Here’s how it happened.
In the audition, Mann wanted McGill to try things a bit louder
McGill remembers thinking his audition checked off all the boxes. “It was articulate, it was intelligent, it was lawyerly and understandable, and behaviorally real,” he says. But Mann knew the scene demanded something more, that it should be an inflection point in the movie. So he gave the actor a scenario to embody.
“This tobacco lawyer—I want him to fear for his safety,” McGill remembers Mann telling him. “Let’s say Ron Motley was just a few years away from playing football at Ole Miss. This lawyer should actually consider the thought that he might rip his arms out and beat him with it…You’ve got to take it up there, because structurally speaking, this is the first time in the film that anybody with any power has come to Wigand’s side.”
As McGill interpreted the new direction, Mann took out his camera and began filming the audition. “I went from 30 miles an hour in the school zone to 90 on the freeway in terms of intensity of delivery,” McGill says. The actor knew he’d earned the part when, in the middle of screaming, he heard Mann doing his best Sickos meme under his breath: “Great! Great! This is GREAT!”
“Wipe that smirk off your face!” was conceived right before shooting began
Two months after the audition, McGill arrived on set (the production shot in the same Mississippi courtroom where the actual deposition took place) and made sure Mann still wanted him to go big. But as they began rehearsing, the director felt something was still missing from the script. “I don’t know,” he said. “We need something you might tell a nine-year-old kid who’s acting up, to wipe that smirk off their face…”
McGill perked up. “I said, ‘What’s wrong with me saying, Wipe that smirk off your face?’ That’s a pretty good old Southern statement.” Mann liked his logic. “That was, as I put it, the biggest, shiniest bead on the necklace of that character’s arc,” McGill says. “Michael just said, ‘Wow, that is great.’”
Aware that the line was going to reach for the highest decibels, McGill approached the movie’s sound recorder and gave him his vocal “score” so that his audio (which begins faintly, as he addresses Wigand up close) would never get blown out and distorted. “If they don’t know you’re going from very quiet to very loud, they’ll turn the volume down and cut off the top of your shiny, bright beat,” McGill says. “And they can never get that back in production.”
Mann shot the scene 71 times
“That’s right,” McGill laughs. “Tons.”
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