Was the screenplay always set in Chicago?

No. Richard grew up in the Bronx and I think he has a house in Harlem these days. He has spent his life in New York and he is so New York. The script took place in New York and we were setting up to shoot it there. At that time, Universal and Scorsese were going to do a remake of Kurosawa’s “High and Low” and commissioned David Mamet to do the script. When that script finally came in, it was about 400 pages long and I think Marty told me that David sent a letter with it saying “I know you can’t do anything with this, but this is what came out.” So Marty was kind of left high and dry because he thought that was going to be his next project. Spielberg had previously approached him with the idea of doing a remake of “Cape Fear” that he had turned down the first time. Again, this is conjecture on my part but he hadn’t worked with De Niro in a lead role in a while and that gave him a chance to work with De Niro again since he was already on board. He took the assignment of “Cape Fear” and since Bob was getting into his forties and needed to be in fantastic shape for that film, he wanted to do that one first. They shut us down and took Bob away and went off to make “Cape Fear” and I wound up getting left high and dry. The day after they shut down our picture, I got a call from Eric Bogosian, who had seen “Henry” and had a show up in New York called “Sex, Drug, Rock n Roll,” which was the successor to “Talk Radio.” It was perfect because it was only a three-day shoot of a stage show. It was an abbreviated production schedule that I could fit in during the time that De Niro was leaving us and finish just before he came back.

When everybody came back to New York, the IA, the International Alliance of Theatrical—the union for all the below-the-line jobs like costumes and production design—went on strike in New York, so we couldn’t shoot. We were casting and prepping and every couple of days, we would hear, “They’re getting ready to settle!” and then they wouldn’t settle. Then we had to start thinking that we were about to start losing actors and think about where else we could shoot it. Of course, Steve Jones and myself were from Chicago as well and the casting of Bill Murray meant that it would be a perfectly serviceable location for that story. It was mostly horrible because we would make plans one day to do it in Chicago and the next day hear, “No, they are settling in New York.” Finally, we had to just pack up and come to Chicago and they didn’t settle in New York and we would have lost actors.

Were any of the actors already attached to the project when you came on board?

De Niro was interested. Marty couldn’t have been more kind or generous to me. We were meeting one day and he told me the Bob had read the script and was interested in it. It was completely up to me—he wasn’t pushing or anything—but he wanted to know if I would be interested in talking to him. I worshipped De Niro’s work and was happy to meet him and discuss it. There was this amazing meeting in Scorsese’s office—it was me and Scorsese and then Bob shows up. At first, we had been talking about Al Pacino for the part of Frank Milo. There is a knock at the door and it is Pacino. He sits down and we start talking and having a lot of laughs because those guys all have great senses of humor. While we are talking about the film, there is another knock on the door. Who could it be except for George Lucas, who just happened to be in town.