A Fter Hours

Griffin Dunne looks back on starring as the hapless hero in Martin Scorsese’s exhilarating nightmare comedy…

In the 1980s, Griffin Dunne starred in two movies that opened to mixed receptions but are now considered classics. One was John Landis’ horror comedy An American Werewolf in London (1981); the other was midnight-black screwball thriller After Hours (1985), directed by Martin Scorsese.

‘It is now de rigueur for every horror movie to have humour and horror in the same frame, but that was considered sacrilege at the time,’ says Dunne, now 68, of An American Werewolf in London. ‘I played Jack Goodman [who’s killed by a werewolf and returns as an animated corpse to warn his friend David of his hairy fate], and it was my job to be funny, despite how torn up and rotting my corpse was. Jack went through his own living hell in various degradations.’

Dunne’s character in After Hours, Paul Hackett, has it a whole lot worse. A meek computer operator, he meets Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) in a New York coffee shop and scores her phone number. When he calls, she invites him over to her loft in SoHo, but the night rapidly descends into the date from hell. And there’s no escape. As Paul desperately tries to flee, he’s confronted by irate cabbies, bumbling cat burglars, crazed waitresses, punks, sadomasochists, a corpse and more, until his increasingly hostile encounters peak with a baying mob chasing him through the streets. Maybe it’s because we’ve all had a nightmare date that the movie has gathered such a following over the years?

‘I certainly did,’ grins Dunne, who grew up in New York. ‘You’re at an age where you’re really open to experience, to adventure. You know, I’ve met someone on the subway or in a bar, and they seem one way, and then it’s like, “How do I get this person out of my apartment?” Or, “Am I going to get knifed right here, in my own house?”’ He laughs. ‘Bad-date movies became a genre after this. And After Hours has become an adjective for a type of movie, or a type of night or date, that goes south.’

TOTAL FILM RETROSPECTIVE

Scorsese’s involvement came about quickly. For many months he’d been prepping The Last Temptation of Christ, to shoot in Israel. Aidan Quinn had lost a good deal of weight to play Jesus, Harvey Keitel had dyed his hair red for Judas. But Paramount pulled the plug just four days before the shoot was to begin – already fearful of the escalating budget and the protests of the Moral Majority, the studio lost its nerve when Philip Kaufman’s epic The Right Stuff flopped. Determined to shoot a movie, Scorsese ploughed through numerous scripts and settled on After Hours, which had been written by Joe Minion at Columbia University (he got an A) and was owned by Dunne and his producing partner, Amy Robinson. Pledging to make it ‘all style’, Scorsese shot 16 set-ups a day (or rather, night) on a $3.5m budget; usually he did five set-ups a day and the budget of his previous movie, The King of Comedy, was $20m.

‘He was excited to go back to his Mean Streets roots, and the run-and-gun he had on Taxi Driver,’ Dunne recalls. ‘He has said it brought back his passion and love for moviemaking. It was certainly exhilarating. Marty was so prepared. On the call sheet was stapled the shot list of everything we were doing that day.’

The movie didn’t have an ending. They scrambled for ideas. At one point, the character of June (Verna Bloom) was going to balloon in size and have Paul climb inside her womb to escape the mob.

‘Yes! I have to confess: we loved that idea,’ adds Dunne. ‘Verna goes, “I know where you can hide.” She opens her legs and I climb inside her. She’s now fecund with Paul Hackett. She ends up on the West Side Highway, and she lies down and gives birth to me. And naked, covered in placenta, I come tumbling out. So I called David Geffen, who financed the film, and I said, “We’ve got the ending.” I explained it. He takes a beat and goes, “Have you all lost your fucking minds?”’

It was legendary English director Michael Powell, a hero of Scorsese’s, who suggested the elegant, Kafka-esque climax of Paul ending up back at his work desk. Steven Spielberg and Terry Gilliam agreed. It was an inspired finish to an inspired film, which now, nearly 40 years on, is so often described as Scorsese’s most underrated movie, it’s not underrated at all. For Dunne, the steadily growing praise has been a mixed blessing. ‘Well, having this be the second movie to have that happen, it’s flattering, exhilarating and kind of frustrating that it wasn’t appreciated like that at the time. And I always suspected that would be the case.’ Really? ‘Yeah, on both films. I always thought, “They’re not getting it, quite. They’re going to.”’