CS Daily Archive > From the Trenches > 08/27/04

Tracking Suspect Zero:
Director E. Elias Merhige on Developing the Thriller

by Jeff goldsmith

The director who brought Suspect Zero from development hell to this weekend's screens talks about the strengths of the film's writers, his philosophical serial killer killer, and why there's more to remote viewing than meets the (mind's) eye.

This week in Los Angeles, Creative Screenwriting Magazine and CS Daily hosted a Q&A screening of Suspect Zero with director E. Elias Merhige (Shadow of the Vampire). Folks lined up nearly an hour in advance at Paramount to get into this sold-out screening, and we apologize again for those of you who didn't make it inside. Merhige spoke for nearly 40 minutes, covering everything from developing the script with writers Zak Penn (who penned the original spec) and Billy Ray (writer/director, Shattered Glass) to his 47-day shoot to answering questions from the audience. Merhige explained that what attracted him most to the project was the unique setup in te script of a cop who kills serial killers by using remote viewing (an ESP-styled experience allowing one to see specific events or places over great distances). The director also found the intimate meeting of minds between Mackelway (Aaron Eckhart) and O'Ryan (Sir Ben Kingsley) similar to one of his favorite stories, The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad. Here are a few tasty bits from Merhige's interview.

How did you break in as a director?

It was with Begotten, my first feature film, that I started my professional life as a director. I have two more parts to Begotten that are very different from the first that I intend to make.

You had also written Begotten. Do you have plans to write again?

I have three important and complex stories that I have spent quite a lot of time cultivating into outlines. One of those stories I am just now beginning a first draft screenplay. I love to write, but I equally enjoy an excellent piece of work from someone else's pen. The bottom line is that a great story is a great challenge to make a great film -- and this is an extremely gratifying process.

Suspect Zero began with Zak Penn's script, which was sold to Cruise/Wagner Productions and then went through many different hands. Was it true that Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull) rewrote it at one point?

It's true that Paul Schrader took a crack at it, but I never read his draft. Really, out of respect to all of the various writers and directors who had considered this property, I didn't want to know where they were headed with it -- I wanted to look at the material with fresh eyes, which is why I went back to Zak Penn's original script. I also wanted to keep it away from Manhunter, Red Dragon, and Se7en -- which are great films -- so why remake them here? I wanted to do something new.

What did you find to be the different strengths of your two screenwriters, Zak Penn and Billy Ray?

I feel that Zak and Billy are both really talented. The advantage I had with working with Billy was that he was unfamiliar with the material, which allowed him to jump off with a fresh interpretation of the story. Zak was very married to the older version of the story, when it was written in 1996-1997. I thought that Zak had an excellent sense of structure, and I really admired that in his script. Billy was also really able to embrace the remote viewing aspect and add in somewhat of a Secret Sharer intimacy to the meeting of these two minds, along with some of the subconscious elements that I wanted to explore in these characters.

What are the realities behind remote viewing?

For almost a quarter of a century, from 1972 to 1995, the U.S. government had a program which took volunteer military personnel and government civilians and taught them a mental skill known as remote viewing, which, roughly described, is a sort of "controlled clairvoyance." Using this skill, government remote viewers were used to spy on the Soviet Union, Middle East terrorists, the Chinese, and even narcotics traffickers -- whomever might present a national security threat at the time. Remote viewing did not work all the time, but it worked often enough that the government continued to fund it for 23 years. The CIA officially canceled and reclassified the program in 1995, making it legal now to talk about it.

I found it extraordinary that an institution as conservative as the U.S. military was financing research that involved putting some of the most gifted physicists together with some of the world's most gifted psychics. In an effort to take Suspect Zero away from the procedural and the empirical and bring it into the realm of the deeply psychological and subjective, remote viewing was a perfect vehicle to create an imagistic bridge without words between O'Ryan's and Mackelway's minds.

Separately from the film, I have been putting together a documentary on remote viewing by interviewing the original program directors and the original members of the team. This has become a personal interest, and I have been brought through a remote viewing session myself. I came within 70 percent accuracy of a target I had no previous knowledge of. It proved that anyone can remote view; that it's a perception we all possess, but are too lazy to sharpen and use.

Could you elaborate about your own remote viewing experience?

There were four envelopes, labeled one through four. Each contained a specific site in Texas, but they weren't landmarks. So we randomly invited in a housekeeper from the hotel, and had her roll a die. She rolled a four, and envelope four was chosen and then taken away. I was then led through the protocols for a remote viewing session to see what was in that envelope. The methodology of the session was designed to do a run-round on your cerebral cortex so that you're no longer thinking or guessing. I was focused on the target and asked a series of specific questions. What does it smell like? What does it taste like? What are the temperatures? You can't take more than a second to write down your answers, and then you start to put it all together moving from the fragmentary aspects to the bigger picture.

I was able to tell it was very windy at the site, that there was a presence of water, a river, and that on one side of the target there were square buildings and on the other side of the target there was this green forest and no buildings. I also smelled fresh black tar and got a sense of steel girders. I thought it was either a causeway going over a river or a bridge or a tunnel going underneath a river. When we drove out to the site, nobody told me what it was. When I saw in the distance this steel bridge, a chill went through my body because I knew that was the target -- and I was right. I had smelled tar, and as it turned out they were laying down tar that morning! They hadn't even finished their repairs and were still steamrolling it.

When O'Ryan remote views he listens to an audiocassette to get him into his trance. Is it the same cassette for each trance, or is he being sent different tapes?

Benjamin O'Ryan is listening to the same tape from his defunct remote-viewing program throughout the movie. That tape actually comes out of an experiment that they really did in the remote viewing program to tune the mind to an alpha-wave level faster. It used to take 45 minutes to get a remote viewer into that state, but with the tape they were able to bring people into that state within four or five minutes.

Why did O'Ryan strip off the eyelids of his victims? Was that in the script or something the script inspired you to add?

The story exists on a multitude of levels, and one of the levels is about the nature of seeing -- that seeing in and of itself can be horrific. Most people don't know that, from 1973 thru 1983, about 98,000 Vietnam vets [that had returned from the war] blew their brains out with their government-issued pistols. That's almost twice the amount of people that died in battle. The reason they killed themselves is because of these images that they couldn't shake from their nightmares: battle, grotesque disfigurement from mortar shells, dead children, mangled bodies, and all of that. That motif of being able to see, but not being able to stop seeing… it fucks people up. These open eyes are a grisly message to Mackelway that he too needs to see what's happening.

This idea of using the eyes was something I added to reinforce the concept of Mackelway continuing to use his new gift. Also, O'Ryan was cutting off his victims' eyelids because these serial killers live in a state of darkness and denial -- in his mind, he was cutting off their eyelids so they could ultimately 'see the light.'


Jeff Goldsmith is a regular columnist for Creative Screenwriting magazine and serves as the Los Angeles Events Coordinator in charge of the Creative Screenwriting screening series.

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