The INVESTIGATOR
IT’S BEEN NEARLY 20 years between my first film as director and the second, Motherless Brooklyn. So I guess the question is: why the rush?
Truth is, I didn’t intend for it to be that long. But I knew when I got the rights to Jonathan Lethem’s novel that I wasn’t going to work on it right away. We did Fight Club. I directed Keeping The Faith. For four years I just wasn’t working on it. Then I wrote about half of it but got blocked.
Finally, the guy running New Line, Toby Emmerich — we’d become friends doing American History X — told me, “I want the rest. Write it!” He pushed me and pushed me and I finally finished it. And then Toby was the one who said to me, “You gotta direct this.” That was maybe 2012. The funny thing is, we talked about the fact that with Obama getting elected for a second term — this black community organiser as President of the United States — maybe a lot of what this movie’s about is fading in the rearview mirror. But Toby was a big believer in it.
It took us five years to get the resources together. New Line wasn’t making these kind of movies. But then Toby became head of Warner Bros. And Donald Trump got elected President. And suddenly the underlying themes in the movie felt white-hot again. Toby said to
