James Caan, from the “salvation” of Misery to the terror of filming a scene that ended up being iconic

“It was a piece of paper. like no other that had been offered to me, he reacted to things as I would never have imagined, “ said James Caan, who died Wednesday at the age of 82, about his role as Paul Sheldon in the Rob Reiner classic, Misery.

According to the interpreter, that character came at the right time in his career, as a kind of “salvation” in times of creative drought. Somehow, the devil stuck his tail in for Caan to co-star in the feature film. based on the 1987 novel by Stephen King, as colleagues like William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Michael Douglas, Harrison Ford, Dustin Hoffman, and Robert De Niro had rejected him.

the actor of The Godfather, Instead, he found in the role of that writer the perfect opportunity to get out of register and enter an extremely murky universe, with a woman managing the action: Katy Bates as the unforgettable Annie Wilkes.

Misery premiered in 1990 and earned Bates an Oscarthus setting two precedents. On the one hand, the actress became one of the few to be recognized for a genre film. For the other, it was the only golden statuette to receive a production based on a novel by the prolific Stephen Kingwho also highly approved the script by William Goldman, a close collaborator of Reiner.

The film chronicled Annie’s unhealthy obsession with the fictional title character, Misery Chastain, created by novelist Paul Sheldon. When that woman finds out that her favorite writer plans to kill misery in the last work of the saga to be able to approach other stories, he becomes furious with that writer whom he keeps captive in his house after he is injured in a storm.

The The sequence that caused the greatest impact on the film was, simultaneously, the most complex to film. When Paul tries to escape from that place where he is confined at Annie’s mercy, the woman breaks both his ankles with a sledgehammer to ensure that Paul does not seek to flee from there, away from his number one fan.

Amputate it or hit it? That was the point. In the first draft of his script, Goldman had included a sequence that shocked Reiner and the production team, even though it was in the original text: Annie took an ax and cut off his feet.

“I did not agree with that”, the director would explain later about that terrifying scene. “We wanted Paul Sheldon to end up victorious in the finale, which triumph over Annie Wilkesand even if he lost a single foot, we were still implying that he had paid too high a price.

So Reiner and his producer, Andrew Scheinman, reviewed Goldman’s script and made an observation that led to a tense back-and-forth. The decision that was made, despite the dissenting voice of the screenwriter, was that Annie only hit him hard on the ankles to have Paul more time by her side, not to cause irreversible damage (in the end of the movie, he is seen walking with a cane). “Rob was right in the end,” Goldman said after the premiere. “If I had included that scene, the audience would have hated Annie and we wouldn’t have recovered from that for the rest of the film.” Bates, on the other hand, had a different opinion: “I would have cut off his feet,” he revealed.

Once that topic was resolved, the director turned to visual effects, the secret charm of Misery. Since the necessary prosthetics for James Caan’s legs that they were made of gelatin until the incorporation of armor, everything was perfectly orchestrated so that this cruel sequence did not impact its protagonists.

However, Bates was in a permanent state of disturbance. “She is such a calm person that any hint of violence made her cry”said Caan who, according to the production team, was “upset” about filming it as he didn’t like not speaking in a scene and relying on visual effects.

We could assure you that Bates won the Oscar for many sections of the film, but he shone more than ever in the one that so terrified him. “It was very complex to shoot that scene, I had to hit at the right time in the right place and sometimes I didn’t get it”declared the actress about one of her best performances.

In 2015, Bates and Caan reunited for a special on the publication. Entertainment Weekly. In that reunion the actor recalled King’s special visit to the screening. “We saw it in Westwood for the first time and he was sitting in the back of everything with Rob. He is a man who never watches his movie adaptations because he didn’t end up liking them, but he got so attached to him. Misery who, in a moment of total silence, was heard shouting: ‘Watch out, she has a gun!’ We all turned around and there was Stephen”, he recalled.