Production Notes – The Soloist
The producing partners had been driven by a near instantaneous reaction to Lopez’ columns. Explains Krasnoff: “I can’t remember ever reading newspaper articles that so moved me like those Steve wrote about Nathaniel. Here was a story about two men, one who is troubled and who society says is broken, and another who is seen as very successful. Yet Steve discovers in Nathaniel a passion he will never know. I was intrigued because Steve was not just investigating a story about an unusual homeless man; he was looking deeper into the motivations and rationales for all our lives. He had gotten down to the very root of these characters, which for a film, is everything.”
After striking a deal with Lopez, Krasnoff and Foster brought DreamWorks on board, who in turn approached Oscar-nominated screenwriter Susannah Grant, best known for turning the true story of “Erin Brockovich” into an acclaimed and award-winning hit movie. To pique Grant’s interest, they simply sent her a packet of Lopez’s columns. “I just knew I needed to write it, and the challenge was trying to communicate what excited me so much about the material.” At the same time, to capture the reality of the story, Grant spent considerable time with both Lopez and Ayers, getting to know them personally. She spent days hanging out at Disney Hall in downtown Los Angeles and going off on sheet music buying expeditions with the duo. “They’re two wonderful men and it was a privilege to spend time with them,”
Choosing the Director
When it came to choosing a director for “The Soloist,” the filmmakers followed a suggestion from DreamWorks’ head Stacey Snider about a young, rapidly rising British director Joe Wright. Wright says it was his trip to visit Skid Row and the Lamp Community - the advocacy group that offers nearly 200 private apartments for the homeless, including the one where Ayers currently lives, that made everything clear. “The people I met on Skid Row are the reason I’m making this film,” he states. “They are the kindest, gentlest, funniest and most honest people I’ve ever met. If you let them, they will change your life. I hoped involving them would bring an authenticity to the film, but also would do something for them in return. It would be work, they’d learn skills and it would be something to be proud of. These people are the most disenfranchised people in American society and don’t generally have a voice. I wanted our film to be able to give them that voice.”
Robert Downey Jr and Jamie Foxx
As soon as the script was completed, Academy Award winner Jamie Foxx expressed interest in the role.
It was Downey’s initial meeting with Joe Wright that sealed the deal. “I was so taken by the way he saw the movie,” he says. “He spoke about how he wanted to pepper the cast with actual members of the Lamp Community, how he really wanted this to be a film not about mental illness but about faith. He also said it was a love story, which I thought was a charming notion.”
Supporting Roles
Surrounding Foxx and Downey in “The Soloist” is an ensemble of highly accomplished actors in crucial supporting roles. They include Catherine Keener, a two-time Supporting Actress Oscar nominee for “Capote” and “Being John Malkovich,” in the role of Mary Weston who, in the film, is Steve Lopez’s editor and ex-wife. (Utilizing some dramatic license, the character of Mary is actually a composite of several real-life figures in Lopez’s life. Lopez is happily married to his wife, Alison, who is not his editor at the Los Angeles Times.)
Homeless community extras
Signed up 450 members of LAMP for extas. Among them were a core group of about 20, nicknamed “the Lamp Chorus,” who appear in several scenes with Foxx and Downey inside the Lamp Community building where Nathaniel Ayers resides. (The Lamp Chorus was also joined by ten SAG actors for scenes that required specialized performance skills.) Lamp and the other programs maintained their own personal advocates on the set to assure the extras’ needs would be effectively communicated.
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