Taylor Hackford's long journey to make 'Ray' may end in Oscar glory
Soul man
Taylor Hackford's long journey to make 'Ray' may end in Oscar glory
By Rob Lowman
Entertainment Editor
It wasn't long into the making of "Ray," the first of the Oscar best picture nominees out on DVD, that Taylor Hackford got some directing advice from Ray Charles.
At the time, the director ("An Officer and a Gentleman," "The Devil's Advocate") and the musical legend were in the studio recording vocals for scenes in which Charles (played by Jamie Foxx) would be in a room just singing alone or rehearsing with someone else. Later, after the scenes were filmed, Charles' versions were dubbed in for Foxx's voice.
"At the beginning, when we'd talk about film, Ray would defer to me because it wasn't his medium. But when we went in the studio together, that was tough, that was his turf. And he is the king and the master of his world," says the 60-year-old Hackford, talking the day after he had gotten his first Oscar directing nomination.
"When I went in the beginning, I would describe the scene to him and how I saw it. The problem was when he first played it, it wasn't right. And I'd say, 'Gee, Ray, I think it needs to be more intimate.' And he'd say, 'Hey, Taylor, I played it exactly as you described it, and I don't have all day. I'm not going to sit in here and waste my time. You got to get more precise.' And he was right."
Hackford says that at that time Charles was quite vibrant and "a man very much in control of all his faculties and powers." Hackford didn't see him again until after shooting the film, when he showed the singer a rough cut.
"He was sick and deteriorating. It was incredibly painful. I described to him the scenes visually, and he listened to the film. He loved it. He really loved it. It was a fantastically gratifying moment for me. But painful also." Charles died last June, before the film's fall release.
While getting films made is never easy, getting "Ray" to the screen was a marathon. Hackford met Charles in 1987 when he tried to get the rights to his life story. The legend, as Hackford describes the singer, was not an easy person, "but nobody that accomplished is that easy." After a while, a trust developed between Charles and Hackford, who was determined to show in the film the complexities and dark sides of the singer's life, including his heroin addiction and infidelities. "In fact, the first time you meet the adult Ray in the movie," Hackford says, "he's telling a lie to get on a bus from Florida to Seattle.
"Ray was from the segregated South; he knew how to survive," explains Hackford. "And in this instance, what I wanted to show was what this man was thinking - that he was bound and determined to get there. And if he had to tell a little fib to do so, he still got to Seattle."
(After reading the script, Charles only made two factual changes.)
"The great thing about Ray Charles ... whatever he went after, he just bared his soul - kind of interpreting America to America and to the rest of the world," says Hackford. "He kind of had this ability to feel something whether you're black or white and express it through his voice and capture us all. He especially captured me."
Still, for more than a decade, the director couldn't get any studio interested in the project. Finally, Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz gave him the $35 million needed to make the picture. "The film is really the only independent film among the Oscar best picture nominees because it didn't have a studio distributor," notes Hackford. Even after after making the film, it took time to get a studio to bite.
When asked why a story about Ray Charles was such a hard sell, Hackford simply sighs.
"It's a very strange situation. I had the script. I thought it was a compelling script. I don't know why they wouldn't step up then. And then the film was paid for, and Phil Anschutz was willing to pay for part of the promotion and advertising ... and they still wouldn't take a chance. I just think that there is not a huge amount of vision out there. ... Bottom line is that it didn't make any sense to me because the film you see now is what the studios looked at. And only Universal stepped up."
The next challenge was finding someone who could play Charles. "You have a big burden. Ray Charles is known by everybody. They know what he looks like, they know how he moves, they know how he sounds."
Hackford says that he approached Foxx, who had the right look, because he saw Foxx was a good actor and more than a comedian. But he wondered if Foxx could carry a movie. When the director met the actor and found out how "incredibly intelligent" he was and that he had gone to college on a classical piano scholarship, that cinched it.
"What I learned spending years working with Ray Charles was that Ray trusted his instincts better than anyone I ever met. I took a page out of his book and said, 'It just feels right,' and I never looked at another guy."
But Hackford, who produced the Ritchie Valens biopic "La Bamba," knew that making a film about an African-American icon such as Charles was bound to attract criticism and that it was important that he and Foxx be on the same page.
"I told Jamie, 'We have to form a partnership here because otherwise we're both in deep s---. You're a black man having to portray a hugely famous icon, and you can't spend the rest of your life walking into the black community hearing them say, "Gee, Jamie I guess you just couldn't do it." And I'm a white man who doesn't want to look at every black friend who says, 'How dare you? How could you (screw) that up?' So, effectively, from the moment I went with Jamie, we've been doing this together."
Foxx, for his part, told Interview magazine that Hackford "knows how to put a film together. ... He knew everything about Ray, and he loved the music ... (and) Taylor, knowing that he had the reins of this movie, really listened. He listened to suggestions that I had about things like casting - that if you cast this movie the 'wrong' black Hollywood way, the project was not going to be what it could be."
"I wanted everybody - white, black, blue, green - to appreciate this story, but I particularly wanted a black audience to be able to accept it," says Hackford. "I didn't want them to look at this and say, 'Baloney. This is a sham and not a great portrayal of our culture.' But they have embraced the film phenomenally."
A Peace Corps volunteer in the '60s, Hackford has been making features since the 1980 music- themed film "The Idolmaker," but he's also done his fair share of producing, including the documentary "When We Were Kings," as well as waiting for projects to get off the ground.
"If you won't go out and just work by assignment, you suffer, and if you want to make every film your own - you wait."
Now Hackford is anxious to get to his next project (one of the possibilities involves his wife, Helen Mirren, whom he directed in the 1985 "White Nights.") But first he will do the Oscar dance. (He actually owns a statuette for a short he did in 1978.)
"Whenever you start these things, you hope they'll stand the test of time, and I hope this film's going to. Twenty years from now, we'll see. Whatever wins, wins," says Hackford. "It's the films that stay in people's minds (that count). I know that Ray Charles will really help this film."
