How did you decide upon CGI in de-aging Peter?
Originally, we’d done a prosthetics test years ago. And it just didn’t quite work. It was always a question of what is the emotionally authentic thing to do. And once we put prosthetics on Peter, I didn’t have access to his face and his expressions. We were never going to be able to make Peter Dinklage look like Hervé Villechaize. They have very different shaped faces. They have completely different voices. Even though both of them are dwarfs, they couldn’t be more different, physically. So, what we did was a wig and eyebrows and teeth. It was going to be Peter’s version of Hervé [with] the clear connection between some of the things Hervé went through and Peter has gone through in his life.
We did use a little bit of CGI in the de-aging. From ’50s Paris to ’70s Thailand to ’90s London and LA and ’50s New York, we went all over the world with this movie. So, you never know if something like that is going to work. But I do feel like Hervé was out there cheering us on [laughter]. The last time I saw him, he said, “I know you’re going to find a way to tell the story, one way or the other.” It took 25 years, but we did it.
What went into recreating the “Fantasy Island” scenes with Andy Garcia?”
Andy was absolutely fantastic. We were incredibly fortunate that the original set that “Fantasy Island” used in ’76 or ’77 for the TV movie, and then the whole series up until when it was canceled in ’86, is standing in Arcadia. It was part of an estate, Queen Anne Cottage, that was given to the state of California in the ’30s by an oil baron. And anyone can go see it. It’s pretty amazing. Before we started the film, Peter and I said, “We’ve got to shoot at the actual ‘Fantasy Island’ place.” And luckily, we were able to get them to agree to do it. We were able, 35 years after the show was canceled, to come back to the place they’ve shot it and recreate the “Fantasy Island” cottage, and that was pretty extraordinary.
Peter’s accent is impeccable. Did he work with a dialect coach?
There was an incredible dialect coach called Liz Himelstein. And Liz was incalculably brilliant in her contribution [in] putting Peter at ease with the voice register, because Peter’s very bass, and Hervé’s very nasally, very high-pitched. It was quite a feat to get Peter to do it, and Liz was absolutely integral. There was a lot of work that went practicing the voice, trying to get as close to Hervé as possible, while also accepting we never wanted to do an impersonation. We really wanted to kind of peek at and channel a piece of Hervé, and that character that you feel in the movie, it’s just this otherworldly version.
There’s great chemistry between the two leads. How did you choose Jamie as your stand-in?
One of the themes of the film is judgment. It’s how we all rush to judge. Hervé says to Tate at the first restaurant meeting, “You’ve written the story before you got here. You’re an amateur. You have no idea what the truth is. Maybe you want to find out.” Jamie is a fantastic actor. I’d seen him in “The Fall,” for which he was nominated for BAFTA here. And he was just brilliant and devastating and powerful. And he went and did “Fifty Shades,” and a lot of people’s impression of him was based on that, which is not really an impression of who Jamie Dornan is as an actor. He’s far beyond that. When I auditioned him, he just blew me away. I said, “Let’s work together.” I thought, in a strange way, casting Jamie fits with the theme of the film. Which is: Don’t judge a book by its cover. Just as [people] have a prejudgment of Hervé, they’ll go, “Oh, Jamie is just this pretty boy.” And the reality is, there are so many more layers there.
I’m a big fan of “The Terminal.”
Steve read my short scripts and actually imparted them onto Steven Spielberg, who ended up hiring me to write “The Terminal.” Without Steve, I wouldn’t have a career in film.
Tom Hanks’s Victor Navorski is so memorable. What was the inspiration for that character?
That was actually based on a true New York Times story. There was a real Iranian dissident living at Charles de Gaulle Airport, Alfred Nasseri. And he was an extraordinary character, and so, because his predicament was so unusual – he was basically stuck in a transit lounge, unable to get on a plane to Iran where there was a lot of possibility he was going to be detained and/or killed and unable to reenter France because he’d been an illegal immigrant – he was sort of in this limbo, in this sort of diplomatic kind of limbo; a man without a country. And DreamWorks auctioned the New York Times article, and originally took it to Andrew Niccol, and I worked with him a little bit on it, and ultimately, he then felt that Tom Hanks and Spielberg wanted to make the film. It was, again, pretty much with everything I’ve done, whether it’s with “Hervé” and/or “Anvil: The Story of Anvil,” it comes from a true story or a true character.
Do you have any new projects that you’re excited about on the horizon?
I’m doing the Boy George film at MGM, so I just spent the afternoon with Boy George talking about his life. Another exotic, fascinating, and incredible character. I might even be directing that, so that’s the thing I’m plugged into right now. And it goes back to growing up in London in nightclubs and knowing a lot of these people. I met George, for the first time, when I was 19. So, I’ve known all these people a long time; it’s quite wild to come back around and have a chance to try and make a film about him and that band and that period. It’s really exciting. Clearly, between “Anvil” and “Hervé” and this, I’m stuck somewhere in the fall of 1982. I’m hoping to move into the ’90s, eventually.
Sacha Gervasi recently received a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Television Movie for “My Dinner With Hervé.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9BkyB87nH8
