LOS ANGELES – Most people crave homes that have character, but filmmaker John August wanted a house to be a character.
Four years ago, the screenwriter of Tim Burton’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Big Fish” and Doug Liman’s “Go” attended an open house and found not only a new residence, but also the inspiration and the principal setting for “The Nines,” his feature-length directorial debut.
“I immediately thought about shooting a film here,” says August, 37, sitting in a shaft of afternoon sun that filters through a stained-glass window and onto the wrought-iron staircase of his 1924 Spanish Mediterranean manse in Los Angeles’ Hancock Park neighborhood.
“The house is a character in the movie, a guy who is brawny, forthright and friendly but not effusive. He’ll offer you a drink but doesn’t want you to stay past 11.”
Few directors would surrender their personal living space to a crew of 40, let alone reveal it to the general public exactly as it is in real life, not one room disguised with props or other fakery. But it is August’s unaltered interior design — finishes, furnishings and all — that lends intimacy and emotional veracity to the story. He wouldn’t have it any other way, especially when scenes were conceived with particular rooms in mind.
“The script was written for that space, so if I lived somewhere else, the story would have changed,” he said. “The middle section of the movie is autobiographical. It’s supposed to be my house — and everything feels real because it is.”
“The Nines,” a provocative look at domestic life in Los Angeles’ movie colony, is composed of three interlocking tales that explore what home means to different people. In the first part of the film, a troubled TV actor under house arrest feels imprisoned by the iron railings of a home that isn’t his. The middle section, centered on a gay writer-director, conveys August’s experience of being single in a place that’s “far too big for one person to be living in alone.” In the final tale, about a married video game designer, the house is clearly a home, a place of safety.
“The movie is like a Russian nesting doll,” says actor Ryan Reynolds, who plays the three male leads. “There are references within references, which are often based upon real experiences John has had.”
The film was made with a nod to the stripped-down, hyper-realistic Dogme 95 style pioneered by director Lars von Trier. Shooting in August’s home, Reynolds says, added a level of authenticity.
“The rooms took on a life of their own,” he says. “A space which is seemingly plush and welcoming can transform into an atmosphere that is elegantly haunting.”
Though the setting serves as a totem for be-careful-what-you-wish-for prosperity, in real life the space that August shares with partner Mike (who also goes by the last name August), their 2-year-old daughter and pugs Jake and Louie feels understated and unpretentious.
Jen Bianco, a University of Southern California film-school buddy who met August in 1992, says the home is far from the unsettling, creepy, possibly haunted place that it seems in “The Nines.”
“It is a very adult home,” she said, “but there is nothing fancy and intimidating.”
August grew up in Boulder, Colo., in what he describes as a classic one-story ranch built in the 1960s, thoroughly suburban with wood paneling and cottage cheese ceilings. Following the success of his first film, “Go,” he bought a Dutch Colonial house in L.A.’s Windsor Square neighborhood and hired interior designer Tim Clarke to select paint colors and purchase antiques.
“I fell back on the tactic of ripping pages out of magazines to show what I wanted,” August said. “To my credit, I think I was at least consistent.”
His breakthrough came in the kitchen. A culinary enthusiast, August blended function and aesthetics in a gut-and-remodel led by the design team of John Martines and Scott Pryde, specialists in restoring historic houses in the area.
August was so pleased with the results that he had Martines and Pryde duplicate that kitchen right down to the drawer details and leaded-glass cabinetry in his new residence, which Martines describes as “hacienda meets villa.”
