Director John Maybury was equally scrupulous about casting the smaller supporting roles. "I was incredibly lucky to have Kelly Lynch and Brad Renfro," he says, "They are both so talented. When people see Kelly Lynch playing Jackie's mother, I wanted them to bring the history of the character that Kelly played in Drugstore Cowboy, as if that character hadn't died-well, here she is twenty years later with a teenage kid. And similarly, Brad Renfro has kind of a wild history, but he also happens to be a brilliant actor, so that's an extra added bonus."
Maybury reunited with Daniel Craig, who played one of the leads in Love Is the Devil. Craig's participation gave the director a reassuring familiarity, and his talent was essential to the believability of a small but crucial role, that of Mackenzie, the mental patient who befriends Starks at the institution. "I've worked with Daniel before, he's a personal friend and I know his ability as an actor inside out," explains Maybury. "And also, he's actually the only person in the whole film playing a mad person. If you're making a film about an asylum, the one person who is crazy needs to be a pretty good actor."
As with nearly every aspect of the production, Maybury's goal with the acting in The Jacket was to blend sensibilities here with his own. "For me, the pacing of the performances is very European," he says. "It is inspired by Fassbinder, because he's my biggest influence, and a kind of European sensibility. By that I mean the work of my favorite filmmakers: Passolini, Rossellini, Fassbinder, Herzog. There's a different kind of tone and texture to the performances in their work that allows you to linger on a face, to linger on a performance."
In this as in so many other respects, Maybury's background as an experimental filmmaker and his reverence for European art cinema would seem to be at odds with the formal narrative and aesthetic boundaries of Hollywood filmmaking, but he does not see it that way. "Although I come from experimental film, I made music videos for five years, so I did have a brush with huge audiences in that respect," he says. "Love Is the Devil was my first attempt to move from my avant-garde, experimental past towards more conventional cinema."
This film information was taken from the film's Official Production Notes.
This film is rated R for violence, language and brief sexuality/nudity.
