Even before The Nice Guys opens in theaters, it seems a sure thing to spawn a sequel since watching the antics of Russell Crowe as enforcer Jackson Healy and Ryan Gosling as private eye Holland March as they bumble and stumble their way through a missing persons case is pure, unadulterated fun.
“Every film I’ve ever been on, where people talk about sequels, we never made a sequel,” Crowe says. “And from almost from the second conversation I’ve had with [producer] Joel Silver, he’s already talking about a second story, but we’ll see. It’s a very hard market…It’s one of those movies that’s very hard to explain why people will have a good time until they’ve actually seen it. When they’ve seen it, then they’ll want to talk about it with their friends, but actually getting them to see it in the first place…that might be tricky.”
Crowe may be erring on the side of the caution, since Silver is famous for making films with sequels, including Die Hard, Lethal Weapon and Sherlock Holmes. Parade.com film reviewer Neil Pond also urges people to catch it, writing: “The Nice Guys, a juicy, slam-bang action-comedy cocktail punched up, pimped out and powered down with rowdy, new-fangled film-noir fun. Hot stuff.”
Set in Los Angeles in the 1970s, The Nice Guys is the story of down-on-his-luck private eye and single father Holland March, who teams up with enforcer Jackson Healy to solve a missing persons case. Of course, it turns out to be so much more than that with a huge conspiracy thrown in that puts their lives in danger, but could also be the start of a whole new career.
Parade.com was lucky enough to catch up with Crowe at a roundtable for the film, where he talked about working with Gosling and Angourie Rice, who plays Gosling’s daughter; why it was set in the ’70s; and more.
What did you like about working with Ryan?
What I really love about working with the man — because as funny as he is, and he really makes me laugh, just genuinely, his humor is my sort of humor — but he has a serious intent. He approaches the job really seriously. He loves it, he studies it, he thinks about it, he has a perspective on everything that you’re about to do and that’s great, man, I dig that.
Talk about developing the humorous action stuff with Ryan, because you seem to be on the same wavelength for that, as well.
A lot of that was just a pure connection that happens naturally. There’s no mathematics to it, we don’t have to think about it. We established really early, when we were reading the script, that the characters had a very similar rhythm, so that we would have to make sure that we were harmonic to each other in scenes, but not in the same sonic hole. So, we said that and then never mentioned it again, never had any other conversations about it. Every time we came to a scene, we just found ways to be in the same scene together, harmonizing but from different perspectives.
In your scenes with Angourie Rice, who plays Gosling’s daughter, you have some tender moments that are so different from Jackson’s normal demeanor. Can you describe how you approached giving this guy those moments?
The first thing that I wanted to do was I wanted to dislocate him. He’s obviously from the East Coast, and I’ve always thought that he had quite a long service history. You see little hints of that in the place where he lives. Where some people might have 10 of one particular item, he has one. And he’s very organized. He can get from his bedroom to the front door with everything he needs on that path.
I think he’s an immensely sad man, reaching the age he is and still having that one fundamental, where he just wants to feel like he’s useful, but I think he also recognizes that whatever he’s lacking in certain areas of emotional connection that poor March is in a much, much worse situation than him.
In somebody else’s film, there would be moments of patriarchal connection [with Angourie], but he can’t quite go there, because he doesn’t really know what to do. So, he ends up treating the little girl straight, like another man.
How much of Healy is you?
That’s one of those questions you can apply to any role you do. You’re, obviously, always going to bring your own sensibilities to everything you do. It’s very difficult to make that division, once you’ve done a piece, but I wanted to leave him a little bit lost.
He goes through this experience and you see him addling every time alcohol is mentioned through the course of the movie, like, there’s some strain involved. It’s never emphasized but you feel it. And his solution, at the end of the story, is to simply go and get a drink. So, he’s a very damaged person. I’m not sure he’s got the road map forward, just yet, in his life.
How was reuniting with Kim Basinger, who you worked with on L.A. Confidential?
It was funny, because the relationship we had on L.A. Confidential was so intimate, the scenes we had to do were so intimate, we connected so deeply and I loved her. I still do, but we haven’t really kept in touch. We worked out when we were sitting there talking that we hadn’t actually seen each other in over 10 years. Crazy, right? It was great to work with her, but it’s not the same thing. It’s not like we’re connected in the same way we were in that film.
What do you think setting the movie in the ’70s brought to it?
Well, I think that it’s the most important thing of this film. We call it a comedy, but what [director/writer] Shane Black’s really done is he’s reached back to a time in history where certain decisions were made in the United States of America, which totally corrupted the future and we’re still paying for now. So, I think that’s why this is more important than a comedy because it takes that very serious situation and puts an absurd world around it, but while we’re laughing, there’s still quite a bit to think about.
The Nice Guys, also starring Matt Bomer, Margaret Qualley, Keith David, Beau Knapp and Kim Basinger, opens in theaters nationwide on May 20.
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