David Owen Russell has certainly pushed the storytelling envelope with off-beat comedies like I Heart Huckabees (2004) and Spanking The Monkey (1994). He later garnered critical acclaim with Silver Linings Playbook (2012) and The Fighter (2010). Russell flexed his creative muscle into original caper films like American Hustle. His nuanced sense of story led to Amsterdam, an active mix of comedy, caper, and political thriller which certainly turned a few heads with its bold ingenuity. Creative Screenwriting Magazine spoke in-depth with the filmmaker about Amsterdam.
How did you pitch Amsterdam?
It was about the enchantment of these three friends – these three personalities that Christian Bale (who plays Burt Berendsen) and I and Margot Robbie (who plays Valerie Voze) had been working on for numerous years, and then John David Washington (Harold Woodman) joined us. Just these three friends who really were wonderful characters. They endure quite a bit, yet they rescue a kind of embrace of life nevertheless. They never lose their sense of humor, to quote Smedley Butler.
David O. Russell. Photo by Steve Granitz
And then they roll into this progressively enlarging meta situation which is unfolding from many angles, starting with the courtship of the veterans and a way to reach the most esteemed military general of the time – who is very protective and wary of meeting with very influential powerful people. He knew they had designs on power and they wanted to use him for that. So, the notion is our characters are part of the bait, being used to get this powerful De Niro character (General Gil Dillenbeck), based on history.
And this was the essential pitch. And it had many chapters that are all in the movie – shocking history that you can’t talk about without people being kind of stunned about it and asking if this is true, and asking if this actually happened, and why doesn’t anybody know about it – because in fact, the history has been hidden because many powerful interests don’t want this history known.
Amsterdam was based on The White House Putsch conspiracy in 1933. What makes it personal?
Insofar as personal to me, I very much had a lot of personal experience of my own that went into each character – and that’s almost always the case. Many elements of the Christian Bale character are ones that I can relate to from my own life. I wanted to be a doctor for much of my youth and studied for it. And I also was aware of what it was like to have two ethnic identities that were greeted differently in different places, especially the higher you got in social status – not everywhere, but still in different places.
And being someone who wants to be nobody’s fool and have a spring in their step and a kind of optimism. That’s very essential in my life and with those I love. And a love of music. And not having a problem with operating as an outsider or as an underdog. As for the Valerie Voze character played by Margot – I had experienced a kind of what they call Munchausen by Proxy syndrome when I was nineteen – where people around me didn’t want me to do certain changes and adventures I wanted to have at that time when I was dropping out of college momentarily.
This mystery ailment got grown and grown into this strange thing that sort of sidelined me for a long time until I got very, very confused by it. Like Valerie, I kind of said, “What is this? Why am I still a patient? I don’t understand this.” And friends helped me sort of break out of this. It’s very, very strange grey territory for anybody has ever been down that road. It can happen very quickly. And I’d always loved the artists who inspired me as well – Meret Oppenheim and Georgia O’Keefe and others, who were very brave and living by their own terms and taking what they found beautiful, even amid tragedy, and having a sense of humor about it, and a sense of beauty about it, and a sense of grit about it. Living life on their terms and having fun.
The John David Washington character was personal to me because there have been many times I’ve joined something where you discover, “Gee, I thought I was being welcomed into this group, but really I’m not.” And I also have many friends and family who have experienced this history in the United States from the community, and they’ve had to learn to live in a parallel world that they define by their own fortitude, in spite of the indignities they face. So again, similar in the sense that it asked you to not give up but to proceed to make your life regardless. And I also know people who have been very strong, very grounded, a little more quiet, and those are some of my best friends.
How did you approach your to defining the story parameters given that the source material was so voluminous and outlandish?
Well the story parameters were defined by – let’s have the characters start out. We see them in their world. A couple of fixers, outsiders, one a doctor, one a lawyer who work together – and they’re called into a particular case that’s very unusual, and it involves something far outside what they usually deal with, which is an autopsy. So we’re in a bit of a crime story. And the Christian Bale character is not at all sure he wants to do an autopsy. He’s not comfortable with it, and it’s an autopsy on the general who introduced them. And he’s dead because of a trail of treachery that leads to the wish to create a coup that he would not cooperate with. But they don’t know that yet.
So they begin in this adventure investigating this, which is simultaneously dealing with Burt’s reckoning with his understanding of love and his domestic life, which is a struggle for him that his friend wants to help him with. Which goes to the theme of – “Do you follow the wrong god home in your personal life? Gee, how did I end up in this relationship or marriage? This is not quite right. How did this country end up in the situation? Gee, this is not quite right. But it seemed right. It seemed right one step at a time, or it seemed like it could be okay, one step at a time.”
So, that was that theme. And right when they’re in the middle of trouble that gets worse and worse until they themselves are on the hook as suspects that have been set up for for crimes they didn’t commit – at that precise moment – which is a similar structure to American Hustle, the Christian Bale character says, “What fresh hell is this?” on a freeze frame. “Well, to really understand how we got here, you have to go back a ways.” I often love that in films, when that’s done. And then you get the whole Amsterdam chapter and you say, “Oh wow, these guys are really close. They lived this whole adventure. They’re really great friends. They’ve been through a lot and it’s led them to this place.” And then we resume the crime adventure. We come back where we dropped in.
Would you say Amsterdam has a main character and a main plot?
Yes, I would say that Christian Bale’s character, Burt Berendsen, is the voice of the movie, which he did beautifully. His whole personality and his character – the habits that he constructed from head to toe and the intonation is the voice of the movie.
Tom Voze (Rami Malek) & Libby Voze (Anya Taylor Joy)
He hands it off in turns to Margot Robbie or to John David, but Burt Berendsen, Christian Bale’s role, is the heart and soul of the movie with his two best friends, and further supported by the rest of the cast – most importantly Robert De Niro and then of course, Rami Malek, Anya Taylor-Joy, Mike Myers, Mike Shannon, Zoe Saldana, Andrea Riseborough, Chris Rock, Matthias Schoenaerts, Alessandro Nivola, Tim Olyphant, and Taylor Swift.
To what extent does art imitate life or life imitate art?
Well, a famous writer once said that life is the ancilla of art, which would suggest that what we imagine and what we project informs how we live. Although it works the other way as well. So for example, in a culture dominated by apocalyptic films, there’s no question that that, I think, influences people’s expectations of the world, of what will happen, and what’s inevitable. If you keep telling the same story again and again or projecting the same images again and again, it’s no wonder if you start to inhabit that. Kurt Vonnegut once said, “Be careful what you pretend to be because you may become that.”
So that’s true and in a sense, I would say Valerie’s art is projecting an art of beauty, acknowledging and repurposing a trauma, and in a way, redeeming trauma by giving it a voice and an image and a sense of humor and a sense of heart. And all the art that is made by her is inspired by the artists that she was based on.
I would say that’s why Christian Bale and John David Washington like to sing and all three of them like to sing. The singing – it’s like whistling in the dark if you’ve ever had to get through something that is troubling or helped a child get through something that is troubling. You sometimes find if things are getting too tense, singing or whistling gets you through it somehow. It opens up your spirit again that’s all clenched and closed. So singing would cause them to not focus on their injuries and their setbacks and give them a chance to feel happy and laugh. And that’s what Dr. Berendsen uses in his office as well. He’ll sing a song with the many veteran patients and others who have many ailments. His point is, “Let’s not go down a spiral about what we’re facing. Let’s have a song and let’s remember.”
And there’s actually medical evidence that shows, in some cases, that this has an effect on how quickly one heals or how strong your immune system is – if you have joy or song or laughter and spirit versus depression or spiraling. I think that’s evident from all the statistics on the Internet as well.
How did you keep track of all the character arcs and plot lines during the writing process?
The principal arc is the arc of the Christian Bale character, Burt Berendsen. That’s why he’s the point of view and he’s the eyes and voice through which the entire movie is told to us, through his heart. And his arc is one of coming to terms with a marriage that has not been exactly what he wished it to be. And his arc is one of rediscovering the best friends from the best time he had in his life after the worst time of his life. So you go through all that trauma with him. You go through finding a gleam in the eye after all that devoted optimism. You go through the fact that he is not someone who gives up easily, no matter how dire the situation. That’s the spirit of the film. That’s the spirit of Burt Berendsen and his two best friends Harold Woodman and Valerie Voze. That’s the arc that defines the movie.
What will happen to Burt with his friends, and what will happen to each of their respective romances – Burt’s budding romance with the Zoe Saldana character, Irma St. Clair, and resolving the Andrea Riseborough marriage. And where will Harold and Valerie go to live a life together as they did in Amsterdam? These are questions hanging over the story that will be answered. And in the middle of it, a shocking kind of historic drama that they never would’ve anticipated, which is huge. It’s as big and meta as their personal stories are smaller and human in scale. It’s this gigantic trajectory of the manipulations of history and that’s how life is.
You’re living your personal life and in the middle of it, there’s huge pathways of history happening that are controlled by forces that you don’t even understand or you’re trying to understand. And if you focus on them alone, you sort of lose your own heart and your own identity, and you get caught up in the narrative of watching the news all day, every day. And where is your joy and where is your love and where is your spirit? The mystery arc is also part of that. What is this mystery? What is at the bottom of all this? What was the reason that their friend, the general, was dead in a wood box – Ed Begley? Why was he dead? Why did they do the autopsy? Why does it keep getting weirder and weirder? And they have to find different people to help answer the questions or to get them off the hook. That’s the other arc.
What were the key thrills and challenges of writing the screenplay?
I would say the key thrills of writing the screenplay were the invention of Burt Berendsen’s character for Christian, and Harold Woodman for John David, and Valerie for Margot. That was probably the most joyous thing in the writing of the screenplay and the conversations with the actors over a period of years. And then defining what was their greatest trauma that they had lived in the past and endured, and then what became their greatest happiness in Amsterdam after the first war – which they thought was the only war. They never thought there would be a second war that big. How could there be? It’s so awful. It’s so colossally catastrophic. They all believed it was the war to end all wars.
So, it was exciting to put oneself in the shoes of those characters imagining that they then find themselves trying to get by with some optimism, but also having to relocate each other and reunite as friends, and face this new unfolding intrigue and treachery. Now we’re rolling up on this sort of shocking, unknown history. Those are, I would say, the simplest ways to describe the joys of the picture and writing it. And the attitude – the attitude of the voice-over, the attitude of the characters, the attitude of humor and seriousness and emotion and heart above all.
How did you modulate the pacing and frenetic energy of the film so audiences would stay on the ride?
I would not call the pacing frenetic. It’s propulsive and it has a rhythm that owns each sequence and scene inside the characters and their interactions and solitary moments. Maybe four parts are fittingly frenetic – and then there are sequences that are very lyrical, and emotional, and funny. It’s a variety of paces – but overall propulsive. In all storytelling, you want to be with the central character emotionally, and you want to arrive at moments of solitude and moments of reflection and emotion, and you want to arrive at moments of confusion and stakes and predicament with others. That’s the ride.
General Gil Dillenbeck Robert Di Niro)
Is there a defining moment in the story that captures the essence of Amsterdam?
The essence of Amsterdam, I think, is captured coming out of the trauma in which they all meet in a bloody hospital in France near Belgium – and the journey that they go on with the Margot Robbie character that becomes one of the happiest journeys of their lives; of living in Amsterdam, helping other veterans, watching Valerie make her art, going out dancing, and living very freely. That whole sequence is the spirit of Amsterdam and the spirit of their love.
How do you describe your style of storytelling?
My storytelling style – well it’s different for every movie, isn’t it, in a way? Whether you took The Fighter or Silver Linings or American Hustle or Joy or Amsterdam, I would say – you begin with a person, a character, your main character – and you connect with them as a very specific person in a very specific world. Those are all very specific worlds. You have to saturate those worlds so that the movie is breathing them, it’s breathing those worlds, and the characters in that world; and we are brought into that world, a very specific world. That’s why I would go to the movies my whole life. So all those are different worlds that are defined by different characteristics.
And then you’re with this particular personality and what their worries are, what their strengths are, what their heart is, and what their gumption is. Those are all the things that I want to see. That makes them, by turns, brave, funny, scared, emotional, but somebody I want to be with. They’re people I want to be with. That’s one of the defining characteristics for me because I want to love them and I want to hang out with them and be in their world. And then I want to go on their adventure with them. And love is always a part of it in some way. Love of the characters, love of the world. And surprise of the adventure they’re on and their interactions with each other. And always a sense of urgency, together with a sense of abiding emotionally with these people as they reckon with their journey.
