I reviewed Mimic the other day and had a blast with it. An underrated sci-fi/horror by Guillermo del Toro, ‘pre-fame’. Some of the comments by you lovely Outposters opened up some stories, so I did some digging.
Production Hell
Del Toro had a vision for Mimic, the problem is that Bob and Harvey Weinstein had other ideas. According to reports, the Weinstein’s didn’t think the movie was scary enough and didn’t like the early footage that Del Toro was shooting.
Bob said the movie wasn’t scary enough and would make unreasonable demands on the set for new shots and footage. All of this would deviate from the original script.
People have said there were ‘fights’ between the Weinsteins and Del Toro about the tone that Mimic was taking. At one point, it was reported that Bob was so furious at the way the movie was being shot, he stormed on to the set and he tried to show Del Toro “how to direct a movie”. Later, Harvey tried to get him fired and replaced with another director.
That altercation was interrupted by lead actress, Sorvino. She threatened to quit the movie if Del Toro’s vision wasn’t followed. She received support from her then-boyfriend, Quentin Tarantino, who had made movies with Miramax, a Weinstein company.
In the end, they let Del Toro stay and finish the movie, but they oversaw the final cut of the movie. Del Toro distanced himself from Mimic, and the Weinsteins, and never worked with them again.
Sorvino
We like Sorvino here at the Last Movie Outpost, but working on Mimic put a major wrench in the works of her career. She made the movie in 1997, and later that year made Replacement Killers with John Woo. Then she started doing very under-the-radar movies, apart from Summer of Sam made in 2000 by Spike Lee, which was the biggest thing I could see. All the other movies are stuff I’ve never heard of.
She carried on making movies, and TV shows, but nothing big. It was quite clear that the Weinsteins had put her career on hold. This was brought to light in an interview with Peter Jackson. He was looking to cast Sorvino, and Ashley Judd, in The Lord of the Rings. The Weinsteins had told Jackson that both actresses were a nightmare to work with, Jackson said:
“I recall Miramax telling us they were a nightmare to work with and we should avoid them at all costs. This was probably in 1998. At the time, we had no reason to question what these guys were telling us.
I now suspect we were fed false information about both of these talented women – and as a direct result their names were removed from our casting list. In hindsight, I realise that this was very likely the Miramax smear campaign in full swing.”
It may not have only been the incident on the set of Mimic, but also that Harvey had made sexual advances to Sorvino (and Judd) and they had both spurned him.
The Cast
We now know that diversity can ruin a movie. It’s something that we have always had, but in modern times, it’s been rammed down our throats. Del Toro was someone who wanted to make more diverse movies.
Originally, he wanted the role of Dr. Mann (the wife of Survino’s character) to be played by Andre Braugher. He wanted to show that a Caucasian woman, a Black man, and a Lationo child could all work together.
He saw it as a symbol that all humans are equal and can work in harmony. This was 1997, and the Weinsteins didn’t follow like that idea. They thought that America wasn’t ready to see a mixed-race couple and vetoed the idea.
In the end, Dr. Mann was played by Jeremy Northam. According to Del Toro, Survino and Northam couldn’t stand each other on set.
Mimic saw the first Hollywood role for Norman Reedus.
The character of Manny was originally written by Del Toro for Federico Luppi. The Argentinian actor was one of his favourites and they had worked together on Cronos. Because of Luppi’s accent, it was hard for him to be understood, so much so, that he was later replaced by Giancarlo Giannini.
Not the Ending I Wanted
Del Toro’s Mimic was very different from the one we got. Originally the idea was going to be a short, but ended up as a feature-length movie. The story idea was much darker than the final cuts.
In the original idea for the short, it turned out the ‘giant cockroaches’ were a product of evolution and not science. Del Toro envisioned that God had given up on the human race and was going to let the cockroaches become the dominant species on the planet.
The ending would have seen Sirvino’s character find the male of the colony, but it was almost indistinguishable from a real human, finally fully mimicking man. It would just say:
“Leave!”
Showing that the evolution had got to a point where it could mimic humans almost perfectly. This would spell doom for the human race.
In another alternate ending, the three main characters split up but they met up again on a subway platform after escaping the hive. As they all hug each other, the young lad notices the distinctive clicking sound of someone on the platform.
This indicated that the mimics had already started to infiltrate the human world and started to mingle with all of us. Shame that didn’t see the light of day, as it sounds really interesting. The Weinsteins wanted a happier ending, and not the kind Harvey was used to.
The Weinsteins
In the years after Mimic, it’s come to light exactly what kind of person Harvey Weinstein is. The #MeToo campaign had many famous actresses come forward and tell people what Harvey was like behind the scenes.
There is a sense of irony that these women told us that Harvey would make them famous if they slept with him. They did sleep with him and he did make them famous. This doesn’t take away what kind of creep Harvey was though, but he was also an ass towards others he worked with.
Del Toro hated the theatrical release of Mimic, mainly because Harvey had re-edited it so much. Most of the ‘new shots’ were shot by second-unit directors, one of which was an uncredited Robert Rodriguez.
The shots were wrong, the colours were inconsistent, and it was not in Del Toro’s style. There is a director’s cut, but it’s still not the movie Del Toro wanted to make, but he’s happier with his cut than Harvey’s.
Harvey was known for cutting movies himself. In 2017, The Telegraph had an article entitled: Harvey Scissorhands: 6 films ruined by Harvey Weinstein. I would post a link, but you have to pay to read it.
Word Gets Around
Word got around on how the Weinstein’s had treated Del Toro, so much so that it nearly caused a fight at the Oscars. James Cameron had just won the Oscar for Best Picture for Titanic. Cameron said:
“Harvey came up glad-handing me, talking about how great they were for the artist, and I just read him chapter and verse about how great I thought he was for the artist based on my friend [del Toro]’s experience, and that led to an altercation.”
Cameron claims he nearly hit Harvey with his Oscar statue. Before things got too heated, they were calmed down and everyone was escorted to their seats. See Will Smith, you don’t slap, you hit someone with an Oscar.
Overall
Someone once said that:
“Trying to get a movie made in Hollywood, is like trying to cook a steak, by getting 20 people to blow on it!”
I like to make my own little movies, but it’s just me, with no producers, actors, screenwriters, or anyone to interfere. I can do what I want, when I want. Reading up about Mimic, I can’t imagine the headache it must be to try and make a movie.
As I said, Del Toro was a relative unknown at the time, someone the Weinsteins probably thought they could push around. I don’t want to call Del Toro a genius, but the guy generally knows what he’s doing. His vision for Mimic was very different to the Weinsteins. Without their interference, we would have had a very different movie.
Mimic was the first American movie Del Toro had made, and nearly his last. In an interview with the BFI London, he said:
“My first American experience was almost my last because it was with the Weinsteins and Miramax. Two horrible things happened in the late nineties: my father was kidnapped and I worked with the Weinsteins. I know which one was worse… the kidnapping made more sense, I knew what they wanted.”
The only upside to this story was that on set, Del Toro started reading Hellboy comics and loved them. He went on to make Hellboy and gain the respect he deserved.