Peter Greenaway is the one who turned down “Roger Rabbit.”
The “Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover” provocateur claimed in a new interview with Vulture that he was the first director approached to take on 1988’s live-action/animated hybrid classic “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”
“There were people knocking on my door all the time,” Greenaway said. “And looking back, do you remember a film called ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit?’ I was the first director asked to actually film that. Would you believe that? I found that absolutely extraordinary.”
He continued, “I think that was because of a Hollywood agent who didn’t really understand my cinema at all. God bless him. But I was the name to conjure with for six months. So he threw me in there, and I managed to be one of the first directors to actually read the script.”
Eventually, Robert Zemeckis helmed the 1988 Touchstone Pictures/Buena Vista mystery-comedy starring Bob Hoskins. Zemeckis courted the film throughout the early 1980s before the studio, skeptical over the box-office bombs of Zemeckis’ earlier films, finally hired him. Greenaway eventually did see “Roger Rabbit” and admired Hoskins’ performance as stressed-out private eye Eddie Valiant.
“I always admired that actor, Bob Hoskins. I remember seeing him on British children’s television a long, long time before he became even remotely a name,” Greenaway said. “I like the prospect of combining notions of animation with live action, which became very fashionable after that film, I believe.”
The three-time Oscar-winning, rather adult-skewing “Roger Rabbit” would’ve looked like a very different film in the hands of Welsh auteur Greenaway, who in the mid-1980s was making bawdy, high-minded art-inspired films like “A Zed & Two Noughts” and “Belly of an Architect.” His 1988 “Drowning by Numbers” is now being re-released in 4K. Greenaway’s biggest arthouse success was 1989’s “The Cook, The Thief,” starring Helen Mirren and Michael Gambon. The MPA initially slapped the psychosexual gourmand art film with an X rating before Miramax unleashed it unrated in theaters; it grossed over $7.7 million in North America.
IndieWire last year spoke with Greenaway about the 4K re-release of “A Zed & Two Noughts,” and he shared feelings about how cinema hasn’t really changed at all since its inception in 1895: “We come up with some grand, amazing phenomenon and maybe we practice its possibilities for a few years, and then we go back to our comfort zone again. Cinema [despite 3D innovation, etc.] is still back to where it was. When Charlie Chaplin was practicing. That’s very much to do with the conservatism of human beings.”
