Based on the advanced reports out of the major fall film festivals, Brendan Fraser is on the cusp of a career-best comeback in Darren Aarnofsky's upcoming chamber drama, The Whale. It's only appropriate that the film is premiering exactly 30 years after the The Mummy star had his big-screen breakthrough as the star of School Ties, the 1992 drama that featured a bevy of future A-listers — including Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Chris O'Donnell — in some of their earliest big screen performances.
"Most of them had done no work at all," School Ties director, Robert Mandel, tells Yahoo Entertainment ahead of the movie's 30th anniversary on Sept. 18. "Chris had done one movie, but it was a small film that wasn't widely seen. So you couldn't reference a lot of their past work." (Watch our video interview above.)
Much like Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of The Outsiders a decade earlier, casting fresh faces worked in School Ties's favor. It also worked out for the cast, many of whom went on to become major film and television stars. As a result, the movie holds a place as a generational touchstone for ’90s teens and tweens for whom it provided a first glimpse of actors they'd spend the next three decades watching onscreen.
Written by Dick Wolf — the same Dick Wolf of Law & Order fame — and Daryl Ponicsan, the film takes place at an elite Massachusetts prep school in the ’50s, when casual and extreme antisemitism was still rampant across the country. Desperate to make a showing in the football standings, the Catholic institution's higher-ups recruit a Jewish student, David Green (Fraser), who quickly becomes the star quarterback they've been dreaming of. But the newcomer is well-aware he has to keep his religious identity under wraps lest he lose the friendship of his teammates. Despite his best efforts, the truth inevitably comes out and the team's jealous bully, Charlie Dillon (Damon), orchestrates a campaign to put David in his place.
Before getting cast as Dillon, Damon was one of the many young actors considered for the role of David. But Mandel always felt that he was better suited for the darker role — presaging the actor's celebrated star turn in the 1999 thriller, The Talented Mr. Ripley. "He does willingly go there," Mandel says of Damon's skill at playing bad guys as well as heroes like Jason Bourne. The director also credits both Damon and Fraser with agreeing to play a scene that many young performers might balk at early in their careers. When Dillon finally exposes David, it happens in the school shower room, which required both actors to show their butts onscreen.
"It's their butts," Mandel confirms with a laugh. "There was no thought of using [stunt doubles] or face replacements either." He also says that both actors learned that they'd have to be naked the day they shot the scene. "[We wanted to film it] at a certain point in the movie when everybody's very cohesive," the director explains. "You still ask them, and they were good about it. We put it on the call sheet, and closed the set and did what we needed to do. I don't want to say it was technical, but there was a stunt coordinator, there was nudity and there wasn't a lot of joking around."
Interestingly, Mandel reveals that test audiences found that scene more uncomfortable to watch than it was for the actors to film. "When we previewed it in a longer version, the audience got very uncomfortable watching it," he remembers, adding that those reactions necessitated a re-edit of a sequence that was already challenging to cut together due to the choreography and nudity. "When it went on for too long, it kind of took you out of the movie and you thought, 'Oh my God, they're really naked in the shower.' The audience suddenly became aware of the physicality and would they get hurt? It took them out of the storyline and they got uncomfortable I think."