- This article is about the film Clay Pigeons. For the sport involving clay pigeons, see skeet shooting.
Clay Pigeons is a 1998 film written by Matt Healy and directed by David Dobkin. It stars Joaquin Phoenix as Clay Bidwell, Vince Vaughn as the Lester Long, and Janeane Garofalo as Agent Shelby.
Synopsis
Clay (Phoenix) is a young man in a small town who witnesses his friend, Earl (Gregory Sporleder) kill himself because of the ongoing affair that Clay was having with the man's wife, Amanda (Georgina Cates). Feeling guilty, Clay now resists the widow when she presses him to continue with their sexual affairs.
Clay's problems worsen when he inadvertently befriends a serial killer named Lester Long (Vaughn), who murders the nagging widow in an attempt to "help" his "fishing buddy." Clay is horrified, but does not go to the police for fear of his role in his friend's suicide coming to light. But that doesn't matter for the police, as well as for a savvy female FBI agent (Garofalo) and her partner (Phil Morris), who see Clay as their prime suspect. Yet Clay doesn't tell them of his "friend," who admits to him his crimes.
Production
Clay Pigeons was developed under director/producers Ridley and Tony Scott's then new production company, Scott Free. Director Dobkin remembers, in an interview with Eye Weekly, "This all started with a damn good script and that's where I wanted to keep the emphasis. So we went over it again and again before we ever sent it out to anybody, trying to make sure the basics were as perfectly tooled as possible: a cast of characters whose motivations stay firmly rooted in reality, even though their actions may seem a little... over the top."[1]
Phoenix remembers, "When I first read the script, I thought, 'Wow, this could be really tough -- in the wrong hands, it could just become preposterous.' But then I met David, and we really hit it off. I immediately knew he had what took to help us make these people come alive."
The film's inspiration came from, according to Dobkin, the Coen brothers: "Creatively, my inspiration was the Coen Brothers' Fargo, which took a classic, rather shallow situation and turned it into something new. I mean, nobody in Fargo 'has a character arc,' nobody really 'learns anything,' in Hollywood terms. But you always have the sense that these people have rich, full interior lives, a true philosophical depth, even if they live in a little town, even if they talk differently from you and I."
Vaughn has described his character in an interview with Moviecrazed:
"Lester is a guy who isn’t necessarily from the west—that’s just an image he’s created of himself. Whatever his reality is—being badly hurt by women or whatever—he’s made it over, taking bits and pieces of things he’s seen in movies. He sees his life as a strange western movie, with himself as the hero. He thinks he’s a sane person in an insane world."[2]
In a People Online interview, director Dobkin said this about the characters, "I wanted everyone to be different than what they appear to be — the FBI agent who smokes pot, the small town sheriff who seems slow but is the one who figures [the murders] out in the end."[3]
References
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