Kelly Masterson: On ‘Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead’

Kelly Masterson started as a playwright in the 1980s with limited success. He wrote the original screenplay for ‘Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead’ in 1999. A powerful and bleak crime drama that meticulously reconstructs how an apparently perfect crime goes spectacularly wrong. Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is an insolvent real estate agent. His younger brother Hank (Ethan Hawke) is falling behind on his alimony payments. To relieve their financial troubles they decide to rob their parents’ suburban jewellery store with tragic consequences. Their father’s (Albert Finney) relentless pursuit of the culprits brings everything spiralling towards a terrible climax. The script was optioned by a succession of producers until, after several false starts, the project was given the go-ahead with veteran director Sidney Lumet on board. A superb crime melodrama it was Lumet’s final and greatest achievement. The following is an extract from an interview in which Kelly Masterson speaks about his experience of writing the script: 

What was the inspiration for ‘Before the Devil Knows You're Dead’?

KELLY MASTERSON: I had read a novel I admired called Reservation Road by John Burnham Schwarz. I really liked the structure. It involved a terrible incident followed by an examination of the incident from the point of view of the various participants. I thought it would make an interesting structure for a movie.

I invented my terrible incident: the robbery and shooting of the mother. Then I took each character and followed them to and from the incident.

I also knew it was a tragedy and purposely gave each of the main characters a tragic ‘flaw’ – obsessive behavior they cannot break. For example, the father becomes obsessed with the notion of revenge and cannot stop himself even when he discovers it is his own son who must wreak revenge upon. Devil was the result of my structure and character choices.

Were you involved in any re-writing before or during the production?

KELLY MASTERSON: Fortunately, and unfortunately, no. The good news is I didn’t have to rewrite the script based on someone else’s vision or ideas. I wrote the script and tweaked it here and there over the years. Sidney did a rewrite to get his final shooting script but I was not involved nor consulted. I wish he would have come to me and asked me to make the changes he wanted. The end result, though, is terrific and I am very proud of the movie.

Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead (Directed by Sidney Lumet)

What surprised you most about the transition from script to screen?

KELLY MASTERSON: Lots of things surprised me and most of them pleasantly. I was surprised by the casting of Brian F. O’Byrne as Bobby, the punk accomplice. I had written the part as a 22 year old, stupid kid. I had see Brian on stage in Doubt and thought him remarkably gifted but not right for Bobby. His performance, however, is spectacular and casting a 35 year old made him more pathetic and frightening. It was a stroke of genius on Sidney’s part.

I was surprised by the remarkable restraint and outer calm Philip brought to Andy’s breakdown late in the film. I wrote a cliché scene in which Andy trashes his apartment. Sidney and Philip came up with an eerie, fascinating, slow meltdown that is so much better. Most of all, I was most surprised by the deep, rich, tense and painful relationship between Hank and Andy – Sidney’s rewrite and the performances of Philip and Ethan took this to a level that surprised and enthralled me.

What did you learn in the process of writing ‘Before the Devil Knows You're Dead’ that you’ll take with you to other projects?

KELLY MASTERSON: Raise the stakes. I don’t mean, put the hero in more jeopardy or add a ticking clock. I mean dig deeper – make it more personal and more emotionally significant. Get right into the guts of the characters. While I often try to pull my characters in two or more directions, I think Sidney’s contribution took my material into richer psychological territory. This gave the wonderful actors great stuff to work with in which the emotional stakes were very high. When I am working on projects now, I ask myself the question: how do I get further into this character and really rock him?

What advice would you give to screenwriters who are still struggling to get their work seen and (hopefully) produced?

KELLY MASTERSON: Don’t give up. I wrote for 20 years before Devil got made. And find your voice. I tried for many years to imitate others or to write in ‘commercial’ genres and did not have any success. I wrote Devil from some original place within myself and never dreamed it would get made, let alone succeed. Keep at it.

 - Interview with ‘Kelly Masterson on “Before the Devil Knows You're Dead”’. From Fast, Cheap Movie Thrills.

John Cassavetes: On Writing for Films

A Woman Under the Influence (Directed by John Cassavetes)

As a director, Cassavetes was a genius at portraying domestic issues. For Husbands (1970), Cassavetes assembled a high-profile ensemble. Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, and Cassavetes himself portrayed a trio of suburban husbands who, reeling from the death of a friend, embark on a spree of drink, escape, and sex that includes a sojourn in London. Husbands was initially panned by critic Pauline Kael as “banal,” but others compared it to the work of Bergman and found episodes of rare power in the largely improvised relations between the three leads.

The moderate success of Husbands enabled Cassavetes to secure a deal to make Minnie and Moskowitz (1971). More optimistic than any of his other films, Minnie and Moskowitz was Cassavetes’s reworking of a screwball comedy. Seymour Cassel played a parking-lot employee who falls for a museum worker (Rowlands), who is recovering from the fallout of a relationship with a married man (Cassavetes).

Funny and infused with a lighter spirit, Cassavetes next project was a return to psychodrama with A Woman Under the Influence (1974), an unrelenting and raw account of a Los Angeles housewife’s mental breakdown. Intended initially as a theatrical vehicle for Rowlands, who balked at the role’s stage demands it was brought to the screen instead by Cassavetes’s Faces International production company. 

Peter Falk was cast as the loutish husband, and Rowlands’s magisterial portrayal of the tormented woman at the heart of the film earned her an Academy Award nomination for best actress. Despite some criticism that Cassavetes had diluted  the power of the performances by allowing some scenes to go on for an extended time, A Woman Under the Influence was Cassavetes’ most successful film to date. Moreover, it earned Cassavetes his only Academy Award nomination for best director. It looked like Cassavetes had taken on the film industry and won: he had found a formula to write and produce deeply personal films on his own terms, while winning praise from the industry which he secretly despised.

The following is an excerpt from a rare interview with John Cassavetes by Nicholas Pasquariello published in The Daily Californian, May 1975, in which he discusses the writing and themes of A Woman Under the Influence which starred Gene Rowlands and Peter Falk. Two years in the making, independently-produced,  financed largely by family and friends, and with an extraordinary performance from Gena Rowlands, it remains one of Cassavetes’ most popular and provocative films. This interview was conducted during the editing of the film.

D.C.: How did you write A Woman Under The Influence?

Cassavetes: When I first start writing, there’s a sense of discovery. In some way it’s not just working, it’s finding some romance in the lives of these people. You get fascinated with their lives. If they stay with you than you want to do something – make it into a movie, put it on in some way. It was that which propelled us to keep on working at it. I wrote it originally as a play for Gena [Rowlands] and then Peter [Falk] read one of the plays and he said he’d like to act the part. I say ‘Why, I mean, the husband’s part is not nearly as good as the woman’s part.‘ He said, ‘Well, I still like it and I’d like to do it.’ So I began with that in mind, knowing who the two central characters are, and wrote a screenplay in about a month, and then revised it.

I have a very funny view on writing for films. It keeps changing, but my current view on writing for films is that dialogue should be tied up so heavily with the incident that you don’t feel dialogue and you don’t feel talk, rather you feel the emotions of the people.

D.C.: How much improvisation was involved in the making of A Woman Under The lnfluence?

Cassavetes: Hardly any. On Faces there was none either. On the first picture I did, Shadows, was all improvised, Faces was not, Husbands was about fifty-fifty, Minnie And Moskowitz was all written and this one was all written.

D.C.: Can you tell me the story of A Woman Under The Influence, as you now see it?

Cassavetes: It’s about a woman, it’s about her husband. The influence is the male, and she’s terribly in love with this man, and she’s crazy. He’s in love with her, and she counts on him. The rest of the story involves their lives, how they resolve the problem of her being crazy and him being sane, and being in love with each other.

You deal with an impossible situation, a woman who is really nuts, who can only function with the deepest love and respect from her mate, and when she has that she functions just admirably fine. When it’s taken away in the slightest form, if the man is human and has a bad mood, the woman goes totally berserk. Ordinarily you just let that woman go and say she’s a pain in the ass. Outside of having sympathy for her, she’d be impossible, but he happens to be in love with her, so strongly that it’s taken two people who absolutely have no right to be together except that they’re in love with each other, and they find a way to work it out through enormous difficulties.

He’s a working man, a guy that lays sewer pipes. He has a gang and they work outside in the fields, and they’re quite happy. She’s a prisoner in her household, not really caring about anything except a love affair that exists between herself and her husband. It’s impossible for him really to cope, to understand fully his need for her. And he has an enormous need for her. Every scene in the picture is dealing with their mothers, their friends, their families. Everything is on a level that he doesn’t understand, he can’t comply with, because he doesn’t think that she has any friends except himself.

People love her, and when she goes insane and comes back from the institution, when she’s so-called cured, no one likes her that way, they want her to be what she was, in a controlled area. He’s the only one that can make it that way, that can make her that way. A Woman Under the Influence really is about all women being crazy, because I believe that’s true (laughter).

D.C.: Don’t you think all men are crazy, too?

Cassavetes: I think they wish they were crazy (laughter). Our [men’s] stakes are not as high, and our weapons are greater. Their [women’s] weapons are sharp and finely honed and steeled, but their problems remain constant. And sometimes they can’t use their weapons, and then they don’t know what to do because they have no way of fighting, and then they go crazy. So, a woman who is absolutely in love with a man cannot in any way compete, because she’s in love with him, and so she’s not in competition with him. But I do believe at the end of the picture that love is possible, not only possible but it’s practical and appealing and not maudlin and quite noble.