While making The Deep End, a videotape was shot depicting the teenaged character of Beau Hall ( Jonathan Tucker ) having sex with seedy gay club owner Darby Reese ( Josh Lucas ) —a tape which later ends up in the hands of blackmailer Alek Spera ( Goran Visnjic ) . Yet more treacherous and delicate than the negotiations regarding that tape in the film were those in real life, says openly gay co-director/ producer/ writer Scott McGehee.
Goran Visnjic and Tilda Swinton in The Deep End, opening Aug. 15.
"The negotiation for what happened to that tape when we were done with it was maybe one of the most difficult negotiations we had with an agent on the movie," McGehee admits.
"It's been destroyed. Only what's in the movie still exists. But it was a nice bonding experience for all of us."
The Deep End concerns a Lake Tahoe housewife, Margaret, whose Naval Officer husband is away for months at a time. Her son Beau, a promising musician, is secretly gay and involved with a sleazebag named Darby. One morning Margaret discovers said sleazebag's body on their beachfront, so she hastily hides it in hopes that Beau won't be implicated and his future quashed. But no so fast, mom-;enter blackmailer Alek, carrying the incriminating tape, which not only outs Beau but connects him to the deceased in a way the police might appreciate ... . If this suspenseful premise sounds familiar, that's because it is. The Deep End's roots can be traced to a 1947 "domestic melodrama" novel The Blank Wall, written by Elizabeth Sanxay Holding, and its first screen adaptation, 1949's Max Ophuls-helmed The Reckless Moment.
McGehee says he and creative partner David Siegel-;who have known each other for 16 years and were responsible for 1994's acclaimed thriller, Suture-;saw the acclaimed noir film almost a decade ago and decided to re-adapt its source novel a few years thereafter. In doing so they added a number of distinctive and modern twists and changes. For example, Margaret's son Beau was originally a daughter involved with an art dealer. They transported the location from Los Angeles to sunny Lake Tahoe. And they removed a character, a maid, who previously served as Margaret's confident and played a pivotal role in the story's resolution.
McGehee says the lattermost change was made so Swinton, whom "is great at working silently," would seem more isolated and make the story more about mother and son than mother, son, and maid. The location change to Lake Tahoe allowed for visual and mood variety. And Beau's gay sexuality brought an intense, "more substantial lack of communication" between the mother and son characters.
"What interested us in the story was the communication constriction of this moment and this family," McGehee says. "People just can't talk to each other and that's part of what compounds the problem. And it seemed like making the son gay and this particular time in the son's life when he's very uncomfortable about his own sexuality and hasn't learned how to talk to anyone about it let alone his mom, that's just a nice tender time in this family's life to throw this crisis into the middle of." Jonathan Tucker, previously seen in The Virgin Suicides and Sleepers, was cast as Beau after nailing the audition. "He's a really smart kid," McGehee says. "The only problem we had was that he was 17 at the time, and he needed to be 18 to shoot the blackmail video. So we had to work our schedule around his 18th birthday, which ended up being this kind of crazy comedy—the entire crew was teasing him about his coming birthday and what was going to happen to him!"
Once that birthday arrived, the blackmail video was shot in a hotel room. "It was such a funny shoot," McGehee recalls. "Josh Lucas, the guy who plays Darby, had been involved in another movie and arrived on set kind of late in the game. So this is his first day on set, we'd finished a full shooting day and in the evening [ we ] went out to shoot this video. Jonathan and Josh had barely met, and David and I were super-anxious about directing this scene anyway.
It was really Josh who made it all come together. He was incredibly confident and generous about it and kept reassuring Jonathan that every great actor had played gay, that it wasn't going to destroy his career, and Jonathan kept calling his girlfriend to touch base!"
McGehee says his own life hasn't echoed those of The Deep End's characters very much, from Margaret ( "The people I've known in my life I guess haven't gotten into very bad trouble," he quips ) to Beau. Indeed, until recently he had been part of a 13-year relationship, "so my affair stories are surprisingly limited," he adds, "but I'm looking forward to that soon."
