Movies

The Popcorn King

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Ratner was ultimately one of three directors considered for the assignment; once again, his chutzpah carried the day. "He came in and, for 20 or 25 minutes straight, just pitched his heart out to say why he should be the director," remembers Stern, who, together with New Line's then president of production Michael De Luca, ended up giving Ratner the job. Released in the summer of 1997, Money Talks wasn't a great movie, but it was funny (Ratner deems it his funniest film to date), a fine early showcase for Tucker, and a generally solid effort by an untested director thrown into the fires of a major Hollywood production just two weeks before the start of shooting.

After the movie became a modest hit, Ratner turned his powers of persuasion on Stern, entreating him to leave the studio to come and work for him. At the time, Stern declined. "I was like, 'I'm kind of an up-and-coming executive. I'm not going to leave and go produce movies. You directed one movie!'" Four years later, when Ratner renewed the offer in the wake of Rush Hour, Stern accepted. "When he gets enthusiastic about something," Stern says, "look out — he's going to make it happen."

"He could sell ice to Eskimos," says Rush Hour 3 associate producer David Gorder, echoing the sentiments of almost everyone I talk to for this article.

It's a trait Ratner ascribes to his mother, Marsha Presman, who taught him to be fearless in the pursuit of his goals. Described by Ratner as "a bit of a party girl in Miami" — a hint that extroversion may run in the family — she was just 16 when she gave birth out of wedlock, and Ratner grew up thinking of her less as a parent than as an older sibling. His father, Ronny, a ne'er-do-well rich kid who Ratner tersely calls "a druggie, a fuckup," wasn't in the picture at all; by the time they finally met, Ratner was already 16. Meanwhile, the man Ratner called "Dad" and credits with raising him was Alvin Malnick, a Miami lawyer and friend of Ratner's paternal grandfather whose clients included the gangster Meyer Lansky.

As a teenager, Ratner developed a close bond with another family friend, famed music producer and Chic guitarist Nile Rodgers. It was Rodgers who bought him his first Super 8 movie camera and allowed him to bring it into the studio during the recording of Madonna's seminal Like a Virgin album in 1985. "Madonna was like, 'Get this kid away from me, he's so annoying!,'" Ratner remembers. A scant 14 years later, Ratner found himself directing the pop star in the video to her "Beautiful Stranger" single from the Austin Powers soundtrack.

Then, earlier this year, the mythology came full circle with Ratner's self-effacing cameo on HBO's Entourage, in which the show's endearingly bullheaded career bit player Johnny "Drama" Chase (Kevin Dillon) convinces Ratner to cast him in Rush Hour 3 by invoking the director's own storied history of lucky breaks and refusing to take "no" for an answer. The kid who once had to hustle his way into film school is now the director kids go to film school trying to become. And when Ratner tells you how it all happened — as I saw him do this past May before an audience of students at the Cannes Film Festival — he does so with such beguiling, if-I-could-do-it-you-can-too modesty, that it's not even worth asking if everything in Ratner's life really happened so fatefully or if certain episodes have been enhanced for dramatic effect (like that "chance" meeting with Simmons that maybe, just maybe, was carefully engineered on Ratner's part). It's a good story, and Ratner is nothing if not a born storyteller.

For the record, Brett Ratner doesn't particularly care whether you take him seriously or not. At least he says he doesn't, and I tend to believe him. It's one of Ratner's most appealing traits, actually — a lack of pretense and a sense of comfort inside his own skin that one all too rarely encounters in a business where every comic actor wants to be taken seriously, every agent is actually a producer, indie directors hanker to try their hand on big-studio projects, and George Lucas says what he really wants to do is make small, personal art movies.

"He doesn't have a consumed sense of self-importance — which I think, by comparison to other people who are similarly successful is, if not unique, at least unusual," says Toback. And indeed, when you talk to Ratner, you never feel that he's putting on an act or trying to convince you he's something that he's not. He's one of those people for whom the expression "high on life" seems to have been invented — which, in Ratner's case, may be the literal truth, given that this confessed party boy swears off alcohol and all drugs (including coffee). Can Ratner be brash? Certainly. Does he enjoy being the center of attention? Without question. Does he, during one of our meetings, receive a party invite from Paris Hilton on his iPhone? I'd be lying if I said otherwise. But he's the first to poke fun at himself, and the last thing he seems interested in is wasting any time countering his detractors.

"The answer could be, 'They're all jealous,' or, 'They're all envious,' or, 'They don't really get me,'" says Ratner. "People criticize movies that are in the pop culture, but that's who I am. The thing about the Defamer guy is that he'd be much worse if I let it bother me, if I called him up and said, 'If you write one more thing about me ... ' I simply don't care."

What does matter to Ratner is that his films seem expressive of his personality. "The directors I admire, like the Coen brothers and Scorsese — they're in their films," he says. So too is Ratner in his, for anyone who wants to find him. Perhaps not so much in X-Men: The Last Stand, the noisiest and least necessary in a series whose popularity has eluded me since Day One. But Ratner is everywhere in Money Talks, in the underrated caper picture After the Sunset, and (perhaps most of all) in the Rush Hour movies. He's there in the preponderance of classic R&B and hip-hop on their soundtracks; in their exuberant celebrations of beautiful women, fast cars and other assorted bling; and in their conscious homages to the movies that made Ratner want to become a director in the first place.

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