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 Closer Production NotesIf you believe love at first sight, you never stop looking.
Academy Award-winning director Mike Nichols follows the triumphant "Angels in America" with Closer. A bitingly funny and honest look at modern relationships, Closer is the story of four strangers (Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman and Clive Owen) -- their chance meetings, instant attractions and casual betrayals.
Set in contemporary London, Closer is reminiscent of such Nichols’ classics as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Carnal Knowledge.
Patrick Marber’s comedy / drama “Closer” debuted in London in 1997 to rave reviews and won the Laurence Olivier/BBC Award for Best New Play and the London Critics Circle Award.
The subsequent Broadway production was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play and won the New York Critics Award for Best Foreign Play. It has since gone on to be produced in more than 100 cities around the world and translated into 30 different languages.
The playwright describes Closer as "a love story. It's about other things of course —sexual jealousy, the male gaze, the lies we tell ourselves and those we are most intimate with, the ways in which people find themselves through using others. But in the end, it’s a nice simple love story. And as with most love stories, things go wrong…”
The title, he contends, is open to interpretation. "I wanted something ambiguous, that might give you a sense of mood without closing down the possibilities of what the story might mean.”
Seven years ago, when producer John Calley (who was then chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment) first read Marber’s play he was “crazy about it,” he says. “It’s a remarkable document about our time, witty, immensely romantic and very dangerous — and I think, very important.”
What intrigued Calley and Sony Pictures chairman Amy Pascal was Marber’s witty and bitingly accurate dissection of romance in the modern era. “Marber underscores the complexity of contemporary relationships in which the beginnings are so highly charged and exciting that the process of falling in love can become addictive. People can become falling-in-love junkies and find that habit difficult to kick. Throughout the play, Marber makes acute comments that are both witty and fun. The humor is always informed and sometimes heartbreaking.”
When Calley and Pascal met with Marber and expressed interest in turning his play into a movie, however, he turned them down, says Calley. “He was appropriately dismissive and wouldn’t sell it to us because he wanted a more fulfilled sense of who would be making the movie.”
Fortunately, years later, after its successful Broadway run, director Mike Nichols became interested in the project. Like his most recent adaptations of the widely acclaimed plays “Wit” and “Angels in America,” Closer dealt with intimate issues with humor and complexity. Nichols thought it would lend itself to film adaptation very well because its structure was innately cinematic and because it contained four leading roles which were interesting and complex, and whose personalities change and evolve through the course of the story.
Nichols seemed the ideal director for the project, since it bore similarities to some of his previous films including the acclaimed comedy/dramas The Graduate, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Carnal Knowledge, in which he demonstrated an intuitiveness about relationships between men and women.
The project came full circle when Nichols approached Calley to finance the project. The two men have been the best of friends for the past 40 years. They met when Nichols was part of the acclaimed comedy team of Nichols and (Elaine) May and Calley briefly dated May. Calley produced one of Nichols’ early films, an adaptation of Joseph Heller’s classic Catch-22. They later worked together on such hit films as Postcards from the Edge, Remains of the Day and The Birdcage.
“When Mike came to me, I told him I was always crazy about the play, I’ve always been crazy about Mike,” says Calley. “On stage and on screen, he has had the ability to transmute the written word into drama in a way that can stop your heart.”
What made Closer inherently cinematic, according to Nichols, was the fact that “it’s told in the way that people remember things — in a telescoped way.” Also, he adds, the element of intimacy in Marber’s work lends itself better to the screen than the stage. “It’s hard to present intimacy in front of a live audience, whereas in a movie the viewer is alone in the dark with the characters, which is in some ways more apt for intimacy, sex and love.”
Marber was very excited by the idea of Nichols directing a film version of his play and was brought aboard to write the screenplay. He says he developed an intimate working relationship with the director, who "wanted me to be faithful to the play. Once he'd established the rule that we'd tell the story pretty much how it was told on stage — in fairly long sequences of time — the job became one of cutting, rewriting and a certain amount of restructuring within the sequences.”
“Mike was fantastically good fun to work with,” he continues. “I’m very fortunate to have learnt ‘on the job’ from a master. Added to that, the catering on a Nichols film is excellent.”
Thematically, Marber asserts that Closer makes no moral pronouncements about the characters' behavior, allowing the viewer the latitude to make their own assessment. "I’m not concerned with ‘good’ or ‘bad’ here," he says, "nor in passing judgment on the characters. This is what they said. This is what they did.
How they behaved is really none of my business. The audience will see them as they like, and may well disagree with each other, but hopefully they’ll recognize something true. And laugh at a few of the jokes along the way."
The screenplay retains the acerbic wit of the play, the intertwining story of two couples, or what producer Cary Brokaw calls “a checkerboard of the relationships between two men and two women that evolves as part of the competition between the two men for each of the women at different times.”
Adds executive producer Celia Costas: It's a hopeful piece in that the characters come to terms with themselves and change in very interesting ways. They learn something, which is really the most important thing in life.........and in movies."
Up Close: The Players
 Dan (Jude Law)“What’s so great about the truth? Try lying for a change — it’s the currency of the world.”
In Closer, Jude Law portrays Dan, an aspiring novelist who earns a living writing obituaries. Though Marber contends there is no protagonist in the story, Dan is the character through whom all the other characters are introduced. Law is no stranger to portraying vainglorious characters as he demonstrated in his Oscar nominated performance in The Talented Mr. Ripley and, more recently, in Alfie.
What drew him to Closer, which he had seen several times on stage and greatly admired, was Marber’s “extraordinary dialogue and its concentrated focus on these four characters who are the heart of the play,” he says.
The intimacy of the situation was matched by the demands of working in close quarters with only three other actors. “There was never a day where you could kind of take it easy because virtually every scene has a definite emotional pitch,”
says Law. “You were either opening up and offering yourself to someone or closing yourself up and trying to get rid of someone. It was quite intense and demanding.”
Reflecting on his character, who is a catalyst for much of the action, Law says, “Dan is someone who’s really living in a sort of cocoon, a frustrated novelist, until he meets Alice, who becomes his muse. Through her, he blossoms. The relationship is really responsible for him coming out of himself, encouraging him to be confident enough to find the woman he really thinks he loves, Anna.
Unfortunately, that relationship seems to be doomed from the get-go, and though it gives him some of the happiest days of his life, he eventually throws himself away by pouring himself so wholeheartedly into it.”
While he sees Marber’s play as basically a story about men and women falling in and out of love, it is also a battle between two male characters who become each other’s nemeses. “There’s a certain amount of ego going on between them. You could argue that for them it is almost more important that they’re screwing over the other guy than getting the girl they’re in love with.”
 Anna (Julia Roberts)“Don’t stop loving me. I can see it draining out of you. It meant nothing. If you love me, you’ll forgive me.”
For Julia Roberts, the character of Anna is a departure, says producer John Calley. “Julia is an astonishing actress who always does what she does wonderfully. But in this case, she challenged herself to explore issues about a strong, intelligent woman in a way that beautifully demonstrates how her considerable talent has evolved over the years.”
“Anna is a compelling woman who understands what she wants, even as it changes and in playing her, Julia shows herself in a way we’ve never seen her before,” adds Brokaw.
At the start of the story, Anna is a successful photographer and a recent divorcee. After meeting and flirting with Dan, she marries Larry (Clive Owen), all the while carrying on a secret affair with Dan. Rather than back away from
Anna’s more questionable behavior, Roberts was interested in exploring both her character’s strengths and her flaws. “I had a great amount of trouble with letting her be this incredibly flawed woman. I think she does some really awful things that even at my worst moments, I look like an amateur compared to this woman.
She’s very devious, but I don’t think it’s really calculated.” Overall, Roberts says she admires Closer because, “I think it’s about the plight of these people trying to be closer to each other, to be closer to something really valued in life, to be closer to a truth that maybe none of them will ever be. It’s really more about the intimacy of being compassionate human beings. That’s kind of what they’re secretly or unconsciously trying to attain.”
 Alice (Natalie Portman)“Where is this ‘love’? I can’t see it, I can’t touch it, I can’t feel it. I can hear it. I can hear some words, but I can’t do anything with your easy words.”
“The character of Alice is, in my opinion, Natalie Portman’s arrival as an adult actress,” says Brokaw. “You see her as a fascinating, somewhat mysterious, adult woman who is very sensual and complicated.”
Nichols had first worked with Portman in a production of Chekov’s “The Seagull,” when she was still in her teens. “People don’t quite realize how remarkable an actress she is, because she looks so amazing,” says Nichols, “but she is. I saw her in Closer right from the beginning and she was, in some ways, the beginning of my casting.”
Portman admits, “this is definitely a new kind of role for me.” The key to Alice, she says, is the conflict inherent in her character. “Alice is really alone when she comes to London, so she makes up her entire world, completely creates herself. Yet, she also has this childlike side. She’s really honest and direct in her feelings, which distinguishes her from the other characters. So though she’s lying about her persona, she’s the most direct, honest character in the film.”
Besides tackling the character of a multi-faceted adult woman, Portman also had to take lessons in pole dancing for the film, in which she goes to work in a posh London strip club. “It was fun. I have a whole new respect for pole dancers because it takes a lot of skill and is physically very demanding, a combination of dance and acrobatics,” she says.
Despite its risqué elements, for Portman, Closer is a very moral tale. “It examines the way people have relationships with each other and how they sometimes get so lost in them that they are sometimes insensitive to the other person’s feelings. It’s kind of like ‘I’m in love. I can be irrational now. It doesn’t matter who I hurt.’ So love becomes this weird excuse for doing a lot of hurtful things to other people.”
 Larry (Clive Owen)“You don’t know the first thing about love because you don’t understand compromise.”
Clive Owen, who plays Larry, the handsome, self-assured dermatologist, originally played Dan in the original London stage production of “Closer.” When he heard Mike Nichols was interested in casting him in the film, he asked if he could play Larry instead. “I loved playing Dan, but going back and playing Larry was a real treat,” he says. “It was like starting all over again because when you play a part you see the whole thing through that character’s perspective. Now I had to reevaluate everything that I thought when I originally did it, switch everything around and see it from Larry’s point of view.”
One thing that hasn’t changed since he first read the play, is his admiration for Marber’s material. “You don’t often get dialogue like this in movies. It’s wonderful to be able to get your teeth into some fantastic dialogue. It’s so meaty with four fantastic parts. Playing any of them would be great.”
“What’s important,” he continues, “is that you like all four characters. All the scenes are intense and for it to really work you have to keep swapping your allegiances. You have to keep empathizing and sympathizing with both sides.”
And that is entirely appropriate to the nature of the story, Owen reasons, “because it’s about human beings. It captures how people are behaving now, that’s what’s so exciting about it.”
Larry is someone who gets his heart broken in the story and resolves to never be hurt again, he contends. In defending himself, he winds up hurting others. “These four people fall in and out of love and show how brutal and tough that can be. By the end you wind up thinking, ‘Why do we do this to ourselves?’”
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Natalie Portman and Clive Owen in Closer.