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"They're drunks, liars, and bastards and that's what I love about them." Writer/Director Richard Shepard told me about Sean and Bryan Furst the producing team partly responsible for producing his latest film THE MATADOR. That film, starring Pierce Brosnan, Greg Kinnear, and Hope Davis was just picked up by Miramax for a reported 7.5 million dollars.

Later in the day I asked the Furst brothers about producing and working with Shepard.

"You have to be a real scumbag," Bryan Furst told me joking. "When you have a criminal record and you have to put 'convicted felon' on job applications…."

"Hey, that's a membership card in a way," interrupted brother Sean.

"Yeah, you kinda have to be self-employed in those circumstances," continued Bryan. "No, we both came from creative aspirations. Sean was an actor as a kid and studied acting and business. I went to film school at NYU and made several short films. You know, I think that you have to have a firm grasp on the creative process. This isn't a rule, I'm sure there are a lot of producers who don't have it. You see the results of that every week.

"But I think to be a strong producer you have to have a strong grasp on the creative process and specifically the filmmaking process because it is really unique. It requires a certain instinct that can't be learned because it is having a feel for it, you know."

And how did they become involved with THE MATADOR?

"It was something that we had optioned right out of the gate." Bryan told me. "We were concocting different ways of putting this together-of casting it, financing it. It was really a huge stroke of luck that Pierce even got involved with the project. It was sent to him as a writing sample for another movie they were developing. Richard also makes a living as a writer.

"So, when they read the script, they apparently responded to not only his writing by the story and characters. It was then when he [Brosnan] called up and got involved and we started putting together a plan to finance the movie completely independently. This means us going around to international buyers, pre-selling the movie, maybe bringing in a German tax fund, and thinking of creative ways to bring in money so that we could own the movie."

Bryan continued.

"And that was when CAA stepped in and said 'we can make this a lot easier for you guys. You've got Pierce, we got some equity guys who would really respond to this package.' They sent it to Bob Yari, who was the first person they sent it to, who within 24 hours called up and we had a deal to fully finance the movie with cash."

Bryan told me that the actual budget for THE MATADOR was in the neighborhood of $15 million.

"That's about Pierce's fee on the James Bond movies," Bryan admitted.

In THE MATADOR Brosnan plays a professional assassin, named Julian Noble, who has lost his nerve. On the brink or in the middle of an emotional breakdown, Julian says that he has become a parody. Of course, given Brosnan's popular alter ego as the super agent 007 possessing a license to kill, I asked the Furst's if that may have been a motivating factor for Brosnan to take on the role of Noble.

"I think that there is no ignoring that." Bryan said. "I don't want to conjecture that he [Brosnan] set out to slay his own screen persona. But I think that it was probably partially attractive to him that this was sort of a milieu that he was certainly comfortable in as far as who his character is and does but in a total departure from the typical."

"This movie aspires to be a lot more than that [Bond] movie or those movies do on a character level and this was something he wanted to segue into." Sean commented.

"The character gave him [Brosnan] an opportunity to flex his acting muscles a little and really act." Byran added. "This movie really relies upon the characterizations that were created and he made an indelible singular kind of character [in Julian Noble]. He is rarely given a chance to do that."

Much of Brosnan's dialogue in THE MATADOR consists of insulting macho bravado. The one-liner barroom jokes and insults roll from Brosnan's lips with a delicious poetic cadence that only one who has embodied suave or debonair on screen so much over the years could achieve. But there were lines that the writer and producers acknowledged had to be cut from the final product.

Both Shepard and the Fursts wouldn't reveal what lines were cut possibly because they went too far. But Bryan told me that they were glad that such editing decisions were ultimately made.

"[Without those lines] nothing was lost." Bryan insisted. He told me that the lines cut were things that related to Noble's sexual appetite revealing where he was in his life. But the film in its final version adequately conveys that message.

I completely agree that the film effectively makes its audience understand the great downward spiral Noble is in. And even though he is a killer, we begin to care for him. The whole genre of films in which the main character is a hitman has a lot of miles on it. I asked writer/director Richard Shepard about working within and breathing new life into such a perhaps overused film formula.

"To be quite honest, I'm bored to tears about hitmen." Shepard admitted. "I wanted to reinvigorate an already dead genre. Much like SEXY BEAST did with the 'one last heist' genre. But once I created Julian he was a lot of fun to write. I could be as rude and crude as I wanted. The man had few morals."

Building on that the Fursts added that they like to hybridize the material they are given and Shepard was on the same page with them.

The Furst brothers are very busy these days. Another film they produced called THE WOODS opens Labor Day having been picked up by Universal. That spooky horror film directed by MAY director Lucky McKee stars Patricia Clarkston and the big chinned one Bruce Campbell.

When I spoke with the Fursts they were on location prepping in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for a new thriller called FIRST SNOW. That film stars Guy Pearce.

"It is a psychological thriller about a traveling salesman who finds out from a fortune teller, amongst a few other things, that he is going to die at the fall of the first snow." Bryan told me. "And when some of the other predictions start to come true, he starts to feel that maybe the fortune teller might be right. He then starts to dig up his past to see what it is that is gonna kill him and ends up causing more trouble for himself than he already has."

FIRST SNOW sounds very cool.

Watch for THE MATADOR in theaters possibly in early June. For more about the films of Richard Shepard visit his website: http://www.richardshepard.com/

For behind the scenes pictures from the set of THE MATADOR visit Pierce Brosnan's website: http://www.piercebrosnan.com/open.php

Jonathan W. Hickman