mortals feel
permanently underdressed. The most notable feature, apart from the scented
air-conditioning, is the number of security guards patrolling the elevators
and the manicured lawns. It’s a sort of boot camp for celebrity. Estevez and
Christian Slater are having a mano a mano tussle in the doorway of
our small lounge. “You made the right call, buddy,” shouts Estevez as they
are finally dragged apart.
“Thank God they’ve got a sense of humour,” he adds, waving at an unsmiling
bouncer through the window. Dressed in a black cotton shirt and baggy brown
shorts, the stocky director has a taste for irony that eludes too many of
his peers. But he’s acutely aware of how precious this kind of attention is.
Estevez’s fall from grace has been as spectacular as Icarus’s. As the son of
Martin Sheen, he was baptised by fame. In the 1980s he was the undisputed
leader of a group of spoilt young Hollywood actors who hijacked every teen
movie in the mainstream. Rob Lowe, Anthony Michael Hall, Molly Ringwald, and
Demi Moore (to whom he was briefly engaged) were hard-core cast members of
movies such as The Outsiders (1983), The Breakfast Club (1985)
and St Elmo’s Fire (1985). Tom Cruise, Kevin Bacon, Matt
Dillon, Robert Downey Jr, Kiefer Sutherland and John Cusack were honorary
seconds in the binge-drinking, drug and sex-scandal raps.
In the 1990s Estevez got too old for this nonsense. The acting career came
crashing around his ears, and he reinvented himself as one of Hollywood’s
most disastrous directors. “I helmed a film in 1996 called The War
at Home, a very earnest movie with Kathy Bates, my father and Kimberly
Williams. It was one of those deals with the Devil. I signed on to do D3:
The Mighty Ducks in exchange for the partial financing of my own
project. Mighty Ducks opened on 2,000 screens; The War at Home
tanked on four. I almost quit the business. Since then I’ve been doing
everything I can this side of pornography to make money in an effort to keep
the wolves from the door.
“I did things like sell art works and whatever property I had outside my own
home. I’m on my second mortgage now. At one point I was signing trading
cards with my picture and likeness on them to scramble together $5,000 to
make the next house payment. I mean it got really scary. I had long moments
staring into the abyss. I started gambling on horses to make ends meet.”
That’s crazy surely. “Yeah, but I was pretty good at it. I was desperate to do
whatever I had to keep alive. I admit it was a little nutty.”
If there were any lingering doubts about the trajectory of his career path,
they were laid to rest by Rated X (2000), a movie Estevez made
starring himself and his brother, Charlie Sheen, as the infamous Mitchell
brothers, pioneers of the American porn industry in the 1970s. The deluded
director might as well have shackled a ball and chain to his ankle and gone
diving for eels. Precisely no one got the point of these vaguely saucy
left-wing satires that more or less put paid to whatever poster-boy
credibility he had left.
“I went into that interior hell-hole where you’re well and truly whipped and
wondered what on earth I could do next,” he admits.
Agents and managers thought likewise. The advice was to milk as much as he
could from TV before his name went completely out of fashion. Estevez bit
the bullet, and his tongue, and pulled strings to keep the health benefits
up to date and his two kids, Taylor and Paloma, whom he had fathered while
going out with Carey Salley between 1983 and 1986, in the style to which
they had become accustomed.
“I got to direct some good shows,” he argues. “CSI: New
York, Cold Case and The Guardian papered a lot of cracks. But I
was forever desperate.” He was also, it has to be said, in serious denial.
The scars of Hollywood failure made Estevez wonder whether he had anything
original left to offer the film industry. He had written 30 pages of a
script for Bobby in 2000. It was inspired by a childhood memory of
visiting the Ambassador Hotel in 1969, a year after Robert Kennedy was shot
in the kitchen.
Amazingly, this was as much a seminal moment for Martin Sheen as it was for
his son.
“Dad had just finished shooting a part in Mike Nichols’s Catch-22
in Mexico. Rather than going back to New York, which is where we were based,
he finally decided he had to make a go of it in the movies and so we got on
a train, then rented a car and drove to LA. First stop was the Ambassador
Hotel. I remember Dad walking through the foyer, holding my hand. I was 7
years old and he was saying: ‘Emilio, this is basically where the music
died. This is where Bobby fell.’ The significance of that was never lost on
me, because the year before I had run upstairs and woken him up in bed in my
grandmother’s house in Ohio and said: ‘Hey, Bobby Kennedy has been shot.’ ”
I wonder how a child of 6 could possibly divine the significance of that
moment. “The news was always on,” Estevez says. “Newspapers and magazines
were always open and prevalent in the house. Dad was a news junkie, and I
was by proxy. I remain so to this day. You know, when I can’t sleep, I watch
the House of Commons on C-Span,” he laughs loudly.
That’s terribly sad, I say. “True, but it’s great theatre,” he says. “Anyway,
I wondered why no one had told this story about Bobby Kennedy. A friend of
mine, Jon Bon Jovi, invited me to a screening of U-571 in 2000 and
sat me next to Bobby Shriver (Kennedy’s nephew). I thought: ‘That’s odd.’ I
went to the LA public library and started sourcing as much information as I
could about Robert Kennedy’s death and got hooked on the detail. Andy Warhol
was shot the day before. Kennedy won the California primary the following
afternoon, and it was the first time they had ever used electronic voting
machines. That evening Don Drysdale broke the world record for baseball
shut-outs. So little by little a picture of the day started percolating with
extraordinary topical hooks.”
What’s both disconcerting and clever about this lengthy explanation is that it
sounds as if Estevez was forever on the nail. That he had a hot ready-made
film at his fingertips. The truth is far less romantic. Despite cardboard
boxes full of research materials, Estevez could only muster 30 miserable
pages of script. He made people believe that he was on the verge of cracking
a great film, but he couldn’t hide the bitter reality.
“I was paralysed with the notion that I didn’t really have a story,” he
admits. “I carried these pages around in my bag for a year. I was like
faking it. People were asking me to do TV series and I’m fobbing them off
with ‘I’m writing my movie and it’s not ready yet’. I was in total denial.
After two back-to-back box-office failures as a film director, I had more or
less shut down. It’s a defence mechanism. I don’ t want self-pity here. This
is fact. I planted a garden, built a vineyard and started staining my wooden
floors.
“My family became deeply concerned. They didn’t believe these phantom pages
actually existed so they dispatched Charlie (Sheen) to my house and I handed
them over reluctantly. He goes into the backyard and I stare at him through
the curtains. He comes back in with a very sober look on his face and says:
‘Hey, man, this movie could change your life. You’re an actor, writer and
director. You’re not a f****** carpenter. Get out of here. This house is a
grand distraction.’ So I took his advice. I went completely off the radar.”
Estevez drove 150 miles north of LA and pitched up at an empty and lonely
motel. The receptionist was a lady called Diane. Be it serendipity or the
Twilight Zone, but she actually witnessed the fatal shots that killed
Kennedy in the Ambassador Hotel. “I almost fell over when I checked in,”
Estevez says. “She told me that it felt like ‘the rug had been pulled from
underneath my entire generation’. She also told me that she had married two
young conscripts destined for Vietnam in order that they could relocate to
West Germany.” This encounter provided the trigger to a thumping drama.
Estevez filmed Bobby in just 37 days, and Diane’s testimony figures
large. The hotel was razed as he was making the film, a source of annoyance
rather than sentiment. Earthmovers were demolishing walls just 20 yards from
film set-ups. “It wasn’t a particularly beautiful building, or an
architectural wonder,” Estevez admits. “But people loved it nonetheless.”
I ask about the Sheen family relationship to the Kennedys and whether this had
any bearing on the film. “I met Bobby’s daughter Carrie years ago,” he says.
“I also met Ted briefly. I showed Carrie some scenes from the film recently
and she lost it when one of the characters says: ‘Now that Dr King is gone,
there’s nobody left but Bobby.’ I stopped the DVD. She couldn’t watch any
more. It was very emotional.
“I talk to my father a lot about how much you should get involved, and whether
you can make a difference with a piece of art. He’s been arrested 65 times,
so he’s not only a man of deep commitment, he’s also madly consistent.
“I always thought this film could support a huge star cast, not least because
the biggest star is Bobby Kennedy and no one, whether they’re Redford or
Streep, is going to top that. No favours were called in,” Estevez says. “I
had lunch with Anthony Hopkins one Sunday. The next day the offer went to
his agent. The phone rang. ‘Why didn’t you say anything yesterday?’ he
growled. I replied: ‘If you don’t like it, you don’t have to do it. But if
you do, I’d love to have you.’ It was like that with everyone, I promise.”
- The Times Gala film Bobby is showing on Oct 26 & 27 at Odeon West End 2
