Soon, Raimi rushes in from a meeting, taking time for Fango before rushing off to another meeting. But he's still the same friendly, open Sam he always has been, and no doubt always will be. Remember this guy is the guy who, when he appears at Fango conventions, ascends to the stage by falling on his face, and begins talking while blowing his nose on his tie.
“The Gift,” he begins, “is the story of a woman named Annie Wilson, who raises her three children on her own in this small Southern town. She's lost her husband and the kids have lost their father. It's the story of how she struggles against prejudice, because she exercise this gift of extrasensory perception, which is looked upon badly by the townspeople. She struggles to use her gift for the benefit of the town, though many locals have a terrible prejudice against her. She's a single parent in a tough financial situation.”
When a woman Annie slightly knows
disappears, the police and the missing woman's father come to
Annie for help in finding her. Ultimately, it's learned that the woman has
been murdered, and Annie's ESP really comes into play as she helps—rather
unwillingly—to find the killer. “It's the story of how she, against her
better judgment,” Raimi continues, “gets involved in this case. And slowly
but surely, the images start to come, not all at once, of who might have
murdered this poor girl. And Annie gets deeper and deeper into the thing
as the killer starts to fear that their identity may be revealed. Annie is
threatened, so it's a race to see if she can find who the murderer is
before she becomes a victim herself.”
The Gift was written by Simple Plan actor Billy Bob Thorton and his longtime friend Tom Epperson; the duo's previous script credits include the acclaimed One False Move. Even though this is a relatively low-budget film by studio standards (it is being released by the Paramount Classics division beginning December 8), it has an amazing cast. Cate Blanchett, Oscar nominee for Elizabeth, plays Annie; Hilary Swank, who learned of her Best Actress nomination for Boys Don't Cry while The Gift was shooting, is Valerie, the abused wife of Donnie Barksdale, a belligerent bully played by Keanu Reeves. The busy Greg Kinnear takes on the role of defense attorney Wayne Collins. Gary Cole was, of course, the star of the Raimi-produced TV series American Gothic and also appeared in Simple Plan; here he plays high school principal David Duncan.¹ Others in the cast include Michael Jeter, Giovanni Ribisi, Katie (Disturbing Behavior) Holmes and, in a rare acting turn, Danny Elfman (though prior commitments prevented him from scoring The Gift—but he will score Spider-Man).
Although it might seem as though the small-scale The Gift was kind of a breather between the big-ticket For Love of the Game and the much bigger Spider-Man, that's not why Raimi became involved. “My wife Gillian was reading scripts,” he explains, “trying to find something that I might like to do; she read the logline [brief description] of the story, and thought it sounded very interesting. She asked my agent Josh Donen for a copy of that script, and he got it to her. She read it and said ‘It's great, you've got to read this.’ So I did.
“At first, it was so dark and
upsetting, some parts of it, that I couldn't finish reading it. She said
‘What are you doing? You've got to pick up and finish reading that thing.’
So I picked it up and finished it. I came out the other side of
it, so to speak. I was very affected by its emotional aspects; it goes
into an extremely dark place. Then I thought, my first reaction was so
incredibly against having anything to do with it, maybe it would be
interesting to approach because of my fears and shock at reading
it.”
“But that was only part of it,” Raimi admits. “What really attracted me to it were the great characters that Billy Bob and Tom had written. Like in their other works [One False Move and A Family Thing], they really develop these people; they're real. On top of that, it was a story of a woman with the gift of extrasensory perception. They wrote a very unusual story that I thought would make a very interesting picture.”
Years back, Raimi actually was offered One False Move by Thornton and Epperson, but turned it down. “I didn't think I was the right director for that piece then. I'd love to have a chance to direct it now—but the movie is so fine, there's nothing I could have done better than [director] Carl Franklin did. At the time, it wasn't' that I didn't like it, I just recognized that I wasn't mature enough, or a good enough filmmaker, to handle that particular material.”
Though its horror is certainly not as explicit as in Raimi's Evil Dead films, The Gift does contain some eerie sequences, visualizations of Annie's ESP visions. “At times,” Raimi insists, “ I do want to scare the audience. That was the intention of the script, though I'm afraid to tell the readers of FANGORIA, who are such tried and true keepers of the genre flame, that The Gift is a horror film, because it wouldn't be completely honest.
“It primarily is a Southern-American dramatic piece, but it also has elements of a whodunit and of a horror film. Primarily, it's the story of a woman with her children in a small town. So I don't want to tell your readers it's a horror film, because they might be disappointed if they came in thinking that. But it does have scenes of horror in it.”
It was largely Raimi's flamboyant camera and editing styles that brought attention to his earliest movies, but he knows enough when not to go that route. A Simple Plan, he says, “was all about standing back and looking at these people, being silent and letting the actors and the script do the work. Most of The Gift is similar, with the exception that Annie Wilson has these psychic experiences, so we had to create a reality that was neither in the present, a real moment or fantasy. We had to have some sense of her being out of her body and seeing things, being halfway there, in some space between reality and the dream world.
“We had to get into some kind of filmic techniques to communicate that to the audience,” he continues. “So there's a little bit more flamboyance in those sequences than in A Simple Plan, but overall we tried to keep it in a real, particular narrow venue. There are a number of those scenes; she has a dream, she has two visions, and she gets a psychic premonition. It deals in a lot of subtly different planes, this ESP.”
As might be expected Raimi is very pleased to have worked with The Gift's ensemble
cast, feeling he learned something from each of the actors. “I learned
most from Cate,” he says, “only because she's in every [scene], so I spent
every minute with her. But I really liked her process in preproduction, of
figuring out what we were trying to accomplish in the scenes, how we could
further the ideas.”
He also appreciated the Australian star's quick accommodation to new ideas. “It was great that she could be so flexible about everything and still give a consistent performance. Like if another actor felt they needed something, Cate could react in a way that worked for them and still be true to her own character. Some actors feel, ‘No, I understand my character and I've got to play things this way.’ But she knows if you're angry, you don't have to shout; you could be very, very quiet. You could shout, or you could speak loudly and hold in some of the actor. I'm oversimplifying, but she could find a way to give everyone what they needed and still be true to herself.”
Reeve's role in The Gift is something new for the actor. “He plays this backwoods, God-fearing, single-minded and wife-beating individual,” Raimi explains, “He has a great prejudice toward anyone who is practicing Satan's work, as he sees it, particularly involving his wife—he's very controlling. He's furious at Annie because he thinks that if she isn't doing the work of the devil, she must be a pretty damn good con artist.
“Greg gave a great performance, and he's a really funny, nice guy, too. He plays Cate's new love interest, and he also plays another role. Then there is Gary Cole, whom I like very much; he always gives a solid performance. Giovanni Ribisi takes the role of Buddy, this confused and somewhat damaged individual whom Annie helps through his problems. She's something of a social worked, besides just being a psychic. She uses her powers to try to heal people—and sometimes those powers are simply common sense.”
Inasmuch as Raimi was still wrapping up The Gift while deeply into preproduction on Spider-Man, it's a bit unfair to ask him about potential future projects. But we did anyway—since one such hypothetical film is the long-rumored Evil Dead IV. “I'd like to make Evil Dead IV at some point, but right now, there's no script, and there are no interested financial parties—no money to make it. You know the movies never really made much money. When you look at the box office list in Variety, they reality is that Evil Dead may have made about $1.1 million when the whole thing was over. And Evil Dead II may have made something like $1.1 million. But they've never been big box office. It's hard to get companies—not that I've tried yet—interested in a fourth film. They'll look at how the other three did.”
Yes, he knows a fourth would please readers of this magazine. “FANGORIA fans have always been great to me,” he concludes, laughing, “but that's a small sick group of individuals.”