Last Chance Harvey
    Ironic as it is, the key moment for Last Chance Harvey writer-
director Joel Hopkins was when he missed his chance to direct the
film Nanny McPhee. “I didn’t get the job,” Hopkins says with a
chuckle. “I think I came second, but Emma (Thompson) met with me
and said, ‘I’m sorry Nanny McPhee’s not for you, but I loved your
film (Jump Tomorrow), and we should work together.”

    Hopkins was determined to use the invitation to his advantage
and began to create a film Thompson could star in. He was
inspired by the first film he’d seen her in, the Jeff Goldblum
vehicle The Tall Guy. “She plays this lovely character, the no-
nonsense nurse, who, in her own words, has her hand up old men’s
bottoms all day,” he says. “When it comes to the niceties of
romance or courtship she just doesn’t have the patience.”

    At the end of that film Thompson and Goldblum’s characters
end up together, but Hopkins was struck with the vague resolution
of such films. Would these characters be together in six months,
or a year, or five years? “You never know with these romantic
comedies. What happened if things didn’t work out and a character
like that was still single? It’s not exactly that character 10
years on or 15 years on, but it’s a character like that,” Hopkins
says.

    He was also struck by the idea of an older romantic lead:
“It’s the next stage, the post-Bridget Jones thing. The ticking
clock has stopped. Emma’s playing a character in her mid-40s –
and that was the character that interested me.”

    At first, for the male lead, the screenwriter just lifted a
character from another script he’d written and used a Japanese
businessman. But that imagery now leaned toward more
miscommunication than he wanted. A mild degree of homesickness
made Hopkins, who was a Londoner living in New York at the time,
consider the idea of playing an Englishwoman off an American. “We
have so many commonalities, but also have these nuances. We have
shared things and great little things that are different. It
suddenly became very clear making the character American was much
closer to where I wanted to go.”

    In the screenplay, Harvey Shine (Dustin Hoffman) is already
struggling with his last chance to land a big client and save his
job when he travels to London for his daughter’s wedding and
finds out she’s asked her stepfather to walk her down the aisle.

    Kate Walker (Emma Thompson) interviews airline passengers for
a travel statistics board while she dreams of a life as a writer,
and her latest attempt at a blind date has ended like most of
them do – with Kate quietly fading into the background.

    When their paths cross in an airport bar, the two loners
begin to talk, and as the day continues they talk their way
across the city to Kate’s writing class, to the reception for
Harvey’s daughter, and beyond. Just as a bit of good luck brought
them together, though, a little bit of bad luck may throw them
back apart.

    Hopkins’ dense treatment got approval from Thompson, but with
other projects it was almost a year before he could focus on
writing the screenplay. Until then, the story bubbled in his
mind. “I was actually ready to sit down and write this script,”
Hopkins says. “Really, I must’ve been thinking about it
subconsciously for years. My films so far have been character-
driven, so I have a pretty good idea of the characters before I
do anything. Things they’d say, back stories.”

    He credits the treatment as his solid guideline once he
commences writing, and he rarely diverges from the story
structure he’s put in place. “Obviously something will happen
when you’re actually writing it out properly,” Hopkins says.
“Something will be said in the dialogue or spark something you
hadn’t thought of, but in terms of the structure, that doesn’t
change from the treatment to the script.”

    As it turned out, actor Dustin Hoffman had a few thoughts of
his own for the script. “I was inspired by Willy Loman in Death
of a Salesman,” says the screenwriter. “[Harvey] was a salesman
of commemorative, collectible plates showing the Iraq War.”
Hoffman, however, felt he had moved past the point where
audiences would accept him as a salesman, and so he and Hopkins
set about finding a new profession for Harvey that would retain
the same mechanics the story called for.

    “For a while he was going to be a washed-up actor, “ Hopkins
says. “We had an opening scene with him sitting in a make-up
chair and giving this Shakespearean monologue, and then flipping
to him giving his lines from a trashy daytime soap.” The
breakthrough idea was to make Harvey a failing jingle writer, one
who’d had dreams of being a jazz pianist. Hoffman warmed to this
idea, which paralleled his own parents’ early desire for him to
be a concert pianist, and soon firmed up his attachment to the
project.

    So years after being turned down for one job, the writer-
director finally got his chance to write and direct for Thompson
after all. “It was a sort of fairy tale in a way,” Hopkins says
with a laugh.
Potter film alum Emma Thompson (Prof. Sybill Trelawney) stars in
a new movie, Last Chance Harvey, by Joel Hopkins, co-starring
Dustin Hoffman. The following is a article about the film,
written by Peter Clines, excerpted from Creative Screenwriting
Magazine.
The Article
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Emma Thompson stars with Dustin Hoffman in Last Chance Harvey
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