Spoiler Alert: Mark Steven Johnson does discuss plot details of Finding Steve McQueen during the course of this interview.
Finding Steve McQueen, a fact-based heist movie, marks a distinct change of direction for writer/director Mark Steven Johnson, best-known for his Marvel Comics adaptations Daredevil and Ghost Rider, as well his breakthrough screenplay Grumpy Old Men. Finding Steve Mcqueen features Travis Fimmel, Rachael Taylor, William Fichtner and Forest Whitaker. In the movie, an unlikely gang of thieves attempt to steal $30 million in illegal campaign contributions from President Richard Nixon’s secret fund, but the plan goes sideways, prompting the biggest manhunt in FBI history.
“The story of the United California Bank Robbery is one of the greatest stories never told,” says Johnson in a Director’s Statement distributed to the media by Momentum Pictures. “Back in 1972, the leader of a small group of safecrackers from Youngstown, Ohio got a tip from Jimmy Hoffa: President Nixon was hiding up to $30 million in dirty campaign funds in a bank in Laguna Niguel. Propelled by their hatred for Nixon, the gang traveled to California to rip off the President of The United States.
“It was during this time that Watergate was brewing, putting their audacious heist right in the eye of the storm. The fact that these small town crooks were so far in over their heads brings a lot of natural comedy to the story. They actually got caught because they forgot to run the dishwasher (a new invention at the time) in their stakeout house, leaving fingerprints on the dirty dishes for the FBI to discover. You can’t make this stuff up…”
“You can’t make this stuff up…”
Johnson spoke exclusively with Film Inquiry about the new film. And it’s absolutely true – you cannot make this stuff up.
He agrees. “You know it’s funny because we had to put ‘Inspired by’ versus ‘Based on,’ because some people have thought, ‘Oh, so like a lot of that crazy stuff you made up.’ But we only put ‘Inspired by’ because we had to change the names and some of the places. But all the stuff that happened, the crazier it is, that’s all true stuff. It’s a crazy story. When I first read this script I kept Googling it, going ‘That can’t be real, oh, that can’t be real,’ but it is. It’s a wild one man. And then I kept thinking ‘Why didn’t I know about this?’ I had never heard about the story.”
Neither had most of us. How did he first come to hear about the story?
“I only know about it from the script,” Johnson insists. “Honestly I was reading the script, it was sent to me direct, and they said it was a heist movie and I said ‘I don’t want to do a heist movie, there’s better people for that, I don’t really do that.’ Then I started reading it and I was like ‘This can’t be real,’ and I kept cross-referencing it online and this really happened, that really happened.
“As they say in the movie at one point, we’re in the diner and Molly [played by Rachael Thomas] looks at Harry [Barber] and says ‘So you set out to rip off the President of the United States and it seemed like a good idea at the time and you thought you’d get away with it how exactly?’ And Harry says, ‘It was dirty money, we figured he couldn’t do nothing to us, you know.’ And I think that’s kind of why it kept quiet.
“We all knew that there was a bank robbery and these guys were on the wanted list, but Nixon certainly wasn’t going to say that he was in any way connected with it, and the robbers weren’t going to say anything, and so it kept quiet for a long long time. And then Keith Sherrin, who’s a journalist, a writer for the Orange County Register, he did a series on this called ‘Stealing Nixon’s Millions,’ and the producer saw it, contacted him and optioned the article. Keith is actually now one of our screenwriters for the movie. A lot of this is based on his research and that series he did for the Register. It’s pretty fascinating.”
“Stealing Nixon’s Millions”
The details of the robbery, meticulously re-enacted for the movie, are fascinating to the point of bizarre: The robbers blew a hole in the roof of the bank and kept coming back for a couple of nights while they went through every safe deposit box in the vault for the money. Who’s ever heard of a robbery like this?
“I’ve never heard of that either,” he says.
But that wasn’t the only unique aspect to the project. The script cuts backwards and forwards in time, and that was an additional concern: “As you saw, we jump in and out of time lines all the time. I think there are five different timelines in the movie, so you put it together like a puzzle piece – before and after the heist, the diner, and all over the place – which is really cool, but it’s one thing that kind of was throwing people. We’re jumping around timelines, and then they go into the same bank three times. There was a certain point where people were like ‘What night is this? What’s going on?’
“It’s an interesting thing because I love the challenge of it, but boy… Sometimes traditionally there are going to be some scenes that just don’t work and you want to cut them but you can’t, because if you cut that one scene the whole thing comes down like a house of cards. It’s a trying to do a lot of things for a little film, and it was a deceptively difficult film to make actually.”
The flashback, flashforward structure is one of the things that will actually draw audiences in, building suspense in an unusual way, but one that hooks the viewer very quickly.
That observation pleases Johnson. “I’m so glad you say that, because I didn’t want to do a heist movie because because heist movies are always the same thing. It’s always about the setup of the heist, the planning and the execution of the heist in the second act and then the aftermath and whether or not they get away with it, that’s where the drama comes from: ‘Are they going to get away with it?’ This movie opens up eight years after the fact, and you get that they did get away with it, so that’s not where the conflict of the drama is. The drama is she going to forgive him, are they going to run away together, what’s going to happen to Harry Barber? It’s a love story. I thought that was interesting. It’s not your traditional heist movie. That’s what got me hooked.”
Rooting for the bad guys
Of course you always have the problem with any kind of a heist or caper movie: If you can’t get the audience rooting for criminals to commit a crime you’re sunk, and that’s not the easiest thing in the world to pull off.
“Exactly,” Johnson says. “It’s not. In this one as well, clearly Harry is our hero, we love him and we want him and Molly to be happy together, but then when you get to know Forest Whitaker‘s character and Lily Rabe’s, and you’re like ‘I like these guys too.’ She’s the first woman in the FBI, and he’s the first African American. And you realize that he and his wife have split up, and he’s going through all this personal stuff, and there’s this kind of this weird unspoken attraction between them, and you realize there’s no real good guys or bad guys here – it’s just people all trying to get along. They’re trying the best they can, and it’s interesting because you want everyone to kind of get along. Then we had that nice moment at the end when he’s getting arrested and they all kind of bond over their love of the movies.”
In particular, The Thomas Crown Affair, which of course stars Steve McQueen.
“I love that, it’s like a big love letter to the movies, and that’s what all of our characters have in common,” Johnson says.
Finding Steve McQueen reminded this writer that as a kid he saw Bullitt and Bonnie and Clyde on a double bill.
“Oh my God, that’s fantastic,” he says.
“And I was probably too young to see either one of them, but for some reason my parents decided that was okay, and when I saw the end of Bonnie and Clyde I’m like ‘There’s a woman being cut apart by a machine gun, that’s awful.’”
“Yeah, that was traumatic, wasn’t it? I remember when I saw that for the first time too, and it was like so violent…”
Travis Fimmel: Aussie TV Viking with a sense of humor
It was, I agree, although Bullitt has remained a favorite of mine for a long time. Travis Fimmel, who plays Harry Barber, has been around for some time now, although he’s not a household name. He may be after this. How did he come to Johnson’s attention?
“To be honest I only knew him from Vikings. I didn’t know anything else about him other than he’s a great-looking guy and he had eyes like Steve McQueen. Oh, he definitely had the look, and so I sat down with him, and he was so not what I expected. You know he’s Australian, so like most Aussies he’s got a great sense of humor, he’s very self-deprecating, he takes the piss out of himself all the time. He doesn’t at all mind looking foolish.
“And so I realize he’s really this very funny comedic actor, and there’s something really playful and boyish about him that no one has ever seen before. And I thought that was interesting cuz you know you’re going to get the fact that he’s gorgeous-looking, he’s physical and he can do all the stunts and things but he’s just a goofball and I loved that. You know, that got me really excited.
“So we’ll have that boyish look kind of innocence of Harry Barber and the fun and the comedy but then we surround him with this gravitas of Forest Whitaker and William Fichtner, Lily Rabe and Rachael Taylor who’s also an amazing actress. It just made me root for him. There’s a couple things he does in the movie that I love, that are tough to pull off, because the comedy is tough to pull off, and then you’ll have a scene where he sees his brother for the last time cuz they’re coming to arrest Tommy.
“It’s a heartbreaker, and it’s one of my favorite scenes in the movie because he’s walking away to go to the store and his brother says I love you Harry and Harry freezes and he just says ‘What made you say that,’ and his brother says ‘I don’t know, well I love you too, Tommy,’ and then you get goosebumps. These are the moments where you realize you can have your fun and broad comedy but you got a couple of moments like that and it means everything.”
It is hard to imagine how Johnson could have directed the scene, with the flashing police lights in the background at the end of the street, any better.
Two cars and one doesn’t work
“Oh good, thank you,” Johnson says. “That was just one of those lucky moments where I was like ‘I think you’re going to see him through the rear window.’ Man you know, you make a movie where the budget is 5.5 million dollars, and I’ve made movies with hundred million dollar budgets, but you make a movie like this and you just got to pray, hope a lot of times, that you get lucky. And sometimes you won’t get lucky and you’ve got to think quick on your feet because you don’t have money. You know that you don’t have the luxury of doing Fast and the Furious car chase sequences. You know you got two cars and one doesn’t work.”
Everything in the movie looks very real. When he did Ghost Rider and Daredevil Johnson had to rely on a lot of CGI. Is it more liberating to do it practical, or is it liberating to know that the computers can do anything?
“No, I always want to do it real, always. I don’t want to be dependent on computers and they are fantastic. You know CGI is so great these days, of course, especially compared to when I did Daredevil -which was rough you know that … people know, you feel it, feel a real car versus a CGI car from the back. We have very little CGI here oh, a couple of green screenshots and that’s it.”
After all, the very title of the movie Finding Steve McQueen refers to an era of movie-making where either you could do a stand or you couldn’t do a stunt. There’s something about knowing it’s a real car on a real road.
“Exactly,” Johnson agrees. “Absolutely. And that’s why when we referenced Bullitt, which we referenced a lot of times in the movie, all you think about is that car chase and that’s because it was real, and because it was Steve McQueen driving that car. You saw him behind the wheel peeling out, so you felt it in your gut. And also a lot of that chase is shot from inside the car, you’re in that car, and you’re feeling it. You can’t replicate that with CGI cars and ridiculous stunts.
“That’s where a low budget becomes an advantage, because we can’t afford to do all that stuff anyway, that they do in The Fast and the Furious, we’re not going to outdo that, we’re not going to have spectacular stunts, so what can we do that’s going to make a standout is we can be a little off center. We can a little weirder, make different choices, you know just make it different, and that’s kind of the fun of it: Okay, let’s take all of our restrictions and turn it into something interesting.”
The music matters
The music in the soundtrack is very central to this movie’s effectively evoking a bygone period in time. How closely did Johnson work with his music editor?
“Very closely, he says. “My music guys have done almost all my movies for me. Dave Jordan, who runs Format Entertainment, and Trygge Toven, they’re fantastic and do all the Marvel movies, that’s how I knew them, Dave’s first job was Daredevil, so they stuck with me through thick and thin. I’ll let you know in a little movie like this, no one’s getting rich, no one’s getting paid, so it’s like ‘I need your help,’ and they’re like, ‘Of course.’
“They just beg, borrow and steal to make deals for me because again, it’s such a tiny movie, and you’re right it’s really got some great songs in there. You need them, especially in a period piece. You set the tone and we’re going from 1980 to 1970, going all over the place, and you can track it through the music. And again we’re probably from a different generation I’m probably older than you are but…”
Which is not true, as it turns out. This writer is actually seven years older than Johnson.
“Then you remember the 8-Tracks, man” Johnson says.
Which in fact is true.
“It’s funny when he [Travis Fimmel] kind of ruins his Steve McQueen moment when the tape starts skipping and getting garbled.”
It’s a great moment.
“You can see the young people are going to be asking ‘What is that?’ and we’re going to be explaining ‘Well kids, that is an 8-track tape…’”
He’s probably right about that. What’s up next for Mark Steven Johnson?
“I got a couple things I’m working on. I have a movie that I wrote and will be directing called Patrick 1.5, which is a little comedy that I love, very heartfelt very funny, and I’m hoping to be shooting that later this summer. And at the same time I have a movie with Shirley MacLaine called Lucy Bomer, that I wrote and am producing, again a comedy, a road movie. It should be pretty amazing to work with her. She’s hysterical – I love working with her. So those are the two things at the moment.”
Momentum Pictures will release Finding Steve Mcqueen in Theaters, On Demand and Digital on March 15, 2019.
Film Inquiry thanks Mark Steven Johnson for taking the time to speak with us.
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