NATHANIEL Ayers will never see the big Hollywood movie that’s been made about his life. He’s sat through it, but he’s never seen it, because he closed his eyes the whole time.
Ayers, the homeless classical musician portrayed by Jamie Foxx in “The Soloist,” is schizophrenic. And for him, says his friend Steve Lopez, this entails a crippling fear of two-
dimensional images. “He’s frightened by things on TV screens or movie screens,” says Lopez, the LA Times columnist who wrote the book that inspired the movie.
“Nathaniel hears things and sees things we don’t,” Lopez explains. “His days are spent trying to figure out what’s real and what’s not. It doesn’t help that, in this case, some of the images are representations of him, and that the movie includes some fairly dramatic scenes of his breakdown.”
Lopez, played in the film by Robert Downey Jr., befriended Ayers in 2005, when he was wandering the city looking for a column subject and heard someone playing gorgeous music in LA’s Pershing Square, near the statue of Ludwig van Beethoven. He became fascinated with Ayers’ story — he was a musical prodigy who’d attended Juilliard, but had to drop out when paranoid schizophrenia set in.
Director Joe Wright (“Atonement”), who got to know Ayers and Lopez well, says his interest in schizophrenia has changed many times over the course of the production.
“At first I was fascinated by the strange verbiage, the wordplay and associations and crazy stuff,” Wright says. “But the more time you spend with them, what becomes really fascinating is when you get past the madness to the core of the personality. To see how they coexist with the madness.”
Wright began to meet friends of Ayers’ at the Lamp homeless community center on LA’s Skid Row. He liked them so much, he made the studio agree that he could use 500 of them as cast and crew members. They said yes “without notification of their lawyers, I might add,” he says with a laugh. “When the lawyers heard, they became a little more worried. But I had the trump card.”
And he held onto it. The film features the faces of many of Skid Row’s actual homeless community, some in speaking roles.
“I felt far safer there than in the offices of Hollywood and Beverly Hills, where you’re very likely to be stabbed in the back,” quips Wright. “Downtown, I found the community to be very open and trusting. And with proper laughter. In Hollywood, if you say something funny, people kind of say, ‘Ha. That’s funny.’ But they don’t actually laugh, which I find slightly disconcerting. Whereas the members of Lamp, we had proper laughter. And tears.”
In the same spirit, says Wright, he made sure the depiction of Ayers be devoid of Hollywood melodrama and Oscar-bait moments. “I think the thing I love most about Jamie’s performance is that it’s not over the top,” he says. “It doesn’t feel, to me, like a showoff-y performance.”
Ayers himself, says Lopez, is equally undramatic, sometimes to a scary degree. “Music is his religion, and Beethoven is his god. When they wanted to pay him for the movie, he flipped out and thought it was a conspiracy among me and others to have him institutionalized.”
Those issues ironed out — through the help of Ayers’ sister — Lopez says his friend did make it to the big “Soloist” premiere.
“He’s making progress,” Lopez says. “He went to the movie and sat next to me. He kept his eyes closed, he listened to the music, and he had a good time.
“But,” he adds, “he’d probably prefer the soundtrack.”