Jon Avnet is a director and producer who spends his life working with actors. It's excellent preparation for telling stories about serial killers.
"They are actors in the truest sense of the word," Avnet says. "And the difference between them and the ones who go out on strike for the Screen Actors' Guild is that they act 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And if they fail -- if they don't give a convincing performance -- they will die or they will go to prison."
The director who made his first big splash with the women's drama Fried Green Tomatoes is now heading into three serial killer movies, including 88 Minutes, the Al Pacino film that opens Friday. Pacino plays a forensic psychiatrist responsible for sending a serial killer to death row. On the day he is scheduled to be executed, there's another killing in his style and the psychiatrist is receiving threatening phone calls: is the wrong man in jail, or is the real killer somehow manipulating things from behind bars?
Avnet is also finishing off his second serial killer movie, Righteous Kill, which re-teams Pacino with his Heat co-star Robert De Niro as a couple of New York City policemen hunting a multiple murderer. And coming up after that is I Kill, a serial killer thriller set in Italy.
The 58-year-old director says he's fascinated by the way the friends and neighbours of real-life serial killers, such as Ted Bundy, think they were really nice guys who couldn't have hurt anyone. The reaction of the people who knew them is like a review of their performances.
"These are great actors," he says. "And I thought it would be kind of interesting to play in that world. What does that mean? How do you portray that? We know the killers often are chillingly normal. I thought that was an interesting area."
Avnet acknowledges that the plot of the film seems far-fetched -- Pacino's character is trying to solve the new serial killings and defend his own life at the same time -- but he says that real-life events are proving such a scenario is tame by the standards of reality. He points to the true story of the Atlanta courthouse shooting in which a suspect disarmed and shot a guard, a judge and a policeman, and took a hostage who finally talked him into turning himself in. "It's the kind of thing that if I were writing critically about a story, well that's highly implausible.
"It's very difficult to figure out what's strange any more."
Avnet's career has moved through the strange and the normal for 25 years. He's produced and directed more than 60 films, TV movies and Broadway plays, ranging from Risky Business and the Mighty Ducks films, the critically acclaimed TV mini-series Uprising, about the Holocaust, and the Broadway musical Spamalot. He's also chairman of the board of the American Film Institute.
The world of serial killers, though, is especially intense, especially for a character like the one Pacino plays in 88 Minutes, a man immersed in the mind of psychopaths. "When you go into that world, you start to think like, talk like, behave like, smell like, taste like the people you're spending time with," Avnet says.
Getting too close to violent death can even affect filmmakers. Avnet produced The Burning Bed, a 1984 TV drama with Farrah Fawcett as a battered wife who eventually sets fire to her husband's bed with him in it. Shortly after, a man killed his wife and said it was because of that movie.
"I wanted to get on my soapbox and say, 'This is a really good movie. I think people should be encouraged to do movies that deal with issues.' At the same time I was thinking, 'This is going to end up in court. Am I going to have to be an accessory after the fact to a murder that claims to be inspired by this?'
"What do you do in that situation? And I wasn't sure. And then I started thinking, what do you do as a filmmaker? Shy away from dealing with issues that are incendiary, because one person or some people could respond in a negative way? . . . If you show a killing and there's anything seductive or sensual about it, it can be excitory in the wrong moment to the right person. And those are really difficult moral questions, aren't they?
"I've tried to stay away from glamourizing violence, and I'm sure it hasn't helped my career at a certain level. At the same time, I think I sleep a little better. But I don't even know where the line is."