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Starring: Bruce Willis, Matthew Perry, Natasha Henstridge, Amanda Peet, Kevin Pollak, Tasha Smith
Directed by: Howard Deutch
Screenplay by: George Gallo, Mitchell Kapner
Release Date: April 9th, 2004
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexual content, violence and language.
Box Office: $16,328,471 (US total)
Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures
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Retired hit man Jimmy “The Tulip” Tudeski (Bruce Willis) is enjoying the quiet life in a beachfront bungalow in Mexico.
Thanks to falsified dental records supplied by onetime neighbor and friend Nicholas “Oz” Oseransky, D.D.S. (Matthew Perry) at the end of The Whole Nine Yards, Jimmy double-crossed the Gogolak gang and escaped the Feds by faking his own death.
Now, secure in his Baja hideaway, Jimmy has traded in his shotgun for a dust buster and is learning to channel his natural intensity into more domestic pursuits like cleaning, decorating and perfecting his culinary skills while working through some of the personal issues that led him to a life of crime.
Meanwhile, his wife Jill (Amanda Peet), an idealistic wannabe assassin who has yet to pull off a clean hit, dreams of the good old days when the only thing her wild man Jimmy cared about wiping up was evidence. Suddenly, an uninvited guest shows up on the Tudeskis’ doorstep. It’s Oz, breathless and desperate, begging them to help rescue his wife, Cynthia (Natasha Henstridge), who has been kidnapped by the Gogolaks.
Jimmy couldn’t be less interested. It’s not his job anymore. But before he can toss Oz out on his ear, more gate-crashers arrive. Newly paroled mob boss Lazlo Gogolak (Kevin Pollack) and his goons have followed the naïve dentist down from L.A. and right into Jimmy’s front yard.
All that crazy old Lazlo has been thinking about in jail is how he’s going to get even with Jimmy for knocking off his favorite son, Yanni, and how he’s going to fix that conniving Oz for helping him get away with it. Now Jimmy, Oz and Jill will have to go the whole nine yards – and then some – to save Cynthia, teach Lazlo a lesson and keep one step ahead of the mounting mayhem.
Production Information
The Whole Ten Yards was a result of spontaneous combustion when the original cast reconvened at the press junket for The Whole Nine Yards, nearly a year after wrapping production on the hit comedy. Most had not seen each other in the interim but they immediately fell into their former rapport and began to reminisce about the good times they had together shooting the film and developing their quirky characters. They imagined the kinds of situations these characters might find themselves in if there was a second installment to the story.
How would married life work out for newlyweds Oz and Cynthia, and how would notorious hit man Jimmy The Tulip take to his new role as a househusband? Will novice assassin Jill ever get the hang of, well, the hang of it? And was it really possible for Jimmy and Oz to expect that their whopping big lie about Jimmy’s death would go undetected forever or that either of them could ever really, truly, finally relax? Suppose it all comes back to bite them…
“The cast started kicking around ideas for another movie even before the first one came out,” says producer David Willis, one of the producers on the original film. “It started all of us thinking along the same lines.”
Once the actors had committed to reprising their original roles for part two, the producers handed the reins to director Howard Deutch, fresh from his 2003 DGA-nominated directorial effort Gleason. Adept at capturing the dynamics of on-screen comedy partnerships, Deutch counts among his credits The Odd Couple II and Grumpier Old Men, starring Hollywood legends Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. The director’s renowned sense of comic timing and his willingness to incorporate unscripted moments that might suddenly emerge from his active and collaborative cast made for a relaxed atmosphere where one joke would quickly spark another and it was up to Deutch to keep a firm grip on the story.
“I’m not a big believer in improvisation for its own sake,” Deutch explains. “I think it needs a foundation and basic parameters. But when a scene is making sense and fully grounded, then you can lift off and let the actors mess with it and have fun. They can capture the text and then elevate it with their own ideas and inspiration.”
Helping to provide that foundation is screenwriter George Gallo, who recently worked on Bad Boys II and is perhaps best known for the classic action comedy Midnight Run, in which tough guy Robert De Niro first showed off his comic talent. “The trouble with some sequels is that they almost do the same movie over again,” says Gallo, who began with the characters and story created by Whole Nine Yards screenwriter Mitchell Kapner and brought them into 2004.
“People change over time, and I wanted to know what happened to them since the last movie ended. Jimmy has retired and moved to Mexico where he has time to examine his life, have some kind of nervous breakdown and then develop this domestic passion that, presumably, keeps his old demons at bay – but barely. His former protégé, Jill, is now his wife and trying to launch her own career as a paid assassin but she’s not very good at it. Plus, she really misses their old life.”
Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, “Oz is living in constant fear that the Gogolak gang he helped Jimmy double-cross will come back to get him,” adds Deutch. “He can’t help feeling that it’s not over yet and is constantly looking over his shoulder. He’s thinking about building a moat around his house. He’s got barbed wire, security cameras in every tree and every high tech gadget imaginable, trying to protect himself and his wife, who’s getting sick and tired of his mounting paranoia. The funny thing is, he’s right, but she won’t believe him.”
As much as Oz wants to avoid the Gogolaks, Jimmy wants to avoid anything connected with his former life – that is, his identity as a hit man, his association with the Gogolaks, his ex-wife Cynthia (now married to Oz) and, most definitely, his former friend and neighbor, Oz.
But old Lazlo Gogolak is about to shake up both of these not-so-happy homes. Recently paroled, the psycho septuagenarian has been in jail for years, brooding on the fact that Jimmy knocked off his favorite son, Yanni. He’s been plotting his revenge. Not satisfied with that whole dental-record-ID scam, he believes Jimmy is still alive and hiding somewhere. He also knows that Jimmy is smart and won’t be easy to track down so he goes for the obvious weak link in the operation – the hapless Oz – wisely assuming that “the dentist will lead us to the rat.”
Sure enough, after Lazlo and the boys kidnap Cynthia they watch the panicked dentist run for help to the only person he knows who can handle this situation: Jimmy The Tulip.
“But Jimmy has warned Oz that if he ever tries to contact him he’ll run over him with his car 20 times,” Deutch cautions. “He shouldn’t even think of calling. As far as Jimmy is concerned, everyone back home believes he’s dead and that’s the way he likes it. Clearly, he never wants to see Oz again, so when Oz shows up unannounced at the secret hideaway in Mexico, well, look out, it’s going to be a bad day for Oz.” “Friendship is over-rated. Besides, I’ve got enough friends. I’m looking to lose a few.” “The thing about Jimmy,” Deutch deadpans, “is that he’s funny and it’s okay to laugh at him and sometimes he’s laughing right along with you but you know he’ll kill you. Seriously. He will kill you. It’s what he does.”
Jimmy’s personality has evolved somewhat from what it was in The Whole Nine Yards. Although still “a stone cold killer, he’s now also a bit more sensitive and reflective. He feels some delayed guilt for his former way of life and is grappling with that and other issues that lead to some drunken epiphanies,” mostly in inappropriate moments, Deutch observes. “Plus, he has developed an obsession with his carpet and his cooking and it’s fun to watch these unexpected new dimensions emerging from a character we already know.”
In some ways, this chapter of their lives finds Jimmy and Oz switching some aspects of their original roles, notes Bruce Willis, in that “Jimmy’s given up the life of crime and is living in Mexico with his wife where he’s indulging his domestic side and his love for gardening, and Oz has become more of a tough guy who wants to save the day."
Willis counts among his favorite scenes the one in which he and Perry drink two or three (or nine or ten) too many in a motel bar and his character generously insists on revealing some of his deepest secrets – whether his uneasy companion likes it or not. “That scene, and the following morning,” he admits, “is as far out, comedy-wise, as I’ve ever gone. Jimmy takes a pretty weird turn there and it was actually kind of disturbing…. but in a funny way.” Of course.
“Mixing it up is nothing new for Bruce,” offers producer Arnold Rifkin, who could be talking about how Jimmy accessorizes an apron and bunny slippers with a machine gun. Willis’ longtime agent and a partner in his production company, Cheyenne Enterprises, Rifkin easily calls up a series of successful vehicles for the versatile Emmy and Golden Globe-winning actor across a range of genres, “from Moonlighting and Blind Date to The Kid, from Armageddon and Die Hard to Nobody’s Fool, Pulp Fiction and The Sixth Sense.” He says that one of the prime motivations for Willis on The Whole Ten Yards was simply “to have fun with it. To get back to a character he really enjoyed playing, a bad guy who’s really not so bad, and to work with a talented ensemble cast he knew could lob the ball back from wherever he might hit it.”
“Bruce can do anything,” Deutch attests. “Charming, scary, funny, powerful….he can be whatever he wants. I think he realizes that the chemistry between him and Matthew is unique. He wants to laugh, and nobody makes him laugh like Matthew. And frankly, nobody makes Matthew laugh like Bruce. Jimmy and Oz are opposite in every single way, North and South Pole, nitro and glycerin, and just as combustible. When you have these total opposites colliding there’s going to be an explosion.”
As much fun as the actual explosions is the process of watching them build up to that point, one threat, one whine, one gaffe at a time, “till you get to the point where Bruce throws a tuna sandwich in Matthew’s face or suddenly tries to choke the life out of him in the middle of lunch and you’re thinking ‘well, it’s about time,’” says Rifkin. “They have to be completely in sync to pull that off, to be that antagonistic and yet bonded, to make you believe they can’t stand the sight of one another and yet somehow they’re friends and they’re in this thing together.”
“Matthew and I have exceptionally good chemistry,” says Willis. “It’s easy to crack jokes with him and fool around with the material. He has an innate comic sensibility that really comes through on film.”
“We bounce off each other easily,” adds Perry, a multiple Emmy and SAG Award nominee, who credits his off-screen friendship with Willis as one reason why their timing is so natural. “I know what his reactions are going to be and he knows mine. In the first movie, there was a kind of mutual respect established between the characters.
Oz didn’t turn Jimmy in because he liked him and Jimmy didn’t kill Oz because he liked him. But it’s an uneasy friendship. There’s always the underlying possibility that despite the respect and affection they have for one another Jimmy could just blow Oz away and not have any conscience about it because of who he is. It’s like Felix and Oscar, but only if you knew that Oscar could shoot Felix at any moment.
“Because of that element of fear,” Perry explains, “it allows me to play bigger. I’m playing a character whose life is literally in danger all the time, completely off-balance. I can run into a glass wall in panic or fall down eight times trying to get out of a room and the audience can believe it because the stakes are so high.”
“Matthew can’t open a door without bumping into it and can’t negotiate a staircase because he’s so nervous. It’s Buster Keaton territory,” says Gallo, noting that all the film’s pratfalls were Perry’s spontaneous contribution. “I have never written anything that physical but he instinctively saw the potential in those scenes. He’s a very gifted physical actor. It’s hard to sell running into a door without looking stupid. He just totally commits.”
The Whole Ten Yards also reunites Willis and Perry with Amanda Peet, who earned a Blockbuster Entertainment Award nomination for her performance in the first film as incompetent novice assassin Jill, a young woman who idolized the infamous Jimmy The Tulip the way groupies follow rock stars. In the new story, Jill has married her hero hit man and is still trying to launch her own career as a contract killer with marginal success. Her targets tend to stumble out of windows and fall down elevator shafts before she can get to them and it’s really starting to affect her confidence and possibly her marriage.
“Jill has a lot more zeal than talent,” Peet concedes. “That’s what’s fun about her.”
“Aside from being hilarious and charming, and very easy on the eyes,” Willis compliments his on-screen wife, “she always has good ideas and she uses everything. She’ll crash into something and just keep going, right in character, and ultimately that might end up in the film.”
Expanding his comments to the cast in general and to director Deutch, Willis says, “we would improvise and then go back and nail it down, decide whether it worked or not. At one point Amanda accidentally slammed the trunk of a car on my head and people on the set were concerned but we just kept going. I could go through the film now and point out which moments were scripted and which weren’t but it all looks like it was meant to happen. When you put five or six funny people together like that they just come up with ideas, schtick, running gags. The same thing happened with The Whole Nine Yards.” “It’s interesting for me to see what’s going on in each scene,” offers Deutch, who tries to maintain the dual perspectives of director and audience while filming. “I enjoy the dynamics: who’s up, who’s down, who’s trying to kill whom, who’s feeling sorry for himself and pouting and who’s off creating mayhem, because those dynamics can shift within seconds depending on the situation, especially with these three. Not only with Bruce and Matthew, but also Amanda’s energy. It’s like a three-way tennis game with no net.”
Unbeknownst to Jimmy, Jill has maintained friendly contact with Oz and Cynthia during the past year, a fact Jimmy is not at all pleased to learn, especially since she’s also been confiding in them about her domestic problems. “He’s sweet and he tries to please,” says Peet about the retired hit man, “but it’s not enough for Jill. She fell in love with a dangerous, charismatic tough guy gangster and she wants that guy back. She wants Jimmy to lose the apron and get back into the game. She’s hoping it will revive their disappointing love life, which is kind of a touchy subject for him, so the more she pushes the more he resists – until the whole Gogolak gang shows up at the house and he has no other option.”
One of the original cast members everyone was eager to see again was Kevin Pollak. There was only one problem: the character he formerly played, Yanni Gogolak, was bumped off at the end of The Whole Nine Yards. But wait – why not bring Pollak back as Lazlo Gogolak, Yanni’s ill-tempered old jailbird father? As Rifkin quips, “It’s Hollywood – dead doesn’t necessarily mean dead if you can finesse it.”
“It was Bruce who suggested we have him back by casting him as Yanni’s father,” admits Deutch, who first worked with Pollak on Grumpier Old Men. “But for the record I’d like to take credit for that idea right now.”
As producer David Willis recalls, “I told Kevin that we had good news and bad news…the good news was that we figured out a way for him to be in the sequel. The bad news was that he would need to have four hours’ worth of prosthetic makeup applied every day in order to do it.”
“At first I thought, ‘wow, that’s great,’” Pollak picks up the story, “because I was a little jealous initially when I heard they were all going to do a sequel. And I stared to feel better until I realized how much crap they were to going to put on my face. It completely transforms me. Wesley Wofford [Key Prosthetics] did a remarkable job and Vicki Phillips [Wig Prosthetics] made a great white shock wig and my wife suggested the giant Lew Wasserman glasses. What can I say? – it’s a look.”
Indeed, it’s a look that Bruce Willis describes as “a cross between Liberace and Cesar Romero from his days playing The Joker on the original Batman series.” “Honestly,” adds Pollak, “I’m tempted to not put my name in the credits and just have people wonder ‘who is that guy?’”
Beyond the visual, an essential part of Pollak’s metamorphosis is a thick, vaguely Eastern-European accent with just a hint of Count Dracula and a rich vocabulary of painfully mispronounced words (“I switch all the v’s and w’s” he says) that make up Lazlo’s unique dialect and gives him the opportunity to smack any of his underlings who dares to correct him – which is pretty much constantly. Just imagine what it sounds like when he gives orders to “torch the Porsche.”
“Yeah, he’s pretty intense, short fuse, flies off the handle a lot,” Pollak says affectionately about his feisty character. “He’s menacing and volatile and he has this very real vendetta he pursues all through the movie, but at the same time he’s completely crazy. He’s a 75-year-old maniac. His own family doesn’t know what he’s talking about half the time.”
Pollak’s performance had its drawbacks, as co-star Peet relates. “I think a significant amount of film was wasted because we couldn’t look at him without laughing. There was one scene in which Matthew gives him a line and I was supposed to be opposite Kevin and I just couldn’t do it because every time he started talking I started laughing. So eventually I stepped out and Matthew stepped into my spot and he couldn’t do it either so he gave up. Then they put Bruce in there and he couldn’t do it. So we were standing there for what felt like an hour trying to nail this one line because no one could keep a straight face opposite Kevin.”
Perry sums it up for everyone when he proclaims, “Kevin walks away with every scene he’s in. He completely steals it.”
Also reprising her role in The Whole Ten Yards is Natasha Henstridge as Cynthia, formerly married to Jimmy The Tulip, now married to Oz the dentist. Cynthia goes way back with the Gogolak family and her ex, knows where the bodies are buried, is pretty good at understanding the strained relationship Lazlo has with his less-than-brilliant son Strabo, and she can more than handle Oz – at least she used to think so.
“In some ways, Oz has become more like Jimmy used to be, with the security and the weapons arsenal (nevermind that he doesn’t really know how to fire any of them properly) and it’s Jimmy who’s trying to live a nice quiet life,” says Henstridge, who made her memorable feature debut with the 1995 sci-fi drama Species and most recently headlined Susan Seidelman’s political biopic Power and Beauty: The Judith Exner Story. “Jill’s been around that crazy life already with Jimmy and she’s had enough of it, which is why she chose to go in an entirely different direction when she fell in love with Oz. But as Oz becomes more obsessed about being followed by gangsters, it’s like her old life coming back. She needs to get away.”
What Cynthia gets, instead, is kidnapped, which sets everything else in manic motion. “Cynthia is the catalyst,” says Deutch. “Of the bunch of them, she’s the one who appears to be the most level-headed, which is actually a tough part to play when everyone around you is behaving like a crazy person.” Whether she’s explaining to her husband why he shouldn’t dig a moat around the house or whether she’s chatting about old times with the witless Strabo while being held hostage at the Gogolak mansion, Henstridge, as Cynthia, has to gracefully and believably accommodate herself to the absurdity of her situation “as though it’s all normal, it’s all a part of her life.”
Cast as principal members of the Gogolak gang are Frank Collison as Strabo (“your classic screen nincompoop,” says Gallo), Johnny Messner as Zevo and Silas Weir Mitchell as Yermo, who provide equal portions of menace and comedy as they struggle to one-up each other while serving as punching bags for their volatile and unpredictable boss.
 Production notes provided by Warner Bros. Pictures. |
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The Whole Ten Yards
